In the whitewashed, pre-Beatles pop music landscape of the early ’60s, two musical entities – the Beach Boys and Phil Spector’s teenage symphonies – are generally credited with keeping pop music from being completely vapid. But an overlooked quartet of soulful Italian American kids from New Jersey matched their more vaunted West Coast contemporaries hit […]
Originally published in 2004, when 1979 was midway between Elvis and the present. What is that?” I kept wondering about the strange disco music with the guys talking over the beat that I’d been hearing all over Manhattan since stepping off a Greyhound bus a few hours earlier. I couldn’t go two blocks without hearing […]
Part of being a true living legend is not talking about it, so even as Johnny Gimble made his name playing hot country jazz fiddle with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in the late 1940s and then did Nashville session work on classic albums by Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and […]
Here’s an appreciation of Sam Phillips from 2003, written the day after he died. He had the life I would’ve most loved to live. If he could find a white man who could sing like a black man, he could make a million dollars. That’s what Sam Phillips would say over and over again from […]
The audience stretched as far back from the Zilker Park stage as the eye could see on the last night of the first Austin City Limits Music Festival. When Robert Randolph and the Family Band hit the stage that September night and played an old church song, the audience dug in. But then, without warning, […]
Has it really been 40 years since Richie Havens, destined to be the greatest folk performer America ever produced, was silenced by a freak dentistry accident? It doesn’t seem that long. The legend’s music continues to grow in popularity. Since he met death — so soon after the overnight stardom that came with his electrifying, […]
by Michael Corcoran, 2008 The classic Texas dancehalls are treasures, and they’re buried right in your back yard. We all know about Luckenbach and Gruene Hall , the most famous dancehalls in Texas. And though it’s not technically a dancehall, Floores Country Store in Helotes is a fave way-back venue for the college country crowd. […]
The worst thing that ever happened to somebody, happened to somebody I knew, the great pop/rock singer Bryan Harvey. He, wife Kathryn and their two daughters were massacred at home in Richmond on New Year’s Day 2006 by a couple of career shitstains who chose them randomly. Googling it will only make you sick to […]
Boredom is a bitch. Boredom made me start this web site, when I was just getting the hang of Facebook and Twitter. Eventually, I’ll be posting stuff here every day, including breaking music news, I hope, and reviews of concerts, DVDs, restaurants, TV shows and so on. I’m also going to try to write more […]
Leon Carter and the Rolling Stones, a 1950s Austin band with one helluva retroactive cease-and-desist order possibility. Here’s an ad for the Continental Club in 1958, the year after it opened.
