Michael Kennedy, a respected member of the local music scene, died of an apparent overdose of the muscle relaxant Soma on October 1. He was 37 years old. As primary songwriter for the critically acclaimed Broward-based band Rooster Head, vocalist-guitarist-keyboardist Kennedy penned many of the often humorous songs that showed…
Unlike the drawing rooms of Henry James and Edith Wharton, redolent with intricate ironies, the comedy of manners that is contemporary nightlife inevitably degenerates into broad, knockdown farce. But still, the modern velvet jungle remains a wilderness of artifice where image is everything, one long hand jive of self-delusion, fantasy,…
The News Isn’t All Bad in Goulds The pictures selected for Kathy Glasgow’s article “Going South” (October 12) did not accurately reflect the character or fortitude of my community, Goulds. They did not reflect that Goulds is composed of more than 80 percent single-family homes. We have parks, shopping centers,…
As with the more respectable strains of journalism, the lifeblood of pop reportage is information, from mere frippery to the legitimately sordid. It’s a definite learning experience, this industry of darkness, and felicitously enough for those obsessed with half-baked truths, loose lips — set free by liquor, hubris, and general…
“It’s a done deal,” Brian Franklin proclaims with more than a trace of relief in his voice, putting an end to two months of nail-biting suspense over negotiations with Mercury Records for what’s known in the music biz as a co-publishing/developmental contract. The drama began in early August when, having…
O.J. ruined my day, my week, and if his sorry story keeps being chewed over in the media, he’ll possibly ruin my life. Overnight America entered a terminal phase of short-order lunacy, something less than human and past the redemption of the divine, illuminated from within by the evil eye…
Local singer-songwriter Diane Ward doesn’t usually leave her guitar amplifier in her car overnight between gigs, but she did so a few weeks ago in a bout of self-described laziness. The lapse may have saved her life. While driving onto the Palmetto Expressway, Ward lost control of her Toyota Tercel…
In this particular line of work, the twin polarities of existence — the glorious and the sordid, the soaring of imagination and the sober parameters of reality — coalesce on a psychotic Ouija board, obeying no known dictates of seemliness, either earthbound, otherworldly, or of some ungodly dead zone. It’s…
Contrary to Saint Barbra, people who need people, party kind of people, aren’t the luckiest people in the world. People are crazy, they invariably drive each other even crazier, and the twisted prism of any given social occasion transforms all human interaction into a certifiably insane proposition. Fortunately the inmates…
Cheers, the SW Seventeenth Avenue lesbian bar that has featured punk bands two nights a week (Thursday and Saturday) for the last year, expands its schedule beginning this Saturday, October 7, when the club will start bringing in bands that play rock, acoustic, and alternative music. The lineup for opening…
For listeners of Boom, DJ Kike Posada’s Latin-rock radio show, it was the day the music died. On Sunday, September 17, the weekly hourlong program failed to air for the first time since it premiered almost two years ago as Miami’s first Spanish-rock program on commercial Latin radio. “I immediately…
In an MTV Latino studio lined with silky batik banners, a producer introduces herself and leads an audience in “applause practice,” throwing her arms above her head and bringing them down slowly. But the crowd — a stylish group of about 200 bilingual Latin rock fans, Latin American journalists, and…
Admittedly, the perks are great in this job but it can work on your nerves, and everyone seems to being trapped in an interactive mystery thriller. Nothing is quite what it seems. No one knows what’s going on, who to trust, or where their enemies are. And everyone lies, friend…
Night and day, a psyche at war with itself: In darkness the inner sanctum becomes a vast lollipop of lowbrow magical realism; by day all the short-order fairy tales yield to the cold crunch of truth. And so it’s another night on Earth, twelve straight hours on the job –…
They came. They recorded an album. They left. Well, while here they also attended a Marlins game, went to the dog races and jai alai, and ate Italian a lot. They = Air Miami, composed of Mark Robinson, Bridget Cross, and Gabriel Stout, the former two refugees from indie-pop uber…
The tropical storm brewing between the University of Miami’s student-run record label, ‘Cane Records, and several of the bands appearing on its just-released compilation CD, Miami Hybridized (“Nightclub Jitters,” July 27), has been downgraded to a mere summer squall and no longer threatens to swamp the album in a sea…
September song, and the angst of August — if the heat doesn’t get you, the stupidity will — dwindles down to a foul psychic sinkhole, infested with boredom, futility, and the remains of wasted flesh. Yet again the same old dirge of hopelessness is everywhere at once: Miami’s really over…
You’re at your neighborhood music megastore in search of the latest release by your new favorite group, Seguridad Social. “How ya spell that?” asks a perplexed clerk in the Latin music department. He then walks off to scan the computer (“How did ya say ya spell that again?”), leaving you…
The signs were all there, a red alert of bad karma and a quiet death instinct warned against a spontaneous trip to California. All the essential discount glamour hookups had fallen apart, and given some petty pecuniary circumstances, the travel budget barely covered cigarettes, booze, and Diet Coke. In the…
La Covacha, the Northwest Dade salsa and Latin rock roadhouse, has a new logo — a red parrot wearing a fireman’s hat. The bird appears on the club’s invitation to a “hot, hot, hot party,” which reads, “We told you and we proved it. We are so hot we burned…
The glamour drought of August, a kind of purgatory for normal social columnists. Though to our way of thinking, admittedly not an advisable sensibility, Miami once again has festered into civic perfection, chaos theory in motion, ripe for tales of the wasteland. In this dodgy discipline, either you use the…
Tom Smith, major mullah of local noise band To Live and Shave in L.A., which also includes bassist Rat Bastard and oscillator-theremin player Ben Wolcott, calls to engage in a little P.R., shifting into self-promo overdrive at the sound of the beep. To paraphrase Bette Davis in All About Eve,…
