It’s a safe bet that whatever apocalypse befalls our planet, the catastrophic end of everything will be survived by cockroaches, tardigrades and grunge progenitors the Melvins. The band’s core duo of guitarist-singer King Buzzo (Roger Osbourne) and drummer Dale Crover have carpet-bombed rock and roll with more than a hundred…

Dale Crover is perhaps the most interesting man in grunge music. The Melvins’ drummer formed a band with Kurt Cobain in the 1980s called Fecal Matter and recorded some of the earliest Nirvana demos, including a couple songs on that band’s first album, Bleach. Crover has also played in Redd…

Redd Kross performs at Slim’s in San Francisco on Dec. 19, 2018. Photos: Sean Liming. SAN FRANCISCO — Wednesday was a busy night for drummer Dale Crover and bassist Steve McDonald at Slim’s. The pair did double duty; McDonald joining openers Dale Crover Band on bass, and Crover drummed for seminal…

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…

Every week there’s a plethora of new music at our fingertips. Artists on platforms like Spotify and Bandcamp are plentiful, and the radio offers a steady deluge of new singles, but who has time to sort through all that? RIFF does! We’ve pooled our resources to find some of…

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…