One of the prime tenets of Hinduism and its Buddhist offshoot is the notion that becoming unattached to temporal objects and issues provides the means to achieve nirvana. By giving up the small shit, we can get the big enchilada. Simple, right? Hardly. Life on this earth is so fraught…
It is a story too good to be true, something only a publicist could concoct during a fever dream–so much to hype, so little time. But it all happened, and it of course makes for great copy: The Hottest Band in Austin Gets Hotter, or something along those lines. Get…
Ray, out west Live at Cibolo Creek Country Club Ray Wylie Hubbard Misery Loves Company Dallas native Ray Wylie Hubbard no doubt understands that mythology can be a very powerful and sometimes dangerous thing. One of the many Texas artists given the big-time music business shot in the early 1970s,…
Terri Hendrix is an apple-cheeked blonde whose beaming countenance and beatific smile wouldn’t look out of place, golden wings spread behind her, atop the giant Christmas tree at New York’s Rockefeller Center. An Austin critic once tagged her stage presence as a “basket of kittens,” referring to the way she…
It should be the stuff that Nashville’s dampest dreams are made of: two strapping singin’ and songwritin’ brothers from a wild-west small town in Texas. Both grew up ranching in the Hill Country, working on an oil pipeline, and playing in a local band before both won sports scholarships to…
Down in Austin, there are people who insist that Don Walser is the greatest country singer in the world. Of course, if you happen to have spent time in that town three hours south of Dallas at any point since the 1960s, you probably know there are folks there who…
Down in Austin, the little music city that thinks it’s bigger than it is, thousands of musicians get up every morning and think to themselves, Today will be the day. They subscribe to the myth as common to rock and roll as the music itself: The poor saps actually believe…
For most anyone with a taste for real country music, Nashville is generally seen as the center of the Evil Empire–a place where Darth Brooks and his ilk are conspiring to close up the honky-tonks and replace them with a national chain of spit-shined and sanitized line-dance emporiums. Nashville sucks…
Twang dynasty The Derailers Reverb Deluxe Watermelon/Sire Records This Austin band’s name is one of the coolest in new Texas music. Yet as well as it works for them, it’s something of a misnomer: The Derailers actually follow the C&W track as steadily and true as any of their peers,…
Buddy Miller, Poison Love (Hightone Records) Lonesome Bob, Things Fall Apart (Checkered Past Records) Steve Earle, El Corazon (E-Squared/Warner Bros. Records) Ray Wylie Hubbard, Dangerous Spirits (Rounder Records) R.B. Morris, Take That Ride (Oh Boy Records) John Fogerty , Blue Moon Swamp(Warner Bros. Records) Steve Forbert and the Rough Squirrels,…
“I would say we’re probably the Rolling Stones of our music, because we’ve been around a long time,” says Oscar de la Rosa, lead singer of La Mafia, one of Tejano music’s biggest acts. It’s an awfully grand comparison to make, but de la Rosa has never been one to…
Loud and clear I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray The Fairfield Four Warner Brothers Records Black gospel singing at its best is transcendent–a striking contrast to the travails of African-Americans–and the Nashville-based Fairfield Four (in fact, five) are among the most uplifting voices to be heard today. With a lineage running…
Poor old Scrooge, he missed the big boat when it came to Christmas. If that seminal capitalist were alive today, he could easily be a record-company executive, and then realize the true meaning of the Christmas season: the annual blizzard of Christmas records, a parade increasingly marked by the most…
It’s been looking a lot like Christmas here in the office since about July, when the first “seasonal” albums began arriving, presaging a time when the people of the world–or at least those who aren’t Muslims, Jews, Jains, Bahais, animists, cargo cultists, Druids, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, or born-again pagans–celebrate the…
Alas, poor Simon & Garfunkel. At a time in music when it was more important to be hip and cool than to necessarily be good (sound familiar, kids?), they were so collegiate, so pop, and never quite hip and cool. So why is it that their three-CD boxed set Old…
The last two years of the sixties were a time of awesome transition in music, the nation, and popular culture, as well as the sound and personnel of the Byrds, the Los Angeles-based folk-rock band once touted as America’s answer to the Beatles (by Derek Taylor–the Fab Four’s own flack–no…
Britt Daniel, the brainchild behind the Austin band Spoon, is a rather serious young man. That becomes obvious when he reminds this interviewer that I reviewed a tape by one of his previous bands. “You gave us a bad review,” he says, fixing his pale blue eyes upon me. “Did…
“Hey, remember me? We met 10 years ago at CBGB’s,” Syd Straw sings on War and Peace, her new album. In the seven long years between her first and second album, Straw has somehow managed not to be forgotten by the music world. That hardly surprises me; I can never…
Like members of some secret society, people in the music industry speak in code. This is especially true in Nashville, which in some ways is like a charismatic cult within the already alien world of the music business at large. The latest phrase on the lips of Nashville record companies…
In the musical mythology, Austin is one of the coolest, most laid-back music towns on the planet, a Central Texas bohemia where slack and good vibes rule. But just beneath the seeming bonhomie, one finds a voracious creature that eats its own–and frequently its best. When Stevie Ray Vaughan got…
There are some things that, to be truly enjoyed, require a certain suspension of cynicism–stuff like reading fiction, finding God, falling in love…and music, of course. And cynicism about David Garza–or Dah-veed, as he prefers to be called–has been all but the party line in many of the hipper music…
Queen of the country At a time when Nashville country music is plagued by a goose-stepping line dance for which country radio calls the tune, the women in the post-Garth hat-act-dominated Music City are making most of the music of substance. Rosanne Cash may have packed her bags and moved…
