For an uprooted Austinite, the Sons of Hermann Hall is pure Southern comfort. No pretense, no posturing, just honky-tonk and heartache, darlin’, with some of the best Americana acts to come through Dallas. That’s due, at least in part, to Mike Snider, who began booking shows at the historical venue…
For Elvis Presley, imitation may be the sincerest form of battery. It’s well-nigh impossible to take the poor man seriously with so many goofballs running around in jewel-encrusted jumpsuits and aviator glasses, marrying people in Vegas and gigging office parties. Then again, the real Elvis did decorate Graceland with porcelain…
Four stories of holiday hard luck. I. It was New Years Eve, and Deep Ellum was on edgecars nosing impatiently around the perimeter, people spilling onto the sidewalk and swaying a bit too much. It was like any weekend, really, but a smidge more electric. Just after 2 a.m., when…
A dedication: To the hecklers and the drunk girls and the shitkickers who think they own the place. To the bozo spilling his beer and the gentleman who ashed on my head. To the people on their cell phones. To the cute alterna-girl who thinks tits and a few bottles…
OutKast, “Hey Ya,” Speakerboxxx/The Love Below Where else could we begin? It’s the song of the year–perfect for a drive on a blue-sky day: music at full tilt, voice floating out the open window and straining for harmony, fingers slapping the steering wheel in time, feet stomping the floorboards. All…
Among the CDs currently splayed across my desk are a handful of Christmas titles that I, being a sucker for holiday spirit, popped in the player. Now, I’m no Christmas elf, but I have been known to clap my hands like a seal at the sight of good zippy lights,…
Classical music commandeered my childhood. Bach’s fugues wallpapered our living room. Beethoven symphonies rattled through the door of my bedroom, where I mounted an all-hours rock radio counterattack. But my Madonna, my Duran Duran, my INXS, my (full disclosure) Whitney Houston proved no match for Schubert’s sonatas and Mozart’s warbling…
For the past few months, I’ve asked friends who know Dallas music the same questions: Can I bum a cigarette? And who are your favorite local bands? Right off, I noticed two trends–too many people smoke Marlboros, and people love Pleasant Grove. That doesn’t make Pleasant Grove the city’s most…
By now you’ve probably heard the song. In a bar, perhaps, or while browsing in a CD store. Maybe you heard it on the radio, as I did. One day last week the song played on my way to work and on my way home. Early the next morning I…
It’s Saturday afternoon at the Dallas Music Festival, and the Gypsy Tea Room is packed. Five hundred guys–and they are almost all guys–crowd the hall. They’re not here for a performance but for an industry panel, titled (badly, like most panels) “Growing Your Band at the Club Level.” They have…
There’s been a shift in my party conversation lately. A few weeks ago, I was just another freelance journalist yapping about the same old things: what I did that weekend, what movies I’d seen, and can I get another beer? Then, I became the music editor at the Dallas Observer,…
They are a young band. They have a Web site and a mailing list and a few starry-eyed fantasies, like the one in which the A&R guy comes to their best gig, stands in the back, with a low-slung hat maybe, smoke curling from his silhouette. You know: the discovery…
Kimberlee Simko had a well-paying corporate job and a thousand complaints about it. One day, a girlfriend suggested Kimberlee speak to her aunt. This aunt wasn’t just successful; she was living The Dream. She owned a big house. She was her own boss. And she had done it working for…
Funny how it all works out. “I remember when Beyoncé Knowles announced she was going to make a solo record, but Destiny’s Child was still gonna be a band,” Rhett Miller says on the phone from Los Angeles, where he’s lived off and on for the past few years. “I…
