Almost every day and night of this year’s South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Pimpadelic taunted the bands milling around Sixth Street. While everyone else was playing gigs to people perfecting their disinterested stares, trying to get anyone with a badge and a corporate credit card to listen, Pimpadelic…
I had my chance, and I blew it. Actually, Rhett Miller blew it for me. “Robert, Janeane. Janeane, Robert.” That’s how he introduced me to Janeane Garofalo — in a split second, in so little time she barely had time to acknowledge my trembling presence. I got nothing from behind…
Pete Townshend Lifehouse Chronicles (Eel Pie) The bootlegs never hinted at the breadth and depth of Pete Townshend’s aborted, now-mythological Lifehouse. The demos, which have circulated for nearly 30 years, were just that — sparse, shadowy approximations of songs that would go on to appear on Who’s Next (all the…
Builder Spring Sprang Sprung (Good Earth Records) About halfway into Builder’s debut disc, the fact that it wasn’t intended for a traditional rock-and-roll audience is pretty much inescapable, not unlike the sound of “Jesus Knocking” on his front door that Mike Crawford, former frontman for The Spin, describes toward the…
I am not, strictly speaking, the kind of person who would use the term “back dat azz up” in common parlance, restricted from its usage by an utter lack of pigment and a bordering-on-backwoods upbringing. I am white, ohsoverywhite, though I’ve been known to regularly pepper my speech with various…
As we all know from Pamela and Tommy Lee’s infamous home video (come on — you’ve seen it), the former Motley Crue drummer’s massive whanger can drive a boat, or at least steer it. Of course, said member can’t drive and/or steer a boat too well, as the aforementioned vessel…
Green means stop? On February 25, shortly after Amelia Abreu’s story about the Green Means Go! collective (“Good to Go!,” February 10), the group’s performance space in Denton was closed indefinitely by the city fire marshal for numerous code violations, including inadequate parking facilities and doors that opened the wrong…
At a time when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is lobbying Congress to pass a law that would make all recording artists nothing more than “workers for hire” (essentially making them even less than a label employee), it’s refreshing to see there are still people like Dan and…
In the current climate of uncertainty and unrest within the recording industry, where big record labels eat other big record labels in perpetuity and indies retract themselves into self-contained genre-of-the-month stalwarts, it’s nearly unthinkable for a 12-year-old band to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. But…
From the outside, it appears as if Carl Finch and Brave Combo couldn’t have planned it any better. Only a few weeks after the group’s last album, 1999’s Polkasonic, was named Best Polka Album at the Grammy Awards, Brave Combo will have a new disc in stores, The Process, on…
Scene, heard On March 25 at Fort Worth’s Ridglea Theatre, there will be a Comet reunion…sort of. For the first time since the group broke up a few years back, all four members of the band — Josh Garza, Daniel Huffman, and Jim and Neil Stone — will be playing…
PanteraReinventing the SteelElektra RecordsThese boys are celebrating the release of Album Number Five with a party at The Clubhouse, the, local, ah, gentleman’s club owned by Vinnie Paul and Dimebag Darrell; nothing says metal like a nudie-bar throwdown. Just don’t expect the ladies to actually dance to anything off Reinventing…
The Reverend Horton Heat Spend a Night in the Box Time Bomb Recordings The Reverend Horton Heat has been going downhill for so long, it’s difficult to remember exactly what made the band worthwhile in the first place. And, obviously, they don’t remember either, or else they might have hit…
Deanna Varagona of Lambchop Billed as the new sound of Nashville, Lambchop must have a very different vision of what musical heritage means: Having as much — or as little — in common with No Depression as with young country, the band has a lineage that runs farther, wider, and…
Fu ManchuEverywhere you turn these days, from Jersey to Sweden to Los Angeles, so-called stoner rock bands are sprouting up like weeds, and most aren’t much more appealing than weeds. What they don’t seem to realize is that it takes more than being really high to make great music to…
Love as Laughter Love as Laughter’s latest, Destination 2000, is exactly the sort of thing that makes a person get her Camaro off blocks and start smoking Marlboro Reds again, even though her closet is filled with purple boas and silver fun fur. Is it surprising that it comes from…
Scene, heard Dallas expatriates Transona Five will be back in the area for a few days later this month to finish mixing their forthcoming album with Matts Pence and Barnhart at The Echo Lab (the studio formerly known as 70Hurtz and Transcontinental Recording Company). The band, which moved to Boston…
AC/DC Stiff Upper Lip (EastWest/Elektra) Steely Dan Two Against Nature (Giant Records) Angus, Brian, Donald, and Walter could have gone out and screwed up the formula, which, at their age, would have thrown out their backs. As it stands, expect to hear Stiff Upper Lip’s title track in one of…
A man in his 30s sits down to write his autobiography. He knows that doing so is a rather silly proposition. After all, what does a man in his 30s know? What has he lived through worth retelling? What experiences can he recount, what knowledge can he impart, that others…
New Jersey has long been the butt of jokes — the Polack of states, a place where all the bridge-and-tunnel cretins have Manhattan daydreams and bad ’70s ‘dos. Then along came a man they call The Boss and his colorful band of associates to make the Garden State cool. Yep,…
Last spring in Denton, Gregg Foreman — long-legged and wolf-voiced frontman of The Delta 72 — won my heart, along with that of everyone else in the audience at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios. He sang in smooth, guttural growls, played a mean slide guitar, and owned the stage as if…
It’s one of the oldest saws in show business: Ya gotta have a good gimmick. For Los Straitjackets, the gimmick came about by accident, but it turned out to be a nifty one: Mexican wrestling masks. Not that there is any relationship, per se, between Mexican wrestling and the instrumental…
