He’d likely snicker at the puny waves that have battered South Florida over the past few weeks, because Dick Dale, the patron saint of surf guitar, has seen them bigger. In fact, the 64-year-old has seen it all, pretty much: He was there when Leo Fender’s electric guitar and tube…

South Florida is starving for reggae music. Given our proximity to Jamaica, reggae bands should find rich fields of West Indian immigrants within which to flourish. Aside from stumbling upon stacks of old roots records played by Lauderhill patty-shop proprietors or late-night public radio retro Rastafarians, however, we’re infected with…

When it rains it pours. Last week it seemed as if worthy concerts became like puddles, unavoidable, clustering so close you couldn’t help but step in a few. Some were muddy messes: Hank Williams III did the unthinkable on Thursday, October 24, at the Culture Room as he made it…

This Washington, D.C., group (which takes its name from an old Brian Eno song) took off at the end of 1998, continuing the momentum — and one-half of the personnel — of the beloved band Jawbox. Blending shades of Gang of Four, Pixies, and even XTC into a wiry, angular…

Having grown up in New Orleans, center of the jazz universe, Nicholas Payton can’t even remember his first Mardi Gras, his first visit to Preservation Hall, his first jazz concert. It’s not his fault, though: The 28-year-old trumpeter attended each event before his first birthday. “I was doing that kind…

Given that this year’s Family Values Tour offers a typically execrable smattering of pedestrian cheese-metal (Staind? Who asked for that nonsense?) you’d be within your rights to ignore it, but the first band on the stage deserves consideration. Deadsy, captained by Elijah Blue Allman, son of Cher and Mr. Whipping…

You’d think that, being the target of a federal probe and all, Seminole Chief James Billie would be overseeing a benefit concert (or two) just to pay off his many debts — and legal fees. But instead the big man’s band is hosting a show this Sunday to help scare…

Dude, your package is so suspicious: Mail delivery being what it is nowadays, technicians inside Fortress Bandwidth feel lucky to still have any parcels to open in advance of Christmas. Even better, local CDs seem to be a hot ticket this time of year, arriving at an unprecedented rate and…

Never a band to enjoy a stable lineup, the Damned has reshuffled again and again but this time around has hit on a formidable combination: original singer Dave Vanian and guitarist Captain Sensible at the helm; Vanian’s goth-diva wife, Patricia Morrison (Gun Club, Sisters of Mercy), on bass; Pinch (English…

From 1967 until Jerry Garcia’s death in August 1995, Mickey Hart played percussion with the Grateful Dead. He also regularly succumbed to an uncontrollable urge to uncover and bring to light music from all over the world. He recorded The Music of Upper and Lower Egypt during a Dead tour…

I don’t know about you, but the lowly infidels hidden away deep in the Bandwidth bunker have always been nonbelievers in the band Tool. Not because of Tool’s silly pseudo-intellectual take on heavy metal and prog-rock but largely because of its legion of overzealous, fanatical followers. These people just never…

I don’t want to be known as “Cancer Boy’ for the rest of my life,” sighs Eric Alexandrakis. “You know, “That musical cancer guy.’ But it is marketable.” Alexandrakis, a Miami-based multi-instrumentalist who produces homemade pop songs in relative isolation, doesn’t make his bouts with Hodgkin’s disease the subject of…

Friday, October 12, is going to be a weird night at Boynton Beach’s megavenue, Orbit. Of course any time you’re watching a band from a spot where, only a year before, a Winn-Dixie butcher sliced bloody T-bones, it’s gonna feel odd. But the “Morpheus” party the club has planned for…

I was hoping to use the upcoming Tangerine Dream show to draw parallels between the “space rock” music of the late 1960s and early 1970s — the first haul of electronic music made when synthesizers were invented — and Orbital, perhaps one of the best techno bands operating today. Tangerine…

All Jeff Snow, drummer for West Palm Beach’s Legends of Rodeo, will say is, “We’d rather not say.” “We don’t want to make a wrong move,” cautions singer-guitarist John Ralston. “We’re keeping our cards close to our chests right now,” adds Snow, his voice indicating the discussion is over. A…

Most of the time South Florida seems even farther than a whole peninsula away from the rest of the United States. The wave of benefit concerts in our area, with proceeds to be funneled to victims of the September 11 terrorist disaster, proves that this is far from an un-American…

As spinoffs go, Tom Tom Club came with a remarkable schematic for success. Jettisoning the intellectual elitism that had a grip on their full-time group, Talking Heads, drummer Chris Frantz and his wife, bassist Tina Weymouth, founded their side project on the premise of funky, beachcombing fun. It worked, too:…

The Donnas offer good, clean fun. Well, not exactly good or particularly clean. But it should be fun when Donna R., Donna A., Donna C., and Donna F. perform the gutter-slut punk they made infamous on their most recent outing, Turn 21 — an age at which the four have…

It sort of sneaked up on us, caught us unaware. Who was ready for Fort Lauderdale’s beloved Metal Factory to change its attention-grabbing name? Removing the metal — but maybe not the mettle — from its sign, stationery, outgoing voice-mail message, matchbooks, and more, The Factory (as it is now…

New Orleans-based duo Telefon Tel Aviv trades in “experimental” dance music: in other words the kind you can’t really dance to. The band’s lovely Fahrenheit Fair Enough album — awash in peaceful, hypnotic melodies, chattering electronic percussion, serene keyboards, and dreamy guitar glissandi — has more in common with ambient…

At the height of MTV’s cultural influence, musicians still kidded one another into believing videos were propagandistic statements, short-format art films, while hiding from the reality of what they were really creating: television commercials. And it is harder to find a more revelatory clip than Living Colour’s strafing “Cult of…