Joey Ramone’s Last Testament

The other night, my band played “I Wanna Be Sedated” while two preteen boys jumped around onstage in front of us, shouting the tune’s words with contagious glee. “Twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go / I wanna be sedated / Nothing to do, nowhere to go, oh,” they sang as they bopped, “I wanna be sedated.”

The Read More

Radiohead: Access Denied … Lucinda Williams: The Essence of Loss

Radiohead: Access Denied

Call me crazy, but there’s a Radiohead backlash brewing. It has nothing to do with whether or not Radiohead are pretentious. Of course they are. Always have been. But who cares–other than pop critics, of course? No, the problem stems from the fact that the arty English quintet hasn’t lived up to Read More

Ho, Jack, Maynard and Me: Steve Earle Talks (and Talks)

When he arrived on the scene in 1986, Steve Earle was lauded as a neo-Outlaw hillbilly singer (see Waylon and Willie). But as Mr. Earle’s songs got increasingly louder and the singer himself cultivated a biker look, his records straddled that lost consumer zone between Hank Williams and heavy metal. How was Mr. Earle’s poor Read More

Lucinda Williams Is Ready for Her Close-Up Now

The cognoscenti are wigging. “How did a 45-year-old ‘neurotic diva’ with one foot in Faulkner’s South and one foot in Garth’s make the year’s best album?” wonders a headline in Spin . “Perfect,” declares critic Robert Christgau in the July 9-23 Rolling Stone . “Courtney Love and Alanis Morissette could learn a few things from Read More