While Tracy Shedd deserted our fair city when her husband got (an admittedly) amazing job in North Carolina, the combination of the time she spent in Tucson and the fact that her new album is titled Arizona, I think means we can claim her as one of our own for at least a year or so.

Helpfully, the video for "Broken Arrows" from the new album (available Nov. 12, which is soon!) is set in Tucson and features local musician Andrew Collberg and his girlfriend Sharon.

• Dusty Rose
• NOBUNNY at Night of the Living Fest

Saturday's Night of the Living Fest brought downtown Tucson to Old Tucson. There were old people, young people, hipsters, people who use the word "hipster," and so on. Everyone I know had a great time. Even the cops politely chatting with me in the BBQ place were smiling. But things sometimes happen to change those circumstances, and those cops ceased to be chipper a short time later, at the tail end of NOBUNNY's show-stopping performance.

NOBUNNY is a former Tucsonan (now based in the Bay Area) whose work simultaneously celebrates and satirizes the confrontational ethos of the earliest punk music; the artwork for his 2008 debut, Love Visions, featured him, in his corrosive rabbit mask and tiny black leather jacket, leaning up against a brick wall that was very similar to the one The Ramones posed by for their 1976 debut album. NOBUNNY’s music operates in the same way — short, fast, tuneful anthems that are great punk songs and great punk song parodies, some examples being “NOBUNNY Loves You,” “I Am a Girlfriend,” and “Blow Dumb.”

Tomorrow's Night of the Living Fest is going to be the most fun music and arts event of the season. If you don't believe me, take more of my words for it here.

Now you can win 2 tickets to the Fest by going to the official event page on Facebook and writing a post stating why you and only you should win this contest. A winner will chosen later tonight, so make sure you check back often. Good luck!

As we here the Weekly wind down our Wednesday and get ready for tonight's Tucson Weekly App launch party at Sky Bar (You're coming to that, right? There will be drink specials and shot glasses! You can meet your favorite Weekly staffers and also me!), we think it's time to relax to the soothing sounds of a marching band covering the Beatles.

The Pride of Arizona (which, for many years, was the only reason to stay through halftime for most UA football games) held their annual UA Band Day event on October 26, welcoming high school marching bands from around the state to come to Arizona Stadium and perform their shows in a competition setting. While many of those marching bands had killer shows (special shoutout to the Rincon-University High School Marching Band, which shared top honors this year with Tempe's Corona Del Sol Marching Band), the main event is the full show from the Pride, and this year's show didn't disappoint.

"The Beatles Strike Back," a sequel to an earlier Beatles show back in 1995, does a great job of faithfully interpreting the music of the Fab Four. The video runs fairly long at 14 minutes, so if you're strapped for time, the show starts properly at 2:20; my personal favorite part, half of the Abbey Road Medley through to "The End," begins at 9:05.

And no, they didn't include "Her Majesty," which I would've lost my mind over in joy.

Great job, Pride.

• C. Elliott
• Buddy Guy

Folks are still talking about Buddy Guy's set at the Rialto Theatre last Friday, Oct. 25. Guy is among the pioneers of the Chicago style of electric blues, stolen outright by rock bands of the 60s and 70s, and played to this day in local clubs and bars throughout the world. His shows are an important reality check: They temper our tolerance for cheap imitations.

Lou Reed died at age 71 yesterday. As of this writing, an official cause of death hasn’t been confirmed. The circumstances of his death are certainly less important than the achievements of his life, because without Lou Reed, the worlds of popular music and culture would be very, very different, even today.

Everyone’s heard the famous Brian Eno quote, "the first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." This much is true. There would be no Iggy Pop without Reed. No David Bowie. No punk rock, no hip hop, no electronic pop or rock music. Any artist who has attempted to push the boundaries of what could be considered pop or rock music since The Velvet Underground & Nico hit record store shelves in early 1967 owes Lou Reed their career. Reed brought high art and pulp-novel noir into rock and roll in a way that made the accomplishments of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan seem tentative, even squeamish. They teased; they hinted; they hid behind allegory and innuendo. With Reed and the Velvets, everything was laid out in the starkest of light. Culturally, his crowning achievement of that era was to be the first to deny the myths of the hippie counter-culture. Drug abuse was ugly. Free love was not consequence-free. While the hippies were protesting the Vietnam War with stoned flower-power, America and the rest of the world was quite literally burning, and the music of the Velvets reflected this like no other. The amoral, deglamorized drug tales “Waiting For The Man,” “Heroin,” and “White Light/White Heat”; the twisted sexuality of “Venus in Furs”; the tragic-comic portraits of social posturing in “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and “Stephanie Says”; and the combination of all of the above in the cataclysmic “Sister Ray” violently defiled the baby boomer lie. The Velvets were hated for it.

But Reed had the courage to keep shoving that lie back in the face of the counter-culture that purveyed it. He also had the courage to write honest and beautiful portraits of purity, because like any true artist, he wouldn’t deny any part of the spectrum of life. “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “I Found a Reason,” and “Perfect Day,” the latter from his most successful solo album, Transformer, rank among the most naked and compassionate love songs in twentieth century music.

With the Velvets, Reed introduced free jazz, avant-garde classical music, musique concrete, minimalism based in the primal rhythms of Bo Diddley, and pure noise into rock and roll. He brought the pop-art sensibility and literary innovations of mentors Andy Warhol and Delmore Schwartz, respectively, and it was no longer just rock and roll music. There is popular music before Lou Reed, and there is popular music after Lou Reed. People didn’t know what to call it for another decade, until punk rock was a full-fledged international movement.

That’s a fraction of Lou Reed’s legacy; the tip of the iceberg. By most accounts, he was an awful, cruel person, like another master of the last century, Pablo Picasso. But there is the art and then there is the artist. And the art stands high like a monolith, but also as a battering ram — the sound of ground being leveled for new ideals and ideas to be built upon. The implications of the line “I put you in the mirror I put in front of me,” from “Pale Blue Eyes,” run as deep as any religious or spiritual text. In “Some Kinda Love,” from the Velvets’ 1969 eponymous album, Reed sings, “between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” That lifetime could be one millisecond or one thousand years. It is infinity, and in that space, “the possibilities are endless” (also from “Some Kinda Love”). This is the gift that Lou Reed gave to me. The words and music that opened my mind, eyes, and ears, and the endless possibilities of perspective.

Lou Reed died today. Although the cause of death has not been released, the musician underwent a liver transplant in May:

With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. "One chord is fine," he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. "Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."

Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed was born in Brooklyn, in 1942. A fan of doo-wop and early rock & roll (he movingly inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989), Reed also took formative inspiration during his studies at Syracuse University with the poet Delmore Schwartz. After college, he worked as a staff songwriter for the novelty label Pickwick Records (where he had a minor hit in 1964 with a dance-song parody called "The Ostrich"). In the mid-Sixties, Reed befriended Welsh musician John Cale, a classically trained violist who had performed with groundbreaking minimalist composer La Monte Young. Reed and Cale formed a band called the Primitives, then changed their name to the Warlocks. After meeting guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker, they became the Velvet Underground. With a stark sound and ominous look, the band caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who incorporated the Velvets into his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. "Andy would show his movies on us," Reed said. "We wore black so you could see the movie. But we were all wearing black anyway."

[Rolling Stone]

• Courtesy of the Misfits Facebook page

My brother Tyler wore his Misfits shirt until it, literally, fell to pieces. The skull became more and more tattered with each wash and still he wore it at least three times a week, much to my mom's displeasure. I'm sure that's where my love for the music started. Seeing his pride in something so worn proved the strength of music to me, its ability to make you unashamed of your enthusiasm.

Something in the music by Glen Danzig has always stuck a chord to me, and my favorite album will always be Static Age. The lyrics themselves are blunt to the degree of pain, along with the tone in which they're delivered. Each song has this constant, solid beat, timed with the lyrics perfectly. My sister calls it our 'getting pumped' music because we can never help but feel ready to go after listening to it.

• C. Elliott
• Stevie Vai at the Rialto Theatre, Oct. 22

Girl gets around! When we can catch our breath, looking at all the fun C. Elliott's having, we're reminded of what we've missed, and determined to do better this weekend!

Check out tucsonweekly.getn2.it for all the music in town, every night of the week.