Dave Grohl’s Sound City Players to Perform at SXSW
By Kevin Curtin, March 4, 2013, 4:47pm, Earache!
South by Southwest revealed details this afternoon for the lottery system to get into mega showcases for the Sound City Players, Green Day, and Nick Cave. Last March’s headlining SXSW set by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band functioned similarly, with no real problems reported in the aftermath.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ showcase at Stubb’s on Wednesday, March 13, and Green Day’s load-in at the Moody Theater two days later had already been vetted, but this is the first confirmation of an all-star musical tie-in to Foo Fighter and former Nirvana drummer David Grohl’s SXSW Film documentary, Sound City.
Lottery details here. Guests at the 8pm Thursday Stubb’s showcase include members of the Foo Fighters, John Fogerty, Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield, Fear’s Lee Ving, Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine, Corey Taylor of Slipknot, Chris Goss from Masters of Reality, and more.
The doc pays tribute to the analog recording studio in Van Nuys, Calif., where countless classic rock & roll albums were tracked, including Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous 1975 debut of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ Damn the Torpedoes, the Grateful Dead’s Terrapin Station, Dio’s Holy Diver, Rage Against the Machine’s debut, and, most significantly, Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grohl bought Sound City’s custom 8028 mixing console when the studio closed in 2011.
When Grohl’s directorial debut premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the screening was followed by a live musical performance that featured the aforementioned names, as well as Nirvana alumni Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear, who will also be here at Stubb’s. The Sound City Players do a mix of hits by the artists involved and material written for the project. The group has played several shows since then and Grohl, in interviews, has expressed that he intends to take it on a world tour.
A nine-song studio LP comes out Tuesday, March 12, soundtrack tie-in with the film. Most of the personnel are artists that recorded at Sound City. One exception, Paul McCartney, performs with Grohl, Novoselic, and Smear on a track called “Cut Me Some Slack,” which made its television debut on Saturday Night Live.
The whole Grohl fest calls to mind his appearance at SXSW 2011. After the Foo Fighters documentary Wasting Light played at the Paramount Theater, the Platinum rockers performed at Stubb’s.
Sound City screens on Wednesday, March 13, 7:15pm, at the Paramount; Friday, 1:30pm, at the Rollins Theatre at the Long Center; and again on Friday, 9:30pm, at SXSatellite: Alamo Village.
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