Beat the meatles Orange Swirl Andy Timmons Timstone Music There’s no denying it: Andy Timmons is a Professional, a man who plays guitar the way every child dreams of playing the instrument the very first time he holds a coat hanger in front of a mirror and strums along with…
This is a far cry from the apartment Ronnie Dawson once lived in. For three decades, give or take, the man resided in what really amounted to a rather large room, one crammed full of books, photographs, tour posters, videos, and the collected flotsam of a lifetime spent making music…
They existed forever ago, came and went so quickly, history barely remembers them. ? and the Mysterians was their name, five Mexican-American boys from Michigan’s Saginaw Valley who topped the charts in October 1966 then disbanded three years later without a second hit single to their credit. They were quintessential…
A year ago, there was no special connection between Marilyn Manson and Courtney Love, unless you count the fact that both were famous for being infamous. They weren’t really friends (though Manson has claimed that Love did have a brief, raunchy fling with his guitarist Twiggy Ramirez), and their musical…
The Texas in Terry Allen shoots across the fiber-optic miles from New Mexico with the force of a West Texas rainstorm. Casually stirring up the dust-dervishes of good and God and beauty and pain, the renegade sculptor-painter-musician is talking about truth. Actually, truth and dualities, the two qualities that so…
Love, in focus 13 Blur Virgin Records In the end, “Song 2” meant nothing. It was Brit-pop masquerading as Seattle rock, a Hit Single that was all release and no tension. How very American of a band that, until 1997’s self-titled fifth record, kept everything obscured behind wily working-class-hero lyrics…
Country feedback Welcome to… Eleven Hundred Springs 13 Recordings Matt Hillyer was country before he wasn’t cool, before Lone Star Trio degenerated into a bad Reverend Horton Heat impression, before he formed Strap and trotted out an even worse imitation of ZZ Top–or was it Pantera? Back then, at the…
If you’re Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch, you can have it both ways: Sign with a major label and keep your indie-rock credibility; maintain a successful band and a happy family without disrupting either; live in relative isolation in the cultural hinterland of Boise, Idaho, and still be one of…
Thank you for tuning in this morning to the B.P. radio show! Soul 73 KKDA! You turn me on, and I’ll turn you on. I got my mojo working this morning. In other words, there’s some fever in the funkhouse. There’s a skunk in the skillet. Thank you for joining…
So you wanna be a rock and roll star? Then listen up. 1) Your manager is not helping you. Fire him. 2) There are no such things as demo tapes. They’re only cassettes you haven’t started selling at shows yet. 3) Always open for a band that sounds just like…
When the original members of KISS re-formed for a take-the-money-and-run tour in 1996, a persistent rumor followed their platform boots from city to city. According to this slice of gossip, guitarist Ace Frehley was occasionally in such fragile (read: drunk) condition that at some shows a look-alike had to fill…
Ashes to ashes, dust to Dusty Dusty in London Dusty in Memphis Dusty Springfield Rhino Records Dusty Springfield died March 3 at the age of 59, felled by the breast cancer she had been battling for years. Just two weeks before her death at her London home, a publicist at…
Bob Irwin spends his days sorting through the vaults of record companies, listening to songs long ago hidden away from the general public–songs either too bad, or too good, ever to escape from the tomb. During the past decade, he has been responsible for freeing the Byrds’ best-and-rest from Columbia’s…
Rockabilly buffet More Bad Habits Ronnie Dawson Yep Roc Records Ronnie Dawson always kept it simple: Just pile on the country, dip into the blues every now and then, pretend it’s all rock and roll anyway, and play like hell till the lights go out. Man’s never even recorded in…
They’re unabashed freaks of the music world–young men playing bygone music, children raised on rock and roll who long ago decided they were no longer interested in electric guitars and snare drums and amped-up anarchy. Their weapons of choice are instruments that belong in yellowing black-and-white photographs: banjos and mandolins,…
Shined to a dull finish Central Reservation Beth Orton Arista/Deconstruction Zero Zero Zero Sam Phillips Virgin Records Think of Beth Orton as Jewel for the deep-think crowd. Only this performer trades in folk for “funk” and still manages to go nowhere while the world spins around her; she trip-hops over…
A few weeks ago, word circulated through the Denton-rock grapevine that Brunswick was hit by a car–jarring news indeed about the mascot of the cozy indie scene. But there he is nonetheless, sitting in the cab of his owner’s pickup truck, alert at the window, swinging his tail like the…
Why me to the moon Red White and Pink Mr. Pink Six Degrees The Immaculates The Immaculates self-released Two local swing records in a month’s time: First Johnny Reno puts on his Red Jacket and plays lounge lizard, and now Mr. Pink’s sipping martinis while Frank and Dean do their…
For a long time, Jimmy Eat World singer-guitarist Jim Adkins didn’t believe Capitol Records was really going to release his band’s new album, Clarity. Even after the album was added to the label’s official release schedule and the masters had been sent to the pressing plant, Adkins wasn’t convinced. Why…
Whose grass is it, anyway? The Mountain Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band E-Squared Ain’t so surprising Steve Earle is embracing traditional bluegrass this time around. It’s not the first time he’s woven plucky bits of Appalachia into his sound; the grass is high on such recent post-rehab records…
Dance the night away The Revenge of Sonic Soular The Falcon Project Idol Records Whether The Falcon Project’s Wanz Dover likes it or not, if music were governed by semantics, the band’s debut album, The Revenge of Sonic Soular, would almost certainly be shelved under space rock; it’s just too…
Will Cullen Hart answers the phone out of breath, stopping our interview before it starts by asking whether I could please call him right back and let the phone ring until the answering machine picks up to give him a chance to find his temporarily misplaced cordless phone. As the…
