Out of the Woods Tongue Penelope Houston Reprise Records Hers is one of the most confounding careers in the history of rock and roll, from punk to orchestral folkie to pop-rocker to sorta-punk once more. She’s an Avenger from way back, when she was a 19-year-old buzz-cut screamer in 1977…
I’m prone to hyperbole, especially in situations where alcohol is served, so when I proclaimed, in the presence of a certain sports and music editor for a Dallas weekly, that the Dixie Chicks’ Nashville breakthrough Wide Open Spaces was the best country album of 1998, a good-natured yet heated discussion…
If Michael Corcoran’s defense of the Dixies is funnier than what follows, it’s only because he has the more laughable half of this debate. C’mon–liking the Dixie Chicks? You know Corcoran only likes Wide Open Spaces because ex-Chick Laura Lynch referred to him as an “oily, disheveled troll” in Texas…
Pet rock Echo Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Warner Bros. Records Tom Petty’s old singles (“The Waiting,” “Breakdown,” “Refugee,” and forever so forth) make up a chunk of oldies-rock radio, and the subsequent singles (among them “I Won’t Back Down” and “Into the Great Wide Open”) sound little different from,…
Kathy McCarty once shared a run-down house in South Austin with three other women. Two years ago, the owner of that house died, and the termite-ridden property was assessed at a mere $12,000. McCarty desperately wanted to buy it herself, but the stake was still too high for someone who…
Next to Coolio, Prince Paul may be rap’s best sport. Consider the Handsome Boy Modeling School–a duo featuring producer and ex-Gravedigga Paul (nee Paul Huston) and Dr. Octagon’s Dan the Automator (Dan Nakamura)–and its inauspicious showing at the 1998 South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin. Crammed into a tiny…
Will Johnson and his new bride, Kris, should be packing up the house right about now, putting all those guitars and amps and vinyl records and comic books and Green Bay Packers posters in boxes and shipping them off to St. Louis. That had been the plan for more than…
The last thing former Jawbox singer-guitarist J. Robbins wanted to do after the group broke up in April 1997 was form another band that sounded exactly like Jawbox. He wanted to do something completely different, write songs in a different way. It wasn’t that Robbins was ashamed of anything he…
Drink the pop Drink With the Grown-ups and Listen to the Jazz The Deathray Davies My-t Records When The Deathray Davies took the stage at Emo’s during South by Southwest last month, a few things seemed off-kilter. One, frontman-songwriter John Dufilho had just finished playing a long set with his…
At age 28, George Neal is intent on staking his rightful place in the land of pop culture: front of the ticket line for Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace. He’s talking not about opening day, but about the wee small hours before the Wednesday that another George has…
The girl–and that’s what she looks like, no older than 18–sitting on the couch bears little resemblance to the 29-year-old woman in the publicity photo below. For a second, the mind considers that they’re not even the same person, that perhaps this is some sort of elaborate, ha-ha put-on. The…
Put on your break-up madami’madam Meredith Miller Band Binkey Records Meredith Miller’s second album (pronounced “Madam, I’m Adam”) is her first with her band, singer-guitarist Reed Easterwood and ex-Tripping Daisy drummer Bryan Wakeland. Sharing music-writing duties with Easterwood, Miller is finally fleshing out the smart acoustic numbers she penned as…
Interior, Charlie’s Paradise Bar, South Padre Island, 3/19/99, 3:45 p.m. The subjects are onstage, here, now, doing sound check: the Toadies. You remember–responsible for the huge radio hit “Possum Kingdom” a few years back. (“Do you wanna die”–that song.) Big rock. Rubberneck, platinum record. New album out later this year,…
Mix and match The Dirtchamber Sessions, Volume One Prodigy XL-Recordings Never mind the billing, because this isn’t a Prodigy record. It’s a Sex Pistols record, an Ultramagnetic MC’s record, a KLF record, an LL Cool J record, until the disc’s eight tracks feature nearly three dozen artists. It’s a K-Tel…
Imagine Matt Sharp, the Rentals’ frontman and former Weezer bassist, at a rave in Barcelona at 9 a.m. Or just imagine him at a rave in Barcelona. Or just at a rave. It’s hard to picture the same man who appeared on the cover of the Rentals’ 1995 album Return…
From March 17 to 21, they came from all over the country–all over the world–to piss and moan. The complaints reverberated so loudly that, at times, you could barely hear the music. To refer to the mood at this year’s annual South by Southwest Music Conference as grim is an…
Let it be Spade Cooley & the Western Swing Dance Gang Shame on You Bloodshot Records Western swing has largely been spared revivalist taxidermy, probably because its teeth are a bit too buck for big-city nostalgists, save Cowboys and Indians. Having developed basically by accident when a few Texas yahoos…
Something about Arthur Lee invites myth. Lee–the cantankerous, charismatic singer and guitarist of the groundbreaking yet largely forgotten band Love–inspires tales that spring up from the streets, ghostlike and strange as urban legend: A bum shuffles up to someone who’s strumming a guitar on a park bench, coughs and says…
The Old 97’s have been the darlings of South by Southwest since their first appearance, playing high-profile gigs every year at packed venues–including last year’s festival-ending performance with X’s John Doe at the see-and-be-seen Spin party, traditionally the toughest invite in town. The festival has been good to the band,…
Beat the meatles Orange Swirl Andy Timmons Timstone Music There’s no denying it: Andy Timmons is a Professional, a man who plays guitar the way every child dreams of playing the instrument the very first time he holds a coat hanger in front of a mirror and strums along with…
This is a far cry from the apartment Ronnie Dawson once lived in. For three decades, give or take, the man resided in what really amounted to a rather large room, one crammed full of books, photographs, tour posters, videos, and the collected flotsam of a lifetime spent making music…
They existed forever ago, came and went so quickly, history barely remembers them. ? and the Mysterians was their name, five Mexican-American boys from Michigan’s Saginaw Valley who topped the charts in October 1966 then disbanded three years later without a second hit single to their credit. They were quintessential…
