Chris Isaak

What Are the Best-Selling Bay Area Singles of the Last 25 Years?

Compared to the relatively few big-selling Bay Area albums of the last quarter-century, there's a plethora of singles that have sold at least a half-million copies since 1987. Can you guess the Bay Area singles that have sold the most in the last 25 years? Here are the surprising answers: See Also: ... More >>

Concord, Calif., Named One of Country's 10 Best Music Scenes

The website Livability today compiled a list of the top 10 cities with the best music scenes that aren't New York, L.A., or Nashville. The results were in some ways predictable (Minneapolis, Athens, Ga., and Portland all made it), and in some ways spectacularly weird: Omitted from the list for no ap ... More >>

Sad But True: How the Black Album Both Made and Ruined Metallica

​ See more of our Metallica Week coverage: Metallica Kicks off Its 30th Anniversary Week with Notable Guests, Rare Songs, and Lots of Talking Can't Make It to Metallica's 30th Anniversary Concerts? Celebrate at These Shows Instead Popular music is fixated with jumping-off points, springbo ... More >>

BAM Magazine Is Coming Back -- As a Website

BAM's July 7, 1978 issue​Remember BAM? If you followed By Area music between, oh, 1976 and 1999, you probably read it all the time. And if you didn't, you'll get a chance to -- there's a revived version coming to the web in a couple of weeks. Some background: BAM was a free biweekly print mag ... More >>

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2011: Robert Plant, Thurston Moore, Broken Social Scene, and More

Broken Social Scene is one of more than 90 acts playing Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this year.​ The lineup for this year's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival is out, and good luck figuring out whom to call the "headliner." For the festival's 11th year, organizers have put together another insane ... More >>

The 10 Greatest Music Video Babes of All Time

From the dawn of the music video, there has been the music video babe. Perhaps she's the star of the video, perhaps she's a backup dancer, maybe she just looks longingly at a musician. Most of the music is terrible, a lot of the videos are insipid, and yet somehow these women make it all worthwhile ... More >>

New Year's Eve Guide 2011

New Year's Eve Guide 2011

Follow Pavement's Example and Support Stockton

Marcus RothStockton boys Pavement in 1999​Pavement, the beloved slacker indie rock band, recently added a show in its hometown of Stockton to this year's headline-grabbing reunion tour. Stephen Malkmus, Scott "Spiral Stairs" Kannberg, and co. will play the Bob Hope Theatre on Thursday, June 24, th ... More >>

In Store: Rooky Ricardo's (New Record Shop Column)

​In Store is a new All Shook Down column in which we find San Francisco's quirkiest, most beloved, weirdest, and/or otherwise-most-interesting record stores, talk to people there (employees, volunteers, customers, cops, whoever) and find out what's up. Along the way, we hope to paint a fun little ... More >>

Eight (One-Hit) Wonders of The Bay Area

One-hit wonders are often maligned in music, but the truth is it's pretty hard and pretty remarkable to achieve success on the pop charts. As we slowly wrap up December's reflections into music history, behold the eight most awesome one-hit wonders that the Bay Area has produced:8. The Greg Kihn Ban ... More >>

CD ripping services put record collections in the 21st century

Chris Isaak plays Amoeba In-Store

Feeling Lucky: Chris IsaakIf you've been wondering where local-boy-gone-pop-star Chris Isaak  has been, the answer is, just about everywhere. In a career that's had more legs than ZZ Top in '83, Isaak's gone from an up-and-coming Rockabilly crooner/Elvis impersonator, to Big Time hitmaker ("Wic ... More >>

Chris Isaak Spends Four-Night Residency at the Fillmore in Oct.

Chris Isaak Books Two Nights at the Fillmore in Oct.

Metal boys and their Lesbian lovers

Knockoff

A German New Waver resorts to tired old tricks

Zion I

Hip hop's hope for uniting the underground and the streets

Exile in Mainstream

Can the songwriter's follow-up to the disastrous Liz Phair reconcile her altrock past with her pop-rock present?

The Dog Bites Audition: Les Misérables

Two young theater bunnies behind us discuss existentialism versus spiritualism

Canoodling

One garlicky reason to ride off into the Sunset District

Just a Game

A winning drama

Empty Sex

John Waters' latest farce strives for nothing more than NC-17

Karaoke Dreamin'

The blisteringly harsh world of the Bay Area's competitive karaoke scene is no match for my version of "Three Times a Lady."

A Jury of Their Peers

We asked two local musicians to sound off on the latest and greatest from their fellow practitioners.

SF Weekly Music Awards 2003

Americana DJ/Selector/Turntablist Electronic/Electro Hard Rock/

Metal Hip Hop/Rap Jazz Latin/

International Lifestyle Music New Genre/Beyond Pop Punk Rock/Indie Rock Soul/Funk/ R&B

If music be the brandy of the damned, then we're drunk off our asses

Lou Reed

NYC Man: The Collection

Music

Pro Fusion

Lotus

Reel World

Arbor Vitae; Beneath the Banyan Trees filming; The Homeboy

House Of Tudor

The Gory Wake; Muzsikás; Bitch Fest; Big Love; James Intveld

The Lonesome Ballad of Jim Campilongo

In which an instrumental guitarist finds his voice in musical history

House Of Tudor

Billy Nayer Show, Brendan Perry, and more

Riff Raff

Riff Raff

Night Crawler

Riff Raff

Death of a Multimedia Phenomenon

How the boys at OSC -- the hippest high-tech start-up ever -- created the magical software that lets any garage band in America record studio-quality CDs. And then lost the magic almost overnight.

Riff Raff

The House of Tudor

Drop the Ball, Already

SF Weekly Picks

SFO3 1996

The Book of Lists

SF Weekly contributors salute the best (and worst) music of 1995

Recordings

Night Crawler

Samples