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…
Jump, jive & sob Live at the Red Jacket Johnny Reno and the Lounge Kings Menthol Records This week, A&M Records is reissuing Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, the 1981 record that launched a thousand swing revivalists, even if nobody called it a trend when one bald Englishman was doing it…
You better, you Beck The Hi-Lo Country Various artists TVT Soundtrax It seems of late as though Willie Nelson’s career–one built on the resistance to fad or fashion coupled with the outlaw’s willingness to try anything once–has been reduced to a series of gimmicks. Namely: covering Peter Gabriel and Paul…
An old soul exudes a wisdom and clarity it couldn’t possibly have come by in a single lifetime. An old soul, a rare individual to stumble upon, isn’t one who speaks impulsively; his words surface carefully, from an amalgam of other times and worlds. There’s a peace, a thoughtfulness about…
It’s January 6, 1999–not January 6, 1979–and in the VIP room at Los Angeles’ Great Western Forum, rock stars are doing whatever rock stars usually do whenever they’re presented with an unlimited supply of liquor and old friends. It’s a very metal crowd: Paul Stanley of KISS kindly, patiently accepts…
The best music affects you on a physical level: Your spine melts, you feel yourself slinking to the music, becoming a part of it. Inhibitions break down as you become a marionette to the musicians’ Gepetto. It goes far beyond air-guitaring or beating the steering wheel as you drive; your…
Chris Lewellyn is one of the last true believers–one of the few people around who still sees Deep Ellum as a community, still thinks in terms of us instead of me, still believes in a scene. You’ve probably never heard of him, because as much as he loves music, the…
Tucked away on the ground floor of a three-story shopping complex on the corner of Greenville and Mockingbird, CD World is the kind of record store you can’t leave empty-handed even if you want to. There’s always buried treasure to be found hiding in the racks, like an undiscovered Rolling…
One of their oldest friends describes Joshua and Mischo McKay this way. Joshua is the serious, cerebral older brother, apt to ramble on and on at great length and with great passion about the subject of his music. Joshua’s is an eloquent, deep-felt discourse that will often go on and…
The obvious song Up Up Up Up Up Up Ani DiFranco Righteous Babe There’s a tendency in the rock press to revere Ani DiFranco for all the things that merely surround her music: the self-contained record label, the is-she-or-ain’t-she-queer? thing that obsesses her fans, the voice-of-a-new-generation hype that crops up…
Four years ago, I briefly met Peter Guralnick at a book signing in Memphis, Tennessee. At the time, Guralnick–one of the few great chroniclers of American music–was basking in considerable acclaim for Last Train to Memphis, the first volume of his Elvis Presley biography. The book, arguably the first legit…
The BMW is parked downstairs, and Henry Rollins makes no apologies about it. He survived punk rock to become a taxpayer, a landowner, a commercial pitchman, a published writer, and a publisher himself. When all of that caused the media to anoint him as an icon–a brawny, tattooed thinker, the…
Nobody beats the Wiz Add On! Ghetto Fame-Us Load Zone Central Recordings The first voice you hear on Add On!, Ghetto Fame-Us’ debut album, is that of KNON-FM DJ EZ Eddie D, the mellower than yellow host of the area’s only underground hip-hop show, Knowledge Dropped, Lessons Taught. His presence…
Quiet, disturb My ears are ringing but my heart’s ok Captain Audio Last Beat Records The five-song demo tape Captain Audio was hawking at its live shows last year was as good as almost every other local release of 1998, splitting the difference between art and rock with more pop…
From the gut-wrenching moan of the Delta blues to the brassy fire of New Orleans jazz, the Mississippi River has birthed some of this country’s finest homegrown sounds. But for self-appointed hipsters in the coastal megalopolises of New York or Los Angeles, where voguish chart-toppers train their mikes toward bottom-line…
Waltzing’s for dreamers Sam Prekop Sam Prekop Thrill Jockey Knock Knock Smog Drag City What the hell happened to “indie rock”? A decade ago, the phrase implied loud, brilliant and brainless all at once, hearts worn on the same tattered sleeves upon which young men wiped their snot noses. But…
As with the year’s new records, 1998’s rock-and-roll reading found small pleasures coming from unexpected places, while the much-touted Big Events were ushered into the world with a resounding plop echoing throughout the lavatory. As we’ve been doing every year since, ah, OK, 1999, the Dallas Observer will forgo the…
It’s a hard-knock life? You got that right. But one thing: Don’t bring no Beastie Boys around here. Maybe the only good thing Hilton Als ever wrote in The New Yorker was when he said not so long ago that all the brothers and sisters in the crowd just stared…
