The year is 1983. Offspring singer Dexter Holland–looking very much the blond, spiky-haired, ersatz Billy Idol that he is today–is pathetically bashing away at the drums, in his very first band. This raw piece of camcorder verite is the kind of stuff that VH1’s Before They Were Rock Stars is…

It’s not often that I feel like I’m in the middle of an episode of V.I.P. Actually, part of the inept glory of Pamela Anderson Lee’s action series is that it never feels like anybody’s real life, with the possible exception of those well-tanned, scantily clad super sleuths out there…

Ben Folds Five The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (550 Music) It’s a strange paradox of the music industry that a recording artist’s most common response to success is a case of melancholia. The cutout bins are overloaded with self-pitying follow-ups that lament the emptiness of fame and the tedium…

“Who’s in charge of this? Is it okay if I sing?” The question came from Peacemakers guitarist Steve Larson. The answer was a soft murmur, neither affirmative nor negative. In actual fact, no one was in charge at Balboa Cafe on Wednesday, April 28, the night that the recently formed…

Look through the north window of Alice Cooper’stown and the message is clear. You’re greeted by a life-size cardboard cutout of the king of shock rock in black leather, welcoming you to his nightmare. In front of the cutout, the window sports an orange neon Alice Cooper signature, and directly…

About a month ago, singer-songwriter Pete Forbes and his band were in Los Angeles rehearsing for a club gig that night. During a short break, the band’s drummer, a wiry, bespectacled, mad scientist of the skins named John O’Reilly Jr., idly picked up a violin belonging to Forbes sideman John…

The most frequently repeated joke about the ’60s was that if you could remember it, you weren’t there. Along those lines, the morning after the overwhelming spectacle that was the New Times Music Awards Showcase, the hazy cloud of amnesia that fills my head might be my only solid proof…

It’s 2:00 in the afternoon and Leah Miller’s still a bit groggy. In all fairness, the Zone’s late-night DJ has a good excuse for her mild case of lethargy. Her graveyard shift at the station means she doesn’t get home until six in the morning, and she’s rarely asleep before…

The Hammertoes I Too Have Sinned (Tortuga Records) It’s a sad, basic tenet of the music industry that every band thinks it’s doing something unique, but practically none of them really are. Even on the local scene, there tend to be camps, or factions, of bands that basically sound alike,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…