Elliott Smith Figure 8 (DreamWorks Records) This much we know about Elliott Smith: He moved to Portland at age 14, made his first solo album in 1994, performed his Oscar-nominated song (“Miss Misery”) during the 1998 Academy Awards, and was Spin’s runner-up artist of the year for 1998. He prefers…
Tripping Daisy Tripping Daisy (Good Records/Sugar Fix Recordings) The first thing you notice about the cover of Tripping Daisy’s new self-titled album isn’t the Brady Bunch motif, a tic-tac-toe board dotted with pictures of the band members and grapefruit halves. No, the eyes travel up and left past singer Tim…
The Pinehurst Kids The Pinehurst Kids’ drummer, Marnie Martin, has a metaphysical theory that explains how the four current members of Portland’s Pinehurst Kids survived individual near-death experiences: “It’s kind of like God let us come back, but only if we played together and really kicked ass!” All kidding aside,…
Robbie Fulks Leave it to insurgent country squire Robbie Fulks to parody himself from the git: The title of his latest CD, The Very Best of Robbie Fulks, is a kind of pun, suggesting a compilation of Fulks’ nonexistent greatest hits. Actually, it’s all-new material, and considering Fulks’ past output,…
The Bacon Brothers Take away the name recognition that actor Kevin Bacon brings to the Bacon Brothers — a band he fronts with his brother Michael — and you’ve got a standard-issue rock act that would be hard-pressed to get even a record deal. That the Bacon Brothers, who are…
Bubba Kadane had not performed in public since the last time he played with Bedhead, the last time Bedhead ever played, on May 20, 1998, at a radio performance for VPRO, Holland’s national radio based out of Amsterdam. He had not appeared on any recording since the October 1998 release…
Scene, heard Captain Audio wraps up its unique series of Monday-night shows, dubbed The Subterranean Potluck Blues, on May 1 at the Gypsy Tea Room. The concert, like the two others before it, is free with a covered dish. And no, chips do not count as a covered dish. If…
“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…
Before I can begin my scheduled interview with Blonde Redhead singer-guitarist Amedeo Pace, he covers the phone with his hands so he can talk to bandmate Kazu Makino. When he finally uncovers the phone after a short and muffled exhange, he asks if I would mind doing the interview with…
Last July, kids from all over the world flocked to Olympia, Washington — a city with a population half that of Denton — solely to see music, specifically the bands performing at the semi-regular Yoyo A Go Go festival. But even without a festival to spur them on, kids still…
Neil Young Silver & Gold (Reprise Records) A handful of tracks intended for Silver & Gold have already been released, appearing on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion disc Looking Forward. Neil Young gave his old friends the songs, including the title track, and they did nothing but add…
Robert Schneider takes the small stage at Austin’s Waterloo Records looking as if he’s just wrapped up a brisk game of Frisbee golf, a shaggy beard twice as long as his thinning thatch of hair almost obscuring his face, a pair of flip-flops on his feet. Tuning up his beat-up…
It’s possible to spend a lifetime listening to Miles Davis’ music and still never quite get to the bottom of it. There’s just so much beauty there — and so much chaos as well, perhaps because one wasn’t possible without the other. Even his most “romantic” sides (among them “My…
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…
Brent Best has always been respectful of his heroes, almost painfully so. Faced with the prospect of having breakfast with one of them, Peter Case (whose work with The Plimsouls, as well as on his own, has much to do with Best picking up a guitar in the first place),…
Radio, radio While we try to listen to the Merge (93.3 FM) as little as possible — we’d rather just watch Say Anything — we couldn’t help noticing that at least one of the songs on the station’s playlist seems to have been on the receiving end of a makeover…
Take Me Home: A Tribute to John Denver Various artists (Badman Recordings) New Coat of Paint: Songs of Tom Waits Various artists (Manifesto Records) Turns out they’ve run out of musicians to fete — that, or Henry Rollins is still hard at work finishing his tribute to Jim Nabors featuring…
Centro-matic All the Falsest Hearts Can Try (Quality Park Records) There’s an old joke about musicians that goes, “What does a drummer say right before he’s fired? Hey guys, here’s a new song I just wrote.” Anyone who knows Centro-matic’s Will Johnson (who started as a drummer in Funland a…
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…
Sean Na Na, Ted Leo My father, a Cuban national and Dallas Public Schools educator, claims that the best indicator of mastery of American English is proper use of the word “cute”. Minneapolis trio Sean Na Na is cute: cute in the most complimentary, most rock-and-roll way. They’re as cute…
The X marks the spot Occasionally, a perceived slight and a few choice words can expand into a feud, especially when one of the parties involved (Street Beat) has a short temper, an itchy e-mail trigger finger, and access to several thousand readers. For instance, because of a believed bias…
Scene, heard Seems like only yesterday when Josh Venable was a 19-year-old kid who had snuck onto the airwaves of KDGE-FM (94.5) with a big stack of Smiths records and even bigger hair. On May 27, Venable will celebrate six years of hosting The Adventure Club, which airs every Sunday…
