Tom Russell On Tex-Mex Carnage
Don’t miss “Where God and the Devil Wheel Like Vultures: Report from El Paso,” an amazing essay by artist-musician Tom Russell in The Rumpus. Russell has spent much of his life in Texas border towns, and his writing documents a deterioration from the nostalgic film-noir evoked in movies like Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil…
Interview: Concert Security Pro Marshall Rodriguez Talks About Nitrous Oxide
The battle between concert promoters and the people who sell nitrous oxide balloons has escalated in the last few years to almost an all out war. Standing on the front lines of that battle is Marshall Rodriguez, a fan who launched a security company in 2000 that specializes in festivals and jam band-oriented concert events….
Mercedes Sosa 1935-2009
In 1979, Mercedes Sosa was arrested onstage and subsequently deported by Jorge Videla’s military junta. She was that kind of folksinger, an avowed Communist and a star of the “nueva canción” (new song) movement of politicized folk music that developed in Latin America during the 1950s and ’60s. Dubbed La Negra due to her dark…
Will.i.am To Host ‘We The People Festival’
Suicidal Tendencies, Pepper, Anti-Pop Consortium, Glitch Mob, Flobots, 2Mex, Non Human Intelligence, and Whiskey Pete are among the first wave of acts slated to perform at the We the People Festival. Will.i.am hosts the event, which will take place on three stages at Los Angeles Center Studios on November 21. The conscious hardcore and hip-hop…
New York Philharmonic Cancels Trip To Cuba
The good news is that Cuban musicians are receiving visas to perform in the United States for the first time since 2003. The great singer Omara Portuondo is the latest to be issued a visa to visit. Unfortunately, the New York Philharmonic will not be making its own planned historic visit to Cuba at the…
TckTckTck Campaign’s ‘Beds Are Burning’
Youssou N’Dour, Scorpion, Paul Shaffer, Duran Duran, Bob Geldof, Brazilian Girls, Fergie, and dozens of other musicians and actors you may or may not recognize contributed to Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning,” the climate-change movement’s very own “We Are the World.” Anyone who downloads the overstuffed tune becomes a virtual signer of Global Humanitarian Forum…
Jeff Waful Talks Lights With Phish’s Chris Kuroda
You know them; they light up your life. Jeff Waful, who first interviewed Phish’s Chris Kuroda for Jambands.com eleven years ago, now produces great lights for Umphrey’s McGee (following a long stint with moe.). So who better to check in with Kuroda on the state of the strobe? There’s a lot more where this came…
Bob Dylan To Distribute Worst Album To Citibank Customers First
It’s beginning to sound a little like Christmas thanks to Bob Dylan, whose forthcoming Christmas in the Heart is easily the most disturbing, ridiculous, and superfluous collection of seasonal song in recent memory. Yes, it’s that great – and you can hear the 30-second samples removed from its Amazon page here. Even better – or…
Apple Rejects Single-Payer iPhone App
A free iPhone application – iSinglepayer – that compares the cost of health care around the world, documents insufficiencies in the U.S. health care system, uses the phone’s GPS to determine users’ local congresspersons, and displays how much each member of congress has received from the health sector was rejected by Apple on the grounds…
Mr. U2 Goes To Washington
With two Bono shout-outs to Nancy Pelosi during their Washington DC gig Tuesday night, and an elaborate multimedia stage design (“the Claw”!) that, as one commenter noted, could have fed all Africa, U2 walked a thin line between righteousness and ostentation. The comments to the Chris Richards’s Washington Post review supply a wide range of…