It began in the early ’70s, in a Canadian Dada-Surrealist magazine styled to look like Life. Tucked inside was a flexi-disc sampler of four songs from the Residents’ first album, Meet the Residents–a tongue-in-cheek sendup of Meet the Beatles. Instead of the familiar mugs of John, Paul, George, and Ringo,…
Nestled between the bar and the wall at the Cock & Bull on Gaston Avenue, an overstuffed shoulder bag leaning against his barstool, Jeff Whittington looks no different from any of the young professionals hoisting pints at the end of their workdays in other bars in the neighborhood. He stands…
Hold on, he’s coming Eargasm Johnnie Taylor Columbia Records Ain’t no singer alive with more style and class than Johnnie Taylor. Last time I saw the man, he was sitting in a booth in dusty, now-defunct Naomi’s, wearing a crisp suit and shiny jewels, and it looked as though he…
Branford Marsalis calls exactly at the appointed time, 3 p.m., despite a schedule that should not allow for such promptness. He is on a cellular phone, sitting on the front stoop of his 13-year-old son Reese’s piano school on White Plains Post Road in Eastchester, New York. Branford does not…
Tim DeLaughter, Tripping Daisy frontman and newly anointed father, is one of the most optimistic people ever to have been dropped from a major label. Sure, he’s done his share of bad-mouthing Island Records, the label that signed the local outfit in 1993, promised the moon and stars, then last…
Rock hard Aqua Vita Doosu One Ton Records Let’s just get this out on the table: I’m no fan of Doosu’s genre. Heavy-heavy riffs of the X-chromosome variety, a tight-throttle blend of metal, bile, and clenched jaws. No, not the quasi-funk froth of Hellafied Funk Crew and Pimpadelic (that’s even…
It is not every day a man gets to fulfill his dream, much less find that when it comes true, it’s so much better than the fantasy. Too often our reveries end up in a discarded heap. Most of us have no stamina to fulfill them, and eventually they dissolve…
When Aaron Stauffer moved to Mendocino County in Northern California two years ago, he wasn’t so much giving up on music as much as he was giving in to his love for the ocean. Hollywood Records had recently dropped his band, Seaweed, after just one album, 1995’s Spanaway, and Stauffer…
Out of the Woods Tongue Penelope Houston Reprise Records Hers is one of the most confounding careers in the history of rock and roll, from punk to orchestral folkie to pop-rocker to sorta-punk once more. She’s an Avenger from way back, when she was a 19-year-old buzz-cut screamer in 1977…
I’m prone to hyperbole, especially in situations where alcohol is served, so when I proclaimed, in the presence of a certain sports and music editor for a Dallas weekly, that the Dixie Chicks’ Nashville breakthrough Wide Open Spaces was the best country album of 1998, a good-natured yet heated discussion…
If Michael Corcoran’s defense of the Dixies is funnier than what follows, it’s only because he has the more laughable half of this debate. C’mon–liking the Dixie Chicks? You know Corcoran only likes Wide Open Spaces because ex-Chick Laura Lynch referred to him as an “oily, disheveled troll” in Texas…
Pet rock Echo Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Warner Bros. Records Tom Petty’s old singles (“The Waiting,” “Breakdown,” “Refugee,” and forever so forth) make up a chunk of oldies-rock radio, and the subsequent singles (among them “I Won’t Back Down” and “Into the Great Wide Open”) sound little different from,…
Kathy McCarty once shared a run-down house in South Austin with three other women. Two years ago, the owner of that house died, and the termite-ridden property was assessed at a mere $12,000. McCarty desperately wanted to buy it herself, but the stake was still too high for someone who…
Next to Coolio, Prince Paul may be rap’s best sport. Consider the Handsome Boy Modeling School–a duo featuring producer and ex-Gravedigga Paul (nee Paul Huston) and Dr. Octagon’s Dan the Automator (Dan Nakamura)–and its inauspicious showing at the 1998 South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin. Crammed into a tiny…
Will Johnson and his new bride, Kris, should be packing up the house right about now, putting all those guitars and amps and vinyl records and comic books and Green Bay Packers posters in boxes and shipping them off to St. Louis. That had been the plan for more than…
The last thing former Jawbox singer-guitarist J. Robbins wanted to do after the group broke up in April 1997 was form another band that sounded exactly like Jawbox. He wanted to do something completely different, write songs in a different way. It wasn’t that Robbins was ashamed of anything he…
Drink the pop Drink With the Grown-ups and Listen to the Jazz The Deathray Davies My-t Records When The Deathray Davies took the stage at Emo’s during South by Southwest last month, a few things seemed off-kilter. One, frontman-songwriter John Dufilho had just finished playing a long set with his…
At age 28, George Neal is intent on staking his rightful place in the land of pop culture: front of the ticket line for Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace. He’s talking not about opening day, but about the wee small hours before the Wednesday that another George has…
The girl–and that’s what she looks like, no older than 18–sitting on the couch bears little resemblance to the 29-year-old woman in the publicity photo below. For a second, the mind considers that they’re not even the same person, that perhaps this is some sort of elaborate, ha-ha put-on. The…
Put on your break-up madami’madam Meredith Miller Band Binkey Records Meredith Miller’s second album (pronounced “Madam, I’m Adam”) is her first with her band, singer-guitarist Reed Easterwood and ex-Tripping Daisy drummer Bryan Wakeland. Sharing music-writing duties with Easterwood, Miller is finally fleshing out the smart acoustic numbers she penned as…
Interior, Charlie’s Paradise Bar, South Padre Island, 3/19/99, 3:45 p.m. The subjects are onstage, here, now, doing sound check: the Toadies. You remember–responsible for the huge radio hit “Possum Kingdom” a few years back. (“Do you wanna die”–that song.) Big rock. Rubberneck, platinum record. New album out later this year,…
Mix and match The Dirtchamber Sessions, Volume One Prodigy XL-Recordings Never mind the billing, because this isn’t a Prodigy record. It’s a Sex Pistols record, an Ultramagnetic MC’s record, a KLF record, an LL Cool J record, until the disc’s eight tracks feature nearly three dozen artists. It’s a K-Tel…
