Not too long ago, Wessell Anderson sat in the Atlantic Records offices and heard his A&R person remind him, over and over, how lucky the young alto sax player was to be signed to the label. After all, this man reminded Anderson, Atlantic has a proud and revered history in…
Cashing in Mr. Action Packed Johnny Dollar Dragon Street Records Until 1997, the 20 tracks on this collection were safely tucked away in a North Dallas closet, lost to history 40 years after they were recorded. Had they been released when they were made in 1957 and ’58, who knows–maybe…
Mr. Misery More You Becomes You Plush Drag City XO Elliott Smith DreamWorks One is a reformed-punk-turned-folkie by definition, the other, an orchestral pop star by ambition, but Elliott Smith and Plush mastermind Liam Hayes are wussies at heart. They’re the new breed of soft-rocker, the guy who wears his…
There is no romanticism left in the stories of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. Too many biographies–good and bad, well-told and shoddily reported–have stripped away the excesses of glitz and glamour and revealed the tortured, often sad men who lived underneath the tuxedos and swam below the…
“The name of the record is 69 Love Songs,” Stephin Merritt drawls, pouring himself the day’s first cup of tea, from his first of two pots. “I’ve got 53 so far. Only 16 more to go.” This is his plan for the sixth album by the band for which he’s…
In this attention-deficit culture, a songwriter can’t afford to throw his audience too many challenging bones without scaring them away. Ask Neil Finn. He knows, because he is one of the great singer-songwriters of our time. He knows, because his rich, roiling songs–brimming with some of the sharpest hooks, the…
It’s the damnedest collaboration in recent rock-and-roll history–then again, maybe not. On the one hand is Homer Henderson, who’s all alley and not a little tin-pan. The self-proclaimed “Amazing One-Man Band” is the kingshit anthem writer for all the losers, loners, and little people out there–in time, his “Lee Harvey…
Ours is a reissue society now, a collection of lost tapes and found masters and other such detritus being wiped off, polished up, and sold as new; the music business has given up on selling us interesting new todays, so they just throw out more and more yellowed yesterdays and…
It’s almost as though a brand-new band has sprung straight from the ashes of the Orbit Room. On June 23, the last night of its existence, the rock club’s sooty, Kozik-covered walls shook with 4/4 throttle; but as the punk-rock haven was shutting its doors, a remarkable three-piece took the…
Steve Miller’s last album was released more than four years ago, and even then, the collection was a three-disc boxed set–one of those cardboard tombstones beneath which most artists bury themselves and what’s left of their rotting careers. He has no forthcoming album on any label’s release schedule; as far…
Strung up Long Walk Back Junior Brown Curb Records Come On In R.L. Burnside Fat Possum Records/Epitaph Junior Brown–a born-again Texan best known for his guit-steel contraption and his love for Ernest Tubb and Jesus H. Christ–thinks rock ended with Hendrix; R.L. Burnside–a 71-year-old Mississippi guitarist who got his blues…
To: Rodger Grossman subj: sell out date: Thu., August 15, 1996, 6:09 AM PUNK SELLS?????????? Man, fuck you, I’ll boycott your film you faggot bitch, no punk in their mind will watch it knowing your true intention, your [sic] trying to sell us out!!!!!!! Motherfucker, all you care about is…
Lunch at Luby’s Byzantium Deep Blue Something Interscope/RainMaker (import) The most clever thing Aden Holt–of Caulk and One Ton notoriety–has ever produced is a silk-screened T-shirt that read “Deep Blow Someone.” The towering lad wore it around Dallas a few years back when the pablum hit “Breakfast At Tiffany’s,” that…
Delays are to be expected in the music business. Even at the lowest level, entire albums can be buried in avalanches of red tape and broken promises, perpetually shelved until everyone involved starts to wonder whether they will ever see the fluorescent light of a record store. Until a band…
Bedhead has a van it would like to sell you. They will not need it anymore, because there will be no more tours–and, for that matter, no more records or anything else. Bedhead, you see, is dead, broken up, disbanded, the band’s ashes scattered into the thousand-degree wind that blew…
Chuck D began his 1997 book Fight the Power by revisiting the past, lamenting the present, and dreaming of the future. He opens his autobiography by setting the scene in New York’s Soul Cafe in February 1997. He and Flavor Flav (exiled from Public Enemy for his drug use and…
Bringing it all back home Spyboy Emmylou Harris Eminent Records Emmylou Harris is in her 50s now, and she’s as relevant today as she was two decades ago–maybe more so, because she proves with each successive album that time is her accomplice and not her rival. Harris has watched her…
Whatfunlifeis Duffel Bag Transona Five Sandwich Records It’s never been very hard to pinpoint where Denton’s Transona Five is coming from. Every answer you need is in the four bands mentioned in the classified ad singer-guitarist Chris Anderson and guitarist Chris Foley placed when forming Transona Five: the Velvet Underground,…
Details were sketchy, confirmation was impossible, but the rumors still backfired down the streets of Deep Ellum like fiberglass in the muffler of a muscle car. Despite an eight-month leave of absence and reports of a breakup, Glasspack–a local supergroup few have heard of and even fewer have seen–would once…
Two years ago, they reunited for the final time, one more time, hauling out Quadrophenia for the arena circuit while digging up Gary Glitter and Billy Idol and Ringo’s son Zak Starkey for a little jaunt down the greenback road. They stood on stage after stage in city after city…
On May 29, Joni Mitchell played a two-hour concert to a tiny audience on a secret soundstage in the heart of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California. The show was being filmed to promote her upcoming album Taming the Tiger, named after a saying that compares showbiz to a…
Play, lady, play whitechocolatespaceegg Liz Phair Matador/Capitol Those who spent their time trying to figure out if she was a fuck-and-run cocktease or a punk dilettante missed out on the essential fact: Liz Phair is one hell of a songwriter (she rocks when she wants to, but rarely needs to)…
