Fourkiller Flats is all but belligerently uncowed about wearing its Uncle Tupelo and Whiskeytown influences on its guitar straps. It’s a refreshing posture in the wake of the occasional anti-alt-country drift, and besides, on them it sounds good. The band’s […]
Happy hour at the House of Bricks in Des Moines, Iowa. That means about four tables scootched together around a couple pitchers. A lonely keyboard dominates the stage. A drum set, guitars. A young guy with shaggy lion’s hair, a […]
“The festival was a celebration of a music, a people, a culture. It was la raza reclaiming their identity, their rights, their public space. It was sharing. It was sacred.” — Juan Tejeda, “Introduction,” Puro Conjunto “From the Anglo Texan […]
In the end, for all its swagger and style and violent enthusiasms, rock ‘n’ roll is child’s play. Big loud fun, big dumb sex, nothing wrong with that, and long may you run. Sometimes…sometimes the music even sweeps another generation […]
Few recent bands have inspired as much lore as Whiskeytown. A lot of the mythology surrounding the North Carolina group involved volume and velocity, but not just in terms of loud fast rules: Bandleader Ryan Adams wrote so many songs […]
Bluegrass is about players and characters, a certain place and perhaps even a certain time. For young upstarts like the Benders to come along and ply such singular country fare around the Irish bars and roots-rock clubs of Boston and […]
In a Chattanooga bar, I fell in love with country music. You can blame cheap beer and a dollar’s worth of jukebox Uncle Tupelo, but I fell hard for banjos and fiddles and, yes, even line dancing. I bought myself […]
1 Various Artists, O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (Mercury/Lost Highway) 2 Bob Dylan, Love And Theft (Columbia) 3 Ryan Adams, Gold (Lost Highway) 4 Lyle Lovett, Anthology Vol. 1: Cowboy Man (Curb/MCA) 5 Alison Krauss & Union Station, New […]
Grateful Dead: Gold in that thar box! Loved issue #37 [Jan.-Feb. 2002] as usual. Your side-by-side reviews of the new Grateful Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival boxes sounded just like I had written it…in 1973. Jerry Garcia was the tie-dyed […]
One never knows what stirs the passions that drive us to write. For Christy McWilson, it may be those hours lying awake and wondering about the weight of the world. For Lonesome Bob, it may be the way that weight […]
