As the year comes to a close and movie critics look back at the films released in 2016, they are citing Manchester by the Sea as one of the best. The Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams vehicle has so far earned nominations for the Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globes, and it has…
Editor’s note: Over the past year, Christian McPhate has been collecting stories from Dallas rockers whose brushes with fame offer inside looks at the people who devote their lives to rock ‘n’ roll. Bob Haydon’s ears perked up when he overheard a fellow student, sitting behind him in study hall,…
Ochre House Theater’s original productions often focus on groundbreaking live music performed by notable local musicians. It’s January production of Dr. Bobaganush and His Wonderful World Of The Bizarre and Macabre tells the story of an ancient arts wielding mystic traveling with his show in Nazi-era Europe. The musical delves into…
If while you were ordering a cappuccino at Drugstore Cowboy on Saturday you remarked to yourself, “Hey, that guy over there looks just like Jack White,” you missed a real opportunity to meet the lead singer and guitarist of the White Stripes. White has been making trips to Dallas over…
Hip-hop producer Malik Abdul-Rahmaan is a staunch believer in the power of music to transcend cultural barriers. He’s trying to harness that power with Field Research, a series of albums that will see their first release in early 2017 via the Brooklyn-based Indi-label Paxico Records. Field Research is the musical…
Knox-Henderson looks poised to get a significant makeover in the not-too-distant future, and that could mean big changes for one of the neighborhood’s long-standing nightlife spots. Earlier this week, Dallas’ Open Realty Advisors revealed plans for a new multi-use development along Henderson Avenue, from Glencoe Street to McMillan Avenue. Those…
Charley Crockett is a local blues musician. He recently won the Dallas Observer Music Award for Best Blues Act, and his sophomore album, In the Night — which was nominated for best album — will be released on vinyl Dec. 29. A few years back I was making my living…
For the past decade Lord Byron has been contributing to the fertile gloom-and-doom landscape of Dallas nightlife by way of his Panoptikon residency, where he leads his loyal goth fanbase on a journey through the annals of industrial, dark wave, electronic body music (EBM) and new wave classics. There is…
It looked like a scene from the 1983 classic film, The Outsiders: More than 50 teens fighting hand to hand in an IHOP parking lot in a West Texas town known as “Bomb City” in the late ’90s. It was jocks vs. punks. Spikes and chains, police batons and…
Eighteen children are bouncing around in a stately room, waiting to meet Laura Bush. They’re singing Christmas songs, yelling about their love of spaghetti and meatballs, and generally mugging for the cameras, which are there to capture their interaction with the former first lady. Their behavior is typical of young…
When Woodstock took place in ’69, big music festivals were a rare and special thing. Today, nearly every major city has a generous handful of annual festivals representing a variety of genres. Dallas-Fort Worth has Spillover, 35 Denton, Oaktopia, Lights All Night, Homegrown Fest, Untapped, JMBLYA, and that’s not close…
On a Friday afternoon in October 1991, 33-year-old Don Nedler was handed the keys to the building located at 2424 Swiss Ave. after paying $12,000 for first and last month’s rent. This weekend, the business he built there, Lizard Lounge, will celebrate 25 years as a mecca for Dallas’ rave and…
On any given night, Mike Brooks can usually be found prowling from concert venue to concert venue with a set of cameras around his neck, working to capture the evening’s music highlights on film. We spoke with Brooks, who frequently shoots for the Observer, on the smoking patio of The…
This week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit held by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) to continue building on a section of the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux tribe land in South Dakota. However, two Fort Worth benefit concerts intended to raise money for the tribe…
For the past 15 years, RC Williams has been a musical director, producer and keyboardist for Erykah Badu. He’s also become an avatar for music scene in Dallas. In November he released his sophomore record, called The Feel, with his band the Gritz. With the album, Williams meant to capsulize…
Justin Gabrielli does things all the way or he doesn’t do them at all. The musician-producer scrapped more than 30 of his songs under his new indie-trap project DRIP and started from scratch, because he wasn’t sure the feel was right. It’s kind of shocking until you consider the way…
After Saturday’s Dallas Observer Music Awards showcase brought out hordes of well-heeled music lovers to Deep Ellum for memorable performances by 88 Killa, Mothership, Field Guide, Cygnus, Sealion and more than 40 other Dallas favorites, the awards ceremony at the Bomb Factory Tuesday decided which acts had made the strongest…
Joe Walker has about two and half decades behind the decks and he’s still very much a devotee of the art of mixing vinyl. His knowledge of club music is encyclopedic, backed up by his own mammoth-sized vinyl collection. For this week’s mixtape, Walker is performing under his Jon Wang…
Nick Valensi hadn’t planned to start another band. As the guitarist for the Strokes, who could blame him? But as band members Julian Casablancas and Albert Hammond Jr. began to invest more time in their solo careers, Valensi found himself with more free time than he liked. “A couple years…
You might not always get what you want in this world, but Tuesday night at the Dallas Observer Music Awards the Dallas music community got a whole lot of what it needed. As the Observer honored local artists for the 28th year running at The Bomb Factory, handing out awards…
The Grammys are routinely slagged and often called an irrelevant pep rally for a music industry in decline. But when an awards ceremony that is broadcast to millions worldwide recognizes acts from our own neck of the woods, it’s still nice to see. It means other local acts will get…
It’s November 2012 and John Stewart has just uploaded a remastered version of Danger Mouse’s legendary The Grey Album to SoundCloud. In a matter of hours it’s gone viral; glowing receptions litter the internet, from blogs to top shelf music publications and magazines. But something about the original never sat…
