In a converted nursery school on Wiles Road, with heavy-metal music blaring behind every door, Andrew Musselman leads me to the classroom where he'll teach his next lesson. He's running late, but that doesn't deter him from giving me the grand tour. As we pass a room with beanbag chairs on the floor, he aims a finger at the Jimi Hendrix poster hanging on the wall. "The student lounge," he explains.
The school where Andrew teaches is unlike any other in Broward County. Here, the students don't read textbooks. They don't take quizzes or read essays either. Instead of desks, they sit behind drum sets, and within every classroom is not a blackboard but an electric guitar begging to be played. It is the School of Rock, a real-life music academy where young musicians from all over Broward County come to be educated in the ways of rock 'n' roll.
Let's suspend belief for a second now and imagine a world in which Will Ferrell, Christopher Walken, and SNL support cast in stitches and the dreaded cowbell does not exist. Chances are that in such a scenario, many folks would lead lives unaware of Blue Ă–yster Cult and the impact that they've had on numerous generations of musicians since their inception in 1967.
That's kind of hard, especially since the "more cowbell" skit is one of the true golden nuggets of the show's run, so much so that Ferrell's fictitious member Gene Frenkle has garnered admiration and condolences from the band's less informed fans. And Walken is the epitome of cool as the also amalgam-fiction of The Bruce Dickinson producing their signature 1976 tune "(Don't Fear) The Reaper."
​The stars of 2004's Some Kind of Monster documentary are taking another sojourn into theaters. Except this time it's in 3-D, and instead of being directed by acclaimed documentary filmmakers, it's in the hands of Nimród Antal, who directed 2010's Predators. (If you haven't seen it, it's about monsters, not sex offenders.)
Metallica will start filming the "marriage of narrative and concert" in August, which means there must be unannounced tour dates coming up. It'll be out in summer 2013, according to a press release, but a lot could happen before then.
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Imagine if you will a musical jam party sometime between 1973 and 1985 hosted by the Residents but somehow, don't ask me, they've managed to travel along the delicate tendrils of time and space into the future and managed to acquire modern (i.e. 2010) technology and are able to bring it back in time and are actively filling the brains of their guests with cheese and futuristic avant garde noise!
Well, this certainly will not involve the quad of giant eyeballs and skull, but it might certainly involve you. Now that the Mad Men season is behind us, Sundays are ours for the taking again! The happening cats over at Miami's only roving gallery/venue/educational boardroom/meeting space, The End/Spring Break will be landing in Churchill's this Sunday as they'll host Carlos Rigau's HarD/Drive jam where the crowd will be encouraged to participate via the use of personal laptops, external drives and/or flash drives.
Def Leppard's Phil Collen sure wields a lot of guitar
​No offense to our sister paper, but hey Orange County, Calif.: Sucks to your assmar! When rock music legends want to get married to costume designers 10 years their junior that they met on tour, they naturally gravitate to (where else but) glitzy South Florida. That's what happened Friday, when Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen, 52, married Helen Simmons at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton. The couple met during Def Leppard's 2008 Sparkle Lounge Tour, and live in California's OC.
School of Rock is a new weekly column on Crossfade filling you in on acts playing in town that may be flying under your radar, but shouldn't. Click here for past installments.
When I was but a young teenage wannabe punk rocker, the Queers appealed to me straight away. First, and maybe most importantly as an entry point, they had a name that made parents frown. But more importantly as a sticking point were the Queers' sweet, sweet melodies. They were just rough enough around the edges to make you feel suitably snotty and aggressive by listening to them. But their harmonies and pop structures did a lot to fill the gaping hole created during that awkward teenage period when it was no longer cool to sing along to your parents' Beach Boys records. (Ah, the self-conscious folly of ultra-youth.)
Yes, there was a time when "pop-punk" meant all that -- beachy melodies and choruses over, you know, actual punk rock. Not all these bands with overly complicated names, forced "goofy" promo photos, and ugly neon shirts with huge letters. Seriously -- these are the hair bands of this era, all those musicians and their fans will be embarrassed by it in under two years.
Still, luckily there are still some bands making music that fulfills the original pop-punk promise: a fast-paced, updated digestion of the Ramones and all the delicious power pop, a la the Cars and Costello, that came after it.
One such act is the Leftovers, who hail from Portland, Maine. (Seems kind of weird to us outer-space city slickers, but the Queers themselves come from B.F.E., New Hampshire, after all). Their new album, Eager to Please, is out now, and it's full of the kind of repetitive, catchy, sub-three-minute songs that would have fit in perfectly with everything in the heyday of the sadly defunct Lookout Records. If none of that rings a bell, and you miss Weezer when they still sang about surfing and weren't writing crappy novelty hits, you will also probably dig the Leftovers.
​If you're planning to stop by the Vagabond tonight to check out Portland duo Glass Candy, you are definitely in for a disco-laced treat. But if your knowledge on the pair is pretty much equivalent to your knowledge of quantum physics, let us give you the cliff notes on Glass Candy.
While they've been making music as a pair since 1996, the duo released their debut Smashed Candy in 2001. However, it wouldn't be until the release of 2007's B/E/A/T/B/O/X when they would become critic darlings. Pitchfork, which gave the album an 8.1 rating, said "Glass Candy's previous false starts can now be dismissed as pulled punches, or a band in its genesis; either way, this record marks a flat-out improvement."
Singles like "Beatific," "Candy Castles," and "Digital Versicolor" insured the duo weren't only critical favorites but dancefloor staples as well.
But enough notes. Let's let the music speak for itself. After the jump, check out the video for "Digital Versicolor" and a live performance of "Beatific" at this year's Coachella. More >>
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