earache!

Nearly 40 years of Led Zeppelin bootlegs prove beyond a scintilla of doubt that the second greatest English quartet were a mixed bag live. Jimmy Page could crack open terra firma one night, then the band would sputter like a Studebaker the next. My lovingly illicited new $28 DVD, 126 reunion minutes in London’s O2 Arena last December 10, hasn’t changed the tune.

Practically shot from atop the flagpole crowning the 20,000-plus seater, Zeppelin’s return to this mortal plane – in this case – initially testifies to (ahem) documentarian resolve, the zoom capabilities of this particularly eye in the sky, and judicious use of the next fellow’s shaggy head as a shield from view. When the band’s Recorder of History issues the concert out of his Les Paul laboratory, the second Led Zeppelin DVD of the millennial age will no doubt rival 2005’s Pink Floyd reunion on the Live 8 DVD box. Until then, this bird’s eye view affords dispassionate observation of a once-in-a-lifetime rock & roll convergence. There may well be a Zeppelin reunion tour as Page has said he wants, but there will only ever be this one show played by these four individuals for a man who changed music history as seismically as the group he put his faith in. Read More | 1 Comment »

There’s a style of facial hair known as a hipster, defined as the separate growths of a mustache, soul patch, and chin beard. While the local search for a hipster sporting a hipster was fruitless, I did start to notice a lot of dudes are rocking facial hair.

Then I met local musician Bryan Nelson, who appeared on our Oct. 19, 2007, cover. In addition to producing, engineering, and playing in Gorch Fock and the Little Bicycles, the guy has a 29-inch beard. A bright-orange one.

Intrigued, I asked to photograph him. It snowballed from there. Nelson told me he was "sponsoring" beards for Misprint's 2nd Annual Beard and Moustache Contest, which went down last Saturday at Club de Ville. I learned a few things:

1) It truly is an art.
2) Ladies love the facial locks.
3) Some ladies don't mind wearing the facial locks.

Click through the image gallery, collected from the Misprint contest and Rio Rita's recent gear swap, for all the handlebar you can handle. Read More | 1 Comment »

Journalist, blogger, promoter, radio host, and all-around hustler Matt Sonzala was reppin' the Houston hip-hop scene way before anyone outside the 281 area code knew the names Paul Wall and Mike Jones. Sonzala has been booking hip-hop artists for South by Southwest for several years but was recently hired on full-time. More than 150 hip-hop acts take the stage in Austin from March 12 to 16, and whether they are living legends or local unknowns, Sonzala is the man responsible for getting them on schedule. Bump & Hustle caught up with him last week to talk about the fest's hip-hop lineup.

Bump & Hustle: What are you most excited about this year?
Matt Sonzala: David Banner and Killer Mike doing a panel together at the Carver Center on Saturday [March 15]. Before they go on, I’m showing a film called Slingshot Hip Hop, a documentary about hip-hop in Palestine, and another movie called I Love Hip Hop in Morocco. After that there’s going to be a performance by World Trade, which is Bavu Blakes and Element 7D. Also, having Bun B and the whole UGK family is very exciting. Read More | Comment »

Radiohead has confirmed a few dates and venues for the first leg of its U.S. tour behind latest In Rainbows. Thom Yorke and company visit Houston's Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion May 17 and Dallas' recently renamed Superpages.com Center the following evening. No opening artists or Austin dates have been announced. Presale tickets are scheduled to go on sale Thursday through W.A.S.T.E., with general tickets becoming available Feb. 16. Read More | Comment »

It’s Saturday night before Valentine’s Day and I’m spending it with the man I’ve spent more Saturday nights with than all my husbands and boyfriends combined. He’s been married all these years so it’s been a little dicey, but we’ve managed just fine. We even got his wife to let me “borrow” him for a very public annual event for about twenty-five years, and since I was often married or attached, it looked perfectly innocent.

And in that corny kind of Same Time, Next Year way, there was always that moment when he and I would stand together in front of hundreds of people once a year. No one knew about those Saturday nights, those precious hours after dinner and before midnight. During the two years I lived in Hawaii, my friend E.A. acted as go-between and would record him sending “messages” to me, because his voice is so divine. Sometimes we even spent Tuesday and Wednesday evenings together. And to think it all started on a small, left-of-the-dial radio station in Austin, Texas. Read More | Comment »

The mirror behind the Mohawk’s inside stage produces an oddly unsettling effect. The frosted glass reflects another world, one paralleling its own wood and brick reality. The audience stares dumbed upon themselves, and the performer is left naked and open in the hindsight. Seated before the full room with only her acoustic guitar Wednesday night, it seemed an appropriate environment for Nina Nastasia.

The New Yorker’s songs have always exposed an unnerving intimacy, her powerful voice confidently pitching high and whispering soft in a confessional paradoxically strengthened in her own insecurities. Yet there was also an easy reciprocation from the crowd, who seemed largely her friends, in the discarding of hard stances, the following of her intimations through the looking glass. Read More | Comment »

Richard Kern won’t be winning an Academy Award anytime soon. Or an Independent Spirit Award, for that matter. You won’t hear his name in a list alongside Jim Jarmusch, Paul Thomas Anderson, and John Waters. But he is, nonetheless, a cultural icon and a purveyor of the cinema of transgression (read Marc Savlov’s 2004 interview with Kern, “Transcending Transgression”). Beginning in the Eighties as an erotic filmmaker shooting people like Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins, Kern is probably best known in record stores as the man who created the cover to Sonic Youth highlight EVOL.

Throughout the last three decades, Kern has branched out into music videos (SY’s “Death Valley 69,” King Missile’s “Detachable Penis”), art shows, and zines, but he always kept at least one, um, member in erotic photography. Or in the case of the 280 glossy pages of his new photo book, Action (Taschen Books, $39.99), straight-up pornography.

And no, there’s nothing immoral or unethical about it. Kern’s photographs are beautifully shot and executed and oftentimes quite interesting: A (very) young woman squats down innocently and partially clothed grasping a trio of perfectly white eggs; another chews on a packet of birth-control pills while laying statically on a rumpled bed. The contrast is humorous and ironic. There’s no doubt that Kern has the talent. Read More | Comment »

Before January recedes too far in the rear view mirror, I wanted to point out two releases from last month worth checking out.

Ray Bonneville’s Goin’ by Feel (Red House) has an Austin connection, co-produced by Gurf Morlix and partially recorded here. Born in Canada and raised in the States, Bonneville's a songwriter and guitarist with a solid buzz among folkies of all stripes, and with this disc it’s easy to see why. A bluesman in the same vein as J.J. Cale and a storyteller like John Hiatt, his sixth disc is funky and dark, filled with interesting characters and spare yet solid grooves. In another Austin connection, “I Am the Big Easy,” a potent tribute to post-Katrina New Orleans, features Eliza Gilkyson on backing vocals. If you’ve never heard of Bonneville, this is an excellent introduction to his brand of gritty Americana. Read More | Comment »

MVD Visual has been releasing an excellent slew of music DVDs lately, and the brand spanking new Flipper Live is a true bone(r) for any fan. The quartet’s logo had them forever pegged as a hardcore band, but Flipper was seriously not, at least within the West Coast definition. They loosely existed with the realms of new wave, noise, and punk, all rolled into a sloppy, hot mess. The sound of grunge to come. Plus, they had a sense of humor.

Bassist/vocalist Will Shatter died in 1987, and replacement bassist John Dougherty died in 1995. Singer Bruce Loose once said Flipper was like Spinal Tap, except the bassists kept dying. Krist Novoselic just joined the band, which reunited in '05, so maybe this one will stick and Flipper’s recent sporadic live shows will become less so.

Yes, but the DVD. A 1980 Berkeley concert reveals the early incarnation of Flipper; Bruce Loose still has acne on his face. “Low Rider” (gotta love that sax solo),“Love Canal,” and a drunken performance of “The Wheel,” notable if only to see the crowd, which is even drunker than the band, are all indelible marks of a band on to ... something. Read More | Comment »

A few weeks ago at Momo’s, Tim Crane stepped on stage wearing a vintage green suit and white alligator skin shoes. It’s the kind of getup that would make most people look goofier than Jeff Daniels in Dumb & Dumber. But the look suited the 25-year-old vocalist and frontman of local nine-piece T-Bird & the Breaks just fine. His slick threads matched the band’s vintage R&B sounds and the shoes flashed as Crane's leg kicks punctuated the band’s horns. Bump & Hustle caught up with the gravel-voiced singer to talk about the band’s music and the albums that helped shape its sound. T-Bird & the Breaks play Friday at Momo’s and Monday evenings through March at Antone’s for happy hour.

Bump & Hustle: You’re a relative newcomer on the Austin scene. What’s your musical background?
Tim Crane: I was in a blues rock band up in Massachusetts for a couple years. We would play in New York and Boston. It was me and Sammy [Patlove], who plays rhythm guitar in the Breaks. We wanted to go in more of a soul and R&B direction but my buddies in the band were more into Aerosmith. I made beats on my computer for a while but my background is more music appreciation. I’d skip high school back in the day to put fliers from the record stores under people’s windshield wipers in exchange for free records. Read More | Comment »

It was a small, well-behaved crowd of about 25 that gathered at the Texas Showdown at 2610 Guadalupe on Saturday, Jan. 26. We looked more like casual shoppers at Whole Foods than remnants of Austin’s first generation of punks in the late 1970s, but among us were one-time members of the Huns, the Offenders, the Chickadiesels, the Explosives, Cold Sweat, Sharon Tate’s Baby, the Hostages, Toxic Shock, and the Negroes as well as bonafide scenesters like Music Awards Presentation Chief Dayna Blackwell and me.

We chose the West University drinking establishment because thirty years ago, it was called Raul’s and was the scene of Austin's first punk show, a post-Sex Pistols-fueled event featuring the Violators (with Dylan guitarist Carla Olsen and future Go-Go Kathy Valentine) and the Skunks (with writer Jesse Sublett and soon-to-be Plimsoul Eddie Munoz but before Jon Dee Graham joined). The Sex Pistols show just weeks before gave Austin’s creative community permission to rebel. Not that we needed a bunch of English musicians in a group as contrived as the Monkees to lead the way. We were Texans and black leather jackets were just something to slap a cowboy hat atop. Read More | Comment »

When it comes to classic rock, I’m no conspiracy theorist. Like Cory Glover sang, Elvis is dead. So’s the Lizard King. George Harrison didn’t rip-off the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” with All Things Must Pass sacrament “My Sweet Lord.”

Scott Weiland, on the other hand, seemingly lived up to the ‘aka’ Gibby Haynes once bestowed upon his former tourmate’s band, Stone Temple Pilots: “Phony Boner Colons.” Last night at Stubb’s, a full house turned out for STP/Guns N’ Roses mash-up Velvet Revolver, as did the frontman himself, a notable no-show recently at Sundance. What didn’t make the trip to Austin, unfortunately, was Weiland’s voice.

Not that anyone crowded up in front of the stage noticed anything apparently. Beer, boneheads, and a fine ol’ time flowed freely, no one bothered by the fact that Weiland’s vocals appeared and sounded technologically enhanced. That would explain the sixth man onstage, a few feet from bassist Duff McKagan and trying to look invisible while tapping on his laptop. After warbling the opening lines to GNR’s “Patience” almost an hour into the performance, Weiland's vocals magically doubled in the song’s crescendo, and not because of McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum, the other two band members mic’d for harmonies. At song's end, the singer stepped over to laptop man, leaned into his ear, and waved his arm up and down as if to say, “The highs and lows need evening out.” Pay no attention to the man not behind the curtain, right? Read More | Comment »

The New York Times ran an article on Jan. 10 about the inseparable connection between music and exercise, “They’re Playing My Song. Time to Work Out.” Believe it or not, “Studies have shown that listening to music during exercise can improve results, both in terms of being a motivator (people exercise longer and more vigorously to music) and as a distraction from negatives like fatigue.” It seems obvious. I can’t walk down the hall without having a song in my head. Music and movement go together like coffee and cigarettes. Okay, it’s a weird comparison.

However, exercise and I are just now getting to be close. All those nights spent drinking in bars, eating at restaurants, and generally enjoying the bounty of Austin caught up with me. Urged on by a landmark birthday coming up this summer, I decided it was time to get to work.

I bought an iPod Shuffle and started searching. What album would make the fat just melt away? Which track could motivate me to run a half-marathon? We’re talking magic bullet here. Alas, nowhere in the expanses of the Internets could such bullet be found. I Googled “workout music” and was met with hundreds of premade discs jumping with that horrid Top 40 crap echoed in gyms worldwide. I can’t do my usual indie rock in spandex; it just doesn’t work for me. I need something to get me moving, and being a former Golden Girl – the Conroe High School drill team, not the awesome Eighties sitcom starring Rue McClanahan as Blanche Devereaux – I need something with a beat. I need to feel like I’m dancing. I need music to trick me into thinking that I’m enjoying what I’m doing.

Steven Kurutz’s NYT article cited a Dr. Costas Karageorghis, who sounded pretty official, saying that a song’s tempo should be between 120 and 140 beats per minute. Yep, indie rock is out. My sister has been cramming Justin Timberlake down my throat for years without much success (all right, I do like “SexyBack”), so maybe now is the time to learn to appreciate dance pop. Read More | 1 Comment »

Back by popular demand, the Invincible Czars reprise Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast in its entirety Saturday at Room 710.

Throughout February and March, Walden Media will be in Austin shooting Will, a feature film starring High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens that ends with a classic battle of the bands. In similar fashion, the Paul Green School of Rock Music concludes its trifecta of tribute shows (Black Sabbath, the Who) with a Guitar Gods showcase at Ruta Maya Friday and Saturday, 7pm.

Calling all gearheads. Rio Rita (1308 E Sixth Street) hosts the second music equipment swap meet and sale Saturday, 12-4pm. Power and small amps will be available to test out the equipment. Maybe if you're lucky you'll score one of these.

Don't forget the annual benefit for the Handsome Joel Foundation occurs tomorrow at Elysium with Dixie Witch, Broken Teeth, Pure Luck, Brewtality Inc., and Full Stride. Music starts at 10pm. Read More | Comment »

“No revelations in the water, no tears into the booze.”

That line haunts closer “Window Blues,” from Band of Horses' sophomore Sub Pop album, Cease to Begin. It's lead vocalist/guitarist Ben Bridwell's long fought realization, rising clean from sodden, broken ghosts. All ghosts are daunting, facing what has been left behind and what lies beyond, especially when the shadows haunting the hallways are your own. Perched between the promise of a world to come and the letting go of a world past lies the beauty of Cease to Begin’s paradox.

“Window Blues” is a devastating song, brutal in its hopefulness. It’s a requiem for mistakes, recognition of the small, crucial details overlooked and taken for granted as on debut Everything All the Time. But it’s in the embracing of the ghosts that Bridwell seems to find confidence in the relief of letting go. Read More | Comment »

I caught Black Joe Lewis & the Honey Bears for the first time a couple of Saturdays ago when they opened for Big Sam’s Funky Nation at a sold-out Continental Club. Their youthful, horn-laden, almost punk take on funk and blues was refreshing, and I wondered where Lewis' roots lie. I asked him for his Top 10 albums of all time, and the 26-year-old guitarist and vocalist readily accepted. Black Joe Lewis & the Honey Bears rock the Continental again tomorrow night. They're well worth seeing more than once.

Black Joe Lewis’ Top 10 Records of All Time (This Week):

1) Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsys
2) Bruce Springsteen, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.
3) Eightball & MJG, Comin’ Out Hard
4) Rocket from the Tombs, The Day the Earth Met the …
5) James Brown, Sex Machine (Live)
6) Howlin’ Wolf, Live in Cambridge, Ma., 1966
7) UGK, Ridin’ Dirty
8) Don Covay, King of Soul
9) Lightnin’ Hopkins, The Herald Recordings
10) The Color Changin’ Click, Homer Pimpson 2 Read More | Comment »

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings turned a sold-out Antone’s into a high-energy time warp Saturday. The crowd partied like it was 1969, largely because the Dap-Kings have mastered the art of authenticity. Much of the entertainment media (including this guilty writer) have played on a largely non-existent Sharon Jones vs. Amy Winehouse beef after the Dap-Kings helped create much of the old-school sound for Winehouse’s breakout Back to Black album. Like a worn out cassette tape, it’s a scenario that has played out over and over again throughout modern music history: A young white performer borrows the sound of a black artist to disproportionate acclaim and compensation.

If you need a primer on said scenario check Mos Def’s “Rock N Roll” or Gil Scott-Heron’s “Ain’t No New Thing.” As Scott-Heron ever so delicately says in the intro, “Chuck Berry was doing a very heavy rock ‘n’ roll thing … but white people couldn’t dig having their daughters go to no shows and cream over no black man wiggling on the stage so consequently they invented Elvis Presley.” You could call this an oversimplification but it would be hard to call it entirely inaccurate. Read More | Comment »

Floyd Moore passed away Monday. His name won’t mean much unless you were around in the early 1970s or are from Port Arthur, but trust me when I say that if Austin gets to call itself weird, Floyd was one of the reasons.

We struck up a MySpace correspondence a few months ago, when he wrote ragging me for not having gotten band lineage correct on a Uranium Savages piece I wrote some years back. As Floyd told it, he was the leader of the Marsh Mongrels, who played an infamous battle of the bands in the 1970s at the Ritz, where he worked. The Marsh Mongrels were later mildly famous for having Clifford Antone as their bassist. Read More | Comment »

This blog aims to capture life in the Austin music scene from a different angle, focusing more on the people in the pit and on the street than the musicians on stage. It's a space for everything from fashion to fans, and a place to expose people under the radar who make our scene thrive. Today's the first in a series of profiles on local record store clerks.

Meet Jeff Pettit, aka DJ Jefe, Cheapo Discs' go-to for alternative, punk, garage, surf, and soundtrack recommendations. His dad was one of the top 10 coin collectors in the nation, which sparked his interest in record collecting in junior high. Growing up in Wisconsin, college radio introduced him to Dr. Demento and the Ramones.

He’s never sold any of his vinyl, has seen the Spice Girls from 11th row center, and thinks it would be fun to play pinball with Rob Zombie, which says more about humbleness than music taste.

Experience: Worked at Zia Record Exchange and Radio KAOS before coming to Austin and Cheapo two-and-a-half years ago. Read More | Comment »

Sun City Girl Sir Richard Bishop drops in for a performance tomorrow night at Rancho Relaxo (3402 Merrie Lynn), with locals Weird Weeds, Ralph White, Gary Barftits, and more. If you didn't catch Bishop opening for Animal Collective last year, seeing him at this venue has that beat by a country mile. Starts at 5pm, $7-$10 suggested donation.

Tonight, just across Manor at the Salvage Vanguard Theater, catch Barftits (it just rolls off the tongue) along with Balmorhea, Bright Duplex, and A New Low for a sampling of some the best new local experimental twidlings. Read More | Comment »