We have received a handful of letters from readers insisting they do not want to see another word about Seagrams Company Ltd.’s takeover of the music business. They claim it’s insignificant, it’s all so much meaningless bitching and moaning better left to the business pages. They assert that nobody cares…
With a mainstream to rebel against, a deep love of rock’s true golden age of freedom (the mid-’60s), and a grasp on that era’s melodic raucousness, the first punk-rockers probably saved rock and roll from the death it deserved. Early punk discs are timeless in the way The Sun Sessions…
The song–or whatever it is–doesn’t really begin or end so much as it’s there and then it isn’t, a melody rescued from an aimless groove with little more than raised eyebrows and subtle nods, almost imperceptible cues. A skittish drum beat, marking time and abandoning it, is joined by a…
Head below water Nanci Darvish Hi-Fi Drowning Luminous Records Guilt by association doesn’t always apply to record producers, mainly because they remain anonymous to everyone but the fetishists who pore over the liner notes and memorize every last detail, from the name of the assistant engineer to all of the…
Everything you are about to read is a lie. Well, perhaps that is an exaggeration, much like most of what comes out of Tom Waits’ mouth. It’s not as though he doesn’t know the truth, it’s just less fun to tell it. Every interview, and he has handed out only…
We salute you! Searching for Jimi Hendrix The Right Stuff Where is My Mind? A Tribute to the Pixies Glue Factory Records Burning London The Clash Tribute Epic Records Right now, there’s an Elektra Records exec rounding up the Old 97’s, Styx, and Lou Reed for the Doobie Brothers tribute…
This is no knock on Eric Erlandson–guitarist-songwriter in Hole, co-founding member with Courtney Love, ex-boyfriend of Drew Barrymore, and all-around decent guy, at least during 20 minutes of all-biz chitchat. But when he’s offered up by the Interscope/Geffen publicist in place of Courtney Love, who had scheduled an interview but…
Dick Contino walks onstage at a video-poker bar called the Arroweed Lounge on an Indian reservation in Nevada with a 30-pound accordion strapped to his hairy chest and the aura of 52 years of show business trailing behind him, an aura ignored by those dropping quarters in hopes of jacks…
OK, So We’ll Never do this again. It seemed like a swell idea at first: Do away with the so-called “local music-industry insiders” (i.e., guys who work for Sam Paulos) who have traditionally selected the Dallas Observer Music Awards nominees, and simply let the voters fill in the blanks. That’s…
Worth the Waits Mule Variations Tom Waits Epitaph Mule Variations sounds like it goes on forever, one song leading into the next until the album echoes into tomorrow, then the day after the day after the day after. So much music, so many rickety sounds, so many beautiful notes piled…
At first glance, Erik Thompson is about as clean-cut and familiar as any God-fearing college student. You get the direct gaze, the low, articulate musings of a well-read thinker. He modestly sips his scotch and water; he sits up straight in a starched oxford shirt. On the surface, there’s nothing…
It began in the early ’70s, in a Canadian Dada-Surrealist magazine styled to look like Life. Tucked inside was a flexi-disc sampler of four songs from the Residents’ first album, Meet the Residents–a tongue-in-cheek sendup of Meet the Beatles. Instead of the familiar mugs of John, Paul, George, and Ringo,…
Nestled between the bar and the wall at the Cock & Bull on Gaston Avenue, an overstuffed shoulder bag leaning against his barstool, Jeff Whittington looks no different from any of the young professionals hoisting pints at the end of their workdays in other bars in the neighborhood. He stands…
Hold on, he’s coming Eargasm Johnnie Taylor Columbia Records Ain’t no singer alive with more style and class than Johnnie Taylor. Last time I saw the man, he was sitting in a booth in dusty, now-defunct Naomi’s, wearing a crisp suit and shiny jewels, and it looked as though he…
Branford Marsalis calls exactly at the appointed time, 3 p.m., despite a schedule that should not allow for such promptness. He is on a cellular phone, sitting on the front stoop of his 13-year-old son Reese’s piano school on White Plains Post Road in Eastchester, New York. Branford does not…
Tim DeLaughter, Tripping Daisy frontman and newly anointed father, is one of the most optimistic people ever to have been dropped from a major label. Sure, he’s done his share of bad-mouthing Island Records, the label that signed the local outfit in 1993, promised the moon and stars, then last…
Rock hard Aqua Vita Doosu One Ton Records Let’s just get this out on the table: I’m no fan of Doosu’s genre. Heavy-heavy riffs of the X-chromosome variety, a tight-throttle blend of metal, bile, and clenched jaws. No, not the quasi-funk froth of Hellafied Funk Crew and Pimpadelic (that’s even…
It is not every day a man gets to fulfill his dream, much less find that when it comes true, it’s so much better than the fantasy. Too often our reveries end up in a discarded heap. Most of us have no stamina to fulfill them, and eventually they dissolve…
When Aaron Stauffer moved to Mendocino County in Northern California two years ago, he wasn’t so much giving up on music as much as he was giving in to his love for the ocean. Hollywood Records had recently dropped his band, Seaweed, after just one album, 1995’s Spanaway, and Stauffer…
Out of the Woods Tongue Penelope Houston Reprise Records Hers is one of the most confounding careers in the history of rock and roll, from punk to orchestral folkie to pop-rocker to sorta-punk once more. She’s an Avenger from way back, when she was a 19-year-old buzz-cut screamer in 1977…
I’m prone to hyperbole, especially in situations where alcohol is served, so when I proclaimed, in the presence of a certain sports and music editor for a Dallas weekly, that the Dixie Chicks’ Nashville breakthrough Wide Open Spaces was the best country album of 1998, a good-natured yet heated discussion…
If Michael Corcoran’s defense of the Dixies is funnier than what follows, it’s only because he has the more laughable half of this debate. C’mon–liking the Dixie Chicks? You know Corcoran only likes Wide Open Spaces because ex-Chick Laura Lynch referred to him as an “oily, disheveled troll” in Texas…
