Hot List Hits and Misses: Sonic Youth and Texas Hotel Records

The Hot List has been a Rolling Stone tradition since 1986. All this week, Rock Daily takes a look back at the people and trends that stayed smoking and the ones that cooled off. Today, we visit 1989.

Hot Hit: Sonic Youth. 1989 was an interesting year which, according to Rolling Stone was ga-ga for the cast of Heathers, spandex fashion and fax machines in cars. But that year's hot band was Sonic Youth, who had already wowed the music world with Daydream Nation and were about to sign on to a major label. This year, the band celebrated the 20th anniversary of Daydream and are currently prepping their new album. In between, they have remained an indie cornerstone, bringing morphing, jagged noise to the populace at large.

Hot Miss: Texas Hotel Records. The little label that started as a record store and morphed into a label, the company did distribute some early Rollins Band records and was the company of choice for cultish singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt. But the tiny profile in 1989 talked about two projects that never took shape: a Michael Stipe solo project (which never came to fruition) and the buzz around Texas Hotel band Poi Dog Pondering (who eventually signed to Columbia, then never got any bigger). Texas Hotel Records closed in 1996.

Related Stories:
• Thurston Moore at All Tomorrow's Parties
• Album Review: Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation
• Album Review: Poi Dog Pondering, Poi Dog Pondering

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

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