Ode to the Guilty Simpson

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY
Yet another protégé of the late great hip-hop visionary J. Dilla, Guilty Simpson broke away from the “featuring” set with his very recent full-length solo album Ode to the Ghetto. Just the ensemble of producers would hype up any million-dollar mainstream album: Madlib, Mr. Porter (also known as [...]

MITCHELL STEWART
1959-2008
Mitchell Stewart, of Calabasas & Malibu, California passed away from an
apparent heart attack on Sunday, April 27, 2008 at his home.  Stewart was a self-
made visionary entrepreneur, who along with his wife and business partner, Nurit
Petri, founded and operated a mortgage bank and local concert venues including
the Vault 350 in Long Beach and the [...]

Group grope with the Angry Samoans

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY
Saw Metal Mike Saunders once before an Angry Samoans set, hunched in front of the merch fence at Chain Reaction in about 2001 without anyone capable of discussing his fearsome Britney Spears predictions around: “Mark my words,” he’d written, “20 years from now ‘Hit Me Baby’ and [...]

Earth Crisis: The Fart Face Tapes

PHOTO by LUKE MCGARRY
Let’s dig a hole so deep that we’re hanging lanterns on dinosaur jawbones and see what’s (supposedly) underneath Earth Crisis, the vegan straight-edge hardcore band who instituted the most rigorous musical vernacular since Bad Religion (“Firestorm”) and who metastasized out a secret prank band—which is a joke [...]

Repeater can’t take breaks

PHOTO by DREW KELLEY
So I can geek out for a second, let me put aside the Bunsen burners and the time-honored practice of fanning through science books to find anatomically correct illustrations of the bathing-suit area: A repeater is an electronic device that receives a signal and retransmits it at a higher [...]

What kind of venue is the Backstage Jazz Club–the one all the fuss is about since Friday, when attorneys for the neighboring Archstone CityPlace apartments sued to keep it from even opening its doors?

Last month, for those of you just joining us, I wrote about The Cellar, a downtown blues club at Broadway and The Promenade, which is being built and should open this year.
But there’s another downtown club being built up the street from The Cellar: it’s Backstage Jazz Club, at 330 Pine Ave., a jazz and [...]

Here’s why Brenton Wood’s name looks so familiar: for 40 years you’ve seen it printed in block letters on a cardboard poster stapled to a telephone pole. That’s the way small clubs—often in East L.A. or the Inland Empire—have been promoting Wood’s shows since his one and only year of what you might call stardom. [...]

Bloody but unbowed Rob Walsh reports from Saturday night:
At this show, I was reminded with how far we’ve come since the days when punk rock was relegated to warehouses, basements and former jazz clubs on the verge of being condemned. Pine Street’s Vault 350—with lavish twin big screens and an impressive lighting setup—certainly contrasted with [...]

WC’s Westside Reconnection

A dozen years ago, West Coast rap—back then they called it gangsta—was an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign, the force behind Time-Warner’s multi-million-dollar divestment of Interscope Records and a motive for reassessing the First Amendment. This week, it’s a $30 ticket for Dub-C’s concert at the Vault 350. That’s show biz!
Of course, [...]