TONITE: Baltimore Rock City!

[Illustrations by ALEX FINE] J Roddy Walston and The Business are everything a Rock and Roll band should be. No gimmicks, no effects, just four guys who play straight forward music that you can’t help but enjoy. Baltimore is better-known for mellow indie rockers like Beach House and the Celebration, but that will soon change. Lucky for us, J Roddy and his Business moved here from Tennessee five years ago, bringing along their unique blend of Southern Rock guitar riffs and Queen-style vocal harmonies and the capacity to put on a live show that will leave you wanting 10 encores.  […]

NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

FRESH AIR WikiLeaks‘ release of more than 90,000 military intelligence reports to The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Speigel revealed many new insights long suspected but never corroborated about the war in Afghanistan. Among the biggest revelations from the leaked material was the level of detail about Pakistan’s spy service and it’s level of involvement supporting the Taliban insurgency while taking billions of dollars in U.S. aid. Mark Mazzetti was one of several reporters from The New York Times who sifted through and analyzed the documents leaked by WikiLeaks. In a conversation on Fresh Air, he details what […]

HIGH DIVE: McKenna’s In Fairmount

BY JEN ANTONIC I suppose I can’t tell you anything worthwhile about booze without first explaining why I’m here. I moved to Philadelphia from a city out west after a mid-mid-life crisis and the realization that I always wanted to live in a big, cramped, East Coast city with tall buildings, subways, and neighborhoods. As recently as three years ago, I was somewhat clueless that big east cost cities came in different packages; all I knew was that Philadelphia was close to New York, and it had tall buildings, some subways, and some neighborhoods. If someone would have mentioned the […]

ALBUM REVIEW: The Haunted Windchimes

THE HAUNTED WINDCHIMES Honey-Moonshine Blank Tape Records Maybe I was just bored, or perhaps it was an instinctual lust for alcohol, but the old-timey drawing of a jug of moonshine on the Haunted Windchime’s debut, Honey-Moonshine, drew me right in. Society tells me: don’t’ judge a book by its cove, but fuck ‘em. It looked awesome, so I gave it a spin. The Haunted Windchimes, I soon discovered, are a rootsy folk band that raise the hairs on my arms with their bewitching harmonies. Sassy female timbres blur into male-led verses, creating a sound that sways from the holy to […]

THE FUGS: Kill For Peace

NEW YORK TIMES:  The Fugs were, in the view of the longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, “the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.” They were also perhaps the most puerile and yet the most literary rock group of the 1960s, with songs suitable for the locker room as well as the graduate seminar (“Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,” based on a poem by William Blake); all were played with a ramshackle glee that anticipated punk rock. With songs like “Kill for Peace,” the Fugs also established themselves as aggressively antiwar, with a touch of absurdist theater. The band […]

SIDEWALKING: The Big Bambino

Italian Market, 12:37 PM by JEFF FUSCO PREV: The Phantom Plot To Blow Up The Liberty Bell BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY In the spring of 1969, four activists from the Philadelphia chapter of the Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) were arrested for plotting to blow up the Liberty Bell after the police found bomb-making materials in the refrigerator of their West Philly apartment. According to the police, the planned destruction of the Liberty Bell was part of a larger plot hatched by a network of student radicals to destroy national landmarks across the country. The shocking […]

THE PHAROAHS OF AMERICA: The Secret Tomb Of The Gilded Age Discovered In Elkins Park

WASHINGTON POST: ELKINS PARK, Pa. — Lynnewood Hall, a century-old stunner of a building just outside Philadelphia, silently, almost invisibly, languishes 200 feet beyond a two-lane blacktop road like a crumbling little Versailles. The graceful fountain that welcomed hundreds of well-heeled visitors, President Franklin Roosevelt among them, was dismantled and sold years ago. Its once meticulously sculpted French gardens are overgrown with weeds and vines. The classical Indiana limestone facade may have lost its luster but its poise still remains – at least from the other side of rusted wrought iron gates that keep the curious at bay. Like other […]

PENTAGON PAPERS: Wikileaks Releases 92,000 Classified Afghan War Documents To The NY Times

NEW YORK TIMES: The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001. As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst […]

TONITE: It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World

JAMES WOLCOTT: It’s 1964, LBJ is in the White House, America is on the marching move, the Beatles land at Idlewild and appear on Ed Sullivan–the cymbal clash that signals that the Sixties have truly begun, heralded by the simultaneous mass climax of millions of screaming girls whose joy and delirium explodes like a bomb from the depths of Pandora’s Box. The lid is off and it’s Pop goes the weasel for a whole generation. How satisfyingly smooth is Mad Men able to slip into its groove now, no longer obliged to tick off the mores and reference points of […]

TONITE: I Can’t Believe It’s Non-Classical!

BY DAVE ALLEN Let’s get this out of the way: Gabriel Prokofiev is the grandson of the great Russian composer. It was all that the articles about him could talk about after he launched Non-Classical, a London-based label and monthly club night, in 2004. Quite apart from his lineage, though, the DJ, composer and expert in African music is worthy of attention. Both his label and club night pair classical music—well, not Mozart and Beethoven, but they’d recognize the instruments—with DJ’d sets of dance music and remixes of the classical-styled source material. Prokofiev writes in traditional genres – the string […]

EXIT INTERVIEW: The Photon Band’s Art DiFuria

[Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA] As you may have heard, Philly music legend/art professor Art DiFuria, Ph.D.,  is leaving town for greener pastures — specifically a professorship at Savannah School Of Art And Design. In advance of his farewell show with the Photon Band at Johnny Brendas on Saturday, Phawker conducted an exit interview with Dr. DiFuria. For newbies to the glories of the Photon Band, check out the exhaustive bio down below. PHAWKER: Our first question is fill in the blank: I first came to Philadelphia because ______ but wound up staying because _____. ART DIFURIA: I first came to […]

RIP: Big Star Bassist Andy Hummel Dead At 59

MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL:  The legendary Memphis pop band Big Star has lost another member, as founding bassist Andy Hummel died Monday afternoon at his home in the Fort Worth, Texas, area after a long battle with cancer. He was 59. Hummel had been receiving treatment for the past couple of years, but recently went in for a hip operation and was informed that the cancer had spread and that his condition was terminal. “At that point,” said Hummel’s friend, Ardent Studios owner and Big Star producer John Fry, “Andy elected to accept hospice care and spent the last couple weeks […]

NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

[Portrait of Robert Duvall by SUPERSAL001] FRESH AIR In the new film Get Low, Robert Duvall plays Felix Bush, a secretive recluse who eschews almost all human contact and lives alone in the woods, fueling rumors among townspeople that he’s hiding some terrible deed in his past. One day, Bush comes out of the woods and announces to his town that he wants to stage a public, living funeral — complete with mule, hearse and coffin — before he actually dies. And as it turns out, Bush does in fact harbor a deep secret — one that sent him into […]