Countless films, Rancho Deluxe to Road House, have courted the sheer euphoria of a perfect honky-tonk pairing. Soup to nuts – Songwriter to Honeydripper, locally – what Mssrs. Jimmy Buffett, Jeff Healey, Willie Nelson, and Gary Clark Jr. bottled (respectively), Delbert McClinton brewed Saturday at Gruene Hall.

In metal, like hip-hop, ofttimes one must wade through a lengthy undercard to hit the sweet spot on the bill. For Mayhem Fest at the Austin 360 Amphitheater Friday, that meant surviving post-apocalyptic conditions and a caricature musical genre in order to glimpse Swedish death metal contingent Amon Amarth and their Viking ship stage set.

Five numbers into the Monkees’ 30-song, two-hour set at the Long Center Wednesday, the small screen loomed large. A video backdrop scrolled a continuous run of TV clips from the original quartet’s prime time heyday, 1966-1968, which then spawned a universe of images and even a film. Those four had it all – wit, charm, looks, and boy could they sing.

Last Friday, about this hour, my wife and I sat in the outer office to Rolling Stone, waiting for our friend David Fricke to give us the “nickel tour.” The magazine’s now infamous “Bomber” issue lay on the table in the waiting area. I bagged it, then read the cover story on the flight home. It’s almost as good as the Gary Clark Jr. piece in there.

Self-effacing about his “masterful combination of soft rock and REO Speedwagon,” Robert Plant also failed to update his 40-year-old stage moves last night at a sold-out Moody Theater. Yet, joke as he did upon his Americana conversion, the Led Zeppelin frontman continues to age with grace and wit into the unwieldy assignation of rock & roll deity.

A bachelor in my 40s, I’d never seen a pressure cooker until my final girlfriend whipped up a pot roast in hers on about our fifth date. That’s when she had me. Now married, we’re fonder of that crock pot than most cooking implements. There’s no love of the blender, for instance. I put it down to the time my mate shrugged and threw a handful of weed into it.

Chaos in Tejas came, left its boot print on our face, and went. End of music festivals until ACL, right? Almost. While I always space the spring/summer concerts at Barton Springs, this year’s annual avalanche of music fests nearly caused me to miss the announcement of Wimberley’s 2nd Annual Blue Hole Concerts for the Park, beginning today at 5pm.

Before E. Sixth rose up to rival both its west side progenitor and the post-war chitlin’ circuit as Austin’s preeminent music district, there was the North Door. Located on the same block as Encore Records and three minutes from CiT headquarters at 1100 E. Fifth, its roomy ambiance turned into an empty threat Friday for local earth shakers Same Sac.

Austin’s annual run of spring music festivals works me into a zombie. Chaos in Tejas’ first-night spectrum, from the hiccup pop of locals Deep Time to Kiwi parallels the Bats – with the Wire-y Parquet Courts and punk pioneers the Damned in-between – surely roused me. Yet only the death metal barrage of Benediction truly brought me back to life.