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…
March, 1985. Lankershim Boulevard, nearing the edge of industrial North Hollywood. The Palomino. On stage: Lone Justice, pounding out a Parton-meets-punk mutation of country-rock that had seduced an entire city of music observers. The Next Big Thing. They play stomping blue-collar tales (“Working Late”) and brokenhearted weepers (“Don’t Toss Us…
This is not the complete story of Will Clay. There are too many gaps here for it to be the whole truth and nothing but. That is because so many of Will Clay’s old friends and bandmates have long since left Dallas, disappeared without leaving forwarding addresses. And it is…
The process is nothing if not scientific: At the end of every year, we contact each contributor to our music section and ask him/her to submit a roster of the 10 most overrated, mediocre, or generally offensive records released that annum. In order. These individual tallies are then painstakingly transcribed…
In the Letters section of this week’s Dallas Observer appears a missive from Jim “Reverend Horton Heat” Heath, blasting me for hinting in a recent Street Beat item that Reverend Horton Heat was recently dropped from Interscope Records because the label was unhappy with quality and quantities moved. Heath demanded…
1. Beastie Boys, Hello Nasty (Grand Royal) 2. Radiohead, OK Computer (Capitol) 3. Prodigy, The Fat of the Land (Maverick) 4. Beck, Mutations (DGC) 5. Crystal Method, Vegas (Outpost) 6. Robert Earl Keen, Walking Distance (Arista) 7. Pat Green, Here We Go (Pat Green Records) 8. Billy Bragg & Wilco,…
Only days ago, the mysterious CD appeared on a colleague’s desk here at the newspaper, buried beneath piles of publicists’ releases and other kept detritus. No one knew how long it had been there, where it came from, what the hell it was. The cover, featuring a nattily clad monkey…
Turns us on Floor 13 Floor 13 Self-released Overlooked and underrated are two apt descriptions surrounding Floor 13. Too bad, then, since these boys’ powerhouse live show and new-wave-meets-glam tunes could easily be pulling in some of the city’s biggest audiences. Surely all those displaced tomorrowpeople and Tripping Daisy fans…
Michael Corcoran Makes Stuff Up As a critic gets older — and this one is 43 — certain tasks become more difficult, like trying to show any interest whatsoever in the latest R.E.M. release. But other activities become a breeze, such as making a year-end list of the 10 best…
