At first, it sounded like one of the worst station promos ever, random snippets of familiar songs spliced together, the kind of thing most radio stations use to give listeners an idea of the kind of music they’ll be hearing if they decide to stick around. Only it sounded as…
Best band ever, if only for turning “…Baby One More Time” into the most poignant ballad of 2000; best band ever, if only for making “Killer Queen” live up to its billing. Yes, Travis is the world’s most astute and least finicky cover band–it renders the faddish timeless, the timeless…
Jonny Greenwood would prefer not to be here, this I know. Talking on an intercontinental phone call to yet another journalist about how great Radiohead, in which he plays guitar, is and how important Amnesiac, its new record, is in the face of the cultural poverty that’s replaced the 21st-century…
When most rock musicians turn 32, they’re usually either trying to think of ways to recapture the excitement of their early records or they’re considering plastic surgery. Not Johnny Dowd. Thirty-two is when the soft-spoken singer-songwriter first picked up a guitar, but even at that advanced age, the silver-haired gothic…
The chitlin circuit still lives on The Other Side of the Tracks–or, as an old friend of mine used to say, where the white man don’t go, that’s where the brothers know. Jimi Hendrix cut his teeth on the circuit before he used them to play the guitar, and it’s…
Los Angeles man about town Jon Brion’s the kind of guy you figure would probably be all right if the world melted while he was asleep and he woke up to find himself the only one left, doomed to an eternity behind the bars of his well-stocked home recording studio…
When is a local band not a local band? No, it’s not a trick question; we had too much to drink last night–by last night, we actually mean the last two to three months–so we’re making it easy on you and us. The answer: A local band is not a…
All right, now, this bullshit has to stop. First Joey Ramone dies. Then comes word from E! Entertainment that Duran Duran is re-forming in its original lineup. And a week after that, New Jersey’s Monmouth University gives Jon Bon Jovi an honorary doctorate of humane letters. (To be honest, I’m…
Usually at this time, people are too drunk to pay attention or too exhausted to care. It’s well after 1 a.m. in Austin, and the annual South by Southwest music festival is staggering to the finish line, limping along with a full belly and glazed, red eyes. Four days of…
I think G. Love is high. “What we do is just, like, American music. In this day and age, everything is one, and we just play music, you know what I mean?” Hmm. Correction: I know G. Love is high. “This is what we do, man. We just play this…
When you’re in a young band starting out, trying to get people to buy your debut album and tickets to your shows, this is how it goes: You’re doing an interview with a writer in one of the next tour stops, and the cell phone you’re using won’t cooperate. The…
Four summers ago at Deep Ellum Live, the frustrated disappointment of the scattered fans was a pitch louder than the electronic bird sounds and shimmers coming from Rickie Lee Jones’ accompanists as she spun around onstage amid candles and lamps. She’d pause at the microphone now and again to slur…
Maybe our memory is failing us a little bit, but we’d swear Lift to Experience started working on its debut, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, more than three years ago. However many years it took, it was long enough for the band to completely record and scrap one version of Crossroads and…
The second album of R.E.M.’s Third Phase (end of First Phase: Document; end of Second Phase: departure of drummer Bill Berry) is not much different, and certainly no better, than the first, 1999’s Up, which should have been titled Down. It offers more of the same: pet sounds drenched in…
Rivers Cuomo took a chance a few years ago, and from the sound of it, he’ll never take another one, at least not any time soon. On 1996’s Pinkerton, he collected every one of his confused emotions and awkward missteps for public display, tying them to songs that abandoned Ric…
When Billy Joe Shaver gives directions to his modest house on the outskirts of Waco, he says to disregard the handwritten sign on his front door. “Please do not disturb I haven’t slept in two days,” it says. “That’s just so some ol’ drunks don’t come by at 5 in…
First time I saw the Go-Go’s: early 1980s, at a local punk-rock club, probably the Hot Klub. Belinda Carlisle, girl of my teen-cream dreams, was chubby back then–soft and round and pretty. A girl flirting with being a woman, the angles in her face still obscured by baby fat. She…
The funny thing about singer-songwriters is that most of them can neither sing nor write songs. Occasionally a voice will emerge from the coffee-shop circuit, but for every Jeff Buckley, there are innumerable insufferable slam poets with acoustic guitars. New Jersey native Pete Yorn falls somewhere in between. On his…
Joan Jett has worn her rocker uniform and her tough-girl snarl that betters even Elvis’ confident lip curl for so long now that it makes you wonder if the Philly-born, Los Angeles-raised siren ever suffered from the doubt that seems to wiggle its way under the skin of every rock-and-roll…
Unless you’ve ever had your clock cleaned by a drag queen, don’t think for a moment that you know what it’s like to be Handsome Dick Manitoba. The Dictators’ charismatic front man got himself entangled in one of the most celebrated imbroglios of the mid-’70s at proto-punk hole CBGB’s during…
Here’s how good a job Robert Jenkins has done spreading the word about his new record label, Summer Break Records: Even though Summer Break had yet to release anything at the time, the label came within a few nominations of making the 2001 Dallas Observer Music Awards ballot in the…
Almost everyone can name some scene in some movie that left such a profound impression on the mind’s eye that it caused him or her instantly to become aware of the overwhelming power of moviemaking techniques, even if it wasn’t realized as such at the time. It’s especially the case…
