On one hand, Drums & Tuba are just your typical rock power trio, slogging it out 200 or so dates a year on the road. There’s guitar, drums and, well, on the other hand, a tuba. And no singer. Yet it’s still rock and roll, if also a whole lot…
At an age when this ol’ Cowtown boy could well have been out to pasture, Delbert McClinton has recently proven himself to be a cunning bull in his second prime. In his late-’70s first day, he embodied all that was cool about North Texas roots music–swing, swagger and soul–while cutting…
“One speaker keeps going out on the stereo, but the music still sounds great,” sings Eric Hisaw on “Maybe the Devil,” the song that launches 2002’s Never Could Walk the Line with the primal musician myth of trading one’s soul to Satan for talent. Hisaw makes the reverse swap perhaps;…
If Lisa Marie Presley had the last name of, say, Jones, would the Dallas Observer be speaking to the singer who put out the album To Whom It May Concern? Given the music on her now gold record, maybe, maybe not. Then again, Presley hardly needs to strive for any…
Chris Knight isn’t exactly the American noble savage, but like fellow Kentuckians such as photographer Shelby Lee Adams and author Chris Offut, he offers movingly detailed portraits of life as it’s really lived in Appalachia. His tiny, aptly named hometown of Slaughters (where Knight still lives, despite Nashville record and…
Last seen hereabouts a few weeks back as the prelude to Neil Young’s odd Greendale trip, Williams was aptly paired. Young’s artistic whimsy causes him to falter as often as triumph–the indelible mark of an artist at work–and Williams is now far enough along in her run to show a…
Yo La Tengo is the sound of slightly nerdy brainiacs rifling through the racks of the hippest record store in town. You know the type–obsessive fans who always have the first line on what’s new and cool and often obscure, people who can also find the buried treasures on albums…
The cowboy hat may be D:Fuse’s trademark, but his music hardly makes you think of Texas. Instead, his creations evoke such locales as New York, San Francisco, London and Ibiza, and visions of ecstatic throngs dancing in thrall to a seamless mix of energetic beats per minute. In one of…
Let’s face it: A degree from a respected college is rarely a good credential in a punk’s résumé. The fact that members of the Strokes attended tony Manhattan prep schools is the loudest false note underneath their hype. And the diplomas from Emerson College and Brown University held by Slick…
The Resentments are not a band, yet they are exactly what a band should be: five guys playing together for the sake of the song, the music. A conglomeration of Austin talent that, until recently, only played most every Sunday night at The Saxon Pub in their hometown, the group…
The Blazers I’ve always thought of The Blazers as the younger brothers of Los Lobos. Of course, The Blazers remind me at times of Los Lobos in their early days, back before Lobos discovered their ability to be as expansive with roots music as The Band, and as artistic, in…
Robert Earl Keen’s Texas Uprising In theory, Robert Earl Keen’s Texas Uprising is a splendid idea: A celebration of rising singer-songwriter and neo-country talent from Texas, capped off by one of the state’s finest products since Big Red soda. In practice, it’s almost as good, if slightly schizoid to these…
Radney Foster If there’s one artist who should serve as an example of how to pursue a career in country music, it’s Radney Foster. Note that I said should, because the example Foster provides may not be the quickest path to fame and fortune, but it is a model of…
To the casual listener, Louisiana’s two major roots music styles, Zydeco and Cajun, probably sound like similar servings from the same pot of gumbo. It’s an understandable misperception; both Zydeco and Cajun accent the accordion and dancing, and the two genres share many of the same riffs and even songs,…
Two days into a tour that doesn’t end until the middle of July, Eddie Spaghetti is in a room at San Francisco’s Commodore Hotel, checking the place for anything he may have left behind before he gets into a van and back on the road. Spaghetti’s band, The Supersuckers, played…
George Jones There once was a time when I might not have been so quick to recommend a George Jones show. Not for any musical reasons, mind you: Jones still possesses country’s most stunning voice. Rather, the old George Jones was less than reliable, such a raging drunk that he…
It’s not hard to adore Terri Hendrix if one happens to be a fan of the best in singer-songwriters. The themes and words within her open-ended, post-folk music are rich with humanity, spirit, and inspiration, without ever verging into maudlin silliness. And she keeps getting better and better, each album…
If you judge a man by the company he keeps, it’s no wonder that a good number of discerning tastemakers see Buddy Miller as the bright hope of real country music. A thumbnail sketch of his career depicts a journeyman guitarist who has worked with an honor roll of roots-music…
“American Pie” permanently etched Don McLean’s name on the pop-music map at the end of 1971. It was the kind of song that got people talking, singing, thinking. The eight-and-a-half-minute folk-rock opus became a tombstone for the end of two ages of American innocence: the vision (and fiction) of simple…
Pat Green As H.L. Mencken once cogently observed, “No one in this world, so far as I know…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” And if you happen to be Pat Green, you can actually fashion one helluva successful career by…
If rock and roll and Bolshevism have one thing in common, it’s a vivid sense of iconography. A small Soviet pin with the profile of Lenin and a lapel button with the visage of Lennon have much more in common than just the similar-sounding names. This is something that The…
It used to be that such terms as “folk singer” and “country songwriter” carried some weight with right-thinking folks. But that was before folk was co-opted by the post-collegiate commercial poets, the feel-good liberal crowd, and the tediously self-involved, and before country songwriting was corrupted by a suburban family-values banality…
