“Musicians can be admired for their quest for higher consciousness,” Wimmer said, “but when heroin is the vehicle to get there, the mental quest often becomes secondary to the body’s quest to keep stabilized. The once glorious path becomes little more than a shortcut that leads to nowhere.”
Not many trends or fads have the luxury of knowing exactly when they peaked and started heading back toward normal, but for country music’s boom, the pivotal moment occurred on a hot September night in 1993 when Garth Brooks tried to take his hat act to the Stadium Age and got soaked in posture and […]
New Year’s Eve is the big musical party night of the year, with merriment in the mist as tipsy toasters dance the year away in glittery abandon. It’s ironic, then, that the major music event to occur in the hours connecting two years is significant mainly for the songs it prevented. In the quiet back […]
A stage is higher than the floor because you’re supposed to do something special when you’re performing on that stage, and no one has been so consumed by that challenge as Michael Jackson. At the same time, no other superstar has fallen so hard on the realities of life at the ground level.
It comes in cycles, this “year-in-music” stuff, and 1995 had the misfortune of following one of the most dramatic years in a long time, when such rock monoliths as Pink Floyd, the Eagles, and the Rolling Stones broke box-office records, while a disillusioned youth market shouted out, “Who killed Kurt Cobain?” when, after all, it […]
The party was far from over in a room across the courtyard of the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center in March 2011, but the namesake of this Darrell K Royal Songwriters Homecoming sat in an otherwise empty amphitheater with his wife, Edith. Everyone at the party wanted to say hi to the iconic Texas […]
In that time of segregation, Teagarden couldn’t publicly perform with his musical kindreds, but he broke the studio color line in 1929 when he recorded “Knockin’ a Jug” with Louis Armstrong.
It’s 2 a.m. and I’m dying. My heart is pounding like an offbeat engine and my arms and legs are numb. I would go to the emergency room, but I did that last week. Just tired of it all. The problem is not methamphetamine. That’s not what killed me. It was the realization that a […]
This is a chapter in “Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music by Michael Corcoran Trumpet players blew so hard to produce the slightest spit of sound that they almost passed out. Drummers snapped their sticks with all the rhythmic sense of a pair of tennis shoes in the dryer. The honks of confusion rang […]
So many memories of anarchy tamed by nature, when punks turned into hippies if only for the longest day.
