Scene, heard Cabe Booth, the local artist who’s painted all of the band portraits that hang inside Curtain Club, recently took on other responsibilities at the venue. Booth, who has booked the annual Fry Street Fair in years past, has set up a series of Thursday-night shows at Curtain Club…
Sad sad me About two months ago, a member of The Nixons called us to ask why we had it in for his band after an especially snide reference to the group’s latest album, the appropriately titled Latest Thing. What exactly, he wondered, was our problem? (It’s not like he’s…
Mazinga Phaser Dissatisfied Customers of Hallucination (Idol Records) Since Mazinga Phaser is almost invisible these days — no, I can’t remember the last time the band played, either — you couldn’t blame anyone for thinking it no longer existed. Meaning: I thought the group broke up around a year ago,…
No telling what pushed up the price of the Bobby Soxx “Learn to Hate” single that was put up for sale on eBay — the popular online auction Web site (www.ebay.com) — on April 20. Most likely, the eventual winner, who goes by the handle “jarosis,” was a fan, one…
Everyone knew a kid like Bryce Avary. Some — not many, but some — were kids like Bryce Avary, a young rocker wannabe. A spiky-haired 17-year-old junior at Grapevine High School, he lives with his parents and younger sister in Colleyville. He’s an aspiring photographer and drives a 1972 Camaro,…
Scene, heard Captain Audio wraps up its unique series of Monday-night shows, dubbed The Subterranean Potluck Blues, on May 1 at the Gypsy Tea Room. The concert, like the two others before it, is free with a covered dish. And no, chips do not count as a covered dish. If…
Bubba Kadane had not performed in public since the last time he played with Bedhead, the last time Bedhead ever played, on May 20, 1998, at a radio performance for VPRO, Holland’s national radio based out of Amsterdam. He had not appeared on any recording since the October 1998 release…
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Scene, heard Seems like only yesterday when Josh Venable was a 19-year-old kid who had snuck onto the airwaves of KDGE-FM (94.5) with a big stack of Smiths records and even bigger hair. On May 27, Venable will celebrate six years of hosting The Adventure Club, which airs every Sunday…
The X marks the spot Occasionally, a perceived slight and a few choice words can expand into a feud, especially when one of the parties involved (Street Beat) has a short temper, an itchy e-mail trigger finger, and access to several thousand readers. For instance, because of a believed bias…
Centro-matic All the Falsest Hearts Can Try (Quality Park Records) There’s an old joke about musicians that goes, “What does a drummer say right before he’s fired? Hey guys, here’s a new song I just wrote.” Anyone who knows Centro-matic’s Will Johnson (who started as a drummer in Funland a…
Radio, radio While we try to listen to the Merge (93.3 FM) as little as possible — we’d rather just watch Say Anything — we couldn’t help noticing that at least one of the songs on the station’s playlist seems to have been on the receiving end of a makeover…
Brent Best has always been respectful of his heroes, almost painfully so. Faced with the prospect of having breakfast with one of them, Peter Case (whose work with The Plimsouls, as well as on his own, has much to do with Best picking up a guitar in the first place),…
Robert Schneider takes the small stage at Austin’s Waterloo Records looking as if he’s just wrapped up a brisk game of Frisbee golf, a shaggy beard twice as long as his thinning thatch of hair almost obscuring his face, a pair of flip-flops on his feet. Tuning up his beat-up…
The Nixons Latest Thing (KOCH Records MCA Records should be kicking itself right about now, because Latest Thing, for worse or worse, should be a hit. Not that much of it is any good, but hey, that’s what’s called quality these days. Its songs will fit nicely on KDGE-FM’s playlist…
When Jeff Whittington got back into playing music, after a brief hiatus when his previous group Adam’s Farm broke up, he wanted to be in a band again. But he didn’t want to take on the same role he did with Adam’s Farm, playing the part of frontman — writing…
To set the record straight, no, it is not a mistake if your band or venue does not appear on the 2000 Dallas Observer Music Awards ballot. What it means is that you, as deserving as you think you are, were not nominated. It does not matter if you advertise…
Lately, it seems that even the most successful film adaptations don’t have much more in common with the books that spawned them than the title and some of the characters’ names — at best. Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, for instance, had little to do with James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, apart…
The Flaming Lips A few weeks ago, the Dallas Observer came into possession of an e-mailed memorandum, ostensibly written by Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, describing plans for the band’s sets on the second leg of its North American tour. At first, we were skeptical about the document’s veracity, what…
Gropius Indelicate (Self-released) I am not completely convinced that Gropius’ new album isn’t one long song, one tiresome, meandering, second-encore rendition of “Gold Dust Woman,” or maybe “Gypsy.” (Actually, anything by Stevie Nicks would fit the bill.) Maybe I just keep losing my place among the nine tracks on Indelicate,…
The saying goes something along the lines of “no press is bad press,” but that maxim is surely put to the test by the cover story in the April edition of D Magazine, “Dallas City Limits.” Hey, no reason to argue with someone claiming that Dallas’ music scene outranks the…
No one told Bob Nanna that trying to watch 365 movies in a year was a good idea. In fact, most of his friends attempted to talk him out of it by trying to lure him out of the house and the theaters to do something, anything, else. But for…
