Vintage Sounds
Somewhere between Jimmie Rodgers and Brooks & Dunn, country music turned up its nose at homemade hooch and juke joints and moved uptown to call drinks and kicker clubs. To Wayne Hancock, Dallas-born and Western swing raised, that move was a mistake. So the 31-year-old musician has dug in his…
Deep-fried Country
In a back room on Heights Boulevard, a fiddle player adjusts his Stetson, pushes his spectacles up in anticipation of the sweat that will soon drench his face and shouts into a microphone, “Aw right! Let’s hoedown!” The time is early on a Friday evening, and outside, the sun is…
Frank-ly Speaking
You don’t have to be much of a cynic to at least raise an eyebrow at the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibit “More than a Constructive Hobby: The Paintings of Frank Freed.” After all, as curator William Camfield admitted in a lecture given when the Freed display was unveiled, the…
Field of Nightmares
Tony Scott, the auteur of such blunt-instrument entertainments as Top Gun and True Romance, is not a director for whom subtlety is a way of life. So it comes as a surprise that in The Fan, a formulaic but genuinely creepy melodrama about an obsessed stalker and a baseball superstar,…
Brotherly Love
Talk about beating the sophomore jinx: Ed Burns, the multihyphenate fi filmmaker who burst onto the scene last year with The Brothers McMullen, is back with an even smarter, funnier and altogether better movie, She’s the One. Once again setting his sights on family ties and sibling rivalries in a…
Beastly Behavior
Info:Correction Date: August 29, 1996 Beastly Behavior Wildlife rehabilitator Vivian Steele got along fine with animals. It’s people who gave her trouble. By Randall Patterson It never seemed like a source of evil, a slaughterhouse for small things — even if there was a freezer full of corpses and a…
Travels with Doug
Info:Correction Date: August 29, 1996 Travels with Doug From wastewater to housing, fast-tracker Doug Williams has been a key mayoral operative — with little oversight By Brian Wallstin Two weeks after Bob Lanier’s first inauguration in January 1992, the new mayor’s administration began looking for a consultant to oversee the…
The Insider
Brother’s Keeper Texas Monthly has adjudged golf-happy Congressman Tom DeLay one of the 20 most “impressive, intriguing and influential” Texans of the year, an honor he shares with dope-scarfing partyboy Michael Irvin and noted thespian Chuck Norris. We wouldn’t argue with the designation: after all, it is impressive how much…
Letters
Pandering in the Void I have been Fayez Sarofim’s personal secretary for the past seven years. I have known Linda Sarofim for 15 years. It hurt to see the Press gratuitously divulge details of their unhappy divorce [“Secrets of the Sphinx?” by Lisa Gray, August 1]. What did this family…
Press Picks
thursday august 22 America “I been through the desert on a song with three chords ….” Sit outside, hear the Houston Symphony perform Copland’s Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo and flashback thrills as original America duo Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell belt out such pop hits as “Horse with No…
Long Lasting Treatment
You don’t have to talk with the Cure’s Robert Smith long before you realize that the title of his band’s new CD, Wild Mood Swings, may apply as well to him as it does his current album’s music. Or if not exactly wild mood swings, at least certain wild swings…
Original Rockabilly
Rockabilly, a high-energy fusion of bluegrass and Western swing, is a style that rings truest in its most basic form, especially when performed by someone who helped create it. Dallas native Ronnie Dawson is one of those someones: he’s been playing rockabilly since it was the pop music of the…
Rotation
Screaming Trees Dust Epic Screaming Trees have never really benefited from their Seattle affiliation; this could explain why the group is so adamant about playing up its true home, the town of Ellensburg, Washington, a good 85 miles southeast of the city. Not ones to be felled by grunge, the…