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Will Kennedy is a freelance writer and a senior music writer with Eugene Weekly. He lives in Eugene with his wife, daughter and two cats. All of whom politely accommodate his obsessions with Doctor Who and The Smiths.
Alongside Neil Young and Bob Dylan, Tom Petty has one of the most distinctive voices in rock music. And when you have a distinctive voice, it gets spoofed a lot by comedians. So I ask Mike Campbell, longtime lead guitarist with Petty’s band The Heartbreakers, which comedian does the best Petty impersonation? After giving it some thought, Campbell laughs. “Ask Jimmy Fallon, he’ll give you a good answer,” Campbell says. Continue reading
With all the middle-of-the-road county fair and casino appearances Pat Benatar makes, it’s hard to remember just how edgy this four-time Grammy winner once was. In the days of leg warmers and smoke machines, Benatar jazzercised her way through a string of early MTV mega-anthems including “Love is a Battlefield,” “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” “We Belong” and “Invincible.” Continue reading
Like something from your grandma’s collection of 45s, “10-gallon funnyman” Sourdough Slim harkens back to the days of the singin’, yodelin’, joke-tellin’ cowboy. You might be asking yourself: Is the world really waiting for a revival of the Burl Ives, Will Rogers and Gene Autry sound? The answer is: Probably not. But like a dusty little gem found in a secondhand shop, Slim (né Rick Crowder) shows that you didn’t know what you were missing the first time around. “My true calling as a cowboy was not on the range but, rather, on the stage,” Slim says on his website. Continue reading
Just when the pollen haze clears out and right before the smoke from Central Oregon forest fires rolls in, the southern Willamette Valley is inundated with a different kind of summer haze: a fleet of Vanagons, Subarus and buses (VW and LTD) converging just west of Eugene in Veneta for the annual Oregon Country Fair. Continue reading
Unlike previous efforts, Mike Last feels The Stagger and Sway’s latest release, Fun and Games, is a rock ‘n’ roll record — a sound the quartet has moved toward since adding Brian Schierenbeck on lead guitar. “Brian played our last CD-release show,” says Last, Stagger and Sway’s vocalist, rhythm guitarist and primary songwriter. “But he wasn’t on the record.” Last says Fun and Games has “a little more grit to it — a little more teeth. It’s more of a band record.” Continue reading
“We love Eugene,” says Ashley Edwards, vocalist and songwriter for Durango, Colorado-based Hello Dollface. “The vibrancy, the grit, the consciousness, the food.” The band’s bass player, Jesse Ogle, attended the UO, Edwards says, and this time ’round through Eugene, Hello Dollface’s “heart-quenching desert vagabond soul” will be backed up onstage by some local players: Ben Scharf, Matt Calkins and Brad Erichsen of local jazz-funk group Eleven Eyes. Continue reading
The last bro standing from the ’90s jam band/groove-rock scene (Sublime, Dave Matthews, Blues Traveler et al.), Garrett Dutton, better known as G. Love of G. Love & Special Sauce, is way too chill to care much about superstardom. Instead, G. Love & Special Sauce continues to bring danceable, reggae- and hip-hop-inflected blues rock to the masses. G. Love’s latest, 2014’s Sugar, is more of the same. Continue reading
On record, San Francisco’s Geographer is somewhat blunted by an ambition to sound thoroughly “now,” to fit into whatever mold successful modern rock bands are expected to fit into in these wild and wooly days of making music. Live, Geographer is as raw as twiddling knobs on computer equipment can be, but vocalist Michael Deni adds interest by switching between guitar and loops, while Nathan Blaz supplies keyboards and electric cello and drummer Brian Ostreicher provides a needed punch and danceable energy. Continue reading
When I was a boy, my father, a former music teacher, joked: “There’s nothing worth listening to beyond Bach. Bach wrote it all first.” But I was a child of pop music and, in the words of Morrissey, classical music said “nothing to me about my life.” Continue reading
What were you doing at age 17? Well, 17-year-old Clementine Creevy of the L.A.-based band Cherry Glazerr is busy fostering an up-and-coming indie “it” girl reputation — but not before getting her homework done. The cherub-faced trio’s 2013 release Trick or Treat Dancefloor, out on Burger Records, recalls the early work of fellow female-fronted Southern California band Best Coast; think three chords soaked in reverb and rudimentary melodies alongside loose and stony percussion. Continue reading