Good for what ails ya UFOFU UFOFU The Medicine Label When UFOFU started out, lead singer Joe Butcher was living in his van, pawning his guitar every other week, battling a serious problem with heroin, and giving guys blow-jobs in public parks to support himself. And yet to talk to…
Vast stretches of miles between Jimmy LaFave is the kind of artist a category like “folk-rock” was invented for: a clever, empathetic artist who knows that if you lean into it, tried and true need not mean dusty. LaFave may be the master of existing forms–cliches, if you’re feeling less…
Charon’s song The Boatman’s Call Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Mute Records When Nick Cave spoke to the Dallas Observer a year ago, he made it clear that he doesn’t wish to be a part of pop culture. Describing most contemporary recordings as “music for kids,” he disassociated himself…
If you live in Austin, it’s easy to grow weary of that town’s annual South by Southwest (SXSW) music conference: Downtown becomes impassable, restaurants and clubs are clogged, and the myriad ways in which the shindig makes clear the differences between those with wristbands (for common folk and other peons…
The rain and cold don’t stop Solomon Burke. He’s an hour late for the rendezvous, in the parking lot of the red-ribboned church at the intersection of Franklin and Highland in Los Angeles in the heart of Hollywood, and he hastily apologizes for the tardiness. But Solomon Burke has been…
Son of Blind Joe Death Few career arcs break the way Leo Kottke’s did–starting out as a so-folk-he’s-jazz prodigy on 6 and 12 String Guitar, his definitive (and once ubiquitous, though now out of print) 1970 Takoma release. Kottke was at first an instrumentalist, his fingers seemingly doing eight things…
Though many were surprised by the unexpected break-up of Tablet last week–including some band members–it did not come as a surprise to Tablet frontman Steven Holt. “It was something I’d been thinking about for a long time,” Holt says. “It wasn’t an emotional, sudden decision.” Holt, who formed the band…
Action-packed There are artists who carry with them a sense (and sensibility) of time and place, like a living time capsule. In Muddy Waters, you can hear the great migration from the Deep South to the factories and mills of Chicago; in Dick Dale, the boundless electricity of the California…
You’d think after 20 years, a nightspot would acquire ambience. Not Poor David’s Pub: The day it opened at 1924 Greenville, it looked like storage space for broken restaurant furniture, and it still looks that way. There is no jukebox, no pool table, no “decor.” When the Pub is open,…
Mothers of re-invention Pop U2 Island Records They probably never thought of themselves as an ordinary outfit, but ever since 1990 and Achtung Baby, it’s been obvious that U2 have aspirations (far) beyond that of your standard rawkenroll band, pushing themselves toward something more reflective of the life around them,…
This is country music? An institution so distanced from its past that it won’t allow living legends such as Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings airplay and ignores the heritage of past masters like the Carter Family? An industry that paves over its roots, the better to make way for the…
Hit and mess Come And Get It — A Tribute To Badfinger Various Artists Copper Records Do Me Baby! Austin Does Prince Various Artists Fume Records Forget, for a moment, that artist-based compilation albums are very much a disease foisted upon the listening public for a variety of generally greedy…
Sound and color Marisa Monte A Great Noise Metro Blue Records With A Great Noise, Brazil’s Marisa Monte announces herself as queen of MPB, or Musica Popular Brasileira. The album, half live and half studio, is a condensation of a much more elaborate two-disc package from her home. It’s not…
R.O.C.K. in the Americas If you ever wax nostalgic for rock the way it used to be–concerts as major events, music that isn’t afraid to act like it’s willing to assume a major role in your life, passion rather than posing–you should look to the nascent rock en espanol or…
What a difference a year makes. Last June 13, when Cake played the Galaxy Club, there were perhaps two dozen people in the audience–if you count each person who came and went and came back again twice. Local act UFOFU played an absolutely ragged set right before the Sacramento quintet…
Ever since The Concert for Bangladesh, albums aimed at benefiting worthy causes have been suspect, either as collections of inferior live versions of songs you already have or material adjudged not good enough for purely commercial purposes. If a Tree Falls–a collection of tunes abundant in chlorophyll and message from…
Attack of the killer indies They come in all colors: purple, yellow, blue, orange, even black vinyl. An assortment of moods and aspirations, these five 7″ singles paint a big part of the local music picture as it expands within the here and now while drawing influences from there and…
“Let me tell you a Dallas story,” says Jon Ginoli, lead singer and guitarist of the San Francisco-based trio Pansy Division. This follows a rather randy observation he called his “San Francisco story” that I promised not to print. “Right now, I’m dating a guy who moved out here from…
I was lucky enough to first see Bill Hicks in a comedy club in Austin in the early ’80s; he was a fresh voice in a medium already going stale and self-indulgent. Nobody else so perfectly captured the rage that came with having a brain during the Reagan years, that…
Slouching toward distinction Equus Plebeian Monarchs Carpe Diem Records Like another band on the local Carpe Diem label, Cafe Noir, Plebeian Monarch’s music is a reconstitution of familiar melodies. But Plebian Monarch’s Equus lacks what Cafe Noir–through its distinctly Old-World sound–presents: a truly new experience. Throughout most of the nine…
The company you keep Few artists move between genres–let alone worlds–with the ease of John Cale. Who else has been featured in a 1963 New York Times article on the performance of an 18-hour-long John Cage avant-classical composition and then, 16 years later, fronted a punk band at CBGB’s, down…
He is the king of non-flash guitar, the guitar man on an estimated 2,500 pop and R&B records of the sort where you don’t necessarily recall the guitar parts. Cornell Dupree himself can’t recall most of his discography, save for some obvious credits: Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night In Georgia,” Aretha’s…
