Last Valentine’s Day, Chicago band Chin Up Chin Up became famous for the wrong reason. Bass player Chris Saathoff was killed when a speeding car hit him crossing the street on his way home from the Empty Bottle. But the John Congleton-produced We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were…
Thursday, October 14 You don’t have to love watching cars drive around and around for several dusty, stinky hours to enjoy Firestone Fan Jam. But you do have to love sitting in traffic for hours in order to get to Texas Motor Speedway, where Thursday’s fan jam kicks off the…
The Booker T. Washington high school kids in Spector 45 don’t need to be graded on a curve. The quartet’s EP release Girls, Cars & Rock n’ Roll is wise beyond the band’s almost 18 months together. The boys call themselves greaser punks and cite influences from the founding fathers…
My dad never talked about World War II. The only reasons I even knew he’d served were the bent-edged black-and-white photos of him in his Navy uniform, with the flared legs many years before bellbottoms were cool. He was young, even younger than his sign-up papers said; he lied about…
Thursday, September 30 When Ché Guevara was killed in Bolivia in 1967, people shouted in the streets, “We won’t let him be forgotten.” We don’t think they had in mind that Guevara’s image would now appear on T-shirts, purses, watches and posters, appropriated by people who care more about Urban…
Thursday, September 16 Be careful, Carlos Mencia, or people will start calling you the Latino Dave Chappelle. Like Chappelle, Mencia’s comedy deals with racial stereotypes, misconceptions and differences in an “equal opportunity offender” style. And now, following in Chappelle’s footsteps, Mencia is preparing a television show for Comedy Central. But…
The gear area of the Double Wide’s show room had an unusual inventory Friday night. In addition to the usual drums, guitars and Fender amps, there were the lights: six of the silver clip-on variety (three for Dynah, the opening quartet from Austin, and three for Black Tie Dynasty, the…
We’d like to think this election is like the ninth season of Dallas, and we’re going to wake up and realize it was all a dream. Unfortunately, it’s all real: the mock coffin processional, the real lists of killed soldiers, the debates over military service records, fights about who’s allowed…
Blue October is about a decade late. The Houston band now signed to Brando/Universal Records would have been a perfect match with the mid-’90s (fleeting) success of Better Than Ezra and Deep Blue Something, their brothers in white, college-age, men-unafraid-to-show-their-emotions rock. In fact, Blue October’s hit, “Calling You,” is this…
Max Cady is a rock band. It’s not punk, glam or emo. There are no prefixes here. It’s just rock and roll. It takes the standard rock format–one singer, two guitarists, one bass player and one drummer–and makes the kind of straightforward music that, these days, would be considered a…
Paris, Texas shouldn’t be playing the Gypsy Tea Room. In fact, there shouldn’t be any tour dates booked anywhere. Paris, Texas has broken up, fallen down and cheated death so many times that the members stopped believing. But other people didn’t–bookers, clubs, friends who passed around demos and the labels…
Thursday, September 2 We like to think of ourselves as a beer ambassador, spreading good will as we introduce various European beers to our American gastrointestinal system. But Mark Monfrey is really a bier ambassador, teaching people about Belgium and its 10 types of beers, from Saison, beers produced at…
Becoming a bona fide film buff is like making ranks in the Girl or Boy Scouts. You have to earn your marks. But instead of campfire safety badges or first aid pins, you have to see the right films, know your trivia and, like a good scout, be prepared…to fight…
Thursday, August 19 We’re so despondent over the death of chef Julia Child that we’ve vowed to drink heavily and never cook again. All right, so those aren’t exactly new resolutions, but the passing of “The French Chef” has given them new meaning. Maybe it’s not as fitting a tribute…
“Accessible” is the worst curse someone could give a band like Xiu Xiu, which revels in its experimentation and just plain weirdness like songwriter Jamie Stewart’s lyrics revel in every type of sadness and longing, from unexpected love to redemptive suicide to sexual abuse. So, instead let’s say the band’s…
It’s an indie-rocker fantasy come true: Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein reunite for the first tour since they promoted 1999’s The Sebadoh. The only thing that could ice this cake would be if there were a new Sebadoh album in the works. But it’s the second best thing: a…
One of the so-called curiosities of the Curiosa Festival may be Muse. The British trio aren’t magazine darlings like Interpol or critical darlings like The Cooper Temple Clause. At least, not in America. In Europe, Muse sells out arenas, headlining all the British festivals and having every hairstyle change covered…
“How many of you got the fever?” The Falkon’s Mwanza Dover asks, perched on the edge of the stage in the Gypsy Tea Room’s small showroom. “If you don’t got it, you’re about to,” he says, launching into “Sui-Can” (aka “Got the Fevuh”). Dover does have the fever, and he’s…
Have you heard the one about helping little old ladies across the street? No, of course, you haven’t. That’s because comedy and kindness rarely go hand in hand. There are no funny jokes about spending Christmas serving mashed potatoes at a soup kitchen. “Altruism” and “philanthropy” are words that would…
Thursday, August 5 Along with guidelines on where to park, what to pack and how to dispose of “personal toilet” output, the Burning Man Festival Web site offers this wisdom: “Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like…
Check out this teapot. It looks like any other: short, stout. Here is its handle. Here is its spout. But what you can’t see is the story of this vessel. This teapot, made of pewter and wood in the mid-1700s in either England or Boston, Massachusetts, was owned by an…
Bobgoblin was a concept band: four guys in dark flight suits assigned numbers and pseudonyms, calling themselves the “leaders of Black Market Party revolution rock” and singing about “Standing Up (To the Voice of America).” The shtick that this was not just a musical band but also a band of…
