The Salesman and Bernadette, the sixth album Vic Chesnutt has put his name on, is as sexy as folk-pop gets. Far from the scratchy, aching, desperate tunes that characterized Chesnutt’s first records in the late ’80s–back when he was little more than an Athens, Georgia, cult hero celebrated and produced…
There are only a handful of rock critics whose careers have made them as much pop stars as the pop stars they write about: Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Legs McNeil, Robert Palmer, Jon Savage. Robert Christgau’s there too, but he’s the hey-I’m-just-a-fan-like-you of the bunch, a writer who doses his…
Gang of Four wrote protest music for people who didn’t think they had anything to protest. On the surface, the characters in their songs were the very definition of happy, satisfied folk: office workers, blithely ebullient clubgoers, people who were falling in love–or at least thinking they were. The band’s…
It seems now like a moment that never really existed, like a fantasy conjured by men and women who can only dream of such a time and place as Warner Bros. Records in the late 1960s and 1970s. Might as well have been forever ago, when Joni Mitchell and Jimi…
Wu-Tang for now Bobby Digital in Stereo The RZA Gee Street/V2 Tical 2000: Judgement Day Method Man Def Jam The Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), still stands as the best hip-hop album of the ’90s, an album so perfect, even its creators have yet to figure…
Greg Dulli was never supposed to be the lead singer in the Afghan Whigs. He was originally the drummer, the stringy-haired dude at the very back–you know, the guy you never notice, never remember when he’s replaced three records into the band’s career. Guitarist Rick McCollum and bassist John Curley…
Robert Brooks has been a devoted Dixie Chicks fan for six years, from the time he and his wife first saw them perform at an American Airlines company picnic at Sandy Lake Amusement Park. Since then, he has followed the band like a debt collector, doggedly tracking the Dixie Chicks’…
Sidneys unite! Sniffing Glue The Visitors Mind Control The Visitors ride (too?) hard on vocalist Benjie Bollox’s brief stint with the London-based U.K. Subs, a veteran punk band that outlived its purpose by 1981 yet refuses to lie down. Bollox spent about a year abroad drumming for the Subs before…
After almost eight years, four albums, and 646 shows, Jawbox broke up like so many bands do, quietly and abruptly. The members of Jawbox never had a chance to say goodbye. There wasn’t a swan-song single or farewell tour, not even a final, triumphant gig in its hometown of Washington,…
Lucinda Williams does not simply answer questions. She responds in monologue, rambling on minute after minute until the query almost seems like an afterthought. Perhaps this is because at this moment, she is rushing to get out the door and to the airport, where she will catch a plane to…
Kirking off Volume 1 Fear of Pop 550 Music/Sony Ben Folds’ low-fi-avant-pop-dance-etc. side project won’t much impress the faithful who adore Folds or sway the non-believers who find him a bit twee and insincere. It’s too slick for the basement-tapes crowd, too eclectic for the audience that considers Folds the…
George Gimarc has spent a lifetime collecting and cataloging and preserving rock and roll’s past–first as a radio-show host, then as an author of three books. The front room of his Garland home is the product of a life spent trolling record stores, diving into radio-station dumpsters, hoarding old tapes…
Sweet smell of excess Smell of Incense Southwest F.O.B. Sundazed Music Inc. They say history never forgets, which is scary indeed when you consider that sooner or later, every forgotten rock-and-roll nugget and turd will turn up on compact disc. Yesterday’s echoes are today’s digital treasures, or so the old…
Jewboyz II Men Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman Various artists Kinkajou Records Some day, Kinky Friedman will get his due. Kinky will see to that, appearing as he does on his own tribute record–the man’s nothing but chutzpah, bless him. Maybe history hasn’t done too well…
Hat’s off Never Look Back Brian Houser HEIRESS-aesthetic Music-scene regulars were whispering about Never Look Back, Brian Houser’s debut, long before the album was even finished. Houser, a regular at Adair’s when he’s not fixing Six Flags roller coasters, was the future of country music, they said, even though he…
Brother Russell Miles is 32 years old, and the only thing he does, day after day, is make prank phone calls. He has done this for years, since he was a child growing up in the suburbs of Dallas, making amateur comedy tapes with his older brother. The pair would…
The phone is no friend of Curt Kirkwood’s. Too often, the tidings it bears are foul. He calls them “incomings from Tempe.” They go like this: Your brother’s wife overdosed this morning; she’s dead. Your brother got busted again last night, and he told the cops he was you. Your…
Jorge Hernandez was an 18-year-old Mexican immigrant when, one night in a Los Angeles club, the young accordion player heard a woman sing a song about two drug smugglers. The song unfolded like a film, telling the story of a man and woman–he, an illegal; she, a Chicana from Texas–smuggling…
Lord, help him tonight Greatest Flops & Golden Filler Homer Henderson Honey Records Until recently, I thought Phil “Homer Henderson” Bennison’s “Lee Harvey Was a Friend of Mine” was an honest-to-God true story, about a kid who really did grow up next to Oswald in Oak Cliff and who really…
Terri Hendrix is an apple-cheeked blonde whose beaming countenance and beatific smile wouldn’t look out of place, golden wings spread behind her, atop the giant Christmas tree at New York’s Rockefeller Center. An Austin critic once tagged her stage presence as a “basket of kittens,” referring to the way she…
The members of Chomsky believe the band didn’t really exist until six months ago; of course, many people didn’t know it existed at all. To most, Chomsky has always been just another name in the crowded club listings, another band stuck with an early slot at Trees on a Friday…
Loose change Tracks Bruce Springsteen Columbia Records Even now, there exist two Bruce Springsteens: the arena-rock populist and the folk-obsessed troubadour. The former is the hero who sold 15 million copies of Born in the U.S.A.; he’s still “The Boss” to the fist-pumping faithful who anxiously await the long-rumored E…
