Articles about “bobzilla”

Head Lip, Wayne Coyne, shares his thoughts on mentally preparing for a double album, the ultimate stage show, the power of the PC to enable music-making weirdos, and why completist collectors’ angst doesn’t faze him one bit.

In the middle of the 1980s, Neil Young was having what many people perceived to be a mid-life crisis. Instead of getting himself a red sports car and a mistress, he’d show up one day with a new band and a new persona - one day embracing edgy German electronica, the next turning into Carl Perkins with a slick fifties haircut and sideburns and and the whole bit. Finally around the time he put a cowboy hat on and started jamming with Willie Nelson - “Willie Neil”, his associates called him - Geffen Records decided to stop financing what they saw as a hopeless, self-destructive binge and sued him for not sounding enough like himself, right around the same time that Fantasy was suing John Fogerty for sounding too much like himself. The eighties were a big decade for midlife crises (and lawsuits) among sixties rockers, but Young took the desire to mutate with the times and head into unpredictable territory much further than any of his peers.

Prince is now at roughly the halfway mark of his planned “21 Nights” stint, with eleven shows at the Forum and two sets at the Troubadour under his belt. We thought we’d check in on That Skinny MF With The High Voice once again and see how his extended LA residency is progressing....

During Devo’s set at Club Nokia on Saturday, bassist Jerry Casale at one point asked the crowd for a witness: “You all know now that De-Evolution real, don’t you?” As the screams of affirmation came roaring down from the balcony, Casale briefly resembled a mutant Oral Roberts basking in the glow of his congregation. “Are we not men?” “WE ARE DEVO!”

I’m not sure if anyone but me had images of the workers in Wisconsin in their heads while Gang Of Four was in the middle of a steaming version of “To Hell With Poverty” at the Music Box, but there sure were a lot of fists in the air for the lyric “In this land/ right now/ some are insane/ and they’re in charge.” Sometimes, a coincidence of timing can make a performance of a thirty year old track positively zeitgeist-capturing.

When the band finished their version of Love’s “Along Again Or” aided by a mariachi horn section I was pretty sure we’d seen the highlight of an already strong show. Then, front man Joey Burns called out “Here’s one for D. Boon!,” and burst into the Minutemen classic “Corona,” taking a gringo punk rock imagining of Mexican music and sending it straight back to Mexico with a straight face. It was perhaps the finest only-in-LA moment...

“I don’t like hypnotics. I’m doing a non-hypnotic music, to break up the catatonic state. And I think there is one, right now.” - Don Van Vliet to Paul Moyer, 1980 Trying to explain the world of Captain Beefheart to the uninitiated is a fruitless task. The music that Don Van Vliet and his shifting crew of dedicated accomplices known as the Magic Band unleashed between 1965 and 1982 defies description and confounds any attempts at drawing a valid comparison. The phrase “Beefheart-like” has come to be used as shorthand by music writers trying to describe any old thing with a bent toward oddball beats and dissonant chords, but it’s impossible to get a sense of what Beefheart is about by listening to any or all of the bands trying to live up to that description.

I was twelve years old when The Wall came out, and while the theme of desperate alienation was familiar enough to any pre-teen kid, the way the thing ended - with the lead character turning into a fascist dictator - didn’t make a lot of sense at the time. It was years later, when I heard Roger Waters tell a story about the night when he spat in the face of a fan who was trying to climb onto his stage at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, that the whole concept came into focus. It’s a dark, personal piece of music about about the part of himself that Waters would ordinarily address to his analyst, that dark corner of his soul that secretly wanted to see barbed wire fences across his stage to keep his customers from getting within spittin’ distance.

It is almost impossible to overstate the effect that Ornette Coleman had on the world of American music in the late 1950s. Coleman’s early records for Atlantic - using a band formed in LA, with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, trading the drum seat with Ed Blackwell - declared complete freedom from jazz convention, including the restrictions of tonality itself, while remaining rooted in the blues at its deepest level...

Ever since her Fluxus days, Yoko Ono’s art has often revolved around the challenging of her audience’s assumptions, specifically about the nature of art, social mores, gender roles, and the nature of celebrity. The live show she brought to the Orpheum last weekend continued this tradition, bringing together a collective of first-rate musicians and famous guests for a show that held enormous emotional impact. It was a surprisingly diverse (where else are you gonna get RZA, Iggy, Vincent Gallo and Carrie Fisher on the same bill?) and even accessible package for a woman whose music is often thought of as difficult and anti-rock. But anyone expecting a Yoko show to be two hours of oi-yoi-yoi-yoi warbling hasn't heard her records, especially the new one, Between My Head And The Sky, which made up a good part of the set list. We heard a lot of different kinds of music, some of it simple, gentle and lovely. Some of it was tense and funky, some of it joyous and rocked-out. And, yes, some of it was dissonant, and she did break out the oi-yoi-yoi every so often. But the most discordant moments added texture, some of them loud and powerful, some quiet and fragile.

John Cale’s return to Los Angeles for the first American performance of his landmark 1973 album Paris 1919 includes a reunion with the UCLA Philharmonia, the same group that gave the original recording its lush, expansive orchestration. While the evening promises guest appearances from alt-rock heartthrobs Ben Gibbard and Mark Lanegan, the real treat on offer is the rare opportunity to hear some of rock’s most incredibly ambitious, grandly realized songs performed properly. And...

When the inevitable Hardcore Hall Of Fame hosts its opening ceremonies at the Huntington Beach Quality Inn’s main ballroom in spring of 2014 (even as debate over the eventual location of the actual Hall is still being debated in the letters pages of Maximum Rock And Roll), Bad Brains will be among its first inductees. From the time of their first recordings in 1979, the influence these DC Rastafarians held over a swath of pimply white teenagers was equivalent to any band of their era: Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Minor Threat, DOA, anybody. Their sheer other-ness, the fact that they didn’t look or sound anything like the other bands, their ability to bust into a reggae jam at any moment, served notice that this scene could be expanded in any direction its participants wanted to take it.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Rush, whose current lineup solidified in 1973 with the addition of drummer Neil Peart, are now # 2 in the running for longest-lasting famous rock band that never broke up or changed their lineup. That’s a four year gap from ZZ Top (formed Texas, 1969), who are also showing no signs of going anywhere - in fact they played the Pacific Amphitheater just a few days after this show. But they’d better keep eating right and exercising if they don’t want to be overtaken.

Prog rock seems to be the last unexplored outpost for indie musicians, the one remaining genre that hasn’t been plundered to death by previous generations, which may explain its recent resurgence in popular awareness. The last twelve months alone have seen Genesis inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame (though it’s worth noting that the same kind of rock establishment that chose Jethro Tull over Metallica at the 1988 Grammys has seen fit to induct Metallica into the Hall Of Fame in advance of Tull themselves, or any other progressos), American (mostly East Coast) appearances from Van Der Graaf Generator, the Gentle Giant-derived Three Friends and Neu! offshoot Hallogallo 2010, and the first show since the late 1990s by the proggiest progs that ever progged: Emerson, Lake and Palmer. This 4-CD box set compiles live performances from across their history, with each of the first three discs representing a different era (early seventies, late seventies, and their 1990s reunion tours) and the fourth compiling fan-recorded audience tapes across all the eras.

For a band that’s been filling arenas for thirty years, a proper Rush documentary has been a long time coming. Blame it on the band’s supposed lack of “general appeal”. Adored by intellectual heshers and aspiring shredmeisters, reviled by professional journalists and ignored by the rock mainstream, you have to admit: they did it their way. Somehow, three brainy, unprepossessing, somewhat geeky Canadians with an intact sense of humor managed to become, as bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee puts it, “the most popular cult band in the world.” Even a non-fan like my friend Richard, who claims never to have heard one of their songs in its entirety, was still able to look at the cover of this DVD and say, “That guy has a lot of chorus on his guitar, that guy has a really high voice, and that guy’s a really good drummer.” They don’t lack mainstream awareness, just mainstream appreciation. But Beyond The Lighted Stage puts them into a context where hopefully even those left cold by 15/8 time signatures can appreciate them as artists, unconventional, unwavering in their conviction.

Brazillian maestro Sergio Mendes has made the Hollywood Bowl something of a second home ever since his 1968 debut. On Friday night, midway through his set, he declared it “my favorite place in the world.” And the love is reciprocated almost annually; in the past five seasons alone, he’s been on three of them. It’s easy to see why the mutual love affair continues; Mendes’ breezy bossa nova sounds are the perfect soundtrack for a summer evening involving a bandshell, a picnic dinner, and a glass of wine.

Number one among auto mechanics nationwide, Steve Miller is one of those American institutions whose songs will forever be identified with the age of Classic Rock. In contrast to some of the outsize personalities that emerged in the late sixties and early seventies, Miller never wore capes or hosted fireworks shows. He might be rock’s ultimate everyman; while he hasn’t had a hit since 1981’s “Abracadabra”, he’s got enough juice in his catalog to spend every summer putting on his Casual Friday duds, hoisting his Bud to the sky and finding the feel-good groove in any style he tries on. Not even the cretins wearing “Disco Sucks” buttons in 1978 could resist “Swingtown”, whose beat, bass line and lyrics could have been ripped straight from the Commodores, yet sits easily alongside the straightahead cowbell rockers, blues vamps, mariachi ballads and spaced-out hippie meditations that make up his greatest hits. In Miller’s hands, it’s all as American as Creedence.

Photo of Femi Kuti at Glastonbury Festival June 2010, courtesy of Luke Robinson via Flickr. Nigerian bandleader Femi Kuti made a booty-shaking return to the Hollywood Bowl on July 7. If the Bowl’s “Jazz Series” subscribers in the boxes down front seemed uncertain how to respond to the sheer physicality of the performers on stage, the benches above them looked more like a party, a place where one could get physically overtaken by a...

Englishman Bert Jansch, for nearly fifty years considered one of the world’s great practitioners of the acoustic guitar, has been spending an unusual amount of time in the United States this year, much of it as the guest and opening act of Neil Young. Young not only acknowledged Jansch’s “Needle of Death” as the source of an untintentional/ subliminal rip in his own “Ambulance Blues” years ago, he’s brought Jansch on stage to perform as a duet, as if to erase any lingering doubts: even I rip off some stuff once in a while, and some of it was from this guy. (One only wishes Jimmy Page might be as generous with the acknowlegements.)

The Buzzcocks’ Saturday night appearance at Club Nokia, featuring a scheduled run-through of their first two albums in their entirety, reached its emotional climax about fifteen minutes into their set, as guitarist Pete Shelley led the band through the military/ waltz beat of “Sixteen” and intoned the lines: “And I wish I was sixteen again/ Cause things would be such fun All the things you do and that are said/ Well they’re much more fun than when you’re twenty-wa-wa-wa-wa-one!”

It’s a good thing the Specials made it into Los Angeles before the volcanic ash cloud grounded all flights from the UK, or there would be a squadron of California boot boys swimming across the ocean to beat the crap out of Iceland right now. The atmosphere inside an unusually tightly-clamped Club Nokia fifteen minutes before showtime was tense and hot, as hundreds of patrons were ushered up to the balcony due to overcrowding downstairs, only to find that every seat had been filled. Lots of them looked like they might have a go with the security, or each other, as they roamed the aisles, ready to eat someone alive in order to take their spot. But as the band took the stage and hit the opening notes of “Do The Dog”, all the tension diffused as the balcony began to bounce up and down and people partied where they stood.

Make no mistake: the eight songs at the core of this reissue are required listening for anyone more than casually acquainted with rock and roll, a declaration of total freedom that has hardly been equalled in the thirty-five years of punk rock that followed it. (And if that sounds like feverish praise, the album that came before it, Funhouse, is...

Paul McCartney came to the Hollywood Bowl with a stacked deck. Certainly the man’s written an improbable number of memorable songs on his own in the last fifty years. But advance news that he’d expanded his horizons to include a John song AND a George song among his selections (sorry, Ringo) suddenly increased the possibilities for the set list to near-infinity. Would he stick to the tried and true piano ballads that have anchored his live shows for twenty years? Would he blow all our minds and break out weird favorites from the catalog like “I Want To Tell You” and “Sun King”, or garage stompers like “I’m Down” and “Bad Boy”? Revive his saccharine MTV staples like “Spies Like Us”?

Even though Kinks headmaster Ray Davies had traded a loud electric band for an intimate, acoustic duo format, and found himself in this moment performing for a crowd of dinner patrons still finishing their chicken pot pies, the singer made it clear that this night was not going to be a classical recital demanding their silent attention...

“Hi folks, I’m Randy - the lead singer of the Residents! Over here is Chuck, and that’s Bob over there on the guitar.” Well what do you know? The world’s most famous anonymous musicians have just outed themselves on stage at the Music Box… kind of...

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment it occurs, but at some point while watching John Fogerty run through the highlights of his career at the Kodak Theater, one gets the distinct sensation of tapping the source. Though the songs he wrote for Creedence Clearwater Revival were mostly conceived roughly forty years ago, they seem to be as old as the mountains. They’re so ingrained in the collective consciousness, so deeply embedded, that it’s easy to take them for granted, to assume they’ve just always been around. Not for nothing were they Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski’s favorite band; they’re a signifier of righteousness.