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…
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…
A wise man–perhaps it was James Brown, or maybe it was Don Rickles–once said that when someone calls you a legend, they just mean you’re looking for work. It’s a title writers give to the has-beens and never-weres, the guys who had their shot, watched it fall just short of…
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…
