Girls Rock Camp Austin held two week-long camps where girls ages 10-18 formed bands, wrote a song in one day, and performed the songs at incredibly cute and rocking showcases at the Parish the second and fourth Saturdays in July. Click on the image gallery for the next generation of Austin musicians.

Jon Dee Graham underwent emergency surgery at the University Medical Center at Brackenridge to remove his ruptured spleen on Monday evening, after being involved in a single-car accident late Friday night. The treasured Austin singer-songwriter fell asleep at the wheel and struck a concrete embankment. He suffered two broken ribs, cracked vertebrae, and a concussion. He is currently recovering in ICU, but is expected to make a full recovery. Thanks to an abundance of calls and well-wishes from fans and friends alike, Graham has been taken off of the hospital’s public contact list, and his family asks that the public respect his need for peace and quiet at this time. Updates on his condition are being posted here. Don’t forget: The Continental Club hosts a benefit for Graham on Wednesday, featuring the South Austin Jug Band and Dustin Welch. Half of the proceeds go towards JDG's medical expenses.

I was supposed to be in L.A. and ended up in S.A. It was a good weekend to be there too, boding well for upcoming events that connect the Alamo City with Austin. The first happens Sunday, August 3 in S.A. at Sam’s Burger Joint with a tribute to the very late Chris Holzhaus. Holzhaus died Friday, July 11 in San Antonio, the town he ruled with an iron grip on the neck of his Strat, almost exactly a year to the day since he was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. Like Austin’s Bill Campbell or the late Keith Ferguson, Holzhaus was one-of-a-kind, an eyewitness to musical history who took what he learned to the world. For last year’s Holzhaus benefit, I wrote that the San Antonio-born guitarist recorded with the Argyles for Huey Meaux in 1964 and then with Max & the Laughing Kind out of Port Aransas. After he left the hippie-era band the Children and started with the Eastwood Revue at the Eastwood Country Club, playing alongside Doug Sahm and Spot Barnett, he went on to perform and record with Texas notables such as Augie Meyers and Delbert McClinton. Stevie Ray Vaughan sought him out as a peer and two albums, Live at Dr. Rocket’s and Welcome to Bluzhill, Texas, laid down his blues power for eternity.

Jon Dee Graham was involved in a car accident late Friday night and is currently recovering at the University Medical Center at Brackenridge. Rushing home from a gig in Dallas to greet his oldest son, who had flown in from New York, the revered Austin songsmith hit a concrete embankment after falling asleep at the wheel. He suffered a concussion and some internal injuries, but was removed from ICU on Sunday morning, according to fellow Skunk Jesse Sublett. "He's in a lot of pain but really, considering, he looks pretty good," Sublett wrote. "He dreamed we had a gig at the cafeteria, me and him and Bruton on the front line, since we've all had our introductions to the grim reaper up close. The weirdest part of the dream, he said, was that we had two drummers. You know, that's so Grateful Dead." The Continental Club hosts a benefit for Graham on Wednesday, featuring the South Austin Jug Band and Dustin Welch. 50% of the proceeds go towards JDG's medical expenses.

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.

It’s science fiction week here at the Chronicle, which means, musically, we’ve digested enough Theremin, Moog, and Bowie to last us the rest of the year. You expect to find a decent dose of sci-fi musing in electronica, prog, and, odd as it may seem at first listen, hip-hop, but country and folk music are surely planted in a bit more solid ground. Well, as Randy Travis mused on his debut album, Storms of Life, “There may be factories on the moon, and farming out in space … but there’ll always be a honky-tonk somewhere.”

In trying to scrounge up some good country music sci-fi odes (and that is one mighty thin crop unless you stretch to include the Handsome Family’s fantastic “Tesla’s Hotel Room” or George Jones’ God-awful “High-Tech Redneck”), I stumbled across a little-known but fervent subgenre of folk called filk. It’s not surprising that folk and sci-fi/fantasy epics would go hand-in-hand – after all, the Holy Modal Rounders proved any burnt-out hippie could pick up a guitar to write ridiculous songs and find an audience – but filk is something different altogether.

This week, a collection of local musicians geek out about sci-fi. Here's Brothers and Sisters bassist David Morgan's short list of favorite contemporary sci-fi novels:

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Stephenson always packs an insane amount of ideas in his stories. The Diamond Age is set in a not-too-distant future full of nanotechnology, in which nations have given way to "tribes" or micronations. Like most Stephenson books, it's almost impossible to give a brief storyline but let's just say it follows a girl who grows up to lead a "Mouse Army" of young Chinese girls, an engineer who spends years as part of a hive-mind sex-cult human computer, and a technology specialist and hacker turned evil tribe leader named Dr. X.

Distraction by Bruce Sterling

A political thriller set in a near-future dystopia. The United States still exists but as a much looser confederation. A top political operative and genetic researcher fight for control of a research facility against a Huey Long-type Louisiana governor. The world that Sterling creates is recognizable as having grown out of our own if we let some of our own less-than-admirable societal instincts run wild.

Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross

Nominated for a Hugo Award in each of the last four years, Charles Stross is one of the most accomplished of the newest wave of writers. These two novels are set in the same fictional post-singularity universe (a singularity being the hypothetical point at which technology progresses so quickly that human society is irrevocably altered), in which an entity, probably a human-created Artificial Intelligence, has scattered humanity across the galaxy for its own mysterious ends. These books are part spy story, part space opera, and part exploration of what life after the singularity might be like.

“Don’t tell me about a band after it plays, tell me about it before.”

The reader had a point when he wrote me after a column on the Dead Pyrates last year, except that sometimes the most visceral live experience is the most recent. Isn’t that what you want to express? But here ya go, dear reader: the Dead Pyrates Society meets tonight at Lamberts.

They’re old-school classic rockers, each and every one cut and chiseled in Texas bands all over the musical map. They call themselves “17th Century Rock and Roll,” though if Keith Richards had been from Texas and had taken over Bad Company in 1974, that’s a close approximation to their crash, twang, and thunder.

Their veteran confidence draws from the members’ myriad credentials, such as stints and recordings with Bob Dylan, Spirit, Keith Moon, Jo Jo Gunne, Paul Rogers, Robert Palmer, and an eye-popping list of 1960s Texas garage bands and musicians including Krackerjack, Slip of the Wrist, Gary Myrick, Smiley, Max Pageant, Tribe, Jack Morgan, and Bucky Ballard. I’m on enough music chat forums to know Joe Kennedy, Jimmie Randall, Mark Hamilton, and John Staehely each deserve a chapter in that big book of Texas rock.

Check their wicked “The Eyes of Texas” on MySpace and imagine that boom within Lamberts fine acoustics, where they drop anchor with instro-twangmasters 3 Balls of Fire.

“Sometimes rock forgets where it comes from,” the Pyrates like to say. “Consider this a reminder.”

This Saturday at the Parish, the second installment of groups formed from this summer's Girls Rock Camp Austin, hosted by Rosie Flores! $5 suggested donation, which goes to benefit the Camp, plus a silent auction including items signed by Loretta Lynn, the Donnas, and more. Plus other awesome things like massages, music lessons, mail art lessons! Doors at noon, bands start at 1pm.