It’s been said that part of the reason the Beach Boys fell out of favor with the hippie counterculture of the late ’60s is that the band made the unforgivable mistake of being from Southern California. See, at that time, the command center for both the underground and its new…
That Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch is the most unlikely of rock stars is obvious from the minute he picks up the phone at his Boise, Idaho, home and explains that he’s watching his 5-year-old son, Ben. Politely he asks, “Could you call back in a half-hour?” Thirty-five minutes later,…
For most people, a mention of the music of the 1980s conjures up thoughts of big hair and Boy George–and a terrible drought in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. But for a small, alienated segment of the population, there existed a kind of parallel musical universe that delivered a…
The punches came hard and fast. The day hovered like a fucking prizefighter, and the springtime sun had plenty to do with it. So did the alcoholic blue-collar hero named Will. Lying on my back, I could smell gasoline, the blood and the orange blossoms, and the outline of his…
It took somewhere near 20 phone calls to catch Joey DeFrancesco between tours. His perpetually full schedule is an impressive state of affairs for someone who plays an instrument that until fairly recently was horribly unpopular in jazz for several decades. “I’m in Europe a lot, but it was New…
Olivia Tremor Control Black Foliage–Volume One (Flydaddy Records) If John Cage and Paul McCartney had ever collaborated on a musical project, the result might have been something like Olivia Tremor Control. The Athens, Georgia, band–part of the much-hyped Elephant 6 collective that includes such groups as Apples in Stereo and…
Monsters of Grace, the latest in a series of collaborations between composer Philip Glass and theater mastermind Robert Wilson, is commonly described in press releases as a “still evolving” work. Glass is the first to suggest that this tag might be a bit charitable. Truth be told, when he and…
Joe Zawinul is discussing the kinship between musicians and boxers. “When I see a fighter, like when I hear someone play music, I know right away if the motherfucker has got it or not,” he says gruffly, his Austrian accent still strong after four decades in the States. Aware that…
Leave it to Austin. The self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World” finally has a band go platinum after two decades of false alarms, and it’s deemed such an epochal moment in music history that South by Southwest devotes an entire panel discussion to the “phenomenon.” That panel, “The Fastball…
Blur 13 (Virgin Records) In the end, “Song 2” meant nothing. It was Britpop masquerading as Seattle rock, a hit single that was all release and no tension. How very American of a band that, until 1997’s self-titled fifth record, kept everything obscured behind wily working-class-hero lyrics and rock-but-not-rawking music…
In 1975, George Clinton made the album that he still considers the breakthrough of his career: Chocolate City, with his band Parliament. Chocolate City’s classic title song was not only an obvious precursor to hip-hop (with Clinton smoothly talking over a repetitive rhythm track) but it was also an alternative…
A year ago, there was no special connection between Marilyn Manson and Courtney Love, unless you count the fact that both were famous for being infamous. They weren’t really friends (though Manson has claimed that Love did have a brief, raunchy fling with his guitarist Twiggy Ramirez), and their musical…
Jesus Chrysler Supercar has never played at South by Southwest before. But the Mesa rock quintet doesn’t approach this week’s trip to Austin, Texas, with anything close to virginal innocence. They’ve been at the band thing too long (more than five years) and experienced too many music-biz letdowns to believe…
Looper Up a Tree (Sub Pop) In recent years, sonic experimentalism has taken a foothold in pop music. This infiltration of the mainstream has come most notably through the work of Beck, who’s spawned a legion of imitators eager to copy his formula for combining hip-hop beats, folk stylings and…
Willa and Corrie Alexander aren’t related, but it’s natural to assume that they are. Granted, they don’t look much alike, and the statuesque Corrie literally towers over her diminutive friend. But they not only share the same surname, they both have the exotic-in-the-Valley accents of their native Holland. More important,…
Elvis Costello once told the story of giving an advance tape of his 1982 masterpiece, Imperial Bedroom, to the artist who was going to paint the album cover. Costello thought he’d created the sunniest pop album of all time. He thought he’d made a Left Banke record. When the artist…
DGeneration Through the Darkness (C2/Columbia Records) Produced by famed glam hag Tony Visconti (T. Rex, Bowie, etc.), Through the Darkness differs little from DGen’s last Ric Ocasek-knobbed No Lunch. There’s a torrent of jumbo, sperm-filled Clash chords, soaring Mick Jones harmonies and ersatz-Clash topical politicizing atop an invented street hustle…
Everybody has an agenda, you say? That may well be true, but it’s hard to imagine Creed, Fastball or whatever selections you can order from the BMG Music Club putting sentiments like these on their album covers: “We are a lonely people, pulled apart by the killer forces of capitalism…
Philadelphia’s greatest contributors to hip-hop, the Roots, like to begin their CDs with a snatch of dialogue. It’s their way of introducing a new set of themes, of offering a kind of preamble to the state of the union message that’s on the way. But the exchange that launches the…
What a difference a few weeks can make. In mid-December, Jimmy Eat World was one frustrated emo-punk band. The Mesa quartet had completed a masterful, ambitiously produced album for Capitol Records last summer, hoping all along to have it out by October ’98, so the band could squeeze in a…
It’s Saturday afternoon in downtown Tempe. The Coffee Plantation’s patio off Sixth Street and Mill is warmed by a late winter sun that slow roasts the usual blend of slackers, hackers and idle overachievers. A four-piece band is tucked off in a corner of the courtyard. The music, a bouncy,…
Kelly Willis What I Deserve (Rykodisc) It’s been a good decade since Austinites began predicting stardom for Kelly Willis. Even within the context of her late ’80s roots-rock band Radio Ranch, it seemed obvious that anyone with such angelic beauty and honey-soaked pipes was a can’t-miss proposition. Despite many false…
