Author Archives: M. L. Rio

KANSAS CITY, MO | Kansas City is a weird place to be the weekend of the SuperBowl Whatever matchup between the internet and Taylor Swift. It’s the same weekend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs has taken over the Convention Center and much of downtown. A suppressed but manic energy vibrates under everything like a passing subway train. Five days from now two teenagers will, in what is fast becoming an American tradition as deeply ingrained as the SuperBowl itself, shoot up a parade. But on this breezy, freezy Friday night, Matthew Sweet is playing the Madrid Theatre and it promises to be a pretty good time.

Sweet’s Midwest tour is the first after a long hiatus, but when I spoke to him in January he already had a live gig with Tommy Stinson under his belt and was looking forward to an outing with his new lineup, which includes Debbi Peterson of The Bangles on drums (Susanna Hoffs is also a frequent collaborator of Sweet’s) and John Moreland on lead guitar. Releasing alongside the tour is Sweet’s first live album, WXRT Live in Grant Park, Chicago IL July 4 1993, which draws material mostly from the same year’s Altered Beast and Sweet’s 1991 breakout Girlfriend.

Kansas City’s Madrid Theatre is already crowded when I and a few other rogue writer friends arrive fresh from ten or twelve hours of publishing shop talk. There don’t seem to be many other AWP attendees, but there’s certainly some demographic overlap, with a particularly strong showing of well-behaved middle-aged eccentrics cutting loose for the weekend and a healthy minority of precocious hipster twenty-somethings. A kid to my left who can’t be more than eighteen is wearing a Paul Westerberg 1993 tour tee.

Sweet looks and acts his age and it feels oddly punk rock to do so while Aerosmith and Madonna are still touring like nothing’s changed since 1987. He’s seated for the entire show, sporting a tweedy driving cap over shoulder-length hair, a graying beard, and an impish, dimpling smile. His voice, however, hasn’t aged at all.

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I get a call from Omaha on a frigid Wednesday afternoon. For the last week or so, I’ve been revisiting Matthew Sweet’s discography. A cluster of Midwest tour dates are bringing the power pop legend back onstage mid-February. I tell him I’m looking forward to opening night in Kansas City and, happily, so is he. “First time I’ve gone out and done real dates since before COVID, and it’s kind of a big deal for me,” he says, but after a recent gig with Tommy Stinson of Replacements fame, “I know I can do it, so I’m vastly less horrified to have to go out and play shows.”

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Sweet has always surrounded himself with adept and eclectic collaborators, including Susanna Hoffs, both Stipe siblings, and veteran punk rockers Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd, to name just a few. The upcoming tour is no exception. “I think it’ll be fun because it’s a little different band,” Sweet tells me, citing Debbi Peterson of the Bangles on drums and pal John Mormon on lead guitar. “We’ve never played live together, [and] if nothing else it’ll be fresh for all of us.”

It’s great to hear Sweet so fired up about performing live. Touring hasn’t always been easy for him. Intense aerophobia kept him grounded for eight years at the peak of his career, but it was only one part of the problem. “I suffer from bipolar disorder and I didn’t get treated until the early 2000s,” he explains. “That made life really hard for me. You’re so barely holding together your world.”

His candor is refreshing, and it’s something he appreciates about the present moment. “One of the great things of our era is that it’s not taboo to talk about your mental health. I’ve always been pretty open about stuff, probably more open than I should be,” he says. “I never felt like I could make a fake version that’s the one that’s famous and the one that presents some other personality.” Fame never suited him well. “I didn’t want people looking at me or talking about me. I was so ill-fitted for the rock star part of it.”

Since the heyday of the ’90s, he’s found a better way of doing things: “They put me on an SSRI or something and it was life-changing. It made me able to go out in the world and walk into a store and whatever and not feel all freaked out about it.” Prioritizing his mental health has also changed the way he thinks about music. Fame was never the goal, and now Sweet is focused on his true fans. “When there are fans now, they’re really fans,” he says. “Back in the day when I was having my biggest years in terms of record sales and shows, when you’re on the radio and you have songs that are on the charts and things, you have people don’t really know you coming to shows. That doesn’t really happen now because it’s so specialized.”

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I catch Mat Osman on a Monday morning, but he’s in London, where it must be nearing teatime. He doesn’t sound as if he needs a pick-me-up; as soon as he picks up the phone we’re off to the races. “I spend all of my life talking,” he says, which is one of the reasons he loves making music but hates writing about it. “I love the way music is kind of an older language than anything… it can express emotions that you can’t express in words. I’m always dissatisfied when I write about music because I can’t capture it.”

But he does capture the exhilaration of that primal, pre-verbal communion between performer and audience. His enthusiasm is palpable and genuine. He gives the impression of someone who loves what he does and doesn’t take a bit of it for granted. In an era of untouchable superstars and aloof, too-cool-for-anything auteurs, it’s refreshing to hear from someone who is unapologetically passionate about their art, and how they make it. “One of the things I love about making music is I spend my days with friends I’ve known for thirty years,” he says. “It’s not from the five of us but from some chemical reaction between us.”

That alchemical magic made Suede famous when their first LP won the Mercury Music Prize in 1993 and became one of the fastest-selling UK debuts in a decade. But almost from the get-go, they had a longer reach. “We were quite big in places that didn’t speak English very quickly,” Osman explains. “I think that people understood that we were singing about ordinary lives. Scruffy, poor, quite extreme lives in big cities. It’s dressed up in the clothes of London because that’s where we’re from, but if we had grown up in Tokyo, we’d be a Tokyo band. I think people respond not to the specifics, but the motion of it. We’re quite a dramatic, theatrical, aggressive live act.”

He and his bandmates hope to bring the infectious adrenaline of vintage Suede to their first US tour in 25 years. They haven’t played the States since then except for an appearance at Coachella in 2011. “We have no idea what to expect,” he admits. “It’s going to be absolutely fascinating.” They’re sharing the marquee with the Manic Street Preachers, whom they toured with back in ’94. “If you asked people which two British bands were likely to crash and burn,” he says, “it would have been us and them. It’s quite interesting that we’re the two left standing from those times.”

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Buffy Sainte-Marie has spent much of the last seven decades doing things people said she couldn’t do. Her youthful defiance comes to the fore more than once over the course of an hour’s conversation on what was—for her, in Hawaii—an extremely early morning. Her laughter is effusive, her joie de vivre inspiring as I cling to my coffee for dear life five time zones east. It’s not what you might expect of a self-identified recluse who lives “with a bunch of goats in the mountains,” but Sainte-Marie has made a career of defying expectations.

“I was told that I couldn’t be a musician,” she says. “I was told as a child, ‘You can’t be a musician because you can’t learn to read European music.’” At the same time, “I was told that I could not be indigenous. ‘You can’t be an Indian because there aren’t any more around here.’” She went home with a laugh and played “fake Tchaikovsky” or whatever she heard on the radio, “pretty happy just being [her]self.” You can still hear happiness in her voice, decades later. “I’m just like a kid who’s having fun,” she says—something she insists children naturally know how to do. “They don’t have to be told.”

But she did have a little help from her mother: “My mom told me when I was a kid that sometimes the grown-ups were wrong… She always told me that I could grow up and go find out for myself,” a refrain long-time listeners might recognize. “It was presented to me in that non-judgmental way, just, ‘You can go and find out.’ Not just music or indigenous issues, but whatever you want.” Exploration and open conversation would characterize the rest of Sainte-Marie’s career, which has spanned not only decades but a wide field of humanistic endeavors including music, visual art, activism, and education.

When I ask how she balances all her projects and personas, she makes it sound like the simplest thing in the world: “It all goes together,” she says. “My world and my lives… they all make sense together.” From the outset, her motivations have rarely wavered. Despite being the first person or first woman or first indigenous woman to do a lot of things (listed on her extensive Wikipedia page), she’s never had “any hunger of innovation” or any desire “to get a hit record for Buffy.” Instead, the unifying themes of her work are content and communication. Of her career as a folk singer, she explains, “These are not protest songs. We don’t really have a name for the opposite of a protest song. A protest song lays out what the problem is but there’s another kind of song that’s about the solution.”

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As 2020 comes to a close it’s not lost on us that we—and most likely you—spent very little time in a record store this year (if you even did at all). As we close the book on this trying year, this week we’ve been looking back at some of our favorite pre-pandemic visits to our local record shop to revive that record store experience—with a friend or ten that you just might know. —Ed.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 2019 | Bernard Fowler has been singing with the Stones since the ’80s and his CV reads like a Who’s Who of music legends. But this veteran rocker is anything but intimidating—in person he’s warm, charming, and full of great stories. Cratedigging with Bernard feels like cratedigging with an old friend, even if you just met him five minutes ago.

When we met up at Som, his most recent record, Inside Out, was up on the wall. It’s a collection of Rolling Stones songs, but instead of merely covering familiar tracks like “Sympathy for the Devil” or “Dancing with Mr. D,” Inside Out uses elements of free jazz, funk, and spoken word to completely reinvent songs you thought you knew. Nobody’s better qualified to do this than Bernard, with his impressive musical pedigree and years of personal experience with the Stones.

The day before the No Filter tour’s rescheduled stop at FedEx Field, I asked him what his favorite thing was about playing with Mick and Keef and Ronnie and Charlie. He’s got the best seats in the house, he said, with a laugh. What song would he add to the setlist, given the opportunity? “Dandelion.”

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I catch Adam on the phone on a Monday morning, which seems like an inauspicious time to ring up a rock and roller (his manager’s suggestion, not mine). But to call Adam Weiner a rock and roller feels reductive; after an hour on the horn we’ve talked about everything and everyone from the GOP and Atlantic City to the rodeo circuit and Jerzy Grotowski. Adam himself is best known as the frontman of Low Cut Connie, whose fans range as widely as our conversation—they’ve made the favorites playlist with Rolling Stone, Elton John, and Barack Obama, to name just a few.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, the band’s famously rambunctious live shows have even been transformed for a remote audience known as “Tough Cookies,” who tune in every Thursday to Adam’s living room instead of the news. Judging by the chatter in the sidebar when I join them for the landmark 50th show, many have made Low Cut Connie a part of their weekly routine. It’s not hard to see why; in the course of an evening, Adam and guitarist Will Donnelly not only play new hits, old favorites, and fresh covers, but make up songs, eat tacos, take questions, and pull records from the shelves to share with their fans. DJ sets are dutifully accompanied on the cheese grater, Tupperware, and air guitar. It’s the closest to a house party you’re probably going to get before the year is out—defiantly joyful and deeply cathartic.

That Adam is so generous with his fans comes as no surprise. He’s always been in it for the people. “I’m from New Jersey, but I’ve lived in New York City, Philadelphia, Montreal, Austin, Memphis, and I’ve traveled throughout the US, Canada, Europe, with my music, with some measure of success for the last few years, and with a of measure of no success for many years. And that allowed me to kind of meet people eye to eye,” he tells me. “I’d play anywhere that would have me. Nobody knew me, I didn’t have any fans. If an anarchist punk squat house on a college campus would have me and feed me I would stay over.” His songs are populated by characters at once larger than life and too real to be denied—drag queens and evangelists and everyone in between. “I always feel like I want to talk about the people in my songs with a sort of fascinated and sympathetic eye from how they’re living. I get that as much from movies and literature as I do from music.”

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Suzi Quatro knows exactly who she is and what she wants. That’s the impression she gives, even on a crackling Skype call across the Atlantic. I spoke to her in the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, before either of us had any idea just how crazy the next six months would be. “It’s pretty scary,” she said, when I asked her how she was staying sane back in those early days. “I’m trying to be creative, I’m working on the next album with my son right now… and taking a six mile walk [with him] every day.” As she and the people who know her best readily attest, she’s always raced through life at a breakneck pace, and at 70, she shows no signs of slowing down.

In addition to working on a new album with her son, Richard Tuckey, she’s planning to put out another book, maintaining a presence on social media, and even cleaning up after herself. “Of course my cleaner can’t come so I’m going against my religion to clean it myself. I have to have music on when I clean so I’m dancing around to my Motown,” she says. “That just makes it a little quicker, when you can do the Temptations, you know? I was cheerful for about the last two weeks but that seems to have gone away…”

We chat about her other musical influences and what’s stuck with her since the Sixties: Otis Redding, Billie Holliday, Bob Dylan, and (of course) Elvis Presley. “The music that you listen to as a teenager really stays in your heart forever,” she says. “I saw [Elvis] on TV and knew I was going to do what he did.” Her preferred medium? Vinyl, of course. “Nothing quite like it. The old days you’d go and flick through the sleeves and hold it in your hands… just fantastic. There’s a whole new vibe in vinyl. It’s beautiful in its imperfection.” The same might be said of Quatro’s whole career.

She talks about her favorite tunes with the same electric energy that made her a household name in the music business in the 1970s, singled out for stardom by Mickie Most. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t… getting up and doing a number,” she tells me. “I was always a performer, always, from a little girl. And in fact that’s what I put on my first passport [with the Pleasure Seekers]. I was the only one that put down ‘entertainer’ as profession… It says a lot about my mindset back then.” This, in her own estimation and that of the friends and family who populate her upcoming rockumentary, Suzi Q, is the leitmotif of her life: uncompromising ambition. Suzi Quatro was determined to be a star.

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PHOTO: BEN TAYLOR-VIVIAN | Old-school Australian rockers Datura4 return in April with their fourth studio album, West Coast Highway Cosmic, an ode to the open road and lost legends of rock and roll. Their latest single, “You Be the Fool,” takes us on a sun-soaked trip from the 1970s to now.

With its fuzzy blues-rock riff dipped in psychedelia, “You Be the Fool” sounds like “Roadhouse Blues” covered by Count Five. Reliable set pieces from the classic rock canon in unexpected variations make the song feel at once fresh and familiar: a wailing harmonica which might have been filched from Howlin’ Wolf by the Rolling Stones, a funk undercurrent that smacks of Stevie Wonder, a falsetto refrain which—down to the lyric “What you gonna do?”—seems to echo Gary Clark Jr. on “What About Us.”

“We’d had the main riff kicking around for a while. During our shows we’d regularly incorporate it into our extended jams of ‘Demon Blues’ from our first album. The more we jammed on it, the more I thought it would be cool to extract a song out of it,” says frontman Dom Mariani. “The verses came from another unfinished tune. I was able to marry the two together. The contrast between the straighter rocking verses and the funky blues groove of the main riff and chorus worked nicely.” Listeners will likely agree; “You Be the Fool” is eminently grooveable, and West Coast Highway Cosmic promises more good grooves to come.

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