American music Country Fair 2000 Phil Alvin Hightone Records The first song is credited to “The Blasters,” though without brother Dave it’s hardly the real thing. But Phil’s always gone for the closest approximation: Country Fair’s trip through the American musical landscape–Next stop, N’awlins ragtime jazz! Comin’ up on dem…
Caveman rock Seeing Dinosaur Jr. live can hardly be described as an exciting experience: after all, what’s so interesting about seeing a guy who moves and looks like Snuffleupagus sling a guitar around? Yet for Generation Alternative Nation, hearing is believing, as it convulses in feverish fits of violent moshing…
One has to wonder what Robbie Robertson thought. Robertson has long stayed away from performing on television, but there he was on David Letterman’s Late Show last Thursday, performing the haunting “Ghost Dance” from his new album Music for “The Native Americans,” backed by a band that featured Rita Coolidge…
Moonlight in Jersey Duets II Frank Sinatra Capitol Records Sending Sinatra into the studio with the embarrassing hacks and modest stars (Frank Jr., Steve and Eydie, Patti LaBelle, Neil Diamond, Lorrie Morgan, Jimmy Buffett) and oddball surprises (no, Frank’s really a big fan of the Pretenders) to recut classic songs…
At the end of an afternoon spent together, John Nitzinger takes his interviewer aside and says, in a rare quiet moment, that “God has wiped the slate clean.” He is standing outside the door of his Fort Worth apartment, looking just slightly older than his 46 years, wearing a black…
Stone alone Keith Richards once said Bobby Keys’ greatest problem in the early ’70s was that, for a while, the Lubbock-born sax player deluded himself into thinking he was a member of the Stones’ inner circle. Richards and Keys were great pals, drug buddies from way back whose passion for…
Fifteen minutes into a thoughtful, often painful discussion of the music of Ween–one that goes into influences and intent, touching on technique and style and the influences of Leonard Cohen and Prince–the man known as Gene Ween lets out a loud sigh. “Hey, you’re sitting here making me analyze Ween,…
Beyond the beach Director Quentin Tarantino explains that he opened his paean-to-afros-and-junkies-and-sodomizers, Pulp Fiction, with Dick Dale’s 1962 surf-rock classic “Miserlou” (derived from a 1940s-era Greek pop hit, actually) because “it sounds like the beginning of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with those trumpets, that almost Spanish sound…
Four years ago, Madonna sat in her lush Beverly Hills hotel suite holding court with a handful of reporters who drooled into their microphones as they surrounded “the world’s most famous woman,” as one writer said upon introduction. They came to ask her questions about Truth or Dare, the documentary…
Unconscious in heaven Unplugged in New York Nirvana DGC Records It’s a split decision: underneath the noise and distortion and hoarse growl that defined Nirvana lay finely constructed pop songs, catchy melodies that underscored (perhaps even usurped) the intensity of the lyrics Kurt Cobain choked out. But what made Nirvana…
The walls of Tony Zoppi’s North Dallas townhouse apartment keep track of history better than any journal or book of newspaper clippings. It’s as if the past 40 years have been preserved in this place–a shrine to celebrities and presidents and infamous figures who, even in death or old age,…
Ted Hawkins was born in 1936 to a father he never knew and an alcoholic mother in Lakeshore, Mississippi, a speck of a town defined by its desolation and poverty. He spent most of his teens bouncing in and out of reform schools, then jails, and on chain gangs picking…
All is forgiven Return of the Valley of the Go-Go’s The Go-Go’s I.R.S. Records Fourteen songs into this 36-song retrospective, and you’re still not to the first Hit. In fact, maybe five of the selections could have been considered Hit Singles; the rest went largely unheard or unheeded by an…
Over the past four decades, a million rock and roll bands have made a hundred million rock and roll records. Some go on to sell millions of copies; some, a few thousand; most, maybe a few dozen cassettes. If, tomorrow, most of the would-be Neil Youngs and Kurt Cobains and…
Joe Butcher, the lead singer and guitar player for UFOFU, leans on the microphone and asks the Club Clearview audience if they would prefer a Gordon Lightfoot or a Buzzcocks cover song. It is close to the end of the night’s set, and almost everyone is grinning with something that…
Arresting development Cop Shoot Cop’s “Last Legs,” off their recently released Release, is probably the best nonhit single of the year. It packs the same wallop as the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” both songs linked by their similarity to TV cop-show themes of the late ’60s and early ’70s, but goes…
The end of a local band often comes and goes with little notice or mention; as one implodes, another comes along to take its place, filling a void no one knew was empty. But the passing of Killbilly, which will play the final show of its seven-plus-year career this Saturday…
