Though the Blind Corn Liquor Pickers — four Kentucky natives who play mandolin, guitar, banjo and upright bass — fleetingly give the appearance of a traditional bluegrass band, the illusion is shattered as soon as they launch into the Talking […]
Editor’s note: Film producer Laura McCorkindale interviewed Buck Owens in September 2005 and January 2006 at his home in Bakersfield, California, and at his Crystal Palace nightclub. Other than a mid-March phone interview with a Long Island radio station, these […]
To the country intelligentsia, Buck Owens’ joyous iconoclasm made him a pivotal figure. His twangy, streamlined Bakersfield honky-tonk gave him 26 top-10 hits on the Billboard country chart; 21 of them went to #1, including 15 between 1963 and 1967. […]
Dwight Yoakam’s personal friendship with Buck Owens began Wednesday, September 23, 1987. Yoakam was in Bakersfield to play the Kern County Fair that night, and Reprise Records arranged a meeting at Buck’s offices. That night, Buck surprised everyone by appearing […]
“You can’t continue to do the same songbook over and over. You have to innovate. I always felt that’s what I wanted to do — that and create a signature style or sound no one can say is derivative.” Cassandra […]
“From the beginning, I’ve always tried to find the balance between making the things I was hearing in my head happen while at the same time not being too much of a control freak.” Head-scratching critics who enjoying quibbling about […]
“You live in a jungle, you better be ready to die. Somebody like me may shave your ass dry.” “Monkey & Baboon,” by Mac Rebennack & George Landry, from Creole Moon “There is no finer ambassador for New Orleans than […]
“If we took a year off, a real honest to God year off, it’d drive us all insane. We’d all be dead by the end of it. The five of us have done this because it’s cathartic, and it’s a […]
“I want to save people with music,” Imaad Wasif writes, with unabashed sincerity, in the press release that accompanies his self-titled solo debut. “I feel that I was born to siphon away [people’s] poisons and negative energy so that they […]
Sitting in a Manhattan soul food restaurant and discussing the prospect of fame, James Hunter peppers his speech with the colorful argot of his native Colchester, on the east coast of England: “knee-trembler” (for sex), “piss on his strawberries” (disappoint), […]
