I arrive at 7:30 and Mark Lewis is on the main stage playing some trance to ease us into the night. The main stage is a giant white tent about three stories tall and its rectangular size covers the same size of about one NFL football field. Outside the tent there is a...
I was having a bad week already, when I opened the paper and saw that Ron Asheton, guitarist for the Stooges, had passed away. What could I do, except put on Funhouse and crank it up. This is my blues music. By that, I mean this is the music I turn to when I'm...
I have definite opinions of what makes a great rock concert. Take the same things that make great rock music—energy and originality—and add one more factor: spontaneity. Ideally, the band should play a different set each night, rather than just memorizing a...
Kanye West: producer, rapper, blogger, sunglasses model, and much much more. He's proven that he can conquer basically any task he sets himself. With his latest, 808s And Heartbreak, he's crossed over into music criticism; there's no more accurate and...
After seeing In Flames deliver a short but pretty kick ass set earlier this year as part of Gigantour, I knew that when they returned to the Bay Area on their own headlining tour that I would not be missing them. And when I saw that one of my favorite new bands,...
Given the nature of Rivers Cuomo’s previous raid of his own vaults which yielded the first installment of Alone, fans probably had a good idea of what to expect from Alone II – another collection of embryonic Weezer songs. That isn’t what Alone II...
There are a few things that have always characterized music as rock n’ roll since the day Ike Turner committed the thrill of joyriding around in a “Rocket ‘88” to tape: a lawless disregard for authority, a few rampaging and unhinged libidinous...
I have definite opinions of what makes a great rock concert. Take the same things that make great rock music—energy and originality—and add one more factor: spontaneity. Ideally, the band should play a different set each night, rather than just memorizing a...
It was unusually cold for Long Beach. Normally, this is the kind of town where anything approaching raindrops is cause for doomsayers everywhere to break out the tinfoil headwear and prepare for the apocalypse, and the air had a certain unknowable charge to it that...
Okay, first things first. The CD: I’m biased. I’ve seen Justice perform their Cross live show twice, I loved their album, and I have thousands of dollars of stock in crunchy basslines. So it should come as no surprise when I tell you that sometimes I kiss...