Strict ethnomusicologists say that the first great musical innovation came from prehistoric men blowing on bugs’ wings. And to the cave men, that probably sounded fine. We know that later in human history, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley and the rest were fairly inspired when they mated hillbilly music with…
If he had his druthers, singer-songwriter David Wilcox would have music critics, publicists and their ilk stop calling him a “folk singer.” That label, he believes, belongs to the purveyors of the protest and labor anthems of past decades, to those vocal partisans whose causes were large and whose stirring,…
Your name is Freedy Johnston. You’re a singer-songwriter from Hoboken, New Jersey, by way of Kinsley, Kansas (population 2,000). Your first album, 1990’s The Trouble Tree, concerned life and loss and repeated attempts at redemption. You placed these themes in scenarios ranging from a melancholy take on relationships to an…
Rosie Flores’ foray into the Nineties has been paved with petals. This former head hollerer for Los Angeles’ Screaming Sirens had taken her brand of electric cow-punk through the Reagan years with some success, but there was a bit of blood on the tracks, too. Nashville’s reign of musical terror…
Country music is more popular than it’s ever been. CDs and concert tickets are selling like never before. The names of Garth, Clint and Reba now carry the kind of global recognition once reserved only for Sinatra. Black cowboy hats have become the most nauseating pop-culture symbol since disco’s platform…
First the eight-track tape withered and died. Then the vinyl LP fell from favor. Next on the decaying-forms-of-playback-technology hit list is the cassette. One of the most visible signs that the cassette is beginning to wane is that local acts are turning more and more to CDs. They hold more…
Frank Fara has seen the future of country music, and it’s in . . . Denmark? “That’s right,” laughs Fara, who, along with partner and wife Patty Parker, operates Comstock Records in Scottsdale. “Country music’s come a long way from Tennessee.” For the past 15 years, Fara and Parker have…
It’s 9 a.m. on a Saturday, and Danny Wilde is pooped. After all, he’s a working musician. He’s not usually awake at this hour. Especially on weekends. “Who set this thing up, anyway?” Wilde grumbles good-naturedly about the early-morning interview. The answer, provided by an equally groggy music writer, is…
The Red River Opry bills itself as having the “most talented cast this side of Branson, Missouri.” The reference is to the famous Ozarks resort town that pioneered family-owned-and-operated country-music theatres, and it’s a loose comparison, at best. In earlier decades, 30-odd theatres across the country showcased the country talents…
You may think your city is glutted with local talent, but vocalist Jerry Lawson of a cappella group the Persuasions remembers when live music was on every street corner in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section. The year was 1962, and the neighborhood’s homegrown music was a far cry from today’s horde of…
“Do you have Flaco Jimenez’s new solo recording?” The clerk at the west-side record shop responds with a blank stare that says he’s never heard of it, then rifles through the section marked “Norteno.” After 30 years of recording jukebox 45s for fly-by-night south Texas labels, Flaco, undisputed “El Rey…
One night last May, Tracy Lawrence was out doing up Nashville town. Earlier that day, he’d finished the last vocal tracks for Sticks and Stones, his inaugural album for Atlantic Records. Helping Lawrence celebrate his accomplishment was Sonja Wilkinson, a friend since kindergarten back in Arkansas. They’d hit a couple…
After 365 days and nearly that many albums listened to, the Sun Tracks staff (with a little help from their friends) gets serious and decides on the best of 1992. Robert Baird Sun Tracks editor 1. Jimmy Scott, All the Way (Reprise). Album of the millennium. Lured out of retirement…
In 1992, hip-hop produced an artist whose accomplishments call to mind Robert Johnson, Charlie Parker and Donny Osmond. No, we’re not talking about someone who changed the music like Public Enemy or De La Soul. Hip-hop’s answer to the legends of blues, jazz and Mormon rock happens to be a…
“I don’t want to be just a drummer,” says Phil Leavitt, the accomplished if reluctant stick figure for promising new pop band Dada. “Songwriting is what’s ultimately important to me. Drums are just an instrument I grew up playing. It doesn’t matter to me what other drummers are doing, who’s…
Perhaps it came upon a midnight unclear, but somewhere along the way, I became a Christmas-music fan. Everyone, even those responsible for it, admits it’s the most annoying genre of pop music ever. Individual Christmas tunes have been known to routinely engender as much pop revulsion as “Billy Don’t Be…
Green Jello may be the absolute worst band ever to sign a recording deal. And that may be too generous. The lead singer can’t sing. The band can’t play. And what’s worse, the Green Jello song list is an utterly inane collection of insipid, sophomoric, neonovelty songs based on the…
Not long ago, “Boogie Woogie Country Girl” and stripper-cum-feminist Candye Kane considered selling her soul for a recording deal. She’d already been gathering fans for years in Southern California clubs, ranging from the mighty Palomino in Los Angeles to the Lion’s Club in San Diego. Her tangy, powerful voice wrapped…
When the country seems to be unraveling in bursts of playground gunfire and boardroom slime, it helps to have a good song. For my tastes, nothing too complex or overproduced. I want my songs unadorned, with a guitar and a drum, maybe, some good backing vocals and words that cut…
There was a time when jazz pianists sounded so unique they could be identified in just a handful of notes. Bill Evans’ light touch was pensive and intellectualized. Bud Powell tore off roller-coaster twists of classical-influenced bebop. And Thelonious Monk hammered out lazy lines of chordal weirdness. Pianist McCoy Tyner,…
Asked what guitarist influenced him most, Duke Robillard doesn’t hesitate: “T-Bone Walker.” Some of the first licks Robillard learned were from 78s of T-Bone classics like “Stormy Monday.” Robillard said in a recent Guitar World interview that by the mid-Seventies he was “too into T-Bone” and was in danger of…
When the history of pop music is written, the chapter on Canada will be a strange one. Ignoring Bryan Adams (what else?), the biggest names in Canadian pop-rock music are the Guess Who and its more famous Mormon offshoot, Bachman-Turner Overdrive. From there Canadian pop history devolves to Rush, a…
