If you build it, they will come: Delbert McClinton, Tift Merritt, Jerry Douglas, Donna the Buffalo, Los Lobos, Buddy & Julie Miller. And that list barely scratches the surface of the fifty acts who gathered at Louisville’s Slugger Field and […]
During his first trip to England, Muddy Waters, ruminating about his humble beginnings and how far the blues had taken him in the world, told a reporter from Melody Maker, “There’s no way in the world I can feel the […]
Two weeks before his father died, John Farrar, the eldest son of James Paul Farrar, asked the question every son one day will face. “What should we do, Pops?” His father had been diagnosed with cancer over a year ago; […]
You know Nashville as Music City USA? Not us. We think of our Tennessee home as Hot Chicken Epicenter of the Known Universe. Most any chain or mom and pop joint will give you the option of take-out chicken in […]
There are fans of the mid-’90s Kansas City avant-garde math-rock band Giant’s Chair who remember its guitar player and leader Scott Hobart driving around town in a statement-making “art car” — a ’67 Plymouth Belvedere with its hood covered in […]
TALL TEXANS: A new album from Billy Joe Shaver, who was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award for songwriting at the first annual Americana Music Association Awards September 13 in Nashville, is due November 19 on Compadre Records. Titled Freedom […]
Winter is a relative concept for Australians. Call us wimps, compared to northern hemisphere music fans, but don’t say it to the 2000-odd Paul Kelly fans who waited in the cold and rain to see our unofficial national hero of […]
“You don’t have to stand in the doorway — there’s no earthquake,” quipped Blazers guitarist Manuel Gonzalez to two wallflowers who had crammed themselves in a jamb. Not an earthquake, but certainly a post-flood heat wave, as the warehouse doors […]
Musicians who play the Cave on a July night earn every penny they make. The humidity off the street slides in the front door and through the cracks in the wall of this basement-level bar, while crashes and shouts drift […]
Jon Langford already answers to such honorifics as Mr. Mekon, Big Chief Waco, and Pine Valley party chairman. On this sultry Friday night, he added another: Master of Ceremonies. Though he led the Pine Valley Cosmonauts (a group that included […]
