Archive for August, 2006

Cover Story: Touch And Go Records At 25

Touch & Go Records
Rusk Never Sleeps

“We attempted to celebrate 10 and failed. There was a coffee mug, I think that was as far as it got. We tried to do a 10th anniversary compilation and failed so miserably that we’d try to finish it and have a 13th anniversary celebration — ’cause that would be [...]

Hello, My Name Is Roger

Hello, My Name Is Roger
IE: Do you appreciate how The Byrds are remembered, or is there an angle people never really grasped?
Roger McGuinn: Well, on the whole I’d say The Byrds are underappreciated when you think of The Beatles, The Stones, and The Beach Boys. But they’re sort of a musician’s band.

Massive Attack Interview

Massive Attack
Calm, Cool, And Collected

Having spearheaded an entire musical genre doesn’t mean too much to Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja. The band’s critical record is virtually unblemished and even in the marginalized realm of electronic music in America, their very name commands respect. Yet 15 years in the trenches — 23 if you include the [...]

Lupe Fiasco Interview

Lupe Fiasco
Go Time
By the time this story hits the press, Lupe Fiasco will still be awaiting the drop of his debut album, Food & Liquor (Atlantic) — more than half a year after its originally scheduled release date. Following an Internet leak of the album this past spring, among other snafus, it just doesn’t seem [...]

Mastodon Interview

Mastodon
Land Ho

Mastodon vocalist/bassist Troy Sanders knows all about the classic struggle between man and animal. The topic made his band a household name, after all, when 2004’s Leviathan (Relapse), a concept album that revolved around Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, won the group acclaim from metalheads and indie hipsters alike.Appearing: September 14th at Metro in Chicago.

Nina Gordon Interview

Nina Gordon’s Bleeding Heart
“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen artichokes grow, but I haven’t [before] and it’s pretty amazing. It’s like a huge beanstalk, and at the top is an enormous globe that is a big old artichoke, and I’m not quite sure when I’m supposed to chop it and eat it, but I’m [...]

The Tripwire

Tripwire.com
Free Enterprise
Back in the dark ages, before everyone and their brother had a blog pimping the hottest new MP3s of some yet-unheard of U.K. sensation or Stateside underground phenomenon, the Internet wasn’t commonplace for pedestrian music lovers to find new artists. However, it was a forum for industry heavyweights to drop new release dates before [...]

File: September 2006

Idol Chatter
Hot off the heels of last year’s Devil’s Playground, Billy Idol keeps the product chain coming with a concert DVD recorded at the somewhat-rundown-but-oh-so-punk-rock Congress Theatre.

DVD Zone: September 2006

THE ROLLING STONES
UNDER REVIEW 1962-1966
LED ZEPPELIN
THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES
Music Video Distributors
You would think when it comes to The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, it’s all been said before. After gallons of ink have been spilled and miles of paper reams have been used to dissect and analyze every tidbit of minutia from the bands’ [...]

Cover Story: Touch And Go 2

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CHICAGO
The only people Rusk and Pfahler knew here were the members of Big Black. Rusk had met frontman Steve Albini on the panel of the New Music Seminar in New York and, just as he had with MacKaye, hit it off, thus forging a dynamic partnership. Big [...]

Cover Story: Touch And Go 3

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Independent Worms
The Butthole Surfers, who left Touch And Go in 1991, found themselves with a sizable radio hit, “Pepper,” in 1996. As Ian MacKaye puts it, “Unfortunately bad people have a way of perverting good ideas. That’s the way it is. I’m not trying to say The Butthole [...]

Touch And Go Block Party Preview

Hideout Block Party Preview
Twenty-five bands in three days? Are the Neo-Futurists involved? Unlike some other gargantuan summer fests, The Hideout (1354 W. Wabansia) and Touch And Go kick things off Friday evening. Then it never stops.

Mississippi Amersterdam

Big Bill Broonzy: Amsterdam Live Concerts 1953 (Munich) is a double-CD package of musical and historical significance. The recordings capture Chicago via Mississippi legend Big Bill Broonzy in an intimate setting before appreciative crowds at the Ons Huis (Our House) club on February 26th and 28th, 1953. The liner notes provide a glimpse of Broonzy’s [...]

Studio Happenings

The Countdown recorded and mixed at THE MATTRESS FACTORY in Chicago with Martin Atkins (PIL, Nine Inch Nails, Pigface), owner of Invisible Records. They are working on a full-length album, which will be the follow-up to the 2004 EP Scratch & Sniff. The LP will be released this winter.

Not-So-Sacred Cow

We were never fans of Erich “Mancow” Muller, the libertarian shock jock who started drawing young male listeners to him like flies when he came to Chicago in 1994. But we were not pleased when Emmis Communications-owned WKQX-FM (101.1) dumped his top-rated “Mancow’s Morning Madhouse” in July.