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…
History lessons Dean Wareham has long disavowed the Velvet Underground comparisons that have dogged him since his days fronting Galaxie 500; he has shrugged them off even as he has begged for them (inviting the late VU guitarist Sterling Morrison to guest on 1994’s Bewitched), astutely claiming no one sounds…
Record-industry executives and musicians insist bootleg recordings are the bane of their business, the product of plunderers and profiteers who have little regard for the music itself. With the assistance of the Recording Industry Association of America, those very same musicians and executives have tried for years to outlaw bootlegs,…
Dead-end love affair Black Diamond Stan Ridgway Birdcage Records Former Wall of Voodoo frontman and Raymond Chandler wannabe Stan Ridgway steps back into the guise of the man who’s more weary than he is wise. It’s a persona that fits him like an old, wrinkled suit reeking of cigarette smoke…
No guts, no glory As My Mind Drifts Off Dragline Womb Tunes There’s a place where rock and roll ceases to be “music,” a hard-to-find location where the guitars and drums and bass and vocals collide and degenerate into tuneless, directionless noise. Whether you call it “experimental” or “art” or…
Paul Size doesn’t recall much about the day (or even the exact year) he went into the studio with Mick Jagger–or, for that matter, if it was a day at all. It might have been two days spent recording with the flabby icon, might have been even more and could…
His mother begged him not to sue. Rapper Tracy “The D.O.C.” Curry says this in a rasp that sounds a little like resurrection’s whisper and a lot like Miles Davis’ parched bark. “She’s afraid something bad is going to happen to me,” the 27-year-old Dallas native says from his new…
Baddest of the Bad (Livers) When the Bad Livers make their return to the Sons of Hermann Hall January 26–“We’re the anti-Springsteen,” says Liver multi-instrumentalist Mark Rubin, referring to the other concert that night–they will bring with them as an opening act a former Dallasite whose presence has long been…
Before 1993, Louis Bickel Jr. had no interest in the music business outside of buying a few CDs and listening to his car radio. He was an upper-class kid from Highland Park whose father is a partner at a prestigious Dallas law firm, a young man with money in his…
Nothing’s shocking Dynamic Domination Stinkbug Last Beat Records There isn’t much difference between heavy metal played with a straight face and heavy metal played for grins–except maybe the joke’s more obvious, even if no one’s chuckling. (How can you laugh at the punch line when you can’t understand the words?)…
Pure pop for then people Hi My Name is Jonny Jonny Polonsky American Recordings The Cult of Ray Frank Black American Recordings Jonny Polonsky, a 22-year-old lo-fi do-it-yourselfer “discovered” by ex-Pixie and idol Frank Black, belongs to that clique of post-indie rockers for whom there exists no genre boundaries and…
Grand slam 1st Tape (no tour) Triple Crown Independent Christina Rees’ voice hides nothing, maybe because she just doesn’t know any better. Whether she’s whispering a threat of violence or howling that she really is going to hold that gun to your head, Rees gives her all in every second…
Bobby Patterson’s one of so many talented musicians who never found success when they deserved it most.
A desperado for all times The folks about whom Warren Zevon has written for more than two decades are all the same–outlaws with guns blazing, madmen who point those guns at their own heads and pull the triggers. They’re losers and loners, schizophrenics and sociopaths, outcasts and outsiders, deranged men…
Supergroup–it’s rock and roll’s greatest oxymoron, where the sum of one part is greater than the whole. It’s a great theory that always backfires. It’s a term that dates back to 1969, when Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Steve Winwood crammed their talent and egos into Blind Faith, which would…
Death row Dead Man Walking Various artists Columbia Records Dead Man Walking is, at its core, a soundtrack meant to accompany the Tim Robbins-directed film about a brutal death-row inmate and his relationship with the nun who would be his savior. But this collection tells its own larger story through…
Who pulled the plug? SuperLectric Adam’s Farm Rainmaker Records In Dallas radio stations’ race to make and break local bands they ignored the first and last go-’round, here’s another obvious addition to their playlists–a group with enough sincerity, smarts, and honest talent to convince even the cynics there’s something there…
There was a time not long ago when Mike Dillon was regarded as a buffoon–a talented musician who hid his prodigious gifts behind bongos, ridiculous antics, and a heroin habit that became the stuff of infamy around Deep Ellum. As frontman for the more-funk-than-metal Billy Goat, Dillon once wasted his…
History lessons The Sons of Hermann Hall in Deep Ellum is fast becoming a Texas-music museum, where the state’s best (and the rest, God bless Tommy Alverson and Ed Burleson forever) are on a permanently rotating display that changes every weekend. The best live-music venue in town–a nearly century-old German…
Wallowing in mud Filth Pig Ministry Warner Bros. Records The appeal of so-called industrial is the noise and nothing beyond it; it’s release without any of the unnecessary tension build-up, metal without the hang-ups but just as death-obsessed, anger and angst between the ironic quotation marks. Al Jourgenson’s genius is…
It’s just before New Year’s Eve, and Roger Morgan is packing up his home, along with boxes of singles and CDs, moving his Unclean Records label from Austin to San Antonio. As career moves go, it’s hardly an obvious one, but Morgan has no problem leaving the town that calls…
