Swervin’ from side to side When Jeff Tweedy performs, holding an acoustic guitar with the word “Wilco” painted between the frets, a broad smile spreads across his face. He says he’s embarrassed by photos from live shows that bear this image–he’s afraid it makes him look “goofy and grinning.” But…
The songs are 40 years old, their echoes already fading from our collective memory; they are rarely listened to anymore, needles hardly ever running through their grooves. But the music created in 1955 at places like Sun Records or at Chess Records still rings with as much power, as much…
Taking liberties Kojak Variety Elvis Costello Warner Bros. Records Recorded immediately after 1991’s Mighty Like a Rose and before The Juliet Letters with the Brodsky Quartet, this all-covers disc instead recalls the E.C. of old–the man who released Get Happy! and Taking Liberties, the would-be soul singer, the rock revisionist,…
Give Ty Herndon this much credit: he’s no Ricky Lynn Gregg, the guy who briefly conned a few people into believing he was the next big thing in country music. Gregg, a failed Dallas rocker who had once been a member of Head East (during its ninth or so incarnation),…
Charles Horton has been working on jukeboxes for almost 25 years, has seen them come in all shapes and colors and sizes. He has stuck his hands inside the old Wurlitzer 3300, worked on the classic Seeburgs and Rock-Olas, and repaired the very last jukebox that held vinyl singles–an inbred…
No more Faith Faith No More scored a modest hit in 1990 with the single-video “Epic” off 1989’s The Real Thing, ascending to the top of the pop heap around the same time the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, Living Colour, Jane’s Addiction, and a handful of other pop-metal-jazz-punk-funk-etc. bands…
Swingin’ on a star The Western Life Cowboys and Indians Independent release The points of reference are easily identifiable for the casual historian: Bob Wills, Milton Brown, Louis Jordan, Count Basie, even some Gene Vincent for rockabilly spice. But Cowboys and Indians, among the best bands in town, aren’t some…
Elaborate shrines mourning slain Tejano singer Selena dot neighborhoods throughout Texas, candles and Christmas lights brightening dark streets at night. Selena’s name is scrawled across thousands of car windows with white shoe polish, her photo taped in so many rear windows. Record stores are sold out of her CDs and…
“People talk a lot about Gram Parsons, and they write a lot about Gram Parsons, but you never hear Gram Parsons on the radio.” So said Parsons’ old singing partner Emmylou Harris not long after the singer-songwriter’s death in 1973 from a drug overdose. It was a comment laced with…
Hell-fire and damnation Jason and the Scorchers never got their due the first time ’round, being inexplicably lumped in with the new-wave-roots movement that flourished and faded within the time it takes to say Phantom, Rocker, and Slim. But there was genius within that country-punk, which breathed more fire than…
Legends of the mall Basketball Diaries Various artists Island Records How in the fuck did Jim Carroll, a transparent and hollow boho from New York, suddenly become the “legend” of which the TV ad speaks? From Patti Smith compadre to one-hit wonder (“People Who Died” in 1980, the Cliff’s Notes…
Stuart Goddard, like so many of his British brethren who would later choose careers in music, began his career as an art-school dropout, fascinated with punk because it was as much about the packaging of image–torn clothing, men wearing makeup, performance art creeping into concert, treating the audience like shit–as…
Welfare music Bill Wyman of the Chicago Reader can often be overheard proclaiming the Bottle Rockets the best band in America, and as the band was finishing its set on the final night of the South by Southwest Music Conference, he was shouting his reasons one more time above the…
It is perhaps just as well that Portishead, which was to make its American debut here April 16 at Deep Ellum Live, canceled its Dallas gig just a few days ago. The Island Records publicist explains the cancellation this way: “The band decided to play two shows in Los Angeles…
Exile on vain street Like critic Chuck Eddy once said of Pussy Galore, with whom Trux singer Jennifer Herrema once performed, “Maybe you gotta live in Manhattan to understand this sort of thing.” And like a local rock-crit colleague points out, Yankees go for deconstructed, dissonant, ugly rock and roll–anti-rock,…
On a gorgeous spring day, a man known by the name J. Bone Cro sits on the front porch of a house on Lower Greenville Avenue–the home and studio of a seminal experimental music collective called the Vas Deferens Organization. The 27-year-old musician’s spirits are high, fueled by the sunshine…
Classic rock candy Wasps’ Nests The 6ths London Records 20 Good Vibrations The Beach Boys Capitol Records Stephin Merritt’s list of influences is rooted in the most classic and cliched pop music–names like Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and assorted other ’60s producer-composers for whom sound equalled content. They…
Rufus Thomas is not certain of the year–he figures it was 1943, though it might have been 1950–but he recalls the moment with astounding clarity. He was performing in Currie’s Club Tropicana, a nightclub on the north side of Memphis, Tennessee, when a man walked through the door carrying a…
Bitter, Sweet Matthew Sweet may well be an influence on the likes of someone like Freedy Johnston, who began making records six years after Sweet’s debut, but the similarities between the two men extend only to the music–a rich, well-constructed, indestructible sound. With ex-Television guitarist Richard Lloyd and former Lou…
Memphis is a city that has long thrived on tourism. After all, for many of the world’s countless blues enthusiasts who annually plan trips to the United States, Memphis and New Orleans and Chicago are the only cities that matter. Memphis city officials strive so eagerly to please tourists that…
“Does anyone know if I won a Grammy last night?” Dave Abbruzzese wonders. He says this as an afterthought, in the middle of a casual conversation with producer David Castell as the two stand in the messy kitchen area of Castell’s Garland recording studio. The night before, Abbruzzese and the…
Made in USA Sonic Youth Rhino Records Nice Ass Free Kitten Kill Rock Stars In the end, there isn’t much to get with Sonic Youth. It’s noise signifying noise, the songs an almost accidental result of what happens when you put guitars, bass, drums, and vocals in the same studio…
