Dancing About Architecture

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Champ's Final Bell

Deschamp "Champ-- Hood is dead, and the old line "I didn't even know he was sick" keeps running through my head. Y'see, it was a couple of months ago, at an Austin Music Commission meeting I attended, when someone first asked me if rumors of Hood having cancer were true. It was the first I'd heard about the fiddler, guitarist, and all-around Austin musical legend possibly being ill, and no one could confirm the story. A few weeks later, I finally got around to asking Champ's buddy Eddie Wilson to call the Uncle Walt's Band founder to ask him personally. Wilson called me back to say that Champ assured him that he was in the best of health. It was only last week I learned what Hood had been keeping from the public at large. Sadly, the situation resolved itself before I had to think about hassling a sick man who didn't want people to worry about his condition. The 49-year-old Hood died peacefully on Saturday, November 3, 2001, at 5:55am, following a long battle with lung cancer, one he had managed to hide from even his closest friends almost until the very end. That trickery worked both ways, however. One of those friends, Larry Monroe at KUT was aware Hood didn't have long to live and decided to pay tribute to Hood while he was still around to appreciate it. Hood also took note of a Mambo John Treanor tribute set when it shifted to focus on some of his best work and is reported to have turned to a friend and asked, "Why are they playing all this stuff by me?" Steve Wertheimer at the Continental Club says that he knew something was wrong but didn't expect Hood to pass away so quickly. "He's gonna be a missed man here at the club," says Wertheimer of the longtime Tuesday "Hippie Hour" regular. Toni Price, whose Web site www.toniprice.com has a nice tribute to her beloved bandmate, has been performing with a smaller temporary backup band for the past few weeks as Hood's condition worsened. Cards for the Hood family will be forwarded if sent c/o Paisley Robertson, 2411 Kinney Rd., Austin, TX 78704. The local services for Champ Hood are set for this Sunday, November 11, 2pm, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, 4700 Grover. Also, take this as a heads-up to appreciate your longtime Austin musicians; as with Treanor, Hood, Walter Hyatt, and even the absentee Dan Del Santo, they won't be around forever.

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Mixed Notes

David Patrick Dunn has devised a unique and simple way to help the Red Cross effort. He's assembling what he calls The Essential Austin Box Set to sell via the "Auction For America" project on eBay. What is the Essential Austin Box Set? Well, it's nothing until your band autographs a copy of its latest album and sends it to the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau (201 E. Second St., Austin, TX 78701). Dunn hopes to have assembled enough signed albums to qualify for the "essential" title by Thanksgiving, so get that disc into the mail, take it to the alternate drop point at the Borders Books & Music north location, or check www.essentialaustin.com for the "essential" info... Bruce Springsteen joined Joe Ely at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, NJ, for a show benefiting the families victimized by the September 11 terrorist attacks. Ely helped in raising more than $700,000 for 160 Monmouth County, NJ, families who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks. Ely returns home next weekend to play the Author's Party at the Texas Book Festival with his Flatlanders buddies Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Call 320-5451 for ticket info... Bruce Robison has recently been celebrating his first No. 1 country single with the Tim McGraw/Faith Hill cover of his ballad "Angry All the Time," though I'm not certain what chart he's going by. Billboard has had the tune listed at a respectable No. 3 for the past few weeks... Schatzi's EP, self-released by the band last December, is out on Mammoth as of last week. The band's been on the road and is happy to find that after only three weeks' availability to college radio, the EP is at No. 35 on the CMJ Top 200 national chart... The heyday of Red Buttons is long gone, and nowadays everybody gets a dinner -- or at least a tribute album. In the works currently is one such disc dedicated to the words and music of performance punk Lisa Suckdog Carver. Suckdog collaborator Coz the Shroom, whose own new Orchard of the Tortured will be available at his November 14 show at Room 710, is helping assemble other Austin bands to join the project. E-mail him at [email protected] if interested, with or without attaching a photo of yourself peeing in a catbox with a coke bottle up your butt... You super high-fidelity freaks will be glad to know that Eric Johnson's Ah Via Musicom comes out on DVD audio in December... Look for Texas Folklife Resources' "Western Swing Mandolin Workshop" featuring country great Johnny Gimble and local jazz pro Paul Glasse this Saturday, Nov. 10, 3pm, at the TFR offices, 1317 South Congress. Call 441-9255 to make a reservation... "Between Beerland, Room 710, Red Eyed Fly, and of course Stubb's, I think they've got the live stuff covered," says John Wickham, whose Elysium club opened in the shell of the old Atomic Cafe last week. Wickham says he's put in AC and fixed the place up a bit, but not enough to scare off the old regulars. Live bands aren't completely out of the question, he says, especially since "it's a shame to waste this great stage." Over on Sixth Street, meanwhile, there's still plenty of room for live music, so keep an eye open for the upcoming Acoustic Cafe above the Pecan Street Cafe... The November issue of Vanity Fair is their annual "Music Issue," and besides featuring another "nice cheekbones" shot of Davíd Garza, Austin's Waterloo Records and Video was spotlighted along with nine other stores across the country as one of the best record stores in the USA. That means you can add Vanity Fair to the list that includes Details, Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Playboy, and Fortune, all of whom have featured Waterloo Records at some point... Spoon will be joining Cake (insert your own dessert joke here) for some East Coast dates before heading to the Midwest for their own headlining shows. After the tour, Spoon will head back into the studio to finish recording their next full-length, due out in 2002 on Merge Records... Addendum to last week's anthrax scare at Emo's: Terri Lord writes, "It was a little unclear in your mention of the bomb scare incident at Emo's November 1 that Gretchen and I were leaving the shakers for war protesters. We were basking in the afterglow of the fabulous peace march the day before and jokingly convinced ourselves there might be the occasional bypasser who would want to spontaneously protest the war in Afghanistan. I think we were just trying to make each other laugh, although it seems foolish now. We certainly weren't leaving the shakers for the people who were protesting the show we were playing, an important distinction." Also, credit got left off the fine snap of the Diamond Smugglers last week. That was a digital photograph by Jan Sanders of Los Angeles.

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Last Chance For SXSW

Time's almost up! The South by Southwest Last Chance drop-off date for application to play the music festival is next Tuesday, Nov. 13, at Ruby's Bar-B-Que (29th @ Guadalupe), 6pm-midnight. Bring a CD or cassette of original materials (at least three songs), a press kit, if available, including a bio, photo, and press clips along with a fee of $20. Showcase applications are also available on the www.sxsw.com Web site. Acts will be notified no later than February 8, 2002. Ruby's will be running dinner and beer specials for the event.