Just to sweep the obvious off the table: Yes, the Krayolas are from San Antonio and bear the city’s definitive musical imprint but they’re much, much more. Yes, they were a New Wave-ier product of S.A.’s first punk scene, the one that was anointed by the Sex Pistols’ appearance there. No, the Krayolas are not the Red Krayola that featured Mayo Thompson. (What many people don’t realize is that the 1978 Sex Pistols show was a major victory in the ongoing, uncampaigned battle between musical rivals Austin and San Antonio that gets refueled every generation, usually with no understanding whatsoever of what came before. For example, a 1969 poster for a Sunday afternoon concert at Sunken Gardens Theatre pictured the state of Texas as a beaming, doting mother and her two sons Austin and San Antonio, the former dressed in hippie glory and the latter duded up a la Doug Sahm on the Rolling Stone cover. Austin always had the cool but San Antonio had the dark heart. Maybe I’m rambling. I was all of 15, torched on acid at that show, and bouncing through a largely unmonitored life, so new and fresh that three hours of music imprinted it forever. It seems remarkable now that a concert could be a life-changing step from one level of understanding to the next. I swear I will find that poster.)

Before Omaha became the indie hub of Conor Oberst and Saddle Creek, its greatest export was the enigmatic singer-songwriter Simon Joyner. Since his 1993 debut, Room Temperature, Joyner's songs have delivered dark, melancholy visions that conjure equal parts Dylan and Cohen with the ramshackle solemnity of contemporaries like Vic Chestnutt and Lambchop. Though championed by John Peel and cited as a seminal influence to some of today's most important artists (it's impossible not hear his voice in Bright Eyes' volatile and vulnerable style), Joyner has largely remained unknown beyond the underground. 2006's Skeleton Blues (Jagjaguwar) was perhaps Joyner's most accomplished album to date, balancing a subtle and literate tone with the fuller arrangements of his band, the Fallen Men. This year's reissue of 1994's The Cowardly Traveler Pays His Toll by Oberst's Team Love label best emphasizes Joyner's place in the canon of Nineties lo-fi songwriters like John Darnielle, Bill Callahan, and Will Oldham. Upon first hearing Cowardly Traveler, John Peel played the entire album straight through on his radio show, a distinction granted only one other time in Peel's 30-year run: Dylan's Desire. It's been more than a decade since Joyner performed in Texas, but tonight he plays a last minute show at the Natrix Natrix house in South Austin (3222 John Campbell's Trail). With Cowardly Traveler in mind, there is perhaps no better setting to see Joyner perform than in the garage space of the local cassette tape label. The show is slated to begin at 8pm with openers Caleb Fraid from Houston and local longtime Joyner cohort Lonnie Eugene Methe.

Eees too much sexy this weekend. Too much! Faceless Werewolves return from a two-week tour to play their homecoming Saturday at Beerland, as well as drop some hot, hot vinyl copies of latest Super Secret release Pardon Me, Are Those Your Claws On My Back? Also thumping: 1960s Mod Dance Party with the Ugly Beats at Beauty Bar and Cartright, Coma in Algiers, and Cry Blood Apache at the Scoot Inn on Friday. Art and music orgy Everyone Knows Everyone 6 takes over Mohawk and Club de Ville on Saturday. Sunday, come out to the United States Art Authority and support three local improv troupes who've been accepted to the Del Close Marathon in NYC. Bands performing the benefit include Pataphysics, a reunited Sexy Finger Champs, Nasty Clan, the Pelicks, and Alexander's Dark Band. Plus: a tater tot-eating competition!

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Episode Three: 999 Eyes Freakshow and That Damned Band keep Austin weird.

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.

For about $700, you could wake up next weekend donning the Godfather of Soul’s embroidered purple silk pajamas. After legal wrangling between warring camps of his estate, Christie’s is set to auction off the personal belongings of James Brown on Thursday. Sadly, the collection won’t be part of the Graceland-styled mansion some of his heirs are advocating, but instead will be pawned off to pay for legal costs resulting from a messy and contested estate. It turns out (surprise!) Brown had a whole mess of jumpsuits. They come in a rainbow of colors, some wool, some denim, and some polyester. Nine of them have the capital letters S-E-X stitched across the midsection. Looking to redecorate? Nothing shouts “Good gawd!” like JB’s metallic green vinyl sofa set. Austin bands can add some soul to their lineup with the Godfather’s original Hammond B3 organ, expected to fetch between $10,000-$15,000. The most puzzling lot, listed simply as “hair supplies,” includes a pile of hair rollers, picks, and combs, 11 cans of hairspray, and a Polaroid of a shirtless JB sporting curlers. Cost? That one is priceless.

The collection of vinyl I own is wildly varied, reflecting mostly my tastes from adolescence through the late 1980s, when I gave in to CDs. I collected vinyl religiously through the cassette days (never owned an 8-track because of the way it used to break up “Badge” in my boyfriend’s car) and most of my early vinyl is gone, disseminated to younger brothers and friends as I outgrew it. Or so I thought. Perspective is a funny thing when it involves memory. 40 years ago this summer, I sat and sorted the three dozen or so albums I owned into a “baby” pile and a “grown up” pile, in honor of my newfound awareness of life. I also wrote my name on my records with the new purple Flair felt-tip pen I’d bought and was so proud of. A pen. The “baby" pile included recordings by Herman’s Hermits, the Standells, Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Monkees, and the Beatles. The “grown up” pile included the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, the 13th Floor Elevators, the Mothers of Invention, and the Beatles. The Stones, I believed, were always grown up. The Beatles, I felt, had a “baby” period as well as a “grown up” period and Rubber Soul was the dividing line. If only life were that easy now.

A disc I haven’t been able to get out of my stereo is the Cool Kids recent EP, The Bake Sale (Chocolate Industries). I put it away and it pops back up, shaking my eardrums with all kinds of clever minimalism. It’s surprising, though, because the rudimentary materialism and blatant self-promotion these nonchalant juveniles abide by isn’t usually something I get down with. It was my biggest problem with Mims last year when he got hot. It’s why I can’t really deal with Kanye West off record. And even looking at Common’s Finding Forever has become a hassle. But The Bake Sale is somehow finding a glitch in my matrix, and I think it’s because these two Chicagoans are for real. As people. Composed of MC Mikey Rocks and producer/MC Chuck Inglish, they're as straightforward as their name suggests. With that crisp 1980s bass/snare simplicity, “What Up Man” vocally “ticks” and “claps” its way through a trivial grocery store run and explains its own charm: “Don’t you know I made this beat with my voice and a bell?” Tectonic plates of bassy synths shift and groove under “A Little Bit Cooler,” Mikey and Chuck’s ode to their own guilty pleasures: Fruity Pebbles, Street Fighter, and sneakers (“You judgin’ me, dog? Please, you shop at the mall. I shop at boutiques, limited quantity sneaks. Where do these quantities be? Maybe they’s all on my feet”). Confessing all he needs is “a mic and Inglish,” “Mikey Rocks” chills over a sizzle reminiscent of a fly light catching an arthropod. The only part of The Bake Sale I don’t like is the brevity. The EP checks in at barely 32 minutes. Have no fear, though. The duo just dropped their That’s Stupid mixtape, a fresh batch of – wait for it – six (!) new jams. That’s 20 minutes! They’re nothing life-altering, but it is undeniably fresh. Call it my guilty pleasure, and check them out Aug. 20 at Emo's.

Nels Cline is more of a contortionist than a guitarist. He has an uncanny ability to bend and twist notes, coloring and shaping the sounds in ways that don’t seem physically possible. Aside from his numerous improvised acoustic and electric jazz projects, the “Avant Romantic” – as Rolling Stone dubbed him in its list of 20 new guitar gods – has collaborated with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, was part of the Million Dollar Bashers house band for the I’m Not There soundtrack, and reinterpreted John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space with jazz drummer Gregg Bendian. Most people know Cline, though, as the cerebral force of Wilco, whom he joined in 2004. Two months after Jeff Tweedy and company’s sold-out two-night stand, Cline returns to Stubb’s on Sunday for two sets of screaming tonal bliss with the Nels Cline Singers.