God help us, but we love this filthy business, despite the inevitable toll of the dungheap: metamorphosing into an unhealthy alien existing on earthly junk food, nothing but a blob of numb ectoplasm with an engorged brainpan, continually force-fed a diet of the unwholesome. Home at last for a quiet…
Isn’t this starting to read like an obituary column? If it isn’t a club closing, it’s a band breaking up — we have some bad news and some bad news. What’s ironic is that 1994 was a boon year for the (inter)national music business. Nearly 200 concerts grossed a million…
A city under siege, immersed in the commercial pageantry of Super Bowl, the ultimate arena of power, money, and sex. High-roller time, the juiceless groveling and the connected — from the swinish Rush Limbaugh to Stevie Wonder — tooling down the hookup highway, taking a turboglide run into the heart…
Noise bands have no credibility. It’s just…um, uh…noise. A passing fad, a selfish indulgence, a sham. Except. Except that among all the South Florida acts currently trying to make their way into the national limelight, only a few have any chance of reaching as high a level so quickly as…
The Talkhouse is closing. No it’s not. The Talkhouse is closing. No it’s not. After months of rumors and rumor-quashing, the owners of the Stephen Talkhouse have announced that the beloved Beach venue will go the way of Washington Square, Cactus Cantina, and countless other clubs. The Talkhouse, which opened…
Life’s a banquet, most poor suckers are starving, and the world’s out of whack, past proportion and reason. And now, dear God, even money — pretty much the only thing we care about lately — coming under fire. Socialites rioting in Mexico, all in a tizzy over the failing luxury…
A world spinning out of control, the merry-go-round of moral decay lurching along heedlessly, civilization collapsing in a compost heap beyond the reckoning of Nostradamus. Qubilah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s lovely daughters, charged with plotting to kill Louis Farrakhan, proving once again that people of taste prefer their revenge…
Dateline: January 19, 1997. The ViaWarSon corporation — formed last year with the mergers of Viacom, Warner Bros., and Sony — announced today that their Blockbuster Entertainment Division has completed negotiations to purchase Yardbird Records, the last remaining independent record store in Florida. All recorded music — from the inception…
One year ago WSHE radio was considered an enemy of local rock. Ernesto Gladden replaced Bill Pugh as program director, the station dropped Glenn Richards’s local-music show, and, people on the Miami rock scene claimed, SHE was doing everything it could to avoid — avoid — playing any music made…
A cruel business, this gossip game. With every attention paid to the rich and celebrated, every moment of slack-jawed stupefaction before their banal utterances, their pointless travels and grotesque indulgences, we are, one and all, diminished, crippled by the very act of being a witness, reduced to nothingness. The puerile…
No one ever has disputed Robbie Gennet’s piano prowess — his eight-hours per night practice regimen doesn’t hurt, nor does the fact he began playing at age six — but that alone isn’t enough to satisfy his dreams of pop stardom. With earlier songs such as “Niggle’s Parish” and “Jones,”…
As bleak as 1994 was, with deaths of important figures too numerable to list here, it’s nice that the time is neatly framed, as if calendar measures meant something. As for 1995: Think positive. I’m predicting that to be the next year’s big trend: a move toward positive approaches, a…
Actually there were just a few of us in town for the holidays, going from party to party. Sylvester Stallone. Madonna. Emilio Estefan. Ingrid Casares, always in the right places. Daisy Fuentes and her floating house of discord. Gianni Versace, traveling with sister Donatella, her husband, Paul Beck, and the…
Don’t ever say that Florida Attorney General Robert A. Butterworth isn’t a rock and roller. Actually it’s the local bureau of the attorney general’s office that’s throwing the party, but the boss and his Tallahassee posse are invited (sorry, but the public isn’t) to the office’s holiday party, where the…
I ran into another “homeless” street guy, Uncle Tim, a friend, who revealed through Scripture that my entire Theory of Human Life is based on a fallacy, namely the story of Adam and Eve. See, I always figured that because everyone came from the same source — Adam and Eve…
At a certain level of spiritual coarseness, the nobler aspirations of humanity are stripped of meaning, made ridiculous, and life becomes mere agitation, a wonderment over trifles: the deceits of glamour, the frenzy of renown, the opiate of dissipation. As with the pursuit of religious epiphanies, devotees must suspend disbelief…
You can tell Crash Basket has a handle on songwriting and can play just fine by listening to their Pete’s New Shoes. They rock as clean — but much harder — live. Really driving stuff. Saw ’em at a club called Churchill’s Hideaway in Little Haiti, which I hear we’re…
Some people say life’s the thing, but of late we’ve been seeking solace in air-conditioning and reading, taking comfort in the vast historical continuum of the social graces A from the obscenely rich matrons of the gilded age to the calculated pseudonihilism of the Warhol crowd A attempting to place…
Miami, the ultimate 21st-century city, a portable prison of twisted culture in the vanguard of the bizarre. The demon seed offspring of the American family, an incorrigible distant relation who lowers the tone and drives everyone nuts, dangerous but undeniably interesting. A city careening along with the invincible logic of…
Don’t let it fool ya. Life, like this column, don’t have a beginning, middle, and end. This ain’t freaking Shake-speare (it takes a hyphen, by the way, because it was actually a nom de plume used by Edward de Vere, the true author of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth…) with…
It might seem petulant and childish, but several powerful music industry sources insist that parochialism — almost to the point of isolationism — can be the best way for a local music scene to prosper. These sources say that a community — in this case, South Florida — needs a…
It’s a great life, especially on paper, this play of light and darkness, ferreting out scraps of nourishing filth for a curious sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. Evenings in the bowels of America, restrained at the vast banquet of nightlife like reined-in livestock, held back by domestic circumstance and a pernicious…
