If you turn your back for a minute, maybe to grab a beer from the bar or go upstairs to shoot a quick game of pool, you can almost fool yourself into believing there’s a different band up there onstage, headlining a Friday-night bill at Trees. Even if you face…
The streets are still littered with trash–every single inch, it seems, covered in a thin gray slime that oozes on forever. The light drizzle only makes things worse, more slippery-sticky. Hard to keep your footing in a mess like this. One wrong step, and it’s ass-first into the Mardi Gras…
One gray day last October, while driving up Interstate 405 from Portland to Seattle, I turned off the highway at an exit marked Sleater-Kinney. It was the same kind of impulse that causes certain types of visitors in London to take their shoes off and walk across Abbey Road, or…
Not really what you’d expect in a sushi bar. The otherwise cool, modest clamor of dishes clinking and Kirin bottles toasting and waiters explaining the fishy menu gave way to the scooting about of chairs and tables to make way for…a very loud rock band. The four guys filling the…
Basement tape Excretio: The Difficult Years Poor Bastard Sons Hot Links Records Chris Flemmons, the main Poor Bastard Son, is only in his 20s, and God knows if he’s ever been to Appalachia. Perhaps in a past life, this Denton boy was a union organizer–or, better yet, a deep-and-dusty coal…
It has been seven years since XTC released a record–so long now that Andy Partridge, the band’s co-singer and co-songwriter, cannot believe there are people left on this earth who remember him, much less actually want to talk to him. He figured that by now, XTC would have been long…
Listen to the music The Sebadoh Sebadoh Sub Pop/Sire Records Lou Barlow became important without meaning to. He impressed others by recording his fragile, angry songs on whatever happened to be lying around, whether it was a four-track recorder or a busted Walkman. It didn’t matter, because at first, it…
It is a story too good to be true, something only a publicist could concoct during a fever dream–so much to hype, so little time. But it all happened, and it of course makes for great copy: The Hottest Band in Austin Gets Hotter, or something along those lines. Get…
Josh Baish has hardly begun to tell his story–how he recently bought half of Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios in Denton, how he wants to turn it from an occasional performance space into a full-time club, how he feels his adopted hometown of Denton is on the verge of something big–when…
Three left feet Eight Track Demos Jump Rope Girls One Ton Records At the end of 1997, Spin asked a slew of pop hipsters the question that seems to crop up every week or so: “Is rock dead?” Based on the dubious mainstream success of Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers,…
Bob Stinson died alone on February 18, 1995. He was discovered on the couch of his Minneapolis home, a syringe laying next to his slumped-over corpse. Nine years after being adiosed as the Replacements’ guitarist, good ol’ Bob–dress-wearing Bob, fun guy Bob, crazy fuckin’ Bob–kicked his drug habit the real…
Plastic letters from home No Exit Blondie Beyond Music Universal Madness Madness Golden Voice Recording Company There ought to be eight people in the world who give a real hot crap about a new Blondie record all these years later–four accountants, two lawyers, and maybe a couple of shut-ins who…
It is too hard to listen to the interview with one of the greatest singers of the 1960s–too hard, because the Southern-boy twang in Levon Helm’s voice has turned to mush, as though it has been filtered through granite and broken glass. The voice that comes through the phone lines…
On January 21, 500 record company employees were fired, told to gather up their personal belongings, turn in their company credit cards and security keys, shut down their computers, and be out of their offices by 5 p.m. More than 280 staffers were let go at Geffen and A&M Records,…
Ray, out west Live at Cibolo Creek Country Club Ray Wylie Hubbard Misery Loves Company Dallas native Ray Wylie Hubbard no doubt understands that mythology can be a very powerful and sometimes dangerous thing. One of the many Texas artists given the big-time music business shot in the early 1970s,…
The boy grew up believing his full name was Jegar Eugene Erickson. No one, not even his mother, Dana Gaines, told him otherwise–why would she? It wasn’t until four years ago that Jegar discovered he had a different first name: Roky. It is his father’s name, and it is the…
Coming up short Hedwig and the Angry Inch Original Cast Recording Atlantic Records Hedwig Schmidt’s ill-fated pecker is the biggest thing off Broadway in years. Apparently nothing gets the culturatti in the seats quicker than rock operas about botched sex changes, especially when the star of the show’s a guy…
Rockin’ bones Greatest Grooves “Groovey” Joe Poovey Dragon Street Records Joe Poovey died last October, just months before this gem of a retrospective hit stores, promising the comeback Poovey used to dream of. He proofread the liner notes, and then, that very night, checked out for good. Maybe he knew…
For such an evocative songwriter, Bill Callahan always gets painted in a bland shade of gray. In print, his name and his music come modified by the usual synonyms of introspection: “miserabilist,” “chronically depressed,” “depressive lonerism,” the unpardonable “sadcore.” This is likely because Callahan’s albums–all released under the band name…
Hall monitors Real: The Tom T. Hall Project Various artists Delmore/Sire Nobody writes songs like Tom T. Hall anymore–nobody save Hall himself, who keeps recording despite Nashville’s tendency to promote him as though he were dead. Maybe that’s because somewhere between 1967 and, oh, 1973 Tom T. did his best…
Editor’s note: Odie Hawkins was a member of the Watts Writers Workshop that spawned the Watts Prophets, a collection of spoken-word artists considered among the forbears of modern hip-hop. He is the author of such novels as Lost Angeles, Memoirs of a Black Casanova and Busting Out of an Ordinary…
George Reagan has been a musician for almost half his life, starting in 1985, when he was a 16-year-old Lewisville High School student playing with ex-Fever in the Funkhouse singer-guitarist Nick Brisco and former Tripping Daisy drummer Bryan Wakeland in a band called Aspirin Damage. He’s been in bands ever…
