Eastern Oklahoma is set to be a musical mecca throughout September for rock and country fans as they converge for the return of Rocklahoma over Labor Day weekend and for a new festival just a few weeks later. Running from Friday through Sunday, with a special pre-party on Thursday, Rocklahoma is returning for its 14th […]
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TULSA: The Legendary Stage
Closing in on its centennial anniversary, there’s no place in the state like Cain’s Ballroom. Stepping into the ballroom, 423 N. Main St., is one thing, but being on its spring-loaded dance floor when hundreds of people are dancing to the sound emanating from the stage is quite another. Built in 1924 by entrepreneur Tate […]
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TULSA: Multi-Tracker
Tulsa’s music scene is famous for being sprawling and ever-changing, with thriving communities built around punk, metal, folk, hip-hop, and more all across the city. But if you look closely at each flavor of all those musical pies, you’ll find one guy with his fingers in them all. “There was a lot of different music […]
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Unconventional ‘Cuts’
Here’s a riddle: What makes tracks but leaves no footprints? A music studio. Of course, in a figurative sense, studios and music labels do tend to leave footprints. Whether as subtle as an album’s liner note or as loud as a marketing campaign, those footprints often mark a direct path to a music company. For […]
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The Music at Your Feet
Think of Jimi Hendrix re-conceiving the National Anthem at Woodstock with screeching feedback and blistering fuzz. Eddie Van Halen shredding a forty- minute solo soaked in saturated distortion, the sound whipping and phasing around you in an arena. You can see the guitars in their hands and the amplifiers at their backs, but what you […]
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Save our sanity
The concert business is a tricky one. The risks are intimidating and you’re only as good as your last month of shows. It takes a unique set of wild-eyed professionals to cut it in this business, and I’m proud to count myself among them. Bringing Tower Theatre to life with our team has been my […]
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Local Roots, Global Heart
Vice President Kamala Harris’s words to the staggering numbers fleeing Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have rung a dissonant chord in the ears of the people charged with coordinating aid to the crisis. Organizations like USAID are designed for “international development,” a difficult-to-define objective that amounts primarily to addressing the root causes of the same […]
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Play it again
After being one of the first industries to collapse last spring, live music is roaring back. Show promoters and venues are reporting some dates later this year are already ten bids deep. The 2022 calendars are filling up with concerts. The wheels on the buses are finally going round and round once more. Nowhere has […]
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Digital Showcase
Where is the local music scene? Conventional knowledge finds it in the small coffee shops and dive bars of a city, but savvier minds find it on the internet. As social media has taken gig posters from record store windows to digital feeds over the years, the challenge to stay engaged with new bands in […]
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Don’t call it a comeback
Whatever you’re into, Tower Theatre’s Don’t Call It A Comeback series, co-sponsored by Oklahoma Gazette, launches July 16 and continues until the venue’s anniversary party on Aug. 7. Full-capacity shows resume Aug. 12 with Shakey Graves. All of the concerts are free, but some will be hosted at Ponyboy, which is adjacent to the Tower […]