The C-Man, Sabu, and Monkeyboy ventured into the wilds of Palm Beach County on a recent Saturday night. We had two destinations in mind, the first of which was approached with hopeful optimism, the second with a certain dread. On both counts expectations were met and, ultimately, exceeded. (The Calibrator…
Everyone knows that South Florida is an abnormal place, with anomalies galore. Every crackpot east of the Mississippi passes through the region at least once, and many stay. But without the dark energies that South Florida’s strangeness produces, there wouldn’t be bands such as Iko-Iko. At least that’s how Iko’s…
Kevin Welch Beneath My Wheels (Dead Reckoning) Everything great about Kevin Welch is present on “Everybody’s Gotta Walk,” the first cut from Beneath My Wheels, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s masterful fourth album. His labelmate Mike Henderson lays down a blues-drenched slide-guitar riff, then Welch’s piercing Okie-twang tenor cuts through the groove,…
Far removed from his kinfolk, the Calibrator spent his first Thanksgiving in South Florida with seven new friends on the ninth floor of a high-rise apartment building somewhere along the beach in Hollywood. Musically it was a splendid day all around. Back in Pennsylvania, holiday music in Mother Calibrator’s house…
Amplified “sound systems” were hired out for dances and on Saturday nights the back streets and dance halls of Kingston came alive — and the dream was born — music sprung from the basic beat of Jamaica and all the U.S.A. influences and the power and beauty and joy of…
Tom Rush Very Best of Tom Rush: No Regrets (Columbia/Legacy) Tom Rush always has been saddled with that most deadly of labels: critics’ darling. Translation: popular failure. In a career that spans nearly 40 years, Rush has never achieved the kind of monster success enjoyed by his protégés Joni Mitchell,…
Ray Charles stopped off for 50 minutes last Wednesday night at the Broward Center For the Performing Arts. A packed house was on hand. Many in attendance, of course, were merely rich socialites who could easily afford to pay the exorbitant price that a fat cat like Charles demands for…
Jamie “King” Colton was a seven-year-old boy living in a middle-class neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, the day his parents brought home a plastic clarinet for him. So it was on nothing but a toy that he first learned to distinguish particular musical notes and different keys. A couple years…
311 Sound System (Capricorn) Since forming in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1991, 311 has forged a consistent rap and metal-based sound inflected by shades of ska and reggae. You may remember the band from its huge hit “Down,” which ruled rock radio for a spell in the mid-’90s. With Sound System,…
Ever on the lookout for the next big thing to arise from the miserable swamps of South Florida, the Calibrator, along with his trusty companion Sabu, headed for Alligator Alley in Sunrise on a recent Friday evening to check out the singer-songwriter stylings of one Bradley Ditto. Though Alligator Alley…
When you walk through the front doors of Fort Lauderdale’s Culture Room on Halloween night, you quickly realize that fans of local goth-rock act the Wicked Screaming Squirts take this holiday quite seriously. The first person you see is a topless girl who looks barely 16 years old. She is…
The Clash From Here to Eternity: The Clash Live (Epic) The Clash was as unlikely a band of influences and successes as were the Beatles just 15 years before them, two quartets of scruffy iconoclasts who changed the music world forever. While the Sex Pistols, immediate contemporaries of the Clash,…
With great reluctance Hollywood resident John Lundin removed himself from the goth music scene nearly a dozen years ago. He was 33 years old at the time and growing a bit long in the tooth to be hanging out with a crowd of death-worshiping dilettantes half his age. “You just…
Scott Lucas sounds ironically sad as he sings “Lucky,” slowly playing the circular, tremolo-warbled guitar wash of the folksy, 45-second ditty and uttering plaintively: “Pack up the cats and move to the city/Leave the jocks and their bars behind/… I move with nothing left to prove, to you/Such a lucky…
Heather Duby Post to Wire (Sub Pop) Singer Heather Duby has one of those haunting, ethereal voices that makes everything she sings just a little bit melodramatic. On Post to Wire, Duby’s debut longplayer, love and loss are frequent topics. The accompanying music, however — cowritten with producer Steve Fisk…
Well, the Calibrator has gone and done it now. He’s fallen wildly in love with the married, 47-year-old lounge singer at the Grill Room in the Riverside Hotel in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Surely the news will hit Mrs. Calibrator like a ton of falling bricks. Mrs. C., as every man…
Just when Jason Bieler thought he had it made, the bottom dropped out from underneath him. In the spring of 1998, Bieler’s band, Flat, had been signed to MCA Records, and its new album was complete and ready for release. But before the champagne was poured, the band found itself…
The Mexico City quartet Café Tacuba has long played the enfant terrible of the rock en español movement. On three previous albums the group combined elements of traditional Mexican folk with an edgy pop sensibility and hip-hop production. With the double album Reves/Yosoy, the band has pressed what is by…
Like most contemporary rock composers, Filter singer-songwriter Richard Patrick only has one good song in him. In Patrick’s particular case, that song would be “Hey Man, Nice Shot,” the earthshaking single featured on Filter’s 1995 debut album, Short Bus. Ominous and creepy, “Hey Man, Nice Shot” was a sonic miracle…
Dearest Mrs. C., Well, darlin’, your wily old man has now been in South Florida for nearly 11 weeks. Things are going reasonably well, but I sure do miss the kitties. Please give each a big tongue-kiss for me, will ya? Gracias. As you know, of course, I’m here to…
The Rev. Billy C. Wirtz is feeling great this afternoon as he chats by phone from his hotel room at the Baymont Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is the best, in fact, he’s felt in two weeks. “You gotta understand,” he explains, “for the past three days my body…
The Dixie Hummingbirds Music in the Air (House of Blues) This disc is being billed as an “all star tribute” to the Dixie Hummingbirds. There’s no doubt that the Hummingbirds — inarguably the most influential gospel group of this century — deserve a tribute. It’s just that this album doesn’t…
