How do you experience a year? Can a person ever shed his innate subjectivity and perceive or appreciate something on a different level than he would a warm, fuzzy sweater, a pork chop, or a long car trip? It doesn’t really matter; nobody’s going to pay me to write about…
Q and the Black Martin Q and the Black Martin Moondog Records Challenging and confounding the listener is a dangerous path: You might be as weighty as Bone Machine-era Tom Waits, yes, but you could also end up as annoying as faux-lounge act Toledo. Like the above, Q and the…
Finally in front Transplanting Elaine Summers Loosegroove Records Pete Droge and his band the Sinners offered up one of the best releases of 1996 in Find a Door, an album of slightly skewed rock. Helping out was the potent voice of Elaine Summers, who also played guitar with the group…
Tommy Shannon and his wife, Kumi, are raising four elegant horses–three of them Trakehners, an athletic European breed–on their Austin ranch. This land, where the Shannons have recently settled, spills out into unspoiled Hill Country. With just a bit more landscaping, it will resemble the American dreamscape befitting a humble…
The original Motor City Madman Mitch Ryder–one of the best, if not the authentic, white-boy soul belter and architect of the high-energy “Detroit sound” –has made more comebacks than a boomerang. His early fame was built with the Detroit Wheels upon classics like 1965’s “Jenny Take a Ride!” (actually a…
Brian Houser has quite a view from his workplace; his job as a carpenter, responsible for maintaining the aptly named Texas Giant roller coaster at Six Flags, can take him up to 143 feet in the air. You can’t see both Dallas’ and Fort Worth’s skylines at once, like you…
It’s a family affair What do the Dallas Cowboys and one of the area’s hottest Tejano bands have in common? Not much, other than the fact that tackle Tony Casillas and local Tejano stars La Tropa F will be teaming up to provide a little night music, with the proceeds…
The chorus is delivered with a sing-songy cadence that sounds almost like a nursery rhyme; the voice, accompanied by mandolin and acoustic guitar, is so utterly country in its inflections, it could pass for backwoods–sharp and nasal: alleluia curse the wind i don’t break and i don’t bend and i…
Loud and clear I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray The Fairfield Four Warner Brothers Records Black gospel singing at its best is transcendent–a striking contrast to the travails of African-Americans–and the Nashville-based Fairfield Four (in fact, five) are among the most uplifting voices to be heard today. With a lineage running…
“I would say we’re probably the Rolling Stones of our music, because we’ve been around a long time,” says Oscar de la Rosa, lead singer of La Mafia, one of Tejano music’s biggest acts. It’s an awfully grand comparison to make, but de la Rosa has never been one to…
Don’t fence me in Lift to Experience Lift to Experience Random-Precision Records Smoothie Sandwich Lung Cookie Records One of the bastard children of music criticism is labels, the stifling shorthand used to sum up any hard-to-define band’s work in two or three words: sweater rock, alternative country, blues punk, etc…
Christmas is a time for gentle reflection on good times past–and perhaps even the wiping away of a nostalgic tear, so the cover of Honkey-Tonk Holidays (Christmas in Deep Noellum) is particularly poignant: now-passed nightspot Naomi’s, all aglow with Christmas lights, early-’50s Chevy truck parked in front. Issuing label Big…
Michael Lile stood patiently outside the gate of the grand prix racetrack inside the Malibu SpeedZone in North Dallas, intently watching pint-sized cars wheel around the track in their fervid race to post the fastest time on the house clock. Behind him, a sparse crowd fueled by Miller High Life…
Nobody struck at the soul of jazz like Charles Mingus. His music raged with paradoxical fury: intense yet funny, demonic yet spiritual, chaotic yet carefully arranged. That was Mingus. Oh, yeah. His autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, reveals a tortured soul. But if you listen to the music, you already know…
Let us now praise local bands It’s been a veritable roller coaster of a year for the Old 97’s: big-name attention, major-label foofaraw, and the derision of Whiskeytown’s resident know-it-all and professional butthead David Ryan Adams (what is that guy’s problem?). Now the shameless 97’s have bamboozled another poor boob…
“Catfish and the blues were born together,” declares L.R. “T.C.” Deere, owner of the five-location Top Cat seafood restaurant chain. A bit incongruous behind the cash register of his downtown location (505 N. Griffin, right across from the bus station) in his sharply creased shirt, necktie, and braces, Deere is…
Seed catalog Texas Blues Radio Various artists Independent release Time was, KNON DJs who did Texas blues shows had to bring in old vinyl by dead guys. Now, they have new CDs by Dallas/Fort Worth players who are not only alive, but gigging in your neighborhood bar. Smart move to…
Fall from Graceland Songs from The Capeman Paul Simon Warner Bros. Records It’s easy to understand why Paul Simon would be attracted to the story of Salvador Agron, who, in 1959, stabbed to death two innocents caught in a New York City gang war. Agron, then a 16-year-old Puerto Rican…
Dennis Gonzalez almost ceased to exist this September, when he and his Harley were run off the road by an unidentified motorist. After the impact, flying through the air, he took time to accept his death, he says. He needn’t have. Although re-establishing contact with the firmament peeled off much…
Imagine Rod Serling walking out of the soundstage and into the pool of light cast by a single spotlight. “Submitted for your approval,” he says in that authoritative way that jogs our collective TV memories. “A portrait of a young woman who wants nothing more than to sing, and who…
Just like heaven The Cure has always been a band that was synonymous with the term “cult following.” It didn’t so much have fans as it had disciples: legions of pale-skinned, spidery-haired Robert Smith clones pretending that every day was Halloween. They didn’t just listen to the albums, they believed…
It’s been looking a lot like Christmas here in the office since about July, when the first “seasonal” albums began arriving, presaging a time when the people of the world–or at least those who aren’t Muslims, Jews, Jains, Bahais, animists, cargo cultists, Druids, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, or born-again pagans–celebrate the…
