Archive for the 'Music' Category
one from the vault: deer tick
Tattoo artists may just pocket the money without a comment, but there must be some occasions when their kinder, wiser natures surface, and they ask the client: are you sure? You do know this is permanent? Like, for example, when John MacCauley, aka Deer Tick, decided to get a tattoo of the California Raisins on [...]
Read More..>>Jeff Hanson 1978-2009
News broke today that Jeff Hanson died. There are certain artists who somehow don’t catch the wave of indie press & love, or else ride it only shakily, of those, some of my favorites: Dan Reeder, Headgear, Jeff Hanson. I don’t know what happened - the press release says only ‘tragic accident,’ and a story [...]
Read More..>>oh girl, I’d be so sorry if you gave me a root canal: the chi-lites
Others have pointed to more obviously dramatic instances of ‘music-changed-my-life-and-made-me-see-the-light,’ the most common type of which would be where the person, despondent, possibly suicidal, hears Huey Lewis and the News and realizes it’s time to pull it all together and go on. William S. Burroughs claimed, in Junky, that he kicked a heroin habit with [...]
Read More..>>suspended in our masquerade: bruce springsteen & the e st. band, frank erwin center, austin, texas
To see Bruce Springsteen - who will turn 60 this year - live in concert is to call into question the intensity of your life: what have you been doing? Are you committed to it? Are you so committed to it that you’ll push yourself and your colleagues to the breaking point every night for [...]
Read More..>>there is no methadone for the blues
White blues guitar blowhards are really not in fashion these days - see George Thorogood - so it seems especially tricky that Austin decided to tie its identity so closely to Stevie Ray Vaughan. For reasons having something to do with music, something to do with sales, and something to do with aviation mishaps, we [...]
Read More..>>elvis is everywhere: sxsw wrap-up
The full list of bands I wanted to see but missed would make a killer festival all on its own - so let’s not spend too much time in that half-empty world. Friday afternoon I headed to the east side with the intention of catching the unfortunately named Deer Tick at Ms. Bea’s; instead I [...]
Read More..>>my own ode to sunshine: sxsw at the french legation
Even at its present massive size, SXSW can still sometimes feel like a little community picnic, sun-dappled, idyllic, with cold cans of Lone Star and paper plates of food - that type of thing. Or anyway it felt that way up at the French Legation on Thursday afternoon. (It helps to get away from 6th [...]
Read More..>>night one winners: the besties and phosphorescent at sxsw
A frontman is a frontman is a frontman, as I believe Gertrude Stein said, and the Besties have got them a frontman. Rikky Walsh rocks the Billy Crudup-as-Prefontaine 70s ’stache, and he’s comfy onstage, flanked by the two Besties ladies, and backed up by their absurdly happy drummer (even for a drummer, this guy was [...]
Read More..>>yo adrian: let’s kick off sxsw with gurf morlix
Running doesn’t really fit with the musical hipster image, but then neither does changing diapers, (unless they’re skull diapers as designed by Shepard Fairey), and I’ll be doing plenty of that this week, and very little sleeping, so I’m thinking, considering the marathon nature of not only this event but also now this sentence, I [...]
Read More..>>gringo starr vs. ringo deathstarr: best band names of sxsw
SXSW is here, and what you really need, what you can’t get anywhere else, the thing that will put the jam in your jelly roll, is, naturally, a carefully planned schedule of the best SXSW band names.
So: you arrive a little bleary from La Guardia/LAX/Charles De Gaulle; the rough landing put you in the perfect [...]