earache!

Ronnie James Dio, 66, wins. And Tony Iommi, 60, with the silver crosses inlaid into the neck of his ancient SG. Don't forget Geezer Butler, 59, and his lithe basslines. Even baby Vinnie Appice, 50, rocking his drums until they nearly crashed down upon him. Now billed as Heaven and Hell, the four deserve metaldom’s highest accolade: Black Sabbath. That is, of course, the name they recorded both 1980’s Heaven and Hell and ’81’s Mob Rules under. One black t-shirt at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater on Sunday summed it up in simple white script, with “got ronnie james dio?” on the front, and “ozzy who?” on the back. Ronnie James Dio still roars down from high atop Mt. Olympus, while gods of the underworld Iommi and Butler peal the skin off molten doom blues – here at electric chair speeds – in lashing tides of primordial void. Testament got 30 minutes at 5:30pm, Motörhead 45 at 6:30pm, and headliner Judas Priest hogged 90 minutes that ended at the stroke of 11pm. That left two New York Italians and two mustachioed musketeers from the industrial forests of Birmingham, England, exactly 75 minutes to reiterate The Rules of Hell. Read More | Comment »

Great metal gristle when Phil Lynott fisted a page of its history in 1983 on final Lizzy studio LP Thunder and Lightning, Judas Priest’s double-disc Nostradamus continues these Brits’ decades-long rampage with the “Revelations” and dire “Prophecy” of the French doomsayer’s predictions for the “Future of Mankind.” At nearly 40, the Priest smote its most ambitious album in Nostradamus, overlong by a platter, but “Conquest” nonetheless. The hot breath of Nostradamus fans August flames in Selma this Sunday alongside Black Sabbath alias Heaven and Hell, Motorhead, and the Bay Area’s early-1980s metal paradigm trendsetters, Testament, at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. Both Judas Priest founders, bassist Ian Hill and guitarist K.K. Downing, still lead the group’s classic line-up, rounded out by Downing foil Glenn Tipton, Mr. Hell Bent For Leather himself, screamer Rob Halford, and Painkiller Scott Travis on warp-drive kick drums. Downing called from a festival in Romania, the Priest’s first touch-down there, roundly accented in the tradition of John, George, and Ringo, thoughtful and measured, genial as Charlie Watts. “A couple of night ago we actually had the pleasure of playing the same night as Neil Young, which was great – Judas Priest and Neil Young, 72,000 people. The audience loved it, which was great for me, because I’m a secret admirer of Neil. We go back to the Sixties you know.” Read More | 1 Comment »

“There would be no diva without you,” announced Donna Summer Saturday night at the gorgeous, landmark, Paramount Theatre in the heart of downtown Oakland, California. Up went a high-pitched scream. All men. The self-proclaimed “little black girl from Boston” may have been born again at the height of her fame in 1979, but her audience can still practically bitch-slap a poor woman security drone acting as back-up on a no-pictures melee. Bad, bad girls. Read More | Comment »

I knew Jerry Wexler. That’s no boast. More like incredulity. Doug Sahm’s death in 1999 shook Austin to its bones. Enough to rouse the great Jerry Wexler. That day he called me at the Chronicle, all of Atlantic Records roared in my ears: Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin – Jerry’s kids. Led Zeppelin he only signed to the label. The others he left to mankind and beyond. That I should find myself in one of the five bathrooms at his Long Island home following Sir Doug’s paradise getaway still strikes me as something I saw in a film rather than actually experienced first hand. Whether it was a tiny bathroom with a large photograph of Duane Allman, or the other way around, I swear the spirit of the slide guitar god kept a whisker wired to that water closet. That black and white picture was breathing, and Wexler’s story to go with it stardust. Read More | Comment »

Prompting blasts of horn nudge a band member to the microphone. “Welcome to the Haunted House,” he laughs. “Yes indeed, we have a live recording session tonight and we’d like for y’all to get in the groove and participate, with all this talking microphones and stuff. We’re going to play funky music all night. Heh-heh.” That stony chuckle tickles the crowd. “We’d like for you to be a funky audience all night. So let’s get together and when we get together we’re sure to have a good time.” A blazing guitar workout preps Temptations smoker “Get Ready,” which segues into a hard line R&B version of the Supremes’ “Come See About Me,” then 11 warts and all minutes of James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Wilson Pickett (“Mustang Sally”), Sly Stone (“Dance to the Music”), and Jackie Wilson (“Higher and Higher”) follow cover by cover. Willie Bobo’s roiling chitlun feast, “Fried Neck Bones,” and the scream cutting off “Stormy Monday” because “we’re gonna take a brief pause” shut down disc one’s first set. Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band has just snapped every vertebra in the room. Read More | Comment »

Pounding breakers open into the now classic rock funnel cresting on Top 40 radio a month prior to Ronald Reagan’s first presidential innauguration on Jan. 20, 1980.

Your love is like a tidal wave
Spinning over my head
Drowning me in your promises
Better left unsaid

What a “Heartbreaker” – dream maker, love taker. A foxy cover of John “Cougar” Mellencamp’s pleading indiscretions, “I Need a Lover,” followed on both LP and FM radio, melting further fire and ice off this petite firestarter from Brooklyn named Patricia Mae Andrzejewski. “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” Trish.

On the new Pat Benatar, Ultimate Collection (Capital/EMI), disc one cements its unlikely progression of 1980s perfection on the third track, with the deliciously noir-lite title cut to “Heartbreaker” sponsor and debut album, In the Heat of the Night. Benatar’s trademark come-on/back off materializes out of the shadows of femme fatality as hot and bothered as Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People.

In the heat of the night
When you know it ain’t right
But you do what you want to do
You do what you feel
No one can feel like you

In Heat of the Night shook down a seven, “Heartbreaker” and the tousled tag-team of “If You Think You Know How to Love Me” and “We Live for Love” through “Rated X,” but only one other neon number surrendered its secrets under duress. The sole aural celluloid personally missed from this otherwise Ultimate Collection. A tune that unknowingly fueled the Chronicle’s sci-fi issue this week as irrefutably as one of the genre’s Mount Rushmore men, Arthur C. Clarke. Read More | Comment »

Last October, as Annie Lennox bewitched SMU’s McFarlin Memorial Auditorium in Dallas, one of her national and generational music peers humored at least one autograph hound while watching transfixed from the sixth row. Seems George Michael splits his time between Metroplex largesse, London courts, and Los Angeles with his Big D boyfriend, gallery owner Kenny Goss. “Hey neighbors, how’s it going?” the former Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou asked his über demonstrative Lone Star townies Sunday night at the American Airlines Center. “Thanks again. This is like coming home.” Three songs (“Fast Love,” Wham’s “I’m Your Man,” and “Father Figure”) into an almost three-hour cascade of nostalgia set against a skyscraping, Kanye West-like video backdrop, Michael had already succeeding in regressing back to an era where the wars were still cold and sexuality a hot-topic. Read More | Comment »

Interviews, by phone or in person, generally top out at 45 minutes, an hour. Anything going longer demands either a recess or a follow-up, or else both parties start getting fidgety. File it under the theory that focused concentration requires some sort of reset every 60 minutes. Tony Visconti, record producer to the stars, spoke lovingly about his latest charge, Real Animal Alejandro Escovedo, for just over a half-hour on the morning of June 10, after which our phoner was more of less done. Wrapping, I asked him if I could lob a couple more questions. Really, with someone of Visconti’s stature, you could elicit music history ‘til Elvis comes back for a snack, but that’s why last year he set his autobiography down in print. Bowie, Bolan, and the Brooklyn Boy produces enough rock & roll sound bites to satisfy Hall of Fame war-story quotas. Milton Berle’s foot-long certainly stands out…. Which left me with one burning inquiry about the album that could well become David Bowie’s Tattoo You – his final masterpiece – 2002’s Visconti-helmed Heathen, and of course a general prompting about a personal pet obsession. Tony was only too happy to oblige. As T. Rex once titled one of his Visconti productions, Tanx. Read More | Comment »

If you don’t know who Tony Visconti is, you don’t own enough David Bowie albums. Simply shelving The Man Who Sold the World, Low, Heroes, Scary Monsters, and Heathen made him a household name in my music library. That producer’s credit carried over onto my Thin Lizzy CDs: Bad Reputation, Live and Dangerous, Black Rose. I’m no T. Rex jeepster, but “Bang A Gong (Get It On),” “Children of the Revolution,” “20th Century Boy,” pretty much every Marc Bolan song you care to tick off, all Visconti. And those are just the greatest hits. Devour Visconti’s 2007 autobiography Bowie, Bolan, and the Brooklyn Boy and you can tack on credits for U2, Paul McCartney, Joe Cocker, Morrissey, Gentle Giant, the Boomtown Rats, the Stranglers. When that mark of excellence stamped the advances for Alejandro Escovedo’s new Real Animal, Austin’s very own Lou Reed/Iggy Pop/Mick & Keith had finally arrived in rock royalty style. Although such an honorarium had already been bestowed on his John Cale-produced The Boxing Mirror (2006), Real Animal bares its incisors as firecely as Escovedo’s Stooges set staple “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” as three-guitar Skynyrd as the True Believers, as “Black Shiny Beast” as mothballed glam locals Buick MacKane. Over the horn, Visconti’s energetic calm betrays traces of English vowels and phraseology picked up during the Brooklyn boy’s formative career decades in the UK. Escovedo’s Real Animal dictated our agenda, but once that inquiry closed, there were a few other questions begging a little air. We’ll come back to those presently. Read More | Comment »

Just south of midnight, Scott and I staggered down Broad Street. Well, not staggered – lurched, tripped, stumbled. Three sizzled days accompanying 3am nights of “Philadelphia Freedom” in conjunction with last week’s 31st Annual Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Convention had reduced us to fondue. “Do you know where we are?” whimpered Sancho Panza. “Of course not!” spittled Quixote. “I think we need to take a taxi back to the hotel,” muttered the first, turning on his burro and peering into the steamy mist of a mammoth glass and girder opera house. Broad way glowed yellow brick road. “Two more blocks,” begged Harold. “There it is!” exclaimed Kumar pointing not 10 yards ahead. I spun around as if shot, neon catching me in its arms, an oasis in a stenciled shop front. Closed, of course, and no Sunday hours before my flight home. One particular CD rested against the windowsill of Antone’s Records' East coast cousin, a smaller, more tourist-minded “souvenir shop.” “Look, here’s the office,” nodded Scott. I leapt into the dark alcove, fumbling with my camera. Proof, I needed irrefutable evidence. For myself. The disc’s one thing, Sony Legacy shelf-fodder for Barnes & Noble washing up amid a sea of South by Southwest 2008: The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble & Huff’s Greatest Hits. The O’Jays’ opening shut-down, “Love Train” then “Back Stabbers.” Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes countering with “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” and “The Love I Lost.” Stone soul witching-hour 1970s staples. “Me and Mrs. Jones,” Three Degrees of amniotic “When Will I See You Again” and their MFSB boop-oop-a-dooper, “T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia).” Lou Rawls’ black velvet pledge “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine,” McFadden & Whithead promising there “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now.” Teddy Pendergrass announcing Ms. Patti LaBelle. Turn your love light infrared. Read More | Comment »

Five bone-rattling hours worth of the new Live After Death DVD encores with a 15-minute salutation titled “’ello Texas.” Shot at the Alamo, July 1983, during Iron Maiden’s Piece of Mind tour, the featurette cuts between band member interviews and a throttling performance at San Antonio’s hallowed HemisFair Arena, demolished in 1995. “The Trooper,” “Flight of Icarus, “22 Acacia Avenue,” and “Iron Maiden” all execute trademark tales of historical disembowelment with galloping gusto, but it was frontman Bruce Dickinson that caught my ear, saying that the then UK quintet survived outside traditional radio airplay and MTV. Not true. MTV’s skeleton in the closet belongs to Iron Maiden. Little more than six months separates the debut of MTV, summer 1981, and Maiden’s commercial breakthrough the following March, third LP Number of the Beast. Not only did the fledgling cable channel broadcast the group’s great Indian massacre “Run to the Hills” in regular rotation. I can personally attest that MTV’s summer nights 1982 dripped the sweat and blood of Iron Maiden. Once in bed, 9pm or so, my girlfriend’s parents never descended the stairs until morning. Late night, with a bad case of the munchies, me and my gal zoned out to the station’s overnight programming, which more often than not consisted of entire concerts whiling away the hours. Iron Maiden rammed it home round the clock. Read More | Comment »

Rushing into Stubb’s early Sunday evening to find Alan Sparhawk already writhing through “Destroyer” on his antique, Mahogany-hued Les Paul had the appearance of arriving at your own exorcism late. Duluth, Minnesota’s Retribution Gospel Choir has already born one of 2008’s devilishly best platters in its eponymous spring debut, so catching Wilco’s opener was paramount. Low-fi pioneer and professional six-string stranglehold specialist, Sparhawk tore into his very own My Aim is True-era Elvis Costello epithet, “Kids,” followed shortly by True Believers evocation “Easy Prey.” 100-pounds thin in a snug black shirt, with shoulder-length blond curls, the guitarist looked for all the world like Angus Young as he beat his instrument into plowshares. Hüsker Dü never went so missed. Jeff Tweedy, on the other hand, never wore such a dour, joyless expression as he stepped onstage at the stroke of 8:15pm. As Wilco’s lovably hangdog air traffic controller steadily scales Dylanesque heights of musical worship, the mantle continues to bow his shoulders even when cloaked in a green pinstriped sports jacket. Fortunately, he’s been saved by rock & roll, literally – by his own sung admission – so once he launched into opener “Sunken Treasure,” his clenched face loosened and finally broke into a sheepish grin just prior to “Handshake Drugs,” which tore the first of two sold-out shows a new blowhole. “Happy Mother’s Day,” he offered, “you guys rule. It’s the best day of the year – just look at this.” Austin never weathered such perfect May temperatures Sunday night, so Tweedy and company obliged with 26 songs in 135 minutes that even engaged the high school girl in front of me, texting her boyfriend, “I’m at some concert with my mom.” Read More | Comment »

“Hello, good evening Austin, Texas,” smiled Rush bassist and singer Geddy Lee into the microphone at his small keyboard set-up. “How are you Texans? I’ve been told it’s been 14 years since we’ve played here. How’d that happen? We’re sorry….” Not as sorry as some 7,000 Lone Star salivates cozily ensconced into the Frank Erwin Center’s classic rock configuration. Boston, Scorpions, UFO: 1970s arena bash never flickered out in Austin. It got reconfigured. Not so of the local pit stop for Rush’s 1993 capitulation Counterparts. Full FEC drum, the Canadian power trio’s thunderdome set moved mountains as it has since the Nixon administration despite its forgettable album sponsor. Other than 1991’s Roll the Bones, off which shuddered last night’s third slot, “Ghost of a Chance,” the grunge decade was one of sporadic studio quicksand for the band. Millennial returns run about the same, 2002’s Vapor Trails a metallurgic hammer, but last year’s Snakes & Arrows brought down by drummer Neil Peart’s painfully New Age lyrics. Snakes & Arrows Live, a new double-disc set, corrects the problem same as opener “Limelight” each and every night. Red River’s concrete fountainhead stood and emptied its burnt orange lungs at the Moving Pictures masterwork, its fair-haired architect Alex Lifeson delivering the first of almost three hours worth of hold-your-breath guitar solos. Signals’ “Digital Man,” ones and zeros only 25 years ahead of their time, batted second as if the deep album track had been anchoring Rush's live line-ups since 2112. “Ghost of a Chance,” a watershed tune in Lifeson’s long illustrious line of melodic precision, soared on the guitarist’s perfectly enunciated spacial soul. Read More | 6 Comments »

“WeareKeepofKalessinfromNorway,” exhaled the croaking accent. You could spot them beforehand in the stage wings as their long instrumental intro decibeled symphonic: lanky, blond, raccoon black eyes. Out front of Stubb’s streaming early birds, 6:45pm, the Trondheim quartet’s light coating of ghostly pancake make-up glowed in the slowly setting sun, making its first appearance of the hot doomy day. Keep of Kalessin’s front line, in tight black leather pants and leather-embossed black shirts, had already worked up a Lone Star sweat before striking note one. That musical avalanche struck fast and hard, guitarist and bassist doing the long locks spin cycle as the singer’s deep rasp bellowed just ahead of their lightning strike melodies. Only the drummer’s incessant machine gun double kick drums, never wavering from their brick wall of rhythm, marred Kalessin’s 30 minutes of opening pummel. Read More | Comment »

Lester Bangs’ critical brilliance thrashed for its all too doomed life with the post-Gonzo understanding that sometimes only unraveled psyches can express that which is essentially unexplainable. Mountain Goats herder John Darnielle took this to black heart in his treatise on Sabbath’s Master of Reality. Literally. Over 50 titles now crowd the bookshelf of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, the literary equivalent to Eagle Rock's Classic Album DVD issues. Novella-length booklets dedicated to aural Picasso’s including Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, written by former Austin-American Statesman Don McCleese, and Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones, they’re appreciative by design, but more to the point, introductory. You thumb Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times on the one, but you read Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica to learn the by laws of his storied, avant-garde roots brotherhood. Darnielle’s Reality, meanwhile, straightjackets the essence of Black Sabbath where 40 years of music musings and cultural damnation have failed. Read More | Comment »

If ever a group was perfectly synchronized to the cacophonous acoustics of the new Austin Music Hall, the Mars Volta is it. The touring octet models that particular Mark of Zorro like both the Mexican flag across its amps last night and the one held aloft stage front by a surging crush of human sardines on the venue’s floor. Of course when the Mars Volta last landed on the Music Hall – April 2005 – the same muddle of bottled lightning ricocheted inside the building’s metallic bowels. Cedric Bixler Zavala and his paper thin partner in black Omar Rodriguez Lopez stoked a demon charanga of gargantuan proportions. Three years ago, the cause given was beast of burden Frances the Mute. Now, it’s Holy War The Bedlam in Goliath. Previously, the band’s power line guitarrorism cut slightly sharper and clearer in the Music Hall’s square box. Up in the new revamp’s also teeming bleachers, the only clearly audible instrument was the stage left horn man blowing hurricane gales on flute and saxophones tenor and soprano. The near sellout clamored his due. Santana invented nuclear Latin boogie at Woodstock and the Mars Volta destabilizes its compartmentalized meter with MC5 punk fury. A decade ago at Emo’s, TMV mothership At the Drive-In compressed this alternate power source into tighter, denser reactor rods. In the present, ATDI’s primary spin-off ratchets up its untamed combustion to levels well off the charts. Singer and guitarist have tapped into a breathtaking musical force of nature that electrocutes the Q-Tip axe man and funkifies the poodle-cut frontman, who executed handstands, flying leaps off the bass drum, and mic stand baton twirls. You couldn’t make out a single syllable of Bixler Zavala’s nasal screech, but he looked like James Motherfucking Brown doing it. After 90 minutes, Off the Record and I had seen enough, The Bedlam in Goliath melting into a single sonic wave where only “Ilyena” and “Goliath” sounded out above the fray. On disc, TMV’s diminishing returns began after 2002 debut the Tremulant EP. Live, they “Kick Out the Jams” like no other au currant, recognizable anthems be damned. Read More | 3 Comments »

Flashback number one occurred during the third song of Shine a Light, “She Was Hot,” second single off 1983’s Undercover. Four shows from the European leg of the Rolling Stones' 2005/2006 Bigger Bang tour hadn’t produced such a nugget, but two weeks after the band’s razing of Austin’s Zilker Park (10.22.06), they pulled it out at the Oakland Coliseum. A song long dismissed save perhaps for its equally forgotten slapstick clip running many cable lifetimes ago on Night Flight, live it sent me scrambling back to Undercover. Sure enough: Keith Richards gnaws its Chuck Berry bramble and spits out barbwire. Martin Scorsese blows the shoot in Shine a Light, staying on Mick Jagger when his 18 cameras should be zeroing in on Richards and Ronnie Wood, but no matter. On the Shine a Light soundtrack, it proves itself fraternal twin to Zilker Park freezer burn “She’s So Cold.” Three songs later, Shine a Light pulls out “Some Girls,” another Oakland jolt from my lifetime Stones stalk, only this one from 1999, opening night of the No Security tour. We had shitty seats, but when the boys produced “Shine a Light” and the whole indoor arena sang it with the house lights on, Exile on Main Street rang rebirth not dissolution. “Shine a Light” holds its lighter aloft only over the film’s end credits roll – live – but on the 2-CD version of the soundtrack, its bonhomie unfurls cocktails before the Last Supper. Read More | Comment »

“Free trip to Norway,” read the email subject line. That got my attention. So did frostbite and snowbanks downstairs in the open-air train station at the Oslo airport in February three months later.

“Arctic Circle,” pronounced my father when first informed of Norwegian hospitality. Top of the world, ma! If I ever harbored designs to the Norse Pole it’s courtesy of Led Zeppelin.

Now being accosted by a gang of music thugs in the back of a school bus in the 7th or 8th grade and bullied towards some sort of blood pledge to Led Zeppelin didn’t exactly foster my fealty to the UK’s other fab four. Luckily, my deflowering had gone down several years earlier with a new vinyl copy of Led Zeppelin IV. They had me at the guitar propeller crank that turns over “Black Dog,” though “Rock and Roll” cedes literal embodiment to no namesake. “D’yer Mak’er,” forever first time, mortgaged Houses of the Holy next.

My first year of high school brought 1979’s In Through the Out Door, “In the Evening,” “Fool in the Rain,” and “All of My Love” triangulating radio. On the vinyl’s inner sleeve, the just-add-water colors really worked, “Hot Dog.” The following year, I was in class the days alcohol overdoses killed both AC/DC live wire Bon Scott (2.19.80) and Led Zeppelin wingman John Bonham (9.25.80). I was doing my math homework the night John Lennon was assasinated (12.8.80). I blame Ronald Reagan for the massacre. Read More | Comment »

“R.E.M. was at the Hole in the Wall [last] night and two-thirds of them were onstage. Peter Buck played with Minus 5 and Mike Mills played with Syd Straw, while Michael Stipe held court on the sidewalk.”

That’s this morning’s report from down in the Hole man Paul Minor. While some of us rocked by candlelight to the Athens trio’s forthcoming floor-boarder for Warner Bros. – their 14th – the band itself “held court” here in the heart of cow town at UT’s most venerable watering Hole. Paradox, irony, synchronicity?

Irony dials up Law of Rock No. 12: veteran rock acts of even the most modest integrity never want to repeat themselves. Their longsuffering fans, on the other hand, yearn for the glory days. These opposing forces usually rendezvous at the point that a group strips back down to its roots. In R.E.M.’s case, that came to life as 1994’s Monster (and to a lesser extent 1996 follow-up New Adventures in Hi-Fi), stiff-legged guitar farewell in the face of diminishing returns Up (1998), Reveal (2001), and Around the Sun (2004). The new Accelerate: third stone rocker from the Sun. Read More | Comment »

“They’re like every band in San Francisco right now,” smiled Jello Biafra dismissively.

He should know. No one canvassed the musical talent more thoroughly at by:Larm this past weekend in Oslo than the decade-old Norwegian music festival’s 2008 keynote speaker, who was everywhere, and always down front. He sang the praises of Oslo’s coastal neighbor, Bergen, but three young Finnish girls Ramonesing the “Blitzkrieg Bop” just weren’t melting the arctic circle off the professional raconteur’s Dead Kennedys heart. Much better, he touted, were Norway’s Cyaneed, four women doing what Sleater-Kinney did in three. And convincingly so, Scandinavian so: blindingly blonde.

Stalingrad Cowgirls, though, as black (hair) and white (complexion) as early Joan Jett (open the photo gallery above), multiplied their exuberant power of three into something more universal: exploding heart youth. They made you ache high school in all its struggling nonconformity. Henna Vaarala, whose perfectly cut features recalled the dark queen of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, split the difference on bass between sisters Enni and Riina Kivelä, frontwoman and backbeat respectively. Finland’s tiny town of Salla kisses polar extremes by mere kilometers in its Stalingrad Cowgirls. Sing it:

“We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow….” Read More | 2 Comments »