When Jack White of the White Stripes announced at Stubb’s Austin in June 2003, “It’s good to be in Texas, the home of Blind Willie Johnson,” you can be sure that few on hand had ever heard of the gospel blues singer/guitarist who pioneered a ferocity that still lives in modern rock. The first songs […]
On Oct. 9, 2000, which would’ve been John Lennon’s 60th birthday, Jody Denberg hosted a tribute concert at the KGSR studios. On Facebook, Marsha Milam posted about how Jimmy LaFave just walked in, asked Jody which songs were left (Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin and many other acts were involved) and when he found that “In […]
The best Bob Dylan show I ever saw, will ever see, was in November 1995 at the Austin Music Hall. This was not long after his friend Jerry Garcia died from substance abuse-related causes, and Dylan seemed sharper, more in-the-moment, than the barely coherent legend I saw at the Chicago Theater a couple years earlier. […]
His love of music was contagious.
HOUSTON 2012. Thunder and lightning and buckets of rain. In the hotel lobby bar of the Doubletree Hotel, members of Los Lobos are hanging out, waiting the word on whether or not their headlining set at the Houston International Festival is cancelled. Outside the window is a strobe-lit storm from a B movie. These men […]
South by Southwest has become a Hip Hop Mecca in recent years, with seemingly everyone from big names to rising artists coming to Austin every year for the pub and the party. But that wasn’t always the case. “We’d hear the same thing every time we called New York,” says former SXSW booker Matt Sonzala. […]
International housing: Marriage, MTV, half-hearted defections and Taco Bell! Was that Russian band serious about wanting to defect after a SXSW showcase? Or did they just want to stay in Austin for free as long as they could? It was in the early ‘90s, soon after implementation of SXSW’s international housing program, where bands from […]
By Michael Corcoran From “Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music” (TCU Press) When Jack White of the White Stripes announced at Stubb’s Austin in June 2003, “It’s good to be in Texas, the home of Blind Willie Johnson,” you can be sure that few on hand had ever heard of the gospel blues singer/guitarist […]
SAN MARCOS, 2007: It doesn’t get much more incongruous than this: a group of men in their 60s playing up-tempo sock-hop blues in a vacant house next door to the funeral home owned by their bassist. But the Traits, former San Marcos High School mates who had regional hits soon after forming in 1957, have […]
Originally published in the Austin American Statesman 1/6/13 SAN ANTONIO. “Wow, 35 years!” exclaimed Ty Gavin, singer of the regrouped band the Next, whose members met at the infamous Sex Pistols show in San Antonio on Jan. 8, 1978. “Has it really been that long?” Three days before the anniversary of the most notorious rock […]
