Music

God bless L.A.’s the BellRays, for they — more than any other band in the superficially inseminated “Entertainment Capital of the World” — know what it means to rock. No, not “rock” in the same way as those bands slugging it out at the Coconut Teaszer every weekend that think…

Aaron Blount, lyricist and guitarist for Austin-based Knife in the Water, is but two degrees of separation from president-elect George Dubya, kind of. “He used to be my dad’s next-door neighbor, years back,” Blount laughs. “It’s really weird to see him on TV now. My dad spoke to him a…

It was the best of years; it was the Durst of years. Of the latter, well, Jim Dandy once had his moment in the sun, too, and the critics were right all along: Black Oak Arkansas sucked, the stoned morons who were into the band eventually grew up (or died…

Thirty-six years ago, at the height of Beatlemania — the phenomenon, not the stage show — some cynics pooh-poohed the notion that the unprecedented hysteria around the Four Lads from Liverpool would endure. (“What are you going to do when the bubble bursts?” a smug, apparently drunk Tallulah Bankhead sneered…

Historically, the tango has been at least as resistant to change as church music — odd, given that the former was born in the whorehouses of Argentina, the one place you’d think anything goes. Not so, as Astor Piazzolla discovered in the ’60s when tweaking the rigid dance music’s format…

During the five-year period he spent in seclusion at his home in New York’s Dakota Building, John Lennon periodically issued dispatches to the outside world confirming that he was content to be a devoted bread-baking husband who never left the house. The reality, as author Robert Rosen tells it in…

Listening to this new collection of John Prine’s sparse, gravel-and-molasses renditions of his own early material, it brings to mind how popular music has changed during the past three decades. When Prine first recorded most of these songs, serious-minded “singer-songwriters” were everywhere, soothing the battered spirits of aging hippies with…

“I’m not a musicologist,” Dave Alvin insists for the third time in 15 minutes, “but let’s say you have a certain amount of knowledge that there was a higher percentage of, maybe, Africans from the northeast quadrant of the continent in a particular section of the American South, as a…

TV’s Seinfeld may have shone an unflattering light on the notion of “regifting,” but that shame doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on the music industry. Every year the surviving major labels extract a dozen songs from previously released or newly deleted Christmas albums, slap them onto new “Various Artists”…

The great major-label mergings and purgings of the last several years have cost hundreds of people their jobs — but another tragic result is that many artists have been trapped in record-release limbo. The rootsy rock band Whiskeytown is one of them, and that’s left rock fans unable to hear…

Truly original albums are pretty thin on the ground these days. Everything has a genre, everything has a formula, usually in the form of a very tight, narrow sandbox in which steroidal young men fling themselves about and complain about their mommies. Poor dears . . . Once again, pop…

While the sounds of seven Harleys revving, six angels leaping and, of course, five pool cues to the head won’t necessarily ensure that consumers will pay good money for the “experience,” they are attention-getters. In the case of British bikers the Alchemysts, Zero Zen’s opener, a feedback ‘n’ splatter instrumental…

If you’re like me, you tend not to pay much attention to the actual CD itself; you just tear the plastic wrapping and peel off whatever annoying adhesives the company has seen fit to slap all over the case, take the disc out and pop it in without really looking…

The Joshua Tree home of musicians Victoria Williams and her husband, Mark Olson, is not easy to find. Situated on 10-odd acres, a mile or so off the main road on an unmarked, unpaved street — trail might be a better word — the home rests in the middle of…

As we approach the twilight of each calendar year, it seems music critics are overly eager to proclaim the preceding 12 months as the “Year of” something. You know, “The Year of Grunge,” “The Year of Women in Rock,” “The Year of Electronic Music” and on and on. But if…

Gumbo has queried the finest psychics to be found at the Valley’s swap meets, seeking predictions regarding the state of music in 2001. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Jazz, 2001: The heavy influence of conservative egomaniacal trumpeter Wynton Marsalis on egomaniacal director Ken Burns’ highly viewed epic documentary, Jazz, will…

Love letters from the past: Stuffed inside the LP sleeve of my precious, battered copy of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession — the 1968 debut from a young New York singer-songwriter whom Columbia Records impresario Clive Davis had signed practically as she was walking offstage following a controversial performance at…

Back when electronica was the next big thing — around the time the only things that needed counting in Florida were dead German tourists — Norman Cook was just another washed-up pop musician. Little wonder the former member of the Housemartins and Beats International decided an identity change was in…

Embarrassingly gifted multi-instrumentalist Powell cut his teeth working with Todd Rundgren during the ’80s before going solo, landing for a spell on Mercury Records but never quite finding his “fit.” Given his outlook — a full plate of hook-drenched power pop with a touch of lush classic rock on the…

Why is the Midwest considered the bastion of normalcy? Think about it — all that exposure to Bible Belters and the so-called moral majority is bound to warp anyone’s mind. Not only is America’s heartland a favorite breeding ground for serial killers, but creative types bloom there, too. Weirdos born…