AAS 2010 Aaron Behrens and Thomas Turner , who make up the Austin dance rock duo Ghostland Observatory, are as different as a live wire and a solid state circuit, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. The gregarious, pigtail-wearing Behrens, 28, is a natural entertainer who’s been performing in public since he lip-synced and danced […]
Sometimes you have to listen to husband-wife art rock duos and review Jimmy Buffett concerts, but other times this rock critic stuff can be pretty cool. Just the other day, for instance, I called a number in Chicago and Mavis Staples picked up the phone. You have to understand that Freedom Highway, the gospel/folk album […]
The most unracist white people in America grew up on military bases, where blacks and whites have lived next door to each other, gone to school together, and swam in the same pools since Harry Truman desegregated the military in 1948. There’s no unemployment in the military, so the street corners are empty. Everyone has […]
By Michael Corcoran If you lived in Austin in the ‘80s, you know Debbie Pastor. Hot Amazon blonde on roller skates at Club Foot. Resident of the future stars flophouse on San Gabriel, where the Replacements, members of Faith No More and other acts crashed and R.E.M. came to party. The “House of Many Women” […]
April 16, 2009 by Michael Corcoran The two producers had been hunkered down in a Nashville studio all weekend, tweaking an album that mixes bluegrass virtuosity with airy country pop vocals. “Let’s call it a day,” producer Gary Paczosa said one Sunday evening. “We’ll pick it up tomorrow.” But producing partner Sarah Jarosz, whose debut […]
Set in the Chicago music scene in the early ‘90s, when CDs were king, the Internet was a rumor, and your phone stayed home. I: ALL THAT’S LEFT IS EVERYTHING If a growling stomach was grounds for justifiable homicide, Sallee would’ve left a row of dead boyfriends in her wake. You did not obstruct her […]
Jimmy Buffett’s new $370 million Margarita Resort opens next month in NYC’s Times Square, but the “Margaritaville” legacy began in Austin at a six-bedroom Northwest Hills duplex you could’ve bought for $290,000 twenty years ago. It was on the deck that Buffett started writing his signature song after having his first (followed in quick succession […]
By Michael Corcoran An authentic dive bar doesn’t call itself that; it just is. So, when you see a new watering hole advertised as a lowdown “dive,” it’s most likely targeting young adults who read Charles Bukowski on Kindle. But where are the regulars who claim their barstools daily with territorial zeal? A real dive […]
by Michael Corcoran for AAS 2014 Ray Wylie Hubbard made his debut on “The Late Show With David Letterman” in January 2014 by singing the story of a notorious Dallas rock club with an underage girl at the door checking IDs. Weaving through the lyrics of “Mother Blues” is a tantalizing guitar and its continued […]
Living in Austin is like sex in that what happened in the past has only sentimental value, which when it comes to sex is no value. Who would you rather be, the old guy hunched over his cereal who used to do Victoria Principal or the insufferable hipster in the trucker hat who goes home to that hot barista, the one without the tattoos?
