Country feedback Welcome to… Eleven Hundred Springs 13 Recordings Matt Hillyer was country before he wasn’t cool, before Lone Star Trio degenerated into a bad Reverend Horton Heat impression, before he formed Strap and trotted out an even worse imitation of ZZ Top–or was it Pantera? Back then, at the…
If you’re Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch, you can have it both ways: Sign with a major label and keep your indie-rock credibility; maintain a successful band and a happy family without disrupting either; live in relative isolation in the cultural hinterland of Boise, Idaho, and still be one of…
Thank you for tuning in this morning to the B.P. radio show! Soul 73 KKDA! You turn me on, and I’ll turn you on. I got my mojo working this morning. In other words, there’s some fever in the funkhouse. There’s a skunk in the skillet. Thank you for joining…
So you wanna be a rock and roll star? Then listen up. 1) Your manager is not helping you. Fire him. 2) There are no such things as demo tapes. They’re only cassettes you haven’t started selling at shows yet. 3) Always open for a band that sounds just like…
When the original members of KISS re-formed for a take-the-money-and-run tour in 1996, a persistent rumor followed their platform boots from city to city. According to this slice of gossip, guitarist Ace Frehley was occasionally in such fragile (read: drunk) condition that at some shows a look-alike had to fill…
Ashes to ashes, dust to Dusty Dusty in London Dusty in Memphis Dusty Springfield Rhino Records Dusty Springfield died March 3 at the age of 59, felled by the breast cancer she had been battling for years. Just two weeks before her death at her London home, a publicist at…
Bob Irwin spends his days sorting through the vaults of record companies, listening to songs long ago hidden away from the general public–songs either too bad, or too good, ever to escape from the tomb. During the past decade, he has been responsible for freeing the Byrds’ best-and-rest from Columbia’s…
Rockabilly buffet More Bad Habits Ronnie Dawson Yep Roc Records Ronnie Dawson always kept it simple: Just pile on the country, dip into the blues every now and then, pretend it’s all rock and roll anyway, and play like hell till the lights go out. Man’s never even recorded in…
They’re unabashed freaks of the music world–young men playing bygone music, children raised on rock and roll who long ago decided they were no longer interested in electric guitars and snare drums and amped-up anarchy. Their weapons of choice are instruments that belong in yellowing black-and-white photographs: banjos and mandolins,…
Shined to a dull finish Central Reservation Beth Orton Arista/Deconstruction Zero Zero Zero Sam Phillips Virgin Records Think of Beth Orton as Jewel for the deep-think crowd. Only this performer trades in folk for “funk” and still manages to go nowhere while the world spins around her; she trip-hops over…
A few weeks ago, word circulated through the Denton-rock grapevine that Brunswick was hit by a car–jarring news indeed about the mascot of the cozy indie scene. But there he is nonetheless, sitting in the cab of his owner’s pickup truck, alert at the window, swinging his tail like the…
Why me to the moon Red White and Pink Mr. Pink Six Degrees The Immaculates The Immaculates self-released Two local swing records in a month’s time: First Johnny Reno puts on his Red Jacket and plays lounge lizard, and now Mr. Pink’s sipping martinis while Frank and Dean do their…
For a long time, Jimmy Eat World singer-guitarist Jim Adkins didn’t believe Capitol Records was really going to release his band’s new album, Clarity. Even after the album was added to the label’s official release schedule and the masters had been sent to the pressing plant, Adkins wasn’t convinced. Why…
Whose grass is it, anyway? The Mountain Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band E-Squared Ain’t so surprising Steve Earle is embracing traditional bluegrass this time around. It’s not the first time he’s woven plucky bits of Appalachia into his sound; the grass is high on such recent post-rehab records…
Dance the night away The Revenge of Sonic Soular The Falcon Project Idol Records Whether The Falcon Project’s Wanz Dover likes it or not, if music were governed by semantics, the band’s debut album, The Revenge of Sonic Soular, would almost certainly be shelved under space rock; it’s just too…
Will Cullen Hart answers the phone out of breath, stopping our interview before it starts by asking whether I could please call him right back and let the phone ring until the answering machine picks up to give him a chance to find his temporarily misplaced cordless phone. As the…
If you turn your back for a minute, maybe to grab a beer from the bar or go upstairs to shoot a quick game of pool, you can almost fool yourself into believing there’s a different band up there onstage, headlining a Friday-night bill at Trees. Even if you face…
The streets are still littered with trash–every single inch, it seems, covered in a thin gray slime that oozes on forever. The light drizzle only makes things worse, more slippery-sticky. Hard to keep your footing in a mess like this. One wrong step, and it’s ass-first into the Mardi Gras…
One gray day last October, while driving up Interstate 405 from Portland to Seattle, I turned off the highway at an exit marked Sleater-Kinney. It was the same kind of impulse that causes certain types of visitors in London to take their shoes off and walk across Abbey Road, or…
Not really what you’d expect in a sushi bar. The otherwise cool, modest clamor of dishes clinking and Kirin bottles toasting and waiters explaining the fishy menu gave way to the scooting about of chairs and tables to make way for…a very loud rock band. The four guys filling the…
Basement tape Excretio: The Difficult Years Poor Bastard Sons Hot Links Records Chris Flemmons, the main Poor Bastard Son, is only in his 20s, and God knows if he’s ever been to Appalachia. Perhaps in a past life, this Denton boy was a union organizer–or, better yet, a deep-and-dusty coal…
It has been seven years since XTC released a record–so long now that Andy Partridge, the band’s co-singer and co-songwriter, cannot believe there are people left on this earth who remember him, much less actually want to talk to him. He figured that by now, XTC would have been long…
