Chi-Chi Man Eye for the Straight Guy

Carry on he has. The most recent Massacre album, And This Is Our Music, is a stunning aural vista filled with everything from pop tunes and soundscapes to T. Rex-/Arthur Lee-style rave-ups and made quite a few critics' lists as one of the best albums of 2003. Not bad for a guy who is supposedly too chemical-addled and crazy to play.

This isn't to say that Newcombe hasn't been without his problems. Dedicated fans who have followed his career over its decade-plus span have witnessed everything from onstage meltdowns to mid-set band brawls to just plain stage desertion, with Newcombe's mood fueling the action. They've also seen some pretty amazing shows.

"I would like people to be able to separate the art from the artist, and just enjoy my work," Newcombe says. "The point is that I enjoy making music for the most part, and there are people who enjoy listening. It's never been easy for any real artist."

Pop culture needs people who, like Newcombe, exist on a fringe of the mainstream, driven more by a purity of heart and soul than a love of profit. "Some outlets feel my work is not important at all or not as important as some cunt that just won American Idol or something. I never set out to be a pop idol. I enjoy creating audio-immersion environments. That's what I do." -- Erik Alan Carlson

"Write" Stuff: A "Novel" Approach to "Rock" & Roll
The Rock Bottom Remainders: Wannapalooza Tour 2004
By Dave Barry/Amy Tan/Mitch Albom, et al.
Nocover version 26 October 2004,
$26.00, 0 Pages
By Julie Seabaugh, special to the RFT's Wednesday Book Review

Neo-modern-classic writer Barry/Tan/Albom's collected body of output has come to represent la crème de la crème of the humor/ethno-cultural/sports-afterlife-enlightenment-through-tarries-with-the-geriatric literary genre. Suffice to say that this most recent endeavor, a consummate travail destined to amass ministration for the charitable America Scores inner-city after-school programs, is not contradistinctive in the slightest.

Barry/Tan/Albom's enduring and beloved The Rock Bottom Remainders series is a post-ironic yet blithe perlustration on the nature of "rock stardom." Its main characters, grown surfeited of the proverbial cards dealt them by a life as chaotic as so many words cleaved from one's sanguine heart and violently spilt upon a blank page, have, since the days of the 1992 American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim, sporadically forgone the scriber's existence for that of "musician."

The results are simultaneously jocose and vitalizing, deftly aggregating the whole of the human spirit through the paramount entertainment experience of reveling in a "cover band." The crux of the reverential confreres join with corroborative characters Frank McCourt, Scott Turow, Greg Iles, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Roy Blount Jr. and St. Louis autochthon Ridley Pearson, and anthems such as "If the House is Rockin'," "Gloria," "I Will Survive," "Mustang Sally," "Rock Around the Clock" and "Wild Thing" flow forth from these bursting dams of musical talent like so many raging, boundless rivers. Yet in this particular exemplification, these very courses are not composed of water, silt and fish...but pulchritudinous music. Alas, no diminished sorrow is exuded to promulgate that insofar as the latest Wannapalooza Tour incarnation, neither the adored Matt Groening nor the ad-horrored Stephen King have broken free from the chains of obligation to manifest within the aggregate.

Remainders extols no mere symbols of caprice; the fully formed flesh-and-blood pluckers of guitars, blowers of saxophones and, in the case of the feminine leanings of Barry/Tan/Albom, wearers of sui generis couture, feature a perspicacious subplot in the form of Byrds' guitarist Roger McGuinn, who casts a striking shadow of lilting legitimacy. Verily, their difficile struggle is ours. The steadfast machinations of time shall tell, but Barry/Tan/Albom's most meritorious legacy shall perhaps be enjoining the collective conscious to embrace the Rock Bottom Remainders within, exculpatingly, ourselves.