Bouquets and Brickbats
To pop queen Gwen Stefani for emerging from domestic happy-land with country-music prince Blake Shelton to grace some stages in the American heartland this summer with her necessary presence. Call her punk, pop, ska-pop, rock, or SoCal Harajuku girl, Stefani combines the best female-performer stage presence since mid-period Madonna with the finest female rock and roll yawp since Joan Jett. Yes, we love her. While Lana Del Ray may be the female Bob Dylan of the ’20s, a cool and mysterious shape-shifter who defines the zeitgeist without being defined by it, Gwen Stefani is more fun. That’s because she recalls the halcyon days of the 1990s, when the Cold War was won and all that was left for us Americans to do was to have fun, glorious fun — and then cry our eyes out after the …
Boone and Jocko's Best Pal Snock
Michael Hurley, authentic folk survivor of the weird old America, is now 81 years old and still plays paying gigs
Mail five dollars to a farm in Del Rio, Texas, and you’d get a shoebox full of peyote, he recalls
Have Moicy! was named best record of 1976 by Bob Christgau, the obnoxious Village Voice critic, if anyone alive still gives a crap
East Fairfield is a small village of just over a thousand people in northern Vermont, about half an hour from the Canadian border. Approaching from the west, you crest a large hill and the land begins to open up. Horses graze in slanting pastures, and the faint smell of manure comes and goes as you pass the occasional dairy farm. It was here and in the surrounding towns that the folk singer Michael Hurley spent much of the ’70s and ’80s, playing at ski lodges and bars with his bands The Redbirds and Automatic Slim & the Fatboys. When music didn’t pay the bills, he worked for local farmers, transporting bushels of hay and clearing rocks from fields.
Hurley cemented his cult status with the 1976 release of Have Moicy! — a record so wonderfully strange that longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau named it album of the year. In the five decades since, Hurley — who is playing here …
Crime Blotter
The Florida legislature is taking action against the threat of “crack bears,” which are apparently menacing rural homeowners. Under the terms of HB 87, Floridians will be allowed to shoot and kill bears that trespass on their property, as long as they notify the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission within 24 hours of the kill. Shooters will be prohibited from possessing or selling the carcasses of the animals. Current Florida law restricts homeowners to non-lethal means to scare bears away from their property.
The new law, sponsored by Rep. Jason Shoaf and Sen. Corey Simon, gained traction last September after Franklin County Sheriff A.J. Smith said his community was “being inundated and overrun by the bear population.” The bill was dubbed “the cocaine bear bill” on social media, after Shoaf said Floridians have the right to protect themselves against “the ones that are on crack.”
Rep. …
