They say that Rock n Roll is a lifestyle–a way of life. You can build cities out of it. And while Tampa, Florida wasn’t built on Rock n Roll, Tampa’s Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is. And with the completion of their expansion, Tampa, Florida, is finally ready for you to rock and roll all night and party every day.
So what would you need to live the rock star life? Glitz, glamour, and opulence. And Hard Rock is filled with it. Bright lights fill the gambling floors, offering every kind of game for every price point. Swim through the sea of lights, and you’ll find a restaurant, a venue, or recreational experience. Want a stack of pancakes? Fresh sashimi? A perfectly marbled steak? Or maybe you want to grab a drink and watch live music? It’s all there.
Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tampa
And live music is everywhere. Hard Rock Tampa features multiple stages, ranging in size from hundreds to more than a thousand. Their largest stage holds 1500 people and hosts internationally-renowned singers, comedians, and performers. Between all of their locations, you are guaranteed a show, with more as you get closer to the weekends.
Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tampa
If you are just there to relax, you’re also covered there. A beautiful pool ringed with cabanas, and a long poolside bar forms the center of the hotel and casino. Stop by for a swim, or a full day lounging in the sun. Finished with your tan? Hang out at the bar and watch a game over drinks. Just to the side of the pool, explore Hard Rock’s ‘Rock Spa & Salon,’ where you can treat your body and spirit with their brand new 26,000 sq ft facility. Enjoy a massage, a therapeutic facial, or a workout class in Hard Rock’s state-of-the-art fitness center. Hey–even rock stars need time to relax.
Architectural Photography
And the food. I mentioned it earlier, but it is worth mentioning again. Restaurants range from casual and cool, like the Hard Rock Cafe, to the stately, with Council Oak Steaks & Seafood. Both, by the way, feature live music. Whatever food you want, they’ve got it. A special shout-out to Council Oak Steaks & Seafood, and their supreme cuts of meat–I even follow their Executive Butcher on Instagram just to see the latest cuts. But don’t miss out on your chance to try out all 13 of their dining locations.
Council Oak Steaks & Seafood
The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tampa takes its Rock n Roll soul to heart. Its vast collection of memorabilia, its multiple venues, its delicious food, is all a celebration of our urge to cut loose, indulge, and treat yourself in ways that you can’t at home. If you want to rock and roll all night, Hard Rock is always open.
The Amazon is ablaze, the West Village is so thick with humidity you can practically chew the air. The time is ripe for those queued outside Le Poisson Rouge to descend underground, and bear witness to the legendary God of Hellfire, Arthur Brown.
“Who is Arthur Brown?” a friend asked. The answer requires a time machine to another volatile point in history.
It’s 1968. Arthur Brown, a soft-spoken Englishman, is recounting his recent American tour to Brian Matthew in a BBC Radio One interview. Brown languidly lists the costumes used in his act: masks, gowns, face paint…a fire helmet.
“It’s very spectacular,” Matthew interjects. “Is it dangerous to you?”
“Yes. Well, ah, we set one stage on fire. Set my gowns on fire. I burnt my face the other day.”
Arthur Brown lit so many fires in his wake that he got booted off a tour with Jimi Hendrix when venues feared incineration.
Even if Brown himself isn’t a household name, he certainly made a distinctive mark in music history. His neo-pagan theatrics, inspired by the wild antics of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, served as a catalyst for musical newcomers in Great Britain. Despite Fire being his one major hit, the list of Brown’s imitators is staggering.
A young Londoner attended Brown’s Paris gig, cribbed his mime and drag elements, and studied with legendary performance artist Lindsay Kemp…emerging as David Bowie. The Who wrote Tommy with Brown’s operatic voice in mind; he appeared in the film as the crazed priest of a Marilyn Monroe cult. Iron Maiden borrowed Brown’s banshee screeches. Alice Cooper nicked the corpse paint. Peter Gabriel owes a thank you to Brown’s flamboyant headdresses. Ozzy Osbourne covered Fire; Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s frenzied disco version in 1979 remains a club banger today.
Photo: Alice Teeple
Back to Le Poisson Rouge 2019: Arthur Brown, now 77, crackles with the vocal prowess of a man five decades younger. His band, each wearing costumes, headgear and face paint, is ready for the long haul. Brown is a mystical spectacle, beginning the set with Nightmare, lyrics straight out of a William Blake painting:
Dynamic explosions in my brain
Shattered me to drops of rain
Falling from a yellow sky
Orange faces to an opened eye
After each song, he runs offstage during a musical interlude, returning draped in a different costume. Pirate shirt! Sequined tunic! Fiber-optic waistcoat! He is mischievous, jamming a microphone down his trousers for Muscle of Love, his ode to kundalini rising. Brown paid tribute to Screamin’ Jay with a screeching rendition of I Put A Spell On You. No fire helmets at this show, but he did don a massive black feather headdress during a twenty-minute performance of Fire, his frenzied keyboardist practically in trance as Brown mingles with the audience.
The show generates so much energy that one leaves feeling exhausted, rejuvenated, and wondering if Brown is, in fact, a sorcerer. The answer is…perhaps.
What do the blues, baseball and stand-up comedy have in common? Besides all of these concepts being entertaining to many millions of people, they are all undeniably art forms that originated in the United States. Without the blues there would be no rock & roll, and in turn, no hip-hop.
Bluescentric was formed in 2009 to fill the niche of there being “no online resource for people passionate about roots, rock & roll, blues and soul music.” Founder Matt Marshall started Bluescentric as part of a college project, putting his computer programming skills to work. Several years later, Matt changed the direction of Bluescentric, making it the seller of officially-licensed merchandise from legendary musicians and record labels. Bluescentric partners include the estates of Otis Redding, Bo Diddley, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Johnny Winter. The company also follows many green initiatives, even using recyclable packaging to ship its orders.
Downtown spoke to CEO Matt Marshall prior to the company’s holiday season rush. While based in Missouri, Matt is very familiar with New York, as he constantly checks out live music in other states. Beyond keeping up a website at www.bluescentric.com, Bluescentric can be followed on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.
Matt Marshall
How would you describe Bluescentric to someone who hasn’t visited the site before?
Matt Marshall: Our mission has always been to connect music fans with authentic, quality merch in the digital age that actually benefits the artist or band estates in a meaningful way. Bluescentric.com carries unique, quality music merch for Blues, Soul, Rock n Roll, musicians, vinyl collectors, and live music. It’s officially licensed and paid directly to artist estates and independent labels.
How exactly did you go from being a computer programmer to the head of Bluescentric?
MM: I was always a business-minded entrepreneur. The programming came in handy because I actually wrote the first Bluescentric.com store from scratch. The website started as a college project that kind of of got out of hand…but there was this worldwide group of passionate fans of this American music culture that were really being ignored. So we set out to give music lovers quality apparel that would help express their love of American “roots” music, in the broad strokes of Americana, blues, soul, R&B and rock & roll. After shipping tens of thousands of tees to 70 countries, it’s awesome to keep discovering how many other diverse, music-minded people are out there.
Do you have a favorite item of what’s sold by Bluescentric?
MM: I’ve got a closet full of favorites, but lately our old soul music tees are too fun. Coincidentally and all at once, we got serious soul power: Stax Records, Otis Redding, Memphis Horns, Shaft, the whole party.
Before Bluescentric even existed, I was making pilgrimages to the Stax Museum in Memphis to stand on the hallowed studio ground where Otis was cutting “Dock Of The Bay.” Now every day we ship old soul tees to other blues pilgrims in Memphis, Brooklyn, Tokyo, France…It’s a special thrill to get to harness our excellent creative department on music so impactful.
Are any of your licensors or artists based in New York?
MM: The late Bo Diddley — the originator and the man who some say invented rock & roll. We also work with a couple licensing agencies in the city, like Perryscope Productions.
Do you have a favorite concert venue in New York?
MM: Terra Blues is a great little music club. Brooklyn Bowl books some of the best roots-leaning acts touring today, and the concept is too cool. We’re stageside for Grace Potter and that deadly Flying V of hers while somehow bowling on lane five. I’ve always wanted to go to The Beacon [Theatre].
Your company ships its items from Missouri, which is a lot closer to the origin of the blues than New York. Where did your appreciation for the blues first come from?
MM: My earliest memories were glued to oldies radio and digging into dad’s records, so the blues was a natural progression — or foundation, depending how you look at it. However, the name of the shop more subtly reflects that popular music today, in one way or another, is really all the blues.
There’s a whole subculture argument on what is and isn’t “blues music” — but between people like Janis Joplin and Big Mama Thornton, both lived it, both sang it in a way people simply cannot forget. Who are we to cast the first stone at which invisible boxes “art” falls into? Rap, soul, country, R&B, rock & roll, punk, et. al. grew with-and-from the “mother earth” of this Mississippi Delta blues, gospel, and work song music foundation.
Matt Marshall
What about the green initiative of your company? Was your environmentalism inspired by a particular person or event?
MM: Each American produces about 1,500 pounds of waste every year, which is frighteningly almost 170% more than we produced in 1960 — and there’s a lot more of us. Whew, it adds up quick. And it doesn’t magically disappear. I’m frightened about the way we treat the environment as a whole, and frightened at the rate which we’re killing the other animals who have a right to be here because we want microbeads in our toothpaste and plastic bottles of water.
I want my future children or whoever’s behind me to live in a better world. Just as with rent and power, a business owes its stakeholders a common-sense conservation plan and a policy that strives to make no negative impact on the environment in which it exists. We’re fortunate that our processes create low impact and, thanks to our town’s recycling policy, our waste is easily recyclable.
What is coming up for Bluescentric? Any new collections in the works?
MM: We’ve got new merch scheduled almost through the 2017 summer — there’s a bigger product pipeline than we’ve ever had. We’re launching more throwback “old dead record label” tees and merchandise, new blues and soul licensees, vinyl record merch and tees, apparel and accessories that fans will love.
For someone to become affiliated with Bluescentric in terms of licensing or selling merchandise, what should they do? Is there criteria to be sold on the site?
MM: We do have a narrow set of criteria when considering licensees. Each artist is different and caters to different markets. Often we work with “deceased musicians.” We opened the business of selling licensed artist tees because there were a lot of these incredible artists who had passed away, and eventually, merch wasn’t being produced for their fans or maybe never was to begin with, and because of that, bootleggers were filling some of the demand.
I once saw a bootleg tee sell $5,000 in merchandise online in days, then disappear before anyone caught them. Maybe 40% of that went straight into the pocket of a thief in eastern Europe, and 0% went to Howlin’ Wolf. In contrast, by the end of next year, we’ll have probably sent Howlin’ Wolf’s estate alone $5,000. When you buy an artist tee, especially online, it’s good to make sure it’s officially-licensed. Money made by the estates goes directly to family members, helps preserve the legacy of the musician you love, and funds artist’s non-for-profits that buys instruments for children, funds musical scholarships and more.
When not busy with Bluescentric, how do you like to spend your free time?
MM: I just got an ancient stand-up piano that I can suffer pretty good, and then there’s the record store tax. I enjoy a lot of cooking. My girlfriend and I travel for music pretty frequently. This year, we got stuck in a hailstorm to the music of Steely Dan in Red Rocks, Colorado. That’s an experience even Ticketmaster couldn’t tack a stupid fee onto.
What’s the best concert you’ve seen this year?
MM: That’s probably an unanswerable question; this has been my year for dream shows. Favorites: Sturgill Simpson, Vulfpeck, Buddy Guy, Nathaniel Rateliff, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux and his Mardi Gras indians at Jazzfest — looking the prettiest in their full feather suits. There was Dr. Lonnie Smith, a brilliant jazzy B3 player extraordinaire. My girlfriend and I caught Lee “Scratch” Perry, this brilliant and super funky dub and reggae founder and luminary, in this old basement venue. That was an unforgettable experience I’d pay to see over and over.
Do you have a favorite album of 2016?
MM: I’ve loved this popular “reaffirmation of love” for soulful music lately, with acts making popular and creatively groundbreaking “new old soul” music. Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats’ self-titled album is both fresh and still just smells like the horns and funk and gospel and sweat in those legendary 60s all-night Memphis jams. And they’re on Stax Records, the label that invented soul. Full circle. Also, I hear he’s a Missouri boy, born an hour down the road from our office, so he must be alright.
Finally, Matt, any last words for the kids?
MM: Buy music, buy band merch, love live music, and come by and see us!
It’s been more than 50 years since “Satisfaction,” “Get Off My Cloud” and a lot of musical gems by The Rolling Stones first hit the charts. Yet unlike many of the band’s 1960s peers, there is still new music coming out from The Stones. Earlier this month, The Stones’ Blue & Lonesome debuted at #4 on the Billboard charts.
Photo: Darren Paltrowitz
Hosted at Industria in the Meatpacking District, Exhibitionism is a decades-in-the-making exhibit featuring almost everything Stones-related that someone would want to see. Beyond behind-the-scenes video and rare audio content, Exhibitionism includes instruments, studio equipment, and costumes of the band members. Without giving too much away, it also includes a recreation of the apartment where several members lived together in the Stones’ early days.
Now if only more legendary artists would follow the lead and make their own version of Exhibitionism — I’m looking at you, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan…
Chuck Berry — the artist who codified the sound, rhythm and language of rock and roll — celebrated his 90th birthday last week with the surprise announcement that he will release a new album, simply titled Chuck.
The album Chuck will be released in 2017 through Dualtone Records, an Entertainment One Company. Comprised primarily of new, original songs written, recorded and produced by the founding rock and roll legend, Chuck is Berry’s first new album in 38 years. It was recorded in various studios around St. Louis and features Berry’s long-time hometown backing group, including his children Charles Berry Jr. (guitar) and Ingrid Berry (harmonica), plus Jimmy Marsala (Berry’s bassist of 40 years), Robert Lohr (piano), and Keith Robinson (drums).
“This record is dedicated to my beloved Toddy,” said Berry, referring to his wife of 68 years, Themetta Berry. “My darlin’ I’m growing old! I’ve worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!”
Dualtone president Paul Roper adds: “It is a great honor to be a part of this record and the broader legacy of Chuck Berry. This body of work stands with the best of his career and will further cement Chuck as one of the greatest icons of rock and roll.”
It would be impossible to overstate Chuck Berry’s influence on popular culture around the globe — and beyond it. Berry received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984, and was in the inaugural class of Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductees in 1986. He was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 2000, placed #5 on the Rolling Stone list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All-Time in 2010, and was given the first-ever PEN Award for literary excellence in lyric writing in 2012. More recently, he was the subject of a widely discussed essay by author Chuck Klosterman predicting that hundreds of years hence, Berry would be singularly synonymous with rock and roll itself, and last month his classic 1973 red Cadillac Eldorado went on display as part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American Culture and History.
