Captain Beefheart

Meet Mexican Summer's Jess Rotter, Whose Art You've Probably Already Enjoyed

Jess Rotter truly racked up the frequent flyer miles this year. The long-time in-house publicist and marketing wiz for Brooklyn-based indie record label Mexican Summer practically lived in airplanes, repeatedly jetting out west and back to handle her duties repping Best Coast--the label's biggest su ... More >>

Hot Snakes On Their All Tomorrow's Parties Reunion

The All Tomorrow's Parties festival, which will be held this weekend at Pier 36, continues to honor the ever-nostalgizing indie world with reunions among the kind of small-scale and beloved acts that seemingly passed into the mist long ago. This year's slate includes the Afghan Whigs, Captain Beefhe ... More >>

I Was A Teenage Jam Band Scenester: Coming Around On The Ominous Seapods And Other Life Lessons

Through a series of maybe not-so-unfortunate events, I was a teenage jam band scenester, which, when properly italicized and luridly capitalized, sounds like a sordid music-crit version of a '50s exploitation paperback. But the truth is, I wasn't seduced by drugs, sex, or anything else until college ... More >>

10 No-Brainer Rock Legends Never Nominated For The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame

This weekend, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts its class of 2012, which consists of Donovan, the Beastie Boys, the late singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, the Small Faces and the Faces, blues guitarist Freddie King, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Guns N' Roses, although not lead singer Axl Rose, wh ... More >>

Gary Lucas

Da Capo's Second-Best Music Writing 2011: 112 Of Last Year's Most Notable Music Stories

The 2011 edition of Da Capo's annual anthology Best Music Writing— which this year was guest edited by The New Yorker classical writer and The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross; Daphne Carr has been the series editor since 2006—contains 32 essays and is augmented by a a jumbo-sized "Other N ... More >>

Artists Reveal the Tunes They Work To

The sonic muses of Terry Winters, Lisa Yuskavage, John Chiara, Jaime Hernandez, Demetrius Oliver, and James Casebere

Jazz Consumer Guide: Pure Joy and Hard Work

Saxophonists get up to mischief (and engage in a little drama)

STRICTLY PERSONAL

Remembering Captain Beefheart

Video Premiere: O'Death's "Bugs"

Steven OberlechnerO'Death In the mid-to-late '90s, O'Death haunted Brooklyn's creaky loft spaces as cracker-barrel mad men, an angry Man Man who worshipped Neil Young instead of Captain Beefheart, wore overalls instead of dirty white linens. As country-noise loons, the five piece was best known for ... More >>

R.I.P. 2010's Jazz Notables

Honoring this year's fallen, with a few we failed to note last year

2010's Celeb Deaths: Which One Upset You The Most?

Jean Simmons​And there were a lot of them, all with a legacy of astounding achievements well worth reflecting on! Rue McClanahan? Elizabeth Edwards? Teena Marie?

People Who Died, Circa 2010

Jay Reatard, gone but not forgotten.​It is depressing but accurate to note how inexorably the internet bends toward death, and how much of the work of professional critics these days is announcing it, verifying it, and making sense of it (often in that order, unfortunately). Michael Jackson, a ... More >>

Week In Review: All I Want For Christmas Is Train

We suggest you play this song around your family tomorrow. Get it here.​That's it for us, internet, we're back on Monday. But before we leave, let's run it back. The worst song of 2010? Well, it wasn't the cast of Glee's "Loser." And it wasn't Bret Michaels's repulsive cover of "What I Got." W ... More >>

Captain Beefheart: A Beginner's Guide

Don't buy this first​Don Van Vliet, a/k/a Captain Beefheart, died on Friday, reportedly of complications from a decades-long battle with multiple sclerosis. He was 69. Long a cult hero, with a critical fan base rivaling that of Lou Reed or the Fall's Mark E. Smith, he was naturally (and deserv ... More >>

Don Van Vliet, a/k/a Captain Beefheart, RIP

​Terrible news: Don Van Vliet, the stupendous avant-garde bluesman, surrealist painter, and world-class eccentric, has died, as confirmed to multiple outlets by a rep from the Michael Werner Gallery, which often showed his work. He would've turned 70 in January. The engine behind unclassifiabl ... More >>

So Much More Than Just the Facts in DOC NYC

WAX ON

WFMU's annual record fair is back

'Gary Lucas's Beefheart Symposium'

Gary Lucas

Times Talks Vinyl with J&R, Best Buy; Downtown Record Store Owner Has a Different Take

​The New York Times says vinyl is hot again. Not only old-fashioned record sales but also turntables sales are up. (The 35 percent lift in LP sales still doesn't put vinyl above 1 percent of the music market, but it's exciting nonetheless.) They talk to J&R Music, which normally sells CDs, an ... More >>

Organ Recital: Anticuchos in McCarren Park

​McCarren Park may be the very last place where you'd expect to find organs, yet, last Sunday I did. The occasion was the summer picnic of a Greenpoint Peruvian soccer club, attended by perhaps 300 souls, who sat on folding chairs under the London plane trees as bad weather threatened. Undeter ... More >>

The Top 10 Records That Sold Last Week at Other Music in the East Village

In 2009, the traditional practice of exchanging physical copies of records for money is a trade that might best be called quixotic. But New Yorkers are stubborn people, and the record store is not dead. Below, the top ten records that actually sold in the last week at a store near you. Photo of Tak ... More >>

"Tom Always Had His Head Down Mumbling": An Excerpt from the New Tom Waits Bio

Perfect Sound Forever, friend-of-SOTC Jason Gross' long-running online music mag, has an excerpt from Lowside of the Road, Barney Hoskyns' new Tom Waits biography. (Here's the first chapter, actually.) The PSF bit concerns Tom's transformation from sweet '70s crooner to deranged '80s junkyard-dog ca ... More >>

Quick Hits

Democratic Congressional candidate Scott Murphy wants NY-20 voters to know they have a choice in tomorrow's election: Scott Murphy, or Rushbush Palin. Think globally, retract locally: having established a global edition, the New York Times is getting rid of its City section, as well as its week ... More >>

FAMILY FUSE

Sprawling trips are just across the bridge

Fast 'n' Bulbous

MIX MASTERS

From Captain Beefheart videos to Yoko Ono puzzlers

WHO’S THE MAN MAN?

Indie band wages war on form and decorum

Friday

Wednesday

ABBA ZABA

Raise a trout to the genius of Captain Beefheart

Christ and the Robots

Tonight: O'Death at the Luna Lounge, plus MP3s

Alternative Realities

Cosmic commies, Christian rockers, and gay Republicans at the 13th annual NYUFF

Brooklynites With Ridiculous Italian Names Make Creepiness Sound Fun

Version-A-Ning

Jazz tributes foreground Beefheart's primitivist dada and Miles Davis's existential quack

Hot Spot

Music

Weirdo Beardcore

All Music Guide genre entry, just in case they ever need one

Outside Lines

Chicago no wavers melt down indigo and violet crayons

Proggy Went A-Jammin'

Music

Dub for Dummies

Give the Gift of UniMoth

The 1999 Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll

Turkey Shoot

Hungry and Weird

The Other Lode

R.O.C.K. in the USA