A hundred and ten on the old Hogs’ Back You don’t have to read much light history–let alone Cormac McCarthy–to realize that as a nation our current reality is built upon an ossuary, a mountain of broken skulls and bones that reaches up from the past and points toward where…
Do you want to know a secret? I’ve had it up to about here with the Beatles. It’s been more than six months, and the foofaraw surrounding the 35th anniversary of the Fab Four shows no signs of abating. First, I get a chance to buy–for a paltry 160 bucks–the…
Elements of style Melting in the Dark Steve Wynn Zero Hour Records Beautiful Freak Eels Dreamworks Records Sometimes you gotta shake things up–have Frosted Flakes instead of Grape-Nuts; it’s a rule that Steve Wynn–known for his early-’80s stint with the Dream Syndicate and more recently Gutterball–knows well: He relocated to…
Quirky, man, quirky Merkin Wig Riddle Me This Doilie Records Smirk The Sutcliffes Skiffle Beat Records Ambling through a smorgasbord of distinct sounds can be as dangerous as trying to inject a little humor into your music. Overplay your hand in the former case and you come off as unimaginative;…
Letter from home Martin Zellar and the Hardways Martin Zellar and the Hardways Rykodisc A singer-songwriter on stage is very much like a boxer in the ring, except that there’s more than one opponent: You’re up against everybody else in the arena. You can try to subdue with naked honesty,…
The pain of losing a friend is never easy, but it becomes infinitely harder when that loss is a result of a conscious decision. The suicide of Mark Migliore, a successful engineer and investor who used his money to document the psychedelic music scene through his Rockadelic Records, has left…
Dream catchers all Sweets for Slumber The Dreamcatchers CSP Records Things That Show Kris McKay Shanacie Records Perception can be altered by exposure, which is how classic soul–thought the coolest back in the punk era, when it was relatively underappreciated–became so tiresome once ascendant. If you have a roommate who…
Two blue Four Tens Strike Again Bugs Henderson and the Shuffle Kings Flat Canyon Records Got My Mind Back Smokin’ Joe Kubek Band featuring B’nois King Bullseye Blues Lead Guitar Player–in the heroic, capitalized sense of blues-boogie–is a tough slot. For a role model, LGPs should ignore names like Satriani…
Face it: No matter how many pages the itty-bitty booklets have–or how many flaps, fold-outs, and pockets full of the star’s bad art and even worse handwriting a box sports–CD packaging will never hold a candle to the heyday of album graphics; the Age of Vinyl, when dinosaurs walked the…
“The Starck Club?!” the guy next to me ejaculated from his barstool. “Man, everybody was on X all the time and doin’ big lines offa tabletops! They had all this gauzy shit or sumpin’ hanging from the ceiling there, and people would just be fuckin’ in the corners! No shit!…
If you drive northwest on U.S. 84 long enough you’ll hit the cap rock, an elevated expanse that sits several hundred feet above the land to the south. The lookout from the plateau is striking: the vastness below and the flat expanse behind, juxtaposed beneath a sky so huge that…
The heart of the country Interstate City Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men Hightone Records Dave Alvin manages a neat feat here, producing a live album (recorded in Austin at the Continental Club this June) with backing band the Guilty Men that is unique enough to avoid boring those familiar…
It’s Saturday night at Billy Bob’s Texas, and the cavernous honky-tonk is alive with ritual: girls in tight jeans eyeing guys in starched Western shirts; couples on the town; pool shooters with their cues at big-buckle level; and solitary drinkers. Billy Bob’s has a number of stages–even a small rodeo…
Two kinds of flow The Fun of Watching Fireworks American Analog Set Emperor Jones/Trance Syndicate The term “space” is rapidly approaching overexposure, as is the genre (already the suspicion grows that it’s becoming a refuge for those who can’t really play, at least not fast). It’s tempting to declare the…
Standing on the steppes There are words that are inherently silly simply because of the rhythm of their syllables. Limpopo is a pretty good candidate for one of them. Although familiar to most in a more equatorial setting–the name of the river in Africa where the Elephant’s Child got his…
Through the past, darkly 12 Golden Country Greats Ween Elektra Records Brazil’s Sepultura borrows flavors from the Indians of its home. America is way ahead of Brazil in killing aborigines, so when the merry de-/re-constructionists of Ween turn to our past, they go not with the natives, but with the…
His own best friend Lyle Lovett is one of those rare pop figures, a star in the old ’40s sense of the word, someone who seems to have gotten his vaunted status by dint of just being different from you and me; smarter, weirder, hipper, prettier (is it merely coincidence…
Signs that Leroy Shakespeare probably didn’t grow up in Lakewood and go on to attend Woodrow Wilson High School are hanging all around his new house, just off Lower Greenville. Literally: a number of rugs, mats, and/or drapes depend from the ceiling, partitioning the rooms and lending the space an…
The freshness test open rubberbullet Last Beat Records Welcome to the modern world, rubberbullet version: a crashing, dissonant place where things either happen so fast that they’re past before perceived or they grind along glacially, with no change discerned. Open would be a fitting soundtrack for an angry traffic jam…
Area bassist John Adams knows that creation can be a difficult feat–after all, he’s been a free-lance jazz musician since college–but he still stepped into a double whammy: the worldwide debut of both his first album, Jump Shot, and his son, Andrew. Andrew is doing fine at 3 1/2 weeks,…
The woods to the glory hole birch county birch county Pilot Records When the members of birch county–formerly Wonderland–worked on an album last year with a friend producing gratis, they weren’t exactly thrilled with the results and scrapped it. This five-song EP is proof that no work is ever really…
Over and under Moss Elixir Robyn Hitchcock Warner Brothers Genius is the main ingredient in rock eccentricity: Without it, you’re Sammy Hagar; too much, and you’re Brian Wilson. Robyn Hitchcock has always been one of rock’s great eccentrics, writing songs with a point of view that seems to float out…
