His earliest memories are of childhood days spent on the reservation, listening to his mother’s relatives tell stories, play music, pass down traditions as though they were a child’s outgrown clothes. He was born in May 1944, the son of a Mohawk mother and a Jewish gangster. He would never…
At first, you can hear the weariness in her voice–even over a long-distance connection from New York, where she’s performing at Radio City Music Hall, even over the gurgles and cries of her baby son, Seven, who sounds as though he’s trying to swallow the phone receiver. “We’re always together,”…
For some Dallas Observer Music Award winners, the accolade means a great deal; it signifies some recognition of hard work, of nights spent playing to bartenders for pocket change, of hours spent recording an album that only dozens would hear. For others, well, the award makes a nifty doorstop or…
Lyn Collins, “The Female Preacher,” is probably the most-heard unknown singer in America. If you’ve listened to any hip-hop in the last 10 years, you’ve heard her voice sampled over and over, most famously calling out the chorus of Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two”–a sample from…
Y Kant Tori Feel Better Tori Amos From the Choirgirl Hotel Atlantic Records Either you feel Tori Amos’ pain or you think she is a pain; either you embrace her confessions and piano-bench grindings or you dismiss her as nothing but a bundle of theatrics and bullshit who turned to…
The digital sampler, the most utilized musical-production tool of recent years, is the perfect invention for the here and now. The sampler is attuned to every hedonistic and automated whim; for many musicians and producers, a guitar is like a pinball machine in an arcade full of digital Playstations. With…
Sara Hickman said it herself. She was always the girl on the front porch…the girl next door…the girl wearing gingham, playing guitar, spreading joy with the crystal-bell, soft-dove voice as she sang “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” She was the hometown girl whose handcrafted gem Equal Scary People took her to the big city…
No shirt, no shoes Full Service No Waiting Peter Case Vanguard Records Peter Case was one of the lucky ones–a one-hit new-wave hero whose past didn’t drag him down. The Plimsouls still exist, resurrected for the recently completed third album still unheard, but they’re a side project now, no longer…
Down in Austin, the little music city that thinks it’s bigger than it is, thousands of musicians get up every morning and think to themselves, Today will be the day. They subscribe to the myth as common to rock and roll as the music itself: The poor saps actually believe…
Kim Lenz takes no offense at the suggestion that she is like a page torn from a history book. Quite the contrary, she finds it a flattering remark, testimony to the years she has spent looking backward while moving forward. Her ’50s fetishism runs skin-deep and beyond: At this moment,…
Rock it from the crypt The Mullens The Mullens Get Hip Recordings To say that the Mullens are stuck in the past would be as big an understatement as suggesting that maybe someone should keep an eye on Michael Jackson’s kids. Apparently, the band’s collective memory stops around the time…
Reaping the reward The Road Mike Morgan and the Crawl Black Top Records Most local blues bands have repertoires so routine, so predictable, that hometown fans find little reason to hear them more than a time or two a year. An exception is Mike Morgan & the Crawl, partly because…
No Coda Page & Plant Walking Into Clarksdale Atlantic Records Jimmy Page and Robert Plant have spent so many years shitting on their legacy (a little Coverdale/Page anyone, or perhaps a little Honeydrippers?) that they must now live down their failures rather than live up to their history. The duo’s…
Slobberbone’s were-you-there? set during last month’s South by Southwest music conference in Austin wasn’t a life-changing show–it was a life-affirming one. During an early evening party thrown by its record label, Austin-based indie Doolittle Records, four boys from Denton made a courtyard full of industry folk forget that they had…
For most anyone with a taste for real country music, Nashville is generally seen as the center of the Evil Empire–a place where Darth Brooks and his ilk are conspiring to close up the honky-tonks and replace them with a national chain of spit-shined and sanitized line-dance emporiums. Nashville sucks…
As Penelope Spheeris begins describing her documentary, she lets out a slight chuckle, as though the laugh will cushion the blow: “It’s so depressing,” she says of the film, the third installment in her series charting the Decline of Western Civilization. “Isn’t it?” She laughs again, the answer so obvious…
Don’t call it a sell-out; she’s been around for years, and all Meredith Miller has to show for it are two locally released CDs and a day job that pays for her to play at night. No, Miller’s decision to form a band–a year ago now, in case you didn’t…
Learn to play Imaginary Enemy Caulk One Ton Records The only thing worse than an average band is an average band that thinks it’s good and/or is popular. The average bands that can’t fill a club on a Saturday aren’t much of a concern; they’ll never rise above the opening…
The story of Captain Audio begins at the end–two ends, in fact, the death of two bands whose life spans flamed out well before their potential. Even now it seems unfair to those of us who care about such things that Comet and UFOFU don’t exist anymore; just when it…
Sharon Ely’s delicious posole. A couple of cops who stopped David Carradine’s kid brother and him on the way to an old folk-music club in Los Angeles. Those see-through motel towels. A Mexican smuggler and something about huevos rancheros. A muleteer who’s ridden all over the West. The time he…
Just like James Joyce had his Dublin, Mike Watt has his San Pedro. The port town on the Los Angeles harbor has been the bass player’s stomping ground since he was a kid, and he knows every inch of the place. His dad, a career Navy man, was stationed there…
Perfect Night: Live in London Lou Reed Reprise Records Lou Reed did not age gracefully–he aged accidentally, clumsily, defiantly. He has been middle-aged forever, worn out before he was ever broken in, and for proof, you need look no further than 1982’s The Blue Mask, made when he was just…
