"Where the hell can I find that Vanilla Fudge rarity in this podunk town?" Surely, we've all had that thought before, especially when visiting loved ones in other cities. Lord knows when you need a Pavement 7-inch and you're miles from your usual record shop, it can get ugly. Well, no need to panic this [...]
As reported by The Huffington Post and other outlets last week, DJ Jonathan Toubin—the New York-based, soul-centric DJ whom City Paper readers will remember from his appearance on the Bruise Cruise (not to mention a recent performance at Comet Ping Pong)—was severely injured in a bizarre accident last Thursday. Apparently, a taxi cab crashed through The Jupiter Hotel [...]
Willy Turner, everyone was relieved to learn last week, is still alive. After the news spread, some folks even started gathering music and boomboxes to give to the man known around 14th Street NW as Black Cat Bill.
Amid all the excitement, however, comes some bad news. Last Friday, Turner was moved from Deanwood Rehabilitation and Wellness [...]
"Playing music is like handwriting," says Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye. "If you play a song over and over, it starts to evolve."
For my feature this week on Fugazi's new online archive of live shows, I discussed some of the subtle changes you can hear in live version of the song "Repeater." Since then, I spoke to [...]
Woozy keyboards and spacey guitars dominate The War On Drugs latest effort, Slave Ambient. It’s an engaging, fluid listen that effortlessly melds Bruce Springsteen’s earthy songcraft with Spiritualized’s intricate atmospherics. Songwriter Adam Granduciel, 32, has been making records for years, but this much-lauded LP is a real breakthrough, garnering both greater critical acclaim and larger [...]
Since posting an item yesterday on the very-much-still-alive Willy Turner—aka Black Cat Bill—I've received a lot of questions about what to do with tapes and boomboxes. (Turner, who's living in a nursing home in Deanwood, told me he'd be grateful for a boombox and some tunes.) Local writer and activist Andy Bowen says he's organizing [...]
In 2009, a 45-minute MP3 of audio from Fugazi concerts cropped up on punk and indie-rock blogs. But it wasn’t a musical recording: Instead, James Burns, the fan behind the file, had cobbled together choice clips of outrageous stage banter. The collage not only affirmed the band’s reputation for hardline punk diatribes (“Would the gentleman in [...]
"The Black Cat Man is still hanging in there."
That's what William "Willy" Turner told me yesterday afternoon when I visited him at the Deanwood Rehabilitation and Wellness Center on Nannie Hellen Burroughs Avenue NE, and it was a nice thing to hear several days after a handful of local blogs declared him dead.
For more than a [...]
Remember when you paid $5 to see that life-changing, all-ages show where Guy Picciotto hung upside down from a basketball hoop? Or when Ian MacKaye stretched out the insanity of "23 Beats Off" for just a few minutes more? It's time to relive all those memories, folks...
In news that should make Phish jealous, The New [...]
Schooled in D.C. punk's DIY ethos but influenced more by '70s psych-rock than hardcore, Marshall Keith has always been a local anomaly. As the guitarist of The Slickee Boys, he predated the hardcore sound that the District would later become known for, but his band was inextricably part of the fabric of the D.C. underground [...]
