This time last year I wrote about taking my wife and two teenage girls to the Memphis in May music festival. Ginny and I were about the oldest people there. I predicted that would be my last music festival. But I was wrong. My delightful daughter Ruth, who just turned 17, was planning to attend Atlanta’s Shaky Knees music festival with a friend and her dad. Perfect. Perfect is never perfect. Her friend got sick and had to back out. Did we want the tickets, the dad asked? It just so happens my wife’s favorite band, Tame Impala, was the Sunday night headliner. Ginny had been talking about going to see them for months. Mother’s Day and Ruth’s birthday were coming up. I got a sinking feeling Thursday morning that the die was cast. Another music festival was in the cards. It’s not that I don’t like music, I do. But like Memphis in May, Shaky Knees doesn’t allow folding chairs. It’s tough on my old back to stand around in the hot sun for hours … [Read more...] about Midtown Atlanta is urban and residential
Sunshine and city lights lyrics
Remembering Graham ‘Rooftop’ Brotherton, Dallas Musician and Kessler Mainstay
The first thing Chris Savage saw when he walked onto the empty Kessler stage was his friend’s drum set. A stage light beamed down on the kit, illuminating the instrument and forming a single ray of light in an ocean of blackness. Graham “Rooftop” Brotherton would be a part of one more show. The beloved drummer and Kessler Theater team member died on March 30 after a hard-fought battle with aggressive cancer. On Sunday, April 14, his friends, family and fellow artists gathered at The Kessler to honor him in a memorial filled with laughter, stories and music. Rooftop played drums for the band Mercury Rocket, but many knew him as the Swiss Army knife of The Kessler, a man who could be seen working the door, setting up for shows or breaking up fights without throwing a single punch.“Graham did it all,” Kessler artistic director Jeff Liles says. “He was the glue for this team.”Liles knew Rooftop long before he asked him to join the Kessler team in … [Read more...] about Remembering Graham ‘Rooftop’ Brotherton, Dallas Musician and Kessler Mainstay
Upcoming concerts in Phoenix: Justin Timberlake, Travis Scott, Fleetwood Mac
Ed Masley Arizona Republic Published 12:11 AM EST Nov 14, 2018 Justin Timberlake returns to the Valley this fall in a season that also brings big shows from Travis Scott and Fleetwood Mac. Here's a look at those and other concerts swinging through the Valley's biggest rooms, from rock and pop to hip-hop, R&B and country. 11/14: Kyle The Lightspeed World Tour is the up-and-coming rap sensation's biggest headline tour to date, in support of his debut album, "Light of Mine," with Marc E. Bassy and tobi lou. The 25-year-old is best known in the mainstream for his breakthrough single, "iSpy," a quadruple-platinum smash with a Lil Yachty featured topped the rap charts and took him all the way to No. 4 on Billboard's Hot 100. Details: 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix. $28-$60. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com. 11/14: Rodney Crowell A former member of Emmylou Harris' Hot Band, Crowell was best known for … [Read more...] about Upcoming concerts in Phoenix: Justin Timberlake, Travis Scott, Fleetwood Mac
Dessa gets ‘frank, candid and vulnerable’ in new memoir
In a black leather notebook — or its iPhone equivalent, the Notes app — Dessa jots down an idea in one of three piles: Song. Poetry. Essay. Dessa does them all. A satisfying sonic pattern lands in song. A well-drawn image might get filed under poetry. An idea about the state of political rhetoric? “That’s going to ask for some real ink,” Dessa said. “That’s going to ask for 5,000 words — which would make for an insufferably long song.” Dessa started in slam poetry, made her name rapping with the Doomtree crew. Now, her essay writing is getting its due. The New York Times recently published her evocative travel tales from London and New Orleans and, this week, New York publisher Dutton Books will release her debut memoir, “My Own Devices: True Stories From the Road on Music, Science and Senseless Love.” Dessa, 37, writes like she raps like she talks — with a sharp vocabulary, an eye for telling detail and a … [Read more...] about Dessa gets ‘frank, candid and vulnerable’ in new memoir
The Underrated and the Forgotten: Seven L.A. Bands Way More People Should Know About
The tender years in Tucson, Arizona, stealing money from my big brother’s busboy tip jar and buying Circle K money orders with the coins to send to Zed Records in Long Beach for all the Dangerhouse sides, The Eyes, The Bags, the mighty Weirdos, Black Randy and the Metro Squad, The Alley Cats, The Deadbeats, etc. Bands I’d hardly heard but knew were godhead. I was an outcast kid, beat up sometimes, mocked, laughed at. Later, at 15, I’d be living mostly at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, a young bike racer recently named to the junior national team. Was in SoCal for a bike race. Somehow, I wound up in a car with Axxel G. Reese from The Gears and some punk-rock college dude from Tucson. My fake ID, ordered from the back pages of Creem, worked. Bike racing makes you look older.It was Club 88 in West L.A. Dark, a lighted rosy glow, tiny stage, cigarettes, dirty Converse, fouled hair. Big people drinking in a half-full club. Clash on the PA. I … [Read more...] about The Underrated and the Forgotten: Seven L.A. Bands Way More People Should Know About