Courtesy photo. Interview photos: Alessio Neri. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre features Humphrey Bogart as an out of luck prospector south of the border. John Huston’s 1948 film depicts the negative effects success can have on a group of friends. It is the favorite movie of Roger “King…

The Melvins perform at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on July 10, 2017. Alessio Neri/STAFF. SAN FRANCISCO — The sold-out crowd inside the Great American Music Hall hummed with excitement as the Melvins took the stage for their sixth show in a marathon 62-date American tour in…

For the last three decades the Melvins have charted their own wayward course through the heart of rock and roll, confounding critics and conventional wisdom at every turn. How many other bands can claim to have opened for Kiss in front of a quarter of a million people, hired…

Photos courtesy: Paul Rae, Projections: Cloaking.US SANTA CRUZ — Looking back, it’s often easy to spot the turning points in our lives, the doors we stepped through that changed the course of our journey. At 15, I was living in a small, affluent suburb in Southern California, a nice vanilla…

The Flaming Lips perform at BottleRock Napa Valley on May 10, 2013. OAKLAND — There’s a feeling you get on hallucinogenic drugs that’s a little like an astronaut in a space capsule reentering the atmosphere: a fear that grips you as you’re traveling at tremendous speeds, hurtling through the thin…

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy is an old pickup truck: The cracks and rust in his voice testify to the hard miles he’s traveled, the imperfections providing a patina of authenticity in a world full of glossy paint and auto-tune. The sad lilt in his voice invites us to load our…

There’s always been something a little fascist about heavy metal. Putting aside the violent imagery, the sexist lyrics and the glaring absence of femininity, the tyranny of metal demanded conformity; conformity to the mathematical exactitude of double bass drums and power chords, minor scales played at blistering speeds, to…