​Over the years, there have been a multitude of gimmicks employed by bands to get people to listen to the music. Some stop traffic on a busy freeway and perform atop a truck, some give out free CDs at shows in exchange for an email address, and in the case of Crash Vinyl, they had two supposedly hot babes dancing in front of the stage at their shows.

This, of course, earned the band a few extra fans for all the wrong reasons in 1999, when this Zac Crain-penned story was published in the Observer. But in the longrun, things didn't pan out for the band. They rarely do for "dumb rawk and roll" acts like Crash Vinyl, who played it "as intelligently as possible, without taking all the fun out of it," wrote Crain.

Nowadays, former Crash Vinyl drummer John Jay Myers can be seen at The Free Man, the Deep Ellum restaurant/music venue that he opened earlier this year. Hit the jump to read the entire story.

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​In the wake of Good Records Recordings' relaunch last week, it was interesting stumbling across this 1999 Zac Crain-penned piece about the late Tripping Daisy guitarist Wes Berggren.

For more than a decade, much ado has been made about Berggren's untimely death, brought on by a drug overdose. But this is a rare look at the guitarist's early years and upbringing through the eyes of his father, Don, who told the Observer his story only weeks after his son's death.

Don talks about the parenting style he and his wife Joan implemented. Wes and his brother Andy had no rules and ran around naked for the first few years of their lives because they didn't feel like wearing clothes. Both Wes and Andy were the valedictorian of their classes at the high school in the small East Texas town of Malakoff.

Andy went on to be a doctor and Wes dropped out of college to play in Tripping Daisy. Don talked about his sons with pride, but couldn't do so without mentioning his one regret. Read about it in the entire story on the following page.

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​There was a time years ago when the old Winedale Tavern on Lower Greenville Avenue was a decent place to grab a drink. That was long before Singlewide owner Kim Finch, who bought the Winedale earlier this year, had her team scrape dried vomit from the bathroom floor when renovating the space.

It was a place that writer and musician Josh Alan Friedman said "attracts the most democratic mix of humanity of any club in Dallas," in his Observer story about the shenanigans he witnessed while performing his weekly gig there. So, for this edition of This Week In Dallas Music History, we look back at one of Friedman's craziest encounters, in which a Larry McMurtry (famed author of Lonesome Dove) impostor duped everyone at the bar.

By the end of the article, thanks to the help of the real McMurtry, Friedman tracks down the impostor, who claims to have never heard of the Winedale Tavern or even Larry McMurtry. It's a good read, which can be found in its entirety on the next page.

(If you have trouble reading the text, the full article can be found by clicking here.

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​This little bit of Dallas music history is timely, given Edie Brickell's performance at the Kessler Theater this weekend with her band Heavy Make-Up.

Thirteen years ago, her famous act The New Bohemians, who had released two albums on Geffen Records, with only one notable single, were defunct. But, this week in 1998, they announced that they would reunite for a greatest-hits record.

The thought of releasing a greatest hits album, with only two albums and one hit, seemed ridiculous -- at least that's what Robert Wilonsky thought. So, for this edition of This Week In Dallas Music History, we look back to one of the biggest ever Observer music WTF's.

There was something kind of fishy about the release. Brickell had ended her contract with Geffen only a year earlier, so maybe the label was trying to squeeze every dollar from Brickell's catalog while they could. Record labels were like that, remember? It wasn't all bad, though. The label gave Brickell the opportunity to pick the tracklist and to contribute a few new songs.

Read the entire thing after the jump.

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Ricky Martin was "Livin' La Vida Loca" there for a while.

​There was a time in the late '90s when Ricky Martin was an inescapable superstar.

His hit, "Livin' La Vida Loca," was omnipresent, on every radio station at all times. People were so obsessed with Martin's south-of-the-equator style that he ushered in an entire so-called Latin Invasion, most of which was avoidable except for Martin's single hit.

Now we can look back and sort of laugh at those times.

Sort of.

But, with the help of the following comic that ran in the music section of the Observer this week in 1999, it might be a little easier. So, for this edition of This Week In Dallas Music History, watch Ricky Martin take the form of almost every music superstar that came before him. And, at the end of the comic, the artist predicted that when his star burnt out, Martin would be available for Bar Mitzvahs.

Turns out he just came out of the closet last year instead.

Shocking!

Hit the jump to see the whole thing.

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​Everyone likes a good list, right?

Long before there were things like page view minimums, lists still existed, though they were fewer in number. But just about two months before Y2K hit, at which point we were to hole up in an underground bunker 'til they could adjust all the world's computers, the Observer put out a doozy of a list.

So, for this edition of This Week In Dallas Music History, we look back to this week in 1999, to those fearful, terrible moments before the millennium came to an end, during which time Robert Wilonsky compiled a list of the 50 best albums made in Dallas.

At this point, most of the list is pretty dusty, noting forgotten Dallas albums that have since been forgotten again. There are a few names on the list are still relevant -- Bedhead, Erykah Badu, Toadies, Meat Loaf (just kidding) -- but all of them deserve a Google search. Check out Bobby Patterson's It's Just a Matter of Time.

The entire list follows on the other side.

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​It's hard to imagine how a one-hit-wonder like Vanilla Ice has managed to stay in the limelight for so many years after his hit "Ice Ice Baby" grew tired on the top of the charts.

Alas, in 1998, the troubled rapper had a small resurgence thanks to a change in genre. Long before he was on MTV's The Surreal Life in 2004, the rapper decided to try his hand at rap-rock with an album called Hard To Swallow -- and the Observer's own Robert Wilonsky was there to document it.

For this edition of This Week In Dallas Music History, we look back 13 years when Wilonsky referred to Ice as "the walking dead, a corpse who roams the earth long after his time ran out."

Ouch.

The story wasn't exactly a gleaming review of the artist's new musical path. OK, so, Wilonsky basically released The Kraken on Mr. Ice.

Hit the jump to read the entire thing.

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​There comes a time in the life of just about every upper-tier local band that headlining Trees on a weekend night just isn't good enough anymore. About a decade ago, it almost always involved scoring a major label record deal.

For Baboon, that crux occurred this week in 2000, when they learned they were being dropped from massive indie label Wind-Up Records, who you might remember as being Creed's label. As former Observer music editor Zac Crain documented in this edition of This Week In Dallas Music History, at that point, Wind-Up had held Baboon in its death-grip, refusing to put out any of the band's new material, all the while cashing in on the success of "My Own Prison."

Finally, much to their relief, the band was dropped. But, dammit if they didn't almost immediately pursue the help of a major label to put out their third record, which ended up being released on local label Last Beat Records. Can you blame 'em for trying? It's not like you can headline Trees forever.

Hit the jump to read the entire story.

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​We're getting in a Dallas Observer Music Awards tizzy here at DC9 at Night headquarters. The whole thing will come to a head just two weeks from tomorrow, when we announce the winners during the free-to-attend awards ceremony at the House Of Blues on Tuesday, October 18.

On that note, this edition of This Week In Dallas Music History is a bit non-traditional -- mostly because, hey, it didn't actually happen this week. We're hoping that you can take a step back with us and see the big picture, though, as we look back 20 years to the 1991 Dallas Observer Music Awards.

It was the fourth annual installment of the contest, and much like big winner Sarah Jaffe last year, the sweeping winners in 1991 were Course of Empire, who picked up a whopping 10 awards. Unfortunately, most bands, even ones as revered as Course Of Empire, haven't lasted the 20 years since. That band broke up nearly a decade ago.

But there are a few 1991 DOMA winners who are still making music: Sara Hickman, who has since moved south to Austin, won four DOMAs in 1991, including Musician of the Year; Brave Combo took home two including Best Latin Act (?); Cricket Taylor, who now fronts the Electro-Magnetics, won the ZuZu Bollin Memorial Blues Award, which was once a thing we did; and Reverend Horton Heat won the Progressive Country Award.

There are others, too, if you're curious. You can find them in the original article, posted after the jump for your perusing pleasure.

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​Sixteen years ago this week, Lisa Loeb was suffering a massive fame hangover. She was a year removed from her one and only hit song, "Stay" clogging the radio waves and the charts.

It started as a cute, sweet number; morphed into a record-breaking hit; then it devolved into a song that Loeb herself, along with everyone else with functional ears, had heard way too many times.

In the aftermath of it all, Unfair Park's Robert Wilonsky talked to Loeb, who hadn't yet fully recovered from her instant rise to popularity and even quicker tumble down from it. So, for this edition of This Week In Dallas Music History, we turn the page back to 1995, when Loeb talked about her fame with all the benefit of hindsight.

She reflected on her so-called "overnight success," which took her years to achieve, she said. She talked about being the first ever unsigned, unmanaged artist to ever have a Billboard No. 1 single. And she talked her then-new album, Tails, which would be released days after the article was published.

Check out the entire story after the jump.

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