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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

“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.

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

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.

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.