These days, Bill Doss, a key member of the Elephant 6 collective and a co-founder of Olivia Tremor Control, likes to refer to himself in print as “thebilldoss,” or, when he’s in a hurry, “tbd” — both good examples of how he’s able to freshen up familiar ingredients by giving…
At its best, the music of Texas has an openness and quiet intelligence unlike any other state’s. These Texan qualities seem unrelated to style or subregion — it’s evident in Doug Sahm’s border rock, Joe Ely’s flatland rockabilly, and Townes Van Zandt’s wandering folk. That same supple wisdom suffuses Jon…
The enduring power of rockabilly is that it’s rock ‘n’ roll in undiluted form. The dark menace and raging lust that early rock only hinted at were the foundations of every rockabilly backbeat and echoey hiccup. But it took a clique of maniacal ’80s rockabilly revisionists like the Cramps, Flat…
At 22, Conor Oberst is probably too young to be locked into the expectations of a fan base. After all, most musicians of his age are only beginning to figure out what they want to express, and how they plan to go about it. But Oberst’s intensely emotional, confessional songs…
Every rising pop star who manages to forge a distinctive personality on the radio and MTV inherits them seemingly overnight. Hundreds of thousands of like-minded — and sometimes like-dressed — individuals are suddenly drawn out of their shells through their instant identification with this larger-than-life representation of their secret, inner…
Remember Napster? Oh, sure, it’s so two years ago now, but remember all the time, energy and money spent by the record labels to beat it down? And how about all the time, energy and money now being spent doing the same to the similar services that sprouted in Napster’s…
Al Singer likes to poke fun at his own habit of running at the mouth. “Ask me what time it is, and I’ll tell you how to make a watch,” jokes the 73-year-old Singer, a lifelong jazz adherent who moved from Michigan to the Valley 11 years ago. But if…
There’s something comforting in knowing there’s a bar someplace where you will always be treated to a smile, a few kind words, and three fingers of your favorite bourbon or scotch. Where seldom is heard a track by Britney or J.Lo. Alan Jackson’s records are like that, and it’s no…
Or, this year’s fresh Brit hit (so the NME tells us, anyway), meaning those of us who purchased January’s I Heard Myself in You last February from Amazon’s U.K. site, figuring them as the next Coldplay, can now file it away with the rest of London’s letdowns. Seeing as how…
Mounting a history of that dysfunctional beast known as rock ‘n’ roll journalism is probably impossible. The field is plagued by self-aggrandizing guru-dom (hallo, Robert “Consumer Guide” Christgau), near-unintelligible academia-speak (Greil “Doctor of Letters” Marcus), perpetual grudge-holding (Richard “I Coulda Been a Contender” Meltzer), and even — not to put…
The first New Order album in eight years finds the survivors of Joy Division banging their collective drum in yet another monochromatic burst of synthetic rapture. Not that Manchester’s most brooding band ever really suffered commercially from picking at the same scab — or from adhering to the same descending…
History, goes the brutal wisdom, is written by the winners. The dead cannot speak; those who come through the other side intact are, by default if not by choice, the ones left to establish and preserve the official record. Culturally, that gnomic truth often manifests itself in the impulse to…
Jay Farrar, reluctant icon of Americana music, pauses to consider his standing in the alt-country pantheon. It’s not something Farrar seems eager to discuss. After all, it’s been more than 10 years since his first band, Uncle Tupelo, helped kick-start the alternative-country movement with an invigorating blend of rust belt…
It’s always the ones who fail in their chosen field of expertise that are the most fascinating. Always. Poverty-wrecked pulp novelist David Goodis counting nickels for booze and sewing couturier labels into cheap suits at the peak of his form is far more interesting than Elmore Leornard’s latest million-dollar purchase…
Even if hip-hop’s been the dominant form of popular music over the last decade, it’s continually encountered pockets of resistance from people who simply don’t get it, or wish it would go away. Clayton Call and Fabel, Arizona State University seniors, college radio-station DJs and aspiring rappers, both know what…
Is our little Cornelius all growed up now? Keigo Oyamada’s newest album, Point, manages to preserve the wide-eyed sense of wonder that made his previous release so precious, but this time he’s clearly on his best behavior. Cornelius’ last album, Fantasma, released in 1998, was one of those universally acclaimed…
It’s hard to tell where Evans is headed at this point, given the many directions in which she’s been tugged throughout her career. She began as a fairly straightforward soul/R&B crooner, but her involvement with the Notorious B.I.G., whom she married in 1995, and the Artist Formerly Known As Puff…
Funny how quick people are to crown Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell as the kings of honky-tonk, that crossbred country-goes-to-city sound that was born in the scant handful of years before Elvis ripped open a hole into an alternative universe. But where’s Webb Pierce in this party? Pierce had 13…
Even if you get along with your parents, you hardly qualify as a red-blooded American teenager unless you make two crucial musical decisions early on: First, you defiantly reject the old folks’ listening tastes as passé, and second, you find music of your own that’s guaranteed to piss them off…
Frankly, if rock writers didn’t have crazed visionaries to waste ink on, you people would get plenty tired of reading about expertly played tambourine tracks and tearful obbligato passages. No, you’d be reading about Bill Clinton’s three-breasted intern in the Weekly World News like the rest of your weak-willed kind…
High is high, low is low/Everybody wants to get to heaven/But nobody wants to die/Nobody wants to die/Nobody wants to do the don’ts/Don’t the dids/Color outside the lines/Nobody wants to try. Ignore the probability that the above paean to transcendence was written under the influence of amphetamines, hallucinogens, or some…
Sometimes Ralo regrets naming her annual music festival the Earth Mother Mind Jam. The raspy-voiced singer-songwriter/bassist, born Lora Elizabeth Heiniemi, devised the idea for the all-day blowout after relocating from her native Minneapolis to Phoenix in the late ’80s with her band, the Fake McCoys. She had spent the previous…
