The rock ‘n roll suds brand will make its debut during Super Bowl Weekend in Miami Updated: Thu, 01/30/2020 – 09:00   Seattle’s Elysian Brewing is gaining a national stage for the roll out of a new beer in partnership with Rolling Stone, the nation’s iconic music-industry publication, with the premiere of the new craft beer slated for Super Bowl weekend at a major pre-game bash: Rolling Stone Live: Miami Big Game Experience. Elysian’s new high-end suds offering, dubbed Elysian Rolling Stone Lager, will debut at the event this Saturday, Feb. 1, and will be promoted as the e ..read more

When Tim’s Tavern was forced to close because its landlord wouldn’t renew its lease, co-owners Mason Reed and Matthew O’Toole told their real estate agent they wanted their new location to be like the Drunky Two Shoes in White Center. They wanted somewhere with an outdoor stage, somewhere “pandemic-proof.” A year and a half later, they got exactly that. On March 31, the new Tim’s turned its iconic neon sign back on in the old Drunky’s location on 16th Avenue Southwest. It wasn’t the pandemic that did Tim’s in. The hole-in-the-wall venue, formerly located about a mile east of Carkeek Park in Gr ..read more

Podcasts are full of murder, mystery, mayhem and sports. Seattle’s Ruinous Media is focusing on another genre, music, with a veritable cast of well-known Seattle characters who tell stories in an engaging and compelling way. Along the way, Ruinous has exported Seattle’s unique brand of “weird” to audiences across the United States and around the world. Take, for instance, “Whittaker.” It details the story of Bobby Whittaker — a former tour manager for Mudhoney and R.E.M., and a member of the Whittaker family of outdoors royalty (his father, Jim, was REI’s first full-time employee and, in 1963 ..read more

Kevin Sur slunk to town looking for a rock to slip under, but instead found his place in the sun.  In 2003, he was a down-on-his-luck guitarist and songwriter who had invested seven years building up the punk band Luckie Strike, so named as a bowling reference.  Bonded by social rejection and the compulsion to express that pain musically, Sur and vocalist Melanie Levy remained independent and ground out success, playing with big bands, touring the U.S. and producing records.  Luckie Strike rolled the bowling equivalent of a 7-10 split when its van, which contained everything the ..read more

This is part of a series of personal essays and interviews we’re calling Stories from Seattle, contributed by our community and designed to show how the coronavirus pandemic is impacting the lives of Seattleites. Want to share your story, coping mechanisms, wildest ideas? We’d love to hear. Please email: chelsea.lin@tigeroak.com. As told to Tricia Romano. I’m the co-owner of Neumos, Barboza, the Runaway. And then Life on Mars is the bar we opened—me, John Richards, myself and our wives—nine months ago. It’s in the old War Room space. It’s all plant-based food, with 6000 records ..read more

Bridgette A. Wimberly’s libretto for Charlie Parker’s Yardbird, which opened Saturday night at Seattle Opera (premiered in Philadelphia in 2015), casts the troubled jazz pioneer’s life as a suite of 21 continuously flowing scenes, in 90 minutes with no intermission. Wimberly sets up Parker’s 1955 death as a framing device and his career and personal struggles as flashbacks, adding as supporting characters Parker’s mother, Addie; three of his wives; his patroness, Nica; and his mentor Dizzy Gillespie. Most of these reminiscences are staged—regardless of where the events  ..read more

Few things are as artistically satisfying for me as watching people make their own way, use their own voice, tell their own story, fiction of non. Don’t get me wrong, I love a revival or a classic show too, but there’s something about watching a performer/creator that digs deeper into my psychic tissue. This week, Seattle showgoers can choose from an embarrassment of self-made riches, from ACT’s first-ever Solo Fest, featuring four wonderful local performers presenting original work, to a reprise of Lowbrow Opera Collective’s #adulting, which welcomes millennials into an artform that doesn’t o ..read more

Seattle is world-renowned as a music town so it’s no surprise our little corner of the world is teeming with independent record labels supporting local talent. From garage rock to “night bus music” these local companies are sharing Seattle sounds with the world. Here are five local record labels who should be on your radar: Hardly Art A subsidiary of Sub Pop, Hardly Art was founded in 2007, returning to Sub Pop’s early mindset of finding and helping elevate smaller, underground acts —particularly local ones. The two labels share many of the employees related to day-to-day business operation, w ..read more

This article appears in print in the December 2019 issue. Click here to subscribe. “Christmas as calamity” is Taylor Mac’s approach to the holidays and their attendant songs in this musical, maniacal show—and some form of audience participation is likely, so brace yourself. A Pulitzer Prize nominee and MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, this NYC-based playwright, actor and cabaret performer is known for A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which dissects, challenges and queers American history through its songs, devoting an hour to each decade and 10 songs to each hour. Mac ..read more

It’s unusual for an opera chorus rehearsal to begin with an in-depth explication from the director: whom they’re playing and why, in fact, they’re even there. But The Falling and the Rising is an unusual opera. This new work by NYC composer Zach Redler and Chicago librettist Jerre Dye, which opens its run at Seattle Opera this Friday, takes us inside the hearts and minds of those who fight, theatrically reshaping stories drawn from the reminiscences of actual war veterans. At last Thursday’s rehearsal in Tagney Jones Hall (the glass box fronting Mercer Street in SO’s glittering new h ..read more