Roger Waters took US Airways by storm last night. Let’s just say that no one when home without a mind blowing experience. This show had everything you would expect a Pink Floyd veteran to have and then some. Musically, visually and emotionally the audience felt as one through the whole experience. Here are a few photos from this amazing show.
With a sold out show at the Crescent Ballroom you know you will see two things: Good music and an electric crowd that will stay till the last note is played. Many thanks to all of you that came out to support live music here in the valley. Squeeze put on a fantastic show and made all our contest winners at the meet and greet feel welcome. We couldn’t have asked for a nicer group of guys. Local opener, Lady Like, didn’t disappoint either. They had the crowd on their feet and dancing. Look for them playing a club near you.
It was a night filled with songs, memories and good friends for all who attended the Kris Kristofferson show at Celebrity Theatre last night. Kris did an amazing job catering to the crowd with just his guitar and voice. We hope to have him back here again soon. Here are some photos from last night.
Famed Promoter Begins Work with the Property Immediately
SALT RIVER PIMA-MARICOPA INDIAN COMMUNITY, Ariz., March 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Talking Stick Resort, an enterprise of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, is proud to announce the appointment of Danny Zelisko Presents as its new entertainment buyer. As of today, Zelisko and his team became responsible for the procurement of talent for the AAA Four Diamond property.
“It is with much anticipation that we make this announcement about our partnership with Danny Zelisko Presents. His long-standing ties within both Arizona and the entertainment industry will be a huge asset to Talking Stick Resort,” said Peter Arceo, senior director sales and marketing for Talking Stick Resort.
Danny Zelisko, the founder of Danny Zelisko Presents, has been a staple in the Valley since 1974. He has promoted thousands of concerts in Arizona, including Dooley’s Nightclub, a 700 person capacity venue in Tempe, Arizona. There, he helped break the careers of many headliners, including The Police, Bon Jovi, No Doubt and Nirvana. From those shows came the creation of the legendary concert promotion firm, Evening Star which eventually became the Southwest’s most prominent concert promoter, booking and promoting the majority of the shows that came to Las Vegas and New Mexico, as well.
In 2001, Evening Star was sold to SFX, the company that became Live Nation. Zelisko remained president and chairman of Live Nation Southwest until starting his current enterprise last year. In his role as buyer for Talking Stick Resort, he will be responsible for securing headline talent in two of the property’s main venues, the Salt River Grand Ballroom and The Showroom.
“With two great venues on property, it is essential that we continue to secure the best shows in the Valley, ensuring that we meet the demands of our loyal guests,” said Arceo.
Top headline acts that have performed in Talking Stick Resort’s 1600 seat Grand Ballroom include Brian Wilson, Cheap Trick, Smokey Robinson and Huey Lewis and the News. The property’s state of the art Showroom seats 650. With the very intimate seating configuration, there is not a bad seat in the house.
For information on entertainment coming to Talking Stick Resort, call the box office at (480) 850-7734 or visit the Talking Stick Resort website at talkingstickresort.com.
SOURCE Talking Stick Resort
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We had a wonderful time on Friday night at the Crescent Ballroom in downtown Phoenix. The Fabulous Thunderbirds along with Paul Gurvitz & The New Army gave an arena sized performance in a small club. Thank you to all who attended and congratulations to our VIP winner Richard Jacobs. Below check out some photos of that night.
New Year’s Eve with Jerry Riopelle is something of a holiday tradition in the Valley.
In 2005, in fact, Mayor Phil Gordon proclaimed New Year’s Eve Jerry Riopelle Day in Phoenix.
We caught up with Mr. New Year’s Eve to talk about how someone living and recording in Los Angeles became an institution in the Valley, largely fueled by heavy spins the early ’70s on free-form FM station KDKB (93.3).
The roots-rock veteran now lives part-time in Scottsdale and was inducted into the Arizona Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2007.
He’s set to headline the Orpheum Theatre for his first New Year’s Eve performance since 2008 with New York reggae-rocker Garland Jeffreys, whose “Ghost Writer” album is an underrated classic.
Question: How do you think you became so identified with New Year’s Eve in Phoenix?
Answer: The first show I did was in ’74. I opened for Dr. John, and I got so much airplay during that year that I headlined from then on. I was doing a lot of other concerts in the state, too, at that time. I would usually do three nights on New Year’s Eve. I would do the two nights before.
Q: You did a New Year’s Eve show on the 29th?
A: We would do the 29th, the 30th and the 31st. What would that be? About 9,000, 10,000 people over a total of three nights. And I’d do three nights in the summer. I would do concerts in Tucson and Flagstaff.
Serious airplay is what happened. On KDKB, essentially. And airplay is magic. I had eight songs in full rotation at one time on KDKB. So it was just kind of crazy. It was a lot of fun, I’ll tell you.
Q: Where are you from?
A: I was born in Detroit but I lived in LA during that whole time. Now, I live in Kona, Hawaii, but I have a place here, too. I lease a place in Scottsdale because I have a business here that I started with an invention of mine called the Beamz, which is an instrument anyone can play. It was built for special-needs kids. So I go back and forth between here and Kona.
Q: You became a Phoenix institution without living here?
A: Yeah. The people in Tucson thought I was from Phoenix. People in Phoenix thought I was from Tucson. And I was just treated, always, like a favorite son when, in fact, I was living in LA, working in film music and things like that. I was doing big concerts here, and in LA I was only able to do clubs. But there’s all that other kind of work in LA. I lived there 30 years.
Q: Was this your best market?
A: Yes. I had European markets that were important — Amsterdam and several different major markets in Europe. But in the States, Phoenix was always the most important market.
Q: Was that because of the airplay on KDKB?
A: That’s certainly what started it, and then the concerts took hold. We worked so hard on them, and I lived close enough, being in LA, that I could work the market pretty regularly. So we put a lot into it. We treated the shows as though they were incredibly important. And we still do. I’m a family man. I decided not to live my life out on the road way back when. But Arizona was close enough that I could work it often. And I did. I built it up. It’s almost like a family thing when I play here. It’s something we’ve done so much for so long that it’s just incredibly good vibes.
Q: How does your New Year’s show compare with a regular show?
A: There’s a couple of things that are different about a New Year’s show. The event itself is important. And people tend to get drunk (laughs). They usually end up drinking quite a bit on New Year’s Eve, so it gets pretty rowdy, although there’s usually a pretty sensitive section in the middle of the show. I have a lot of ballads.
Q: How often do you perform these days?
A: I’m playing quite a bit now. I work on this invention, the Beamz, and there’s over 100 of them now in schools and hospitals and autism institutions. I really love it, actually, to see the look on a kid’s face who never imagined that he could actually play music. This device uses laser beams kind of like strings. And so, if you put your hand through the beams, it causes musical things to happen. It’s really a pretty sophisticated computerized device. So that was a pretty rewarding experience, and it still is. But now, the business can do well without me, and I decided that I’d really like to get back to playing some concerts and recording more material.
I just got back from LA, where I finished the first three songs of a new album. I’m pretty darn thrilled with them actually. I’m working on a musical about a character named Candy Barr, who was really quite a famous stripper from Dallas. I have a song called “Candy Barr” that tells part of her story. And we’ve twice done readings now in New York. We’re honing it down. We’ve just done a rewrite, and I think it’s really strong. Everybody does. So I’ve got a lot of music I need to record for that and a lot we’ve already recorded. Some of that past material fits into it, too. So that’s a big project with me.
And I’m doing some shows. I did a show down in Tucson with Jackson Browne and Keb’ Mo’ and Crosby and Nash for the victims of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. I just did a show in Prescott called Best Fest. It’s a celebration of Arizona’s Centennial. I’m doing New Year’s Eve. And I’m going to continue to perform.
I’m using some members of the band I’ve had for the last 25 years, and then some new members, and in some cases, the children of some of the people in my band — one being my son, Paul. So I’m really enjoying getting back to what I actually do best.
Q: How old are you now?
A: Oh, well, I never admit to that (laughs). I feel great.
Q: All right then. Old enough to have played a New Year’s Eve show in ’74.
A: That’s right.
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@
arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Twitter: twitter.com:EdMasley.
Jerry Riopelle
With: Garland Jeffreys.
When: 9 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 31.
Where: Orpheum Theatre, 203 W. Adams St., Phoenix.
Admission: $45-$65.
Details: 602-262-6225, dannyzeliskopresents.com, cdbaby.com/cd/Riopelle.
The Beamz
What: An interactive music system that makes it possible for anyone to play music by triggering hundreds of musical instrument samples using laser beams.
Details: 480-202-9087, thebeamz.com.
When it comes to best-of-the-year album lists, there are the polls of authority, like the survey just published by this magazine – and there is everything that hit my Victrola and stuck around, from under the radar and beyond the insitutional consensus. This is some of the best of what happened to me on records in 2011.
Josh T. Pearson – Last of the Country Gentlemen (Mute)
Pearson specializes in final reckoning. A decade ago, on his only album as the singer-guitarist-prophet in Lift to Experience, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads (Bella Union), he brought the End of Days forward with power-trio relish, like Nostradamus with Hendrix firepower. Pearson’s solo debut turns that intensity inward, examining sexual despair and ravaged faith with a gripping solitary force: eccentric improvisations on acoustic guitar, like a slow-motion John Fahey, and a stark anguished voice running the range from burning hell to hard-won peace. This was at once the most frightening and healing record of the year.
We Were Promised Jetpacks – In the Pit of the Stomach (Fat Cat)
It took an incendiary live set at Iceland Airwaves to get me past the band’s name – to the ball-of-spikes distortion and machine-gun precision of this Scottish quartet’s brawny dance-wise pop, like the Buzzcocks armed with the orchestral-guitar majesty of Explosions in the Sky. The final sale, though, was the songwriting the group showed off that night from this album, including the fast glowing dynamite of “Medicine” and the noisy extended grace of “Pear Tree.” Ironically, the name now makes sense. We Were Promised Jetpacks deliver the right flight.
Vicky – Cast a Light (Vicky Music)
I only caught part of one of this Icelandic quartet’s Airwaves shows, but it was long enough to hear what is now one of my favorite songs of the year: “How Do You Feel?”, rusted-glam seduction with striking hints of Johnny Thunders’ grinding fuzz and Siouxsie Sioux’s vocal voodoo in guitarist Karlotta Halldórsdóttir’s blackened crunch and singer Eygló Scheving’s plaintive cry. The rest of Cast a Light, made and released independently by the band, is just as tough and alluring and worth the hunt. You can start at iTunes.
Willie Nile – The Innocent Ones (River House) and Garland Jeffreys – The King of In Between (Luna Park)
These longtime kings of New York both issued peak-time records this year. Nile’s opening trio on The Innocent Ones – “Singin’ Bell,” “One Guitar” and the title track – is Righteous-Anthem City, a fight on behalf of “the outcast, dead last” (as he sings in the second) waged with classic-rock ardor. Jeffreys’ album was a true comeback; his last U.S. release came out in the previous century. But the local geography and defiant vocal poise in “Coney Island Winter,” “I’m Alive” and “Roller Coaster Town” came with a funky jangle and martial stride that seemed barely a New York minute away from the pavement pride and candor of his 1977 classic, Ghost Writer. And that was Jeffreys’ Syracuse University pal, Lou Reed, deep in the doot-doots of “The Contortionist” – a nice bit of reunion to go with the return.
The Gourds – Old Mad Joy (Vanguard)
Founded in 1994, this Austin, Texas institution issued nearly a dozen records on its way to this earthy, lyrically incisive pleasure produced with an invigorating touch by Larry Campbell, the ex-Bob Dylan guitarist who now plays with Levon Helm. The Gourds have always had a good long streak of Helm’s old outfit, the Band, in their progressive-country dynamics and barroom-sawdust party. But the best thing about Campbell’s empathy was the way he brought light and focus to the central continuing dialogue of the Gourds’ primary singer-writers, guitarist Kevin Russell and Jimmy Smith – the wise worn hearts that constantly beat inside the roots.
Jeff The Brotherhood – We Are the Champions (Infinity Cat)
The title is colossal nerve. The truth is in the delivery: Tennessee brothers who play pneumatic punked-up blues like the Ramones with the iron pulse of Neu! Guitarist Jake and drummer Jamin Orrall delivered one of the most lunatic shows I saw at 2011′s SXSW. Everything they did there is here, except for the stage diving.
Arborea – Red Planet (Strange Attractors)
This husband-and-wife duo plays a trance-folk that, at every turn in the slipstream, seems to hail from another country: the murder ballads of Appalachia; the plucked-string stasis and Om drone of New York minimalism; the iridescent-Middle East imagination of the Incredible String Band. Singer Shanti and guitarist Buck Curran take Tim Buckley’s “Phantasmagoria in Two” at a compelling near-standstill pace; their own “Wolves” is a long circular hush streaked with crying fuzz. Another primary instrument here: the soft oceans of reverb that cushion every minute of this stark and tender balladry.
Motorpsycho – Roadwork Vol.4: Intrepid Skronk! (Rune Grammofon)
The Norwegian acid-metal trio that made my favorite loud-and-tripping album of 2008, Little Lucid Moments, dropped this thrilling live souvenir in 2011, part of a for-fans series that promises “maximum immersion value.” That is a good description of the improvised and episodic adventure on these 2008-2010 concert tapes. The plain vocal sorrow of Moondog’s pocket madrigal “All Is Loneliess” gets an 18-minute extension into enraged tangled darkness, while “The Alchemyst,” the breakneck climax of Little Lucid Moments, closes this affair with even greater ascending violence. May next year bring U.S. tour dates. Please.
Wadada Leo Smith’s Organic – Heart’s Reflections (Cuneiform)
Just turned 70, this trumpeter and restless avant-garde explorer has made nearly three dozen albums as a leader, in a wide range of disciplines and contexts, since 1972. Organic, one of Smith’s several current projects, is at once a throwback – building on the aggressive turbulence of Miles Davis’ early-Seventies electric impressionism – and contemporary dynamite: a very big band with strings, reeds, laptops and no fewer than four electric guitarists. Everything on the two CDs of Heart’s Reflections runs way long, to haunting effect with Smith evoking Davis’ clean fighting peals with uncanny immediacy over the momentum. The precedent is obvious. But the music – a modern black-rock Agharta – is fine fresh hypnotism.
Tune in to hear Garland Jeffreys on NPR Wednesday, December 20th on 91.7 KPUB-FM at 2pm EST.
Joe Bonamassa took the stage at the Orpheum Theatre for the 2nd night of two sold out shows. He’s such a master at his craft and with every note of his guitar you really understand on why he’s been hailed one of the best guitar players in the world. He’s been compared to the late and great Stevie Ray Vaughan and let’s face it…that’s as good as it gets. We hope you loved these two shows as much as we loved bringing them to you. Joe is one of the best out there and we loved having him here to entertain you! Here’s a little taste of the photos from last night’s show. Enjoy.
