Each time he approached some level of recognition outside his small realm of jazz musicians, James Clay retreated to Dallas–to his home, his family, a life he refused to sacrifice to fame or money. He was among the greatest jazz musicians ever to come from Texas, and yet when he…
Sitting at the bar, slumped over his beer with an unfiltered Camel smoldering between his fingers, Tom Morrell looks more than out of place. He looks out of time. In this Houston’s restaurant across the street from Prestonwood Mall, filled with suburbanites returning Christmas gifts, Morrell sticks out something fierce–his…
You say potato… The Long Black Veil The Chieftains RCA Victor As they grow longer in tooth (going on 31 years together now), Ireland’s chief exporters of trad music become more and more like Robert Altman, throwing in cameos (explicable and not so) to broaden appeal and strengthen effect. Elvis…
To be a devoted fan and follower of music is to keep pace with trends (who will be this year’s Guided by Voices? tomorrow’s Pavement?) while keeping in touch with the music’s past (should I buy the Sun boxed set or the Stax boxed set? or maybe the Monkees reissues?);…
Guilty as electrically charged To listen to Ed Hamell perform is to understand the power of the acoustic guitar–not merely as an instrument of sensitivity and frailty, but as a weapon, as a knife used to flay away skin and reveal the bloody pulp underneath. Hamell, a Yankee transplanted to…
Whenever Berta Obregon hears the sounds of salsa–the hypnotic rhythms of the drums, the rapid-fire punctuation of the horn section, the primal urgings contained within it all–she is compelled to dance. It’s a force greater than she, a provocative and sensual sound that sneaks up on her and compels her…
The fright before Christmas Two years ago, Jerry Jeff Walker and his Gonzo Zippa-Dee-Doo-Dah Band (or whatever) swung through the now-defunct Lone Star Roadhouse in Manhattan, and in a crowd filled with expatriated Texans with a little Lubbock homesick blues stood one New Jersey man who got the point. Standing…
In the late ’60s–before the Grateful Dead had ever recorded a note, just as Jefferson Airplane landed its deal with RCA Records–Richard Goldstein wrote in The Village Voice that the music emanating from San Francisco was “the most potentially vital in the pop world.” The Bay Area bands, he insisted,…
Inside its modest confines, Direct Hit Records resembles most any independent record store: CDs, new and used, line one wall; and used LPs and seven-inch singles sit in a bin smack in the middle of the store, facing another wall of new records. Near the store’s entrance, a rack displays…
The Go-Go’s have long been dismissed and forgotten–relegated to slots on new-wave-hits-of-the-’80s compilations alongside Kajagoogoo, Bananarama, and Bow Wow Wow, written off as disposable products of a disposable era that gave us the Yugo, Members Only jackets, James Watt, PeoplExpress, and Cabbage Patch Kids. Where, say, the Runaways (and Joan…
Crucify and mortify “Boilermaker,” the track that kicks off the Jesus Lizard’s 1992 album Liar, explodes suddenly and unexpectedly, as though the first couple of minutes were lopped off; you’re placed immediately into this volatile blur, a man screaming “I’m calm now” over this monstrous guitar riff that comes out…
Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Lowe The Impossible Bird Nick Lowe Upstart Records Every decade or so, Nick Lowe suffers through a breakup and emerges the better for it–less a survivor who lived to tell the tale, more a loser left to pick up the pieces and beg for forgiveness. A decade…
Dazed and bemused One night last summer, an audience of 40 or so crowded into the back of the Angry Dog in Deep Ellum, craning to hear the whispery voice of the striking young girl singing by the pool table. Surrounded by musicians who more closely resembled a band of…
With his guitar dangling from his shoulders, Andy Martin approaches the edge of the Galaxy Club stage and begins launching projectiles into the crowd–vibrators, actually, ones that work. And the crowd greets the shower of party favors with expected glee: found among the mass fashion of hard-core apparel are several…
Roll over, Buddy Holly Live at the BBC The Beatles Capitol Records The “first new Beatles record in decades” (so says Capitol) is hardly rock and roll’s Holy Grail: as a historical document, this 69-track, two-disc collection of British Broadcasting Corporation recordings made from 1963 to 1965 sheds little new…
In their book Merry Christmas, Baby, Dave Marsh and Steve Propes explained the appeal of Christmas music this way: with the diversity of musicians recording Christmas standards over the decades–from Bing Crosby to the Ramones, from Bob Wills to Madonna, from Darlene Love to Run-DMC–“every conceivable emotion found its way…
As the year draws to a close, dozens of unlistened-to demos and CDs sent by local bands over the past months choke the file cabinets. Some are unpolished gems of genius; more often, they’re the frightening proof that the gene pool’s starting to mix a little too closely. The most…
Aches and growing pains Vitalogy Pearl Jam Epic Records The Pearl Jam heard on Vitalogy, ultimately, is an above-average rock and roll band–far better than the one heard on Ten, further along than the one on Vs., interesting enough to split camps between those who passionately believe and those who…
The crowd ruined the concert. Had the few hundred invited guests paid attention, had they set down their drinks and shut their mouths, they might have heard the beautiful, poignant words the woman on stage was singing–“Hold me like a mother would,” she beckoned in a voice both tender and…
It has been a year and a half since Marshall Crenshaw has written a song–18 months since the man sat down with his guitar and completed the dozens of unfinished thoughts that rattle around inside his head. He has run smack into writer’s block, that often impenetrable barrier created by…
At about 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Edie Brickell–dressed in a brown leather jacket, a striped T-shirt, black jeans, and old K-Swiss tennis shoes, looking less like the famous wife of a pop-music icon and more like the good ol’ Edie of Prophet Bars and 500 Cafes past–loitered outside Trees, basking in…
Their evil twin In an interview with the Observer a couple of years ago, Frank Black confessed that if he could have been in any band other than his own Pixies, he would have joined They Might Be Giants. Such an admission seemed both odd and appropriate: the Pixies and…
