Misty Mountain Hop If Father John Misty’s life was a Hollywood movie, it would be a metaphysical jail-break thriller about a wrongly convicted man escaping the prison of belief thanks to the liberating power of rock ‘n’ roll and psychedelic drugs. MAGNET goes to the mountain to help write the script. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Father John Misty lives in a red-clay adobe pueblo on top of a low mountain in Echo Park. Good luck trying to find it without GPS and a helicopter. Down below the cloud line, the hazy glittering grid of Greater Los Angeles recedes into the […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Johnny Marr @ The Troc
` Johnny Marr is the Zelig of alternative rock, consider the list of bands he’s played in, contributed to, guest-starred in or recorded/performed with in the last 30 years: the Talking Heads, the Pretenders, Modest Mouse, R.E.M., Beck, Oasis, Bryan Ferry, Pet Shop Boys, Billy Bragg, Black Grape, Electronic, Jane Birkin, Happy Mondays, The The, Chic, Dinosaur Jr, Pearl Jam, Crowded House, Tom Jones. And that’s not even counting The Smiths, the band he started with Morrissey back in early ’80s Manchester, the band that a recent NME readers poll deem the greatest British band of all time, beating out […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Devil And Old Saint Nick
Illustration by JAY BEVENOUR EDITOR’S NOTE: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds play the sold out Keswick Theater tonight. Let There Be Light By Jonathan Valania [via MAGNET, circa September 2001] He was born like this, he had no choice. Nick Cave was born with the gift of a golden voice. He asked Leonard Cohen, “How lonely does it get?” Leonard Cohen hasn’t answered yet. But Nick Cave hears him coughing all night long, a couple floors above him in the Tower Of Song. In the beginning, there was the Birthday Party. And it was good. Rock ‘n’ roll as […]
A FLAMING LIPS EXCLUSIVE: “The Perjinky Effect”
As a souvenir of our visit to Wayne Coyne’s house last week (more on that later), we filmed the Flaming Lips frontman narrating a new comic book he’s working on called The Perjinky Effect in his kitchen. Enjoy. RELATED: The Flaming Lips are going to be busy at this year’s South by Southwest Festival. On Wednesday, organizers behind the Austin, Texas event added even more films to the schedule, including Lips frontman Wayne Coyne’s “A Year in the Life of Wayne’s Phone.” The film, which Coyne directed, is made up of footage recorded solely on the singer’s iPhone, and is […]
FROM THE VAULT: Hello Darkness My Old Friend
Artwork by ADAM GREELEY BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: Near the end of The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson’s storybook cinematic fable of wasted potential, the character of Richie, a disgraced world-class tennis player with a dark secret, looks soulfully into the bathroom mirror. It’s impossible to say what he’s thinking–he looks scared, confused, angry, on the verge. A tensely strummed acoustic guitar spirals in the background, accompanying a hushed, faintly ominous vocal. It’s Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay.” Richie picks up a scissors and methodically, if crudely, crops his shoulder-length tresses down to the scalp. He lathers up […]
INCOMING: Live From Hopelandia
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR MAGNET Iceland isn’t the end of the world but you can see it from here. This is both a blessing and to a lesser degree a curse. Much less. It is the land that time forgot, which is why it is a place of such uncommon purity. Primeval is the word that comes to mind: smoldering volcanoes, black sand beaches, towering geysers, geothermal hot springs, epic waterfalls, vast lava fields that recede infinitely out to the horizon, bumping up against glaciers thousands of years old. Elves. Not for nothing did Ridley Scott select the hinterlands […]
WORD: The Boy Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR MAGNET The NoMad Hotel is one of those swanky bubbles boutique hotels that bejewel the tonier provinces of lower Manhattan. It is here, in this New Gilded Age outpost situated in the fragrant heart of the Perfume District, that The Hives have decamped for a four day charm offensive on Gotham’s media elite, fresh off a triumphant return to the stage-and-screen with a headlining slot at Coachella and a riotous studio lot performance for the Jimmy Kimmel Show. Inside the library lounge, suitably bedecked with gorgeously illuminated two story dark wood book shelves lined with sumptuously-appointed […]
CONTEST: Win Tix For Norah Jones @ The Mann
(We have two pairs of tickets to see Norah Jones at the Mann on Thursday to give away to the first two lucky Phawker readers to email us at FEED@PHAWKER.COM that can tell us the name of her father. Put NORAH in the subject line. Include your name and mobile number for confirmation. Good luck and godspeed!) BY JONATHAN VALANIA It’s another lazy Sunday morning coming down. You are awakened by the sunshine streaming through the open windows and the sound of the Brooklyn streets outside coming alive. Oddly, Danger Mouse is laying next to you, on his […]
EXTRA! EXTRA!: Mr. Phawker Goes To Washington
DAILY NEWS: We’re surprised he cleared Secret Service security, but Phawker.com editor Jonathan Valania was at the White House on Friday interviewing President Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, about his love of indie-rock veterans Guided By Voices. The interview is to appear in the October issue of Magnet. Like the local music magazine, which had been on hiatus, Guided By Voices is also back, after more than five years apart, and plays the Trocadero (1003 Arch) on July 6. Carney revealed his affinity for the Ohio-based Robert Pollard and his GBV cohorts last year. The interview was rescheduled a […]
CONCERT REVIEW: The Hives @ The E-Factory
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER The Hives aren’t an arena rock band, they just play one on stage. All faux-bluster, comic petulance and winking self-aggrandizement, they evoke the high dudgeon of Diver Down-era Van Halen upon having learned that the brown M&Ms have not been exiled from the backstage banquet. But unlike Van Halen, they play it strictly for laughs. The prime driver of these immensely entertaining delusions of grandeur is the band’s sassy, boyish front man, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, a born entertainer with lungs of leather, a certain Jagger-ian grace, and large expressive eyes that could have […]
SIDEWALKING: Me And Mrs. Jones
Norah Jones, World Cafe Live, 1:25 PM by AMY SALIT PREVIOUSLY: It’s another lazy Sunday morning coming down. You are awakened by the sunshine streaming through the open windows and the sound of the Brooklyn streets outside coming alive. Oddly, Danger Mouse is laying next to you, on his back, looking up at the ceiling, languidly strumming an elegiac guitar. He acts like you aren’t there. If you listen closely, you can hear a tinkling, Eno-esque piano arpeggio out of the corner of your ear. It sounds, and more importantly feels, like raindrops falling on your head. You roll over […]
MILESTONE: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Turns 10
BY JONATHAN VALANIA so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. That was written by William Carlos Williams, an American poet. Best I can tell, he was talking about the significance of insignificance, that little things truly do mean a lot—like if you could surf the past in a time machine and you did something as small as, say, kicking a stone in the Stone Age, it could send a ripple through the entire fabric of history. Everything after could be slightly different. You might even erase yourself from existence. I bring […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Devil In Miss Jones
BY JONATHAN VALANIA It’s another lazy Sunday morning coming down. You are awakened by the sunshine streaming through the open windows and the sound of the Brooklyn streets outside coming alive. Oddly, Danger Mouse is laying next to you, on his back, looking up at the ceiling, languidly strumming an elegiac guitar. He acts like you aren’t there. If you listen closely, you can hear a tinkling, Eno-esque piano arpeggio out of the corner of your ear. It sounds, and more importantly feels, like raindrops falling on your head. You roll over and there’s Norah Jones — beautiful, kind, […]