The black granite headstone is lost among the other markers in the Live Oak Cemetery in deep South Austin. Several small objects including a small plastic toy truck scattered around the simple flat tombstone are the only indication the dead […]
Most days, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney can’t believe how far they’ve come in their half-decade together as the Black Keys. What was once nothing more than two friends banging around in a basement in Akron, Ohio, is now a […]
“Passion is no ordinary word,” sang Graham Parker, who perhaps hadn’t read much rock criticism. So abused and overused, it’s nearly impossible to know if the word means anything all. Any exertion by any guitarist or singer that transcends exercise, […]
In his Nobel acceptance lecture, novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez asserted that the magical realism that characterized life in Macondo in One Hundred Years Of Solitude wasn’t that magical. “We have had to ask but little of imagination,” he said. “Our […]
Johnny Cash: Cry, Cry, Cry By coincidence I just found myself simultaneously listening to Carryin’ On With Johnny Cash & June Carter and reading David Cantwell’s review of American V: A Hundred Highways [ND #64, July-August ’06]. With “Long-Legged Guitar […]
A couple of you dropped us a line to protest last issue’s announcement in this space that we were dropping the ND Top 40 retail sales chart. Ivan Sohrakoff of Woodland, California, suggested we replace it with a “recommended listening” […]
A LITTLE GOOD NEWS: Those eagerly awaiting the Be Good Tanyas album Hello Love — due out October 10 on Nettwerk Records — are in for a few surprises. For one thing, the usually sedate Vancouver, B.C., folk trio comes […]
Syd Barrett, the brilliant singer, songwriter, and guitarist whose creative vision gave birth to the psychedelic sound of Pink Floyd, died on July 7 at his home in Cambridgeshire, England. No cause was specified, but Barrett had suffered from type-2 […]
Last year, Warner Bros. reissued a DVD of director Elia Kazan’s 1957 film A Face In The Crowd. The screenplay, by Kazan’s frequent collaborator, novelist Budd Schulberg, is an intense cautionary about power, politics and public manipulation amid TV’s then […]
The 35th-anniversary release on DVD of Albert Ihde’s singular and very rarely screened color documentary feature Bluegrass Country Soul (Time-Life) fills a missing link in the filmed history of American music. Ihde created a loving and detailed portrayal of the […]
