City-and-western Live at Adair’s Jack Ingram Beat Up Ford Records Like the Old 97’s, Jack Ingram and his topnotch band belong to a generation of “country” musicians who come to the genre only after having tried their hands at other music: Ingram once strummed his guitar as a folkie, bassist…
The Geraldine Fibbers’ 1995 full-length debut Lost Somewhere Between The Earth and My Home is a majestic record, epic in its musical scope and explicit in its use of language. It’s the kind of record that comes along once every few years, that appears out of nowhere then slinks back…
Word processor Like Richard Thompson, who gave it his guest shot on 1983’s ironically titled Fame and Wealth, Loudon Wainwright III is a storyteller who recounts his tales to a small, fanatical audience; theirs is the cult of the literate and the twisted, the kind of folks who laugh when…
Four months ago, Erykah Badu was serving coffee at Grinders, the Lower Greenville coffee house across the street from the Arcadia Theatre, antique stores, and trendy dive bars. She was a 23-year-old would-be actress and dancer trying to make ends meet, living with her mom in the South Dallas home…
Great music should be described in terms of the mood in which it puts the listener. In the end, after the echoes have faded and the CDs are stored away in their jewel boxes, we remember the finest worksongs because, individually, they make us do things or feel strongly at…
It is 9 in the morning, a time most musicians do not see unless their day jobs beckon or they wake up to find themselves in the unfortunate embrace of a sleepover mistake. Deep Ellum usually does not wake at this hour, either, save for the construction site that is…
Wallpaper peeling low crumbles recovery Fallen Vlods ernst recordings There is method, so they say, underneath all this madness–a reason the glass breaks when it does, a reason the metal sheets reverberate just so, a reason for all this rancorous disquiet to exist in the first place. It’s all in…
Frank Black is starting to become unhinged. It is 1 in the morning in England, and he has just finished a performance and is secured in his hotel for the night. The show has gone well, so he says, and throughout the conversation Black is affable and funny–a far cry…
Dig the old breed French Buzzcocks I.R.S. Records Ignored legends who received neither the press nor the accolades that are heaped upon their long-disbanded contemporaries, the Buzzcocks have stuck around long enough in various incarnations to go in and out of vogue as often as platform shoes and right-wing politics…
Eating the scraps It is believed, in some critical quarters, that Garbage is a soulless band–the product of three producers so in tune with their studio environment they have lost their passion in their rush to master technology. After all, producers are so often the people who shape the chaos…
Long John Hunter had a gig the day after he picked up a guitar. No shit. One minute he’s working at a Beaumont box factory and reluctantly on his way to see B.B. King at the Raven Club at the insistence of some fellow workers; two days later, he’s a…
Legendary heart Set the Twilight Reeling Lou Reed Warner Bros. Records Lou Reed’s rock is casual and careless, and he still sings like most people talk (in Brooklyn, anyway), spitting out his big words in a monotone rant unchanged over the decades. Age hasn’t made him complacent, but maybe softer…
Back in the old days–those being the days when rock and roll was still the bastard child of the blues, rhythm and blues was teaching white kids how to dance like the black kids, and country was for hillbillies and rednecks–when a bunch of musicians came through your town, it…
Queen of the country At a time when Nashville country music is plagued by a goose-stepping line dance for which country radio calls the tune, the women in the post-Garth hat-act-dominated Music City are making most of the music of substance. Rosanne Cash may have packed her bags and moved…
Seven years later, Alan Govenar still speaks of the specter of Alex Moore, how it still haunts everything Govenar does. Such is the price the historians and folklorists have to pay, watching as the men and women they pluck from obscurity inevitably drop back into the anonymity from which they…
Life support The Dark Ages Bedhead Trance Syndicate By now, Bedhead’s sound has fallen into a familiar formula without the negative connotations “formula” implies: The songs almost always build to a slow climax, forming gorgeous discord from an almost disarming quiet. The songs overtake you, sneak up from behind, attack…
Who stole the Soul Asylum? Lockjaw Lockjaw Treblephone Records A local musician whose opinion I respect claims this record from a couple of ex-Trees members grows on you, but so does hair until you go bald. That isn’t necessarily a knock: The album’s opener, “Joe Connely,” comes on strong enough,…
Speaking in tongues Kismet Marta Sebestyen Rykodisc The liner notes are in at least four different languages, but this isn’t music for musicologists–at least no more than Enya, who sells by the millions to people who play their phonographs with needles made of crystal and still insist it isn’t new…
It’s a chilly winter night at the half-abandoned Executive Inn near Love Field, and the frigid north wind is knocking the temperatures down even further on the skin. The place is dark and seemingly deserted, except for the noise emanating from several of the rooms. What used to be a…
Slip and slide Pavement was playing Lollapalooza in Austin on the day that Jerry Garcia didn’t wake up. A reporter, sent to do a reaction piece, asked guitarist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannenberg to comment on the passing of the hippie icon. “One thing about Jerry Garcia was that he made…
Record label executives like to say, in that snide sideways-speak they call language, that artists can’t sell records unless they have a story to tell. They insist the music doesn’t always speak for itself, and that an artist must first have a gimmick in order to get played on the…
Teisco Del Rey, the self-proclaimed “King of the El Cheapo Guitars,” has just sat down for lunch at Guero’s, a popular South Austin restaurant and taco bar. He barely begins his life story when a distinctive twang and rumble spills out of the sound system. “Hey, that’s appropriate!” he gushes…
