5/12/2023 0 Comments 8bit drummer believerHe did the Conan O’Brien show and got some radio play while earning his usual reams of good press, including a splashy feature in Rolling Stone. He played the label’s South by Southwest showcase in Austin. “It’s the perfect place for me,” Escovedo told the Austin Chronicle in the spring of 1996, just after Ryko had released With These Hands, and both label and artist were gearing up for the many good things to come. It certainly seemed like a match made in heaven at the time. Ryko spokeswoman Darcy Mayers characterizes the split as the hardest thing the company ever had to do Escovedo, she says, was the kind of artist who “represents why people work at a company like Ryko.” Ryko doesn’t drop artists, and artists don’t leave Ryko. As an independent operation that occasionally competes with larger record companies, Ryko is supposed to be an artist-friendly haven that specializes in long-term, mutually fruitful relationships, particularly with major-label refugees like Bob Mould, Throwing Muses, and (for reissues) David Bowie and Elvis Costello. ![]() Escovedo declined, hence the agreement to disagree. And therein lies the rub: Last November Escovedo’s contract with Ryko was terminated, as the saying goes, “by mutual agreement.” According to Escovedo, Ryko was dissatisfied with the sales of his most recent release, With These Hands, and proposed to cut the budget for his follow-up, halving both his personal income and his studio expenses. Nevertheless, their high-volume frivolity has found a home at the well-known independent label Rykodisc, which will release the album later this month, mainly because Escovedo already had a solo deal there. Their debut album, The Pawn Shop Years, was eight years in the making, as they were never overly concerned with making it. Buick is a four-piece garage band-guitarist-vocalist Escovedo, drummer Glenn Benavides, bassist David Fairchild, and guitarist Joe Eddy Hines-that was never intended to be more than a group of friends chasing down Jagermeister and turning up amps. He’s a survivor, a stubborn person who knows what he wants, and if he has irritated people and made a few mistakes, the career that has resulted from his determination is a quiet triumph.Įscovedo’s latest project, Buick MacKane, perfectly illustrates both his music-for-music’s-sake attitude and his bad run on the business end of things. There have been concessions and sacrifices along the way, plus many grueling months on the road, but for the most part, he has gotten by without compromising his artistic choices. Nevertheless, he has been able to keep on making music for most of his adult life. Like Joe Ely, Steve Earle, or even the internationally famous Willie Nelson, he’s more familiar with the ring of a cult following than with the ringing of cash registers. In other words, Escovedo is a member of that unique species known as the Texas musician. And he is universally a critical favorite-with the requisite modest sales figures. ![]() He’s been feted as the next big thing and written off as yesterday’s news. He’s shared the stage with artists as varied as Johnny Rotten and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. He’s sung about teen angst as well as grown-up pain, having experienced plenty of both. Since then, Escovedo, who turned 46 in January, has been in half a dozen bands and recorded for almost as many labels. “That once you were no longer a teenager you couldn’t sing about teen angst.” “We really believed that twenty or twenty-two was too old to rock,” Escovedo says now. His first effort, done with a group of friends in San Francisco, was 1 81ï¿❒, the story of a young punk with more attitude than talent who, on the verge of his nineteenth birthday, was certain the end of teenagehood equaled the end of life itself-or, at the very least, the end of art, rebellion, and rock and roll. BEFORE AUSTINITE ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO had ever played a single note of music, he was an aspiring filmmaker.
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