Spin magazine’s just-released Underground USA (Vintage, $14) is subtitled “An insider’s guide to live music, cheap eats, dive bars, thrift stores, and deviant fun in America’s top music cities.” According to the introduction written by Craig Marks, Spin’s executive editor, the 20 cities listed all “share at least one thing…
Hank’s back Hank Thompson and Friends Hank Thompson Curb Records It took over 30 years, but country music has caught up with Hank Thompson. Thompson–a longstanding force who, with his Brazos Valley Boys, revolutionized postwar country music by blending Western Swing with honky-tonk–has been something of an anachronism since the…
9,000,000 beats per minute The Undulating Band Aaron Avenue Records It’s the Catch-22 that lurks at the heart of every Local Band Hell: Stick around for awhile, play regularly, and in a couple of years people will either take you for granted or view you with thinly veiled contempt. Brad…
Odds ‘n’ sods Songs of the Hawaiian Cowboy (Na Mele O Paniolo) Various artists Warner Brothers Western Most people think of Hawaii as a lush, tropical place and cowboys as working in the arid vastness of the Texas plains, but the Hawaiian cattle industry has a rich heritage of native…
Alas, poor Simon & Garfunkel. At a time in music when it was more important to be hip and cool than to necessarily be good (sound familiar, kids?), they were so collegiate, so pop, and never quite hip and cool. So why is it that their three-CD boxed set Old…
He throws it out there, like a pitch that doesn’t quite make it to home plate, then he walks away from it. Only later, when the interviewer brings it up again, does Joe Jackson explain what he meant when he said: “I went through a time when I couldn’t listen…
No sparkle, just fade With release dates separated by only a few weeks–and similar musical growth–it’s fair to compare Nimrod and So Much for the Afterglow, the latest efforts from Green Day and Everclear, respectively. On Nimrod, Green Day was able to almost seamlessly integrate new instrumentation–horns, strings, acoustic guitars–as…
There’s no lack of props for hometown-girl-done-good Erykah Badu, who sang, danced, and rapped around town for years before heading to New York and making it big at the tender age of 26. There’s nothing green or tender about her mixture of old-school R&B and New Jack riddims, however, or…
When John Lennon or Noel Gallagher proclaimed to the world–tongue-in-cheek, hopefully–that their respective bands were bigger than Jesus, it could be laughed off as harmless boasting from a pair of musicians drunk on their own success (and more than a few pints of lager, in the case of Oasis’ Gallagher…
Check the oil 24 Hours a Day The Bottle Rockets Atlantic Records Third albums are gateway albums, the point where you find out if you’re shtick is getting stale or if you have what it takes to go the long haul. With 24 Hours a Day, the Bottle Rockets manage…
The repetitive patterns in rock and the blues are really not that far removed from the drumming that many “primitive” societies employ for social and religious purposes. The steadily increasing popularity of “jam bands”–improvisational groups that build their musical explorations on a foundation of those rhythms–is an undeniable pop culture…
The goddess is in If Jewel is the traditional singer/songwriter cast as a Hollywood prom queen, Ani DiFranco is “Carrie,” full of rage and magic and dangerous to all that’s bland and popular. She’s the folk singer for folks who hate folk singers, a tiny, trash-talking bundle of lust, pride,…
Unsealed indictment When the Revolution Comes Lord High Fixers Au-go-go Records The breaking down of the blues into its most basic components is nothing new, thanks to the efforts of primitivists such as Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records (R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford) and theatrical pretenders such as Jon Spencer (Blues Explosion,…
One of the big pitfalls lurking under the surface of most versions of romantic love is an implied masochism, an idea that suffering is somehow relative to emotional depth. It’s what scuttles most of what could be referred to (sneeringly or not) as “sensitive” music, songs that deal with emotions…
Conducting interviews over the telephone is always a difficult task–especially when you’re relying on a scratchy overseas connection–but when the person on the other end of the line is Tim Gane, co-founder of Stereolab, the cracks and pops are strangely appropriate. To try to get a better visualization of Gane…
Addressee unknown Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses The Residents Rykodisc You don’t have to dip too deeply into the musical avant-garde to realize that the Residents–the anonymous, tuxedo-clad, eyeball-headed musicians–aren’t all that intense, especially when compared to the relentlessness of Helden or the mechanistic clank of Can. Still,…
Puff Daddy & the Family’s No Way Out is as stunningly slack a piece of work as has ever been issued by a major rap act. Puff Daddy, born Sean Combs, has one of the weakest verbal flows of all time: He mouths wan rhymes in a pinched, charisma-free monotone…
The Rolling Stones–an atmospheric disturbance more predictable and (nowadays, at least) considerably less disruptive than El Nino–blew through the area last week, playing Owen Field in Norman, Oklahoma, on Tuesday, October 28, and Fort Worth’s Texas Motor Speedway the following Saturday. Although much of the dark menace that once surrounded…
Give the people the blues That’s What They Want Anson Funderburgh and Sam Myers Black Top Records That’s What They Want–touted as a “celebration” of their decade together–is yet another winning entry from Anson Funderburgh and Sam Myers, who’ve done a good blues album every two or so years since…
Baby, it’s him In person, Burt Bacharach seems a little smaller than he does when you see him on television or in old photos standing next to ex-wife Angie Dickinson or Dionne Warwick. His arms are twig-thin, and his face is a little more gaunt than it was back when…
In the old days, rock and roll was an alternative to school, the spirit of rebellion and the defiance of convention. That’s all well and good for audience members, but what those trying to make a living in the rock world soon found out was that certain “square” guidelines–write things…
Dyer straits B.B. King and Robert Lockwood were radio pitchmen for Pepticon (a patent medicine) and Mother’s Best Flour respectively, so it’s not without blues precedent for Johnny Dyer to use his talent in commercials. He’s the harp-honker on West Coast TV ads for Budweiser, AT&T, and Nabisco crackers. Born…
