Despite Manchester’s reputation for turning out groundbreaking British rock acts (from the Buzzcocks to Joy Division to the Stone Roses to Oasis), the city also is generally quite supportive of American roots music. Indeed, even on this typically dank Manchester […]
So many touring bands skip Milwaukee on the way from Chicago to Minneapolis that those who do stop and sit a spell ought to be guaranteed an avid response. The Bottle Rockets didn’t sell out this 300-capacity club — named […]
A few years back, I swore off ever seeing John Wesley Harding again after he walked onstage, looked out at a pretty respectable gathering (for a Monday night, anyway) and sneered in a voice dripping with contempt, “Well, I’d like […]
After a recent swing through the Southeast opening for the Black Crowes, a club tour back into the same areas could have been a letdown for the members of Nashville band Bare Jr. This particular night didn’t start out too […]
Leroy Bach ignored the stage and microphones to stand on the floor with his guitar, under a pasteboard cutout portrait of Abe Lincoln and Christmas lights strung among the ceiling fans. He chattered and sang to those seated at tables […]
Besides being a major part of Giant Sand and OP8, Howe Gelb has some stories he wants to tell on his own. Like Jeff Tweedy, he requires more than one entity for his vast musical output. What takes place tonight […]
“Isn’t it kinda cool that no one has to go to work tomorrow?” asked Old 97’s singer Rhett Miller midway through his band’s blistering two-hour set, a reference to this show falling in the midst of Memorial Day weekend. “When […]
Nobody with any degree of hipness aspired to sing on Broadway in 1966, so when 16-year-old Cynthia Gano ruined her voice smoking cigarettes, she didn’t much feel the loss of withdrawing from those classes. Thirty years later, she finally found […]
Nowadays, a music critic is what we call anyone who writes about music, though actual music criticism has all but disappeared. As Greil Marcus wrote in his rock crit classic Mystery Train, “a critic’s job is not only to define […]
Sometimes the decisions about who to put on the cover of No Depression seem to be made of their own volition. When the Gram Parsons tribute album Return Of The Grievous Angel started showing up on release schedules a few […]
