Country oys Wreck Your Life The Old 97’s Bloodshot Records The Chicago-based Bloodshot label has a name for their brand of country music: “Insurgent,” they call it, which is another way of hinting “outlaw” without the baggage applied to that term. It’s also a polite, roundabout way of saying that…
Jeff’s boogie There was a time when only one man in the world generated guitar sounds that millions of musicians now take for granted. Though John Lennon plucked the first note of feedback ever produced on vinyl ( intro to “I Feel Fine” in 1964), Jeff Beck was the first…
Being in a band can be like reliving high school. It’s social hierarchies and gawky self-definition all over again, trying to find one’s own group and struggling to fit in with a particular “scene.” As in adolescence, there are punks, hippies, metalheads, Edge listeners–the outcasts and the in crowd. And…
Suck my suck One Hot Minute Red Hot Chili Peppers Warner Bros. Records Punks who funk but sound like junk, the Chili Peppers never figured out how to become the white Parliament-Funkadelic because they’re too busy evolving into white bread. If such early outings as Freaky Styley and The Uplift…
Big Al Dupree sits alone at a table at Back Country Bar-B-Q, happily finishing off a heaping plate of meat and vegetables. This Greenville Avenue restaurant is, by Big Al’s estimation, the best barbecue eatery in town–“and I’ve tried them all,” brags the man who’s earned the “Big” in front…
This is a call The press biography Capitol Records sent out accompanying the Foo Fighters’ debut two months ago wasn’t a typical band bio – no glib hyperbole (“The greatest album ever”), no gushing praise, no discography; rather, it was a nine page autobiography written by band members Dave Grohl,…
Randy Newman’s publicist is on the phone one more time apologizing for the delay: Randy wants to do the interview, she explains, but he’s locked in a room trying to finish his songs for the upcoming Disney film Toy Story–the first movie done completely with computer animation and featuring the…
Morrissey is murder South Paw Grammar Morrissey Reprise Records In Morrissey’s music, true believers see the light in the dark universe; in his tortured words, truth is revealed and sins are absolved and pain is healed and faith is restored. The acolytes must believe this because otherwise there’s little to…
Joe Ely has left Texas many times, spent many years busking in New York City subway stations and the Paris Metro. He traveled throughout Europe and the United States as a young man, even ran away with the circus for a little while to tend the llamas and a pony…
Dazed and unamused Spirit of ’73 Various artists 550 Music/Epic Records The wonderful thing about post-modernism is the ability to recycle the kitschy and forgotten without irony. In the mid-’90s, all things cliched and ridiculous have become the things of homage and honor, the jokes are now told with straight…
Too often, it seems journalists are more concerned with the celebrity of the artist than the art–fascinated with the private lives of the public person. They could care less about what goes into the creation of the music because they are more concerned with how a musician spends his or…
Rhymes with ‘bored’ Now that Jerry Garcia has switched bands, gone to join that extended jam session in the sky, it looks like the Dead are just that. But what luck: Just as the Grateful have decided to bow out gracefully (for the fall tour, at least, though once the…
Ty Macklin stands in front of his Ensoniq Advanced Sampling Recorder, holding a computer disc that contains samples from six different songs from such artists as Al Green, Dexter Gordon, and Wes Montgomery. He slides the disc into the keyboard and, as he touches the keys, each piece of music…
Throughout the last decade, James “Big Bucks” Burnett has celebrated the oddball (Tiny Tim), befriended the famous (Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page), and championed the dead (Mr. Ed, the eight-track tape). At a time when the wise and the savvy were peddling compact discs, Burnett stocked his record-store bins with…
Although he doesn’t claim to know everything about the Denton music scene, Wanz Dover likes to say he’s trying. Clad in a well-worn My Bloody Valentine shirt and dark jeans, the tousle-haired leader of newly formed band Mazinga Phaser talks eagerly about the Denton underground and its emerging space-rock trend…
Mashmellow valentine King of America Elvis Costello Rykodisc It’s a reissue, and it’s not. The first of Elvis C.’s 1986 “comeback” albums, this one with the Attractions traded in for Elvis P.’s band, it marked a departure from which he’s yet to veer–the pop traded in for swing, the rock…
Sleeps with angels Many of the observations about the woman known as Bjork–that she is a “pixie,” “the girl who fell to earth,” “the ice princess,” a child in a woman’s clothing–are totally surface. They are based upon the obvious observations: She has been captured in photographs as a woman…
Four for Texas It’s easy to take for granted men like Ronnie Dawson, Junior Brown, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock. It has always seemed as though these four Texas-born musicians–best-known as singer-songwriters, revered as legends, admired for clinging to tradition–have been around forever and would never disappear from the landscape…
About halfway through Rage To Survive, the new autobiography of Etta James, one thought hits you smack between the eyes: This is not the kind of life story that’s written while the subject is still alive, much less by the subject herself. The book is a harrowing page-turner that chronicles…
Warehouse of wonder Besides Sugar Rykodisc With the band on so-called hiatus–recent word comes from Austin that Bob Mould has actually dissolved Sugar–Ryko cleans out the warehouse of songs and stories for good: 17 tracks of odds and sods, plus a “bonus” live disc for the first 25,000 who show…
Bob Wills Jr. cannot come to the phone. He is too sick to speak, his wife Elizabeth explains, the victim of a recent series of strokes that have left him incapacitated and near death. Through her lawyer, Elizabeth insists she will not leave his bedside–not to speak to a reporter,…
Turner Van Blarcum is perhaps the most easily recognized figure seen stalking Deep Ellum’s streets. With his shaved and mohawked head, he is a lumbering rail of tattoos and energy–a punk-rocker, to be certain, but no punk. When he speaks, his voice rattles around in his throat as if being…
