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Sarah Jarosz to perform on “A Prairie Home Companion”
Wimberley native Sarah Jarosz will appear along with the Sam Bush Band on the season opener of Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” this Saturday, Sept. 26, from 5-7 p.m. It will re-air on Sunday, Sept. 27, from noon-2 p.m.
Jarosz released her debut album, “Song Up In Her Head,” earlier this year.
More on Jarosz:
Schoolgirl troubadour graduates to national scene
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New Texas Tornados record on the way
The Texas Tornados, who are now Shawn Sahm, Augie Meyers, Flaco Jimenez, Speedy Sparks, Ernie Durawa and Louie Ortego, have reunited and finished recording an album they started when singer Freddy Fender was still alive.
The Tornados have signed a deal with Ray Benson’s Bismeaux Records, to put out the record in early 2010. On Nov. 6, Doug Sahm’s birthday, there will be a tribute show at Antone’s to raise money for a marker on Doug Sahm Hill in the park next to the Long Center.
Sahm, the son of co-founder Doug Sahm said “you can’t replace Doug Sahm or Freddy Fender, but we’re all about celebrating and respecting just how great those guys were.”
Nov. 18 marks the 10th anniversary of Sahm’s death from heart disease.
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Weekend picks: Fuzzy pop rock, mutant folk and modern metal
Pictured: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN
FRIDAY
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart at the Mohawk.The New York indie band, still going strong on the release of its critically acclaimed self-titled album earlier this year, has a new EP, ‘Higher Than the Stars,’ out this week. Like the full-length, the new release is steeped in fuzzy synth-driven pop rock. With the Depreciation Guild and Cymbals Eat Guitars. $12. 9 p.m. — Peter Mongillo
Also recommended:
- Tiny Tin Hearts (CD release) at the Parish
- Peelander-Z, the Birthday Suits, Woodgrain, HUG at Red 7
- Datarock, Esser at Emo’s
SATURDAY
Cave Singers at the Mohawk.This Seattle trio’s country-bluesy mutant folk was downright hypnotic at Fun Fun Fun Fest in ‘07. Their new album ‘Welcome Songs’ is one of the year’s best; as Pete Quirk’s mumble-to-a-moan has become more assured, the music has gotten more confident as well. It’s brave, spare, beautiful stuff. With headliners Asobi Seksu and Lightning Dust, which features members of Black Mountain. 9 p.m. $10 advance, $12 door. — Joe Gross
Also recommended:
- The Horrors at Emo’s
- Busdriver at Red 7
- the Deaf Ears CD release at Club Deville
- day two of Red Eyed Fly’s 10-Year Anniversary with Dangerous Toys at the Red Eyed Fly
SUNDAY
Lamb of God at the Austin Music Hall. Once, this Richmond, Va., band was called Burn the Priest, which has got to be one of the greatest names of all time for a metal band. Then they switched to (the more marketable) Lamb of God and proceeded to become one of the most consistent modern metal bands around, blending tropes from death metal, precision math-punk and whatever language Pantera invented. With the always amusing Gwar and up-and-comers Job for a Cowboy. 8 p.m. $32.50. — J.G.
Also recommended:
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Nasty’s hip-hop celebrates ‘Lucky Thirteenth’ anniversary
For thirteen long years Nasty’s, a North Campus dive bar best known for cheap swill, frosty pitchers of margaritas and ample enthusiasm for rugby, has played unlikely host to one of the city’s hottest urban scenes. Anchored by one of Austin’s premiere party rockers, the inimitable DJ Mel, each Monday a diverse crowd descends on the club from all corners of the ATX to hit the dance floor and bump and grind to an irresistible booty-moving mix of hip-hop, dancehall and scorching soul. To help celebrate the party’s “Lucky Thirteenth” anniversary, Mel has imported DJ Eleven from the NYC-based Rub crew to join in the throwdown.Sloppy debauchery will no doubt ensue. The party runs from 10 p.m til 2 a.m., but plan to hit the club early to avoid a line. $7 cover at the door.
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ACL 2009 preview: The Felice Brothers
Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN
The combustible acoustic quartet the Felice Brothers, whose unplanned unplugged set at the Newport Folk Festival last year launched roots rock legend, channeled the fire performing in New York City subways. South By Southwest veterans, the Felice Brothers debut Saturday, Oct. 3, at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. “South By’s cool, but it’s not that cool,” says singer-accordionist James Felice. “At ACL, you don’t have to deal with as many industry people and (jerks) like that. There’s less fishing around for what people can exploit. Just enjoy the music for what it is.”
(The Felice Brothers perform at 1:15 p.m. Oct. 3 on the Dell stage).
American-Statesman: Your SXSW showcase (at Habana Bar) this year was intense.
James Felice: Yeah, it was chaotic, right? All of those South By shows are a little crazy.
It didn’t help that the venue had only one public toilet per sex.
That’s awesome! Yeah, I guess that didn’t help. It was a great set, though.
‘Penn Station’ (from 2009’s ‘Yonder is the Clock’) really fired everyone up.
My brother Ian wrote that song a little while ago. You know, we played a bunch in the city subway back in the day. It’s about the great architect Louis Kahn, who was out of New York City. He actually died in a bathroom in Penn Station. It was a heart attack or aneurysm, I think. That’s a good, driving song to get people riled up.
As a songwriter, do you consciously think about involving the audience in your music?
Not necessarily. That just sort of happens organically. You play a song a few times and realize that people might sing along with a certain part or you’ll just feel it. If it works, you do it again and again, until you get tired of it. Then you don’t do it any more.
How much does your past as buskers play into that and your aggressive nature onstage?
Yeah, that sort of aggressive way of getting attention at all costs is residual from our time busking. We try to tone it down sometimes. People are now paying to see us play, so we don’t need to force them to listen. It’s part of the show, but not the biggest part anymore.
Clearly, you place high value on storytelling. How important is it to sings songs with substance?
It’s essential. I think a song has to be interesting. It has to have staying power, and staying power is often the lyrics. Lyrics might not be the first thing you focus on and they don’t have to be profound, but they do have to be interesting. Stories give songs character and something to relate to on both emotional and intellectual levels.
Townes (Van Zandt) did that pretty well. You’ve covered his ‘Two Hands.’
Oh, we grew up listening to Townes. He’s one of our favorites of all time because his songwriting is so brutally honest and sad as hell. It’s wonderful. We’ve always looked up to him. He was a horrible alcoholic, and that was probably the biggest problem he had. He was a dark guy with a very dark outlook on life. I mean, the first song he ever wrote was “Waiting Around to Die.” But like Van Gogh, he was brilliant.
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Austin music pioneers: Foy and Maggie Gant
The first influential Austin recording artists were… Maggie and Foy Gant.
In 1934, ballad hunter John A. Lomax from the University of Texas tracked down the Gants at their shack on the Colorado River near Deep Eddy and recorded a host of songs performed by Maggie and Foy and their five children. Among those songs was “When First Unto This Country,” which the New Lost City Ramblers recorded in the late 1950s in New York City. The sad American ballad was later recorded by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. It sounds like it also influenced Bob Dylan greatly.
Mike Seeger of the Ramblers heard the song as a child, when his mother Ruth Crawford Seeger was transcribing the Library of Congress field recordings for the Lomax songbook “Our Singing Country” in 1941.
It’s not known how the Gants learned the song or others they played for Lomax, including “The Gypsy Laddie,” “Tee Roo,” “Adieu to the Stone Walls” and “Black Jack Davy,” In his notes to “Our Singing Country,” Lomax chronicles a poor family from northeast Texas that “had followed cotton into Oklahoma, then down into the Panhandle and, in drought and years of bad prices, had moved on.” Dispossessed in the Great Depression, the Gants came to Austin in the early 1930s looking for work. When there was none, they went on relief.
But the family was rich in music, with Foy teaching son Adoniram how to play the guitar and daughters Glyda and Ella loving to sing those funny songs of a dark time. The Gants had two other sons.
Lomax describes a visit to the Gant’s house at 10 a.m. on a weekday. The children were still asleep. “Last night we all got to singing and dancing,” Maggie Foy told Lomax. “We didn’t go to bed until two o’clock this morning. The children stayed up, too, so I’m letting the whole bunch sleep until dinnertime. The singing kept us so happy, we just couldn’t go to sleep.”
This is a great story, but after a few days of research, it’s hit a bit of a dead end. The Austin City directory of 1935 shows that Foy and Maggie Gant lived at 3203 Riverside View (the street no longer exists). But by 1938, there’s no record of them living in Austin, though Adoniram had moved to 904 W. Elizabeth Street.
Death records show a Foy R. Gant died in Florida in 2000, but the date of birth was July 25, 1912. Too young, maybe a son.
This is being posted so that anyone who knew the Gant family or was related would contact me at mcorcoran@statesman.com. There’s a lot more research to be done, especially at the UT’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, where the Lomax papers are kept, but right now I don’t even have a photo.
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ACL Fest offers free iTunes sampler, releases map
ACL Fest has released a 16-song sampler of this year’s festival artists available for free download from iTunes. Artists in the sampler include Somali rapper K’Naan, combustible acoustic quartet The Felice Brothers, globally influenced mixologists Thievery Corporation and local garage soul sensations Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears.
Festival organizers have also released a map of the grounds to help you plan your daily treks across the park.
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ACL 2009 preview: White Lies
Steve Gullick
2009 has been a wild ride for British pop rockers White Lies. Their debut album, “To Lose My Life,” premiered at No. 1 on the Official UK Albums Chart in January, pushing aside acts such as Kings of Leon and Lady Gaga. Since then the band has been making the rounds at festivals across the UK as well as supporting Snow Patrol and Coldplay on recent tours. The band will be back in the States this month touring with Kings of Leon, including a stop at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. We caught up with bassist Charles Cave, who called from backstage at Wembley stadium after the band’s set on the final night of Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” tour. (White Lies plays at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 4, on the X-box 360 stage at the Austin City Limits Festival.)
American-Statesman: Thanks for talking to us today. Must be a bit anticlimactic to come off stage at Wembley Stadium and have to do an interview. What is it like to play to that many people?
Cave: (Laughs) Not at all, this is really nice. From our perspective standing on the stage, though, you can’t really gauge how many people are out there. Anything over 15,000 people is just too much to really see. But my parents came to the show and afterwards I went up to where they were sitting way at the top. Looking down I finally got a good look at how many people were actually there. It was incredible.
Do your parents come out to a lot of your shows?
Not many actually, because we haven’t played in London much recently. But they come out when they can. They like to see how the band is progressing.
I’m sure they’re pleased with your success. The album, “To Lose My Life,” has been doing very well in the UK. How did your sound for this record evolve?
We (singer/guitarist Harry McVeigh and drummer Jack Lawrence-Brown) have all been friends for a long time and played in different bands all through school. We had some time off from these bands we started playing together as another band (Fear of Flying). Eventually we started writing with more keyboards, getting into more traditional songwriting and developed a more refined way of making music.
The sound on the record is a big sound, well suited for the huge festivals you’ve been playing recently. Do you miss playing smaller, more intimate clubs though?
We still play loads of smaller shows; we prefer that actually. It’s only really in the UK that we’ve been playing these big festivals. In America we still play small clubs and bars. We’ve got a show at Webster Hall in New York coming up, and that place only seats around two thousand people. That’s a big deal for us.
I thought you guys had a strong performance on the Jimmy Kimmel show (recently). Do you notice a different reaction when you play in the U.S. as opposed to the UK?
America is completely different than the UK. We have released singles in the U.S. that we’ve had to have re-mixed because they wanted more guitars in them. (Laughs) Americans like a lot of guitars. In the UK they prefer a more “poppy” sound. But none of us (in the band) feel like a “British” band. We’re sort of unpatriotic in that sense. Our goal was always to play as many places around the world as possible.
We notice that our crowd has grown a little each time we come back to America. After this tour with Kings of Leon we’re headed back home to work on the new album and once it’s finished I think America will be the first place we’ll come to play the new material. Touring with Coldplay has been great, but we’re looking forward to headlining a tour. It would be great to come back to all these places we’ll be playing with Kings of Leon and really pull out all the stops.
You were just here for South by Southwest. What was your impression of Austin?
We had such a good time there. South by Southwest was really hectic for us, for every band really, but luckily we had some time to look around. We were booked to dj a party at a condo one night and really had no idea what to expect. We got to the building, went up in this huge lift and when the doors opened it looked like “American Pie” going on. We just played as much hip-hop as we could find to keep the party going.
Is there any band you’re going to try to check out while you’re here at ACL?
I’m desperate to see the Dirty Projectors. I’m really obsessed with their new album, so I’m going to make an effort to see them. After that we have a day off to relax, so the band is excited about getting to hang out in Austin. Maybe we’ll meet some good people at the festival to hang out with - hopefully someone who will barbecue for us.
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Video: Monsters of Folk on Conan O’Brien with Will Johnson of Centro-matic
Centro-matic frontman Will Johnson played drums last night with M. Ward, Jim James, Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis, aka the Monsters of Folk. Johnson will be accompanying them on tour, which unfortunately isn’t stopping in Austin:
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Here are the acts at ACL Fest taping episodes for the KLRU show
For ticket information to tapings, check out http://ausitncitylimits.org/blog. There will be ticket announcements up there later this week.
Them Crooked Vultures are taping an episode Sept. 30 at 8 p.m. Doors at 7 p.m.
There will also be a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Landmark designation dedication ceremony and plaque-unveiling at 6:15 p.m. Oct. 1 outside the KLRU studio on the University of Texas campus. KLRU CEO and general manager Bill Stotesbery, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame CEO Terry Stewart, ACL executive producer Terry Lickona and, um, Ray Benson will all be there.
Mos Def and K’naan are doing a double-taping 8 p.m. Oct. 1. This will be ACL’s first ever hip-hop show. Doors at 7 p.m.
For those of you not going to ACL Fest, there will be panels about “Austin City Limits” (the show) at the Austin City Limits studio at KLRU. At 11 a.m., members of ACL staff talk about the history and evolution of the show. At 1 p .m., Alejandro Escovedo, Patty Griffin and Martie Maguire talk about ACL’s impact on music in general. The panels will be streamed live at at austincitylimits.org and are free and open to the public, but go to klru.org/blog for information and to RSVP.
Pearl Jam tapes an episode at 8 p.m. Oct. 3. Doors at 7 p.m. It will be simulcast at Hogg Auditorium. For tickets to simulcast go to austincitylimits.org/blog; information will be posted later in the week.
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SRV snubbed again by Hall
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is losing what little credibility it had.
In his second year of eligibility, Stevie Ray Vaughan has once again been passed over. Absolutely ridiculous. Nominated this year are Kiss, LL Cool J, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Genesis, Jimmy Cliff, The Hollies, Laura Nyro, Donna Summer, Darlene Love, ABBA, the Chantels, and the Stooges.
Performers are chosen by a nominating committee, then ballots are sent out to more than 500 industry insiders.
Only five acts make it in. The 25th annual induction ceremony will be held March 15 in New York City. The inductees will be announced in December.
Meanwhile, the R&R Hall of Fame is coming to Austin Oct. 1 to officially designate the Austin City Limits Studio 6A as a rock and roll landmark. The next day, the Rock Hall and Austin City Limits will host two 75 minute panels featuring Alejandro Escovedo, Patty Griffin and Martie Maguire talking about ACL’s impact on music in general. Questions will be taken from the audience, so I’d like to pose one:
How could the Hall of Fame possibly overlook one of the four or five greatest blues guitarists of all time? And here’s a followup: The Chantels?
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Video: Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears on the Late Late Show
In case you missed it, here’s video of Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears performing “Sugarfoot” on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson:
They’ll be performing Sunday, Oct. 4 at the Austin City Limits Festival.
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Video: HAAM Benefit Day at Whole Foods
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Young Mariah hits the big screen
2008 Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN
We first caught up with local r&b sensation-to-be Mariah Roberson at the 2008 Urban Music Festival when the then 13-year-old stunned us with her explosive pipes. We checked in with young Mariah again before this year’s Urban Music Festival in April and she gave us the rundown on all sorts of exciting developments in her budding career including a small role in the upcoming film adaptation of the off-Broadway musical ‘Mama, I Want to Sing.’
The film stars r&b artist Ciara as an aspiring singer struggling to balance her pop aspirations with her family’s strong religious sensibilities. Mariah plays the lead character as a young girl. The film is scheduled to debut this weekend on the closing night of the 13th Annual Urbanworld Film Festival in New York City. Mariah is heading to the Big Apple for the opening.
No word yet on when (or if) the film will hit theaters nationally, but you can check out the trailer, which features our girl laying down some serious soul, here.
You can catch Mariah locally at Emo’s on October 24, when the 15-year-old Stony Point High School student opens for Sean Kingston.
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CD review: Owen ‘New Leaves’
Owen
‘New Leaves’
Polyvinyl
Grade: A-
There is a moment on Owen’s second release when Mike Kinsella, the sole force behind the Chicago-based project, raises his soothing voice over his atmospheric acoustic riffs to ask a few female strangers at a bar, “Which one of you poor souls wants to drive me home?” For “New Leaves,” his latest effort, Kinsella moved out of his home studio and employed producers with connections to Iron and Wine and Wilco to control the knobs so he could focus on singing about being “a housebroken, one-woman man.”
These changes of pace will probably have some longtime fans decrying Kinsella for going soft. And in some senses, maybe he has.
But that doesn’t mean he’s lost his edge. Even after he admits his domestic nature on “Amnesia and Me,” Kinsella blows through an electric solo that might make most metal guitarists blush. Other songs, like “Brown Hair in a Bird’s Nest,” once again show Kinsella’s ability to convey complicated emotions in short stanzas, as he simultaneously laments and jokes about his dishonest habits, singing, “I swear on my mother’s gravy/That I didn’t lie to you/I just didn’t tell the truth.” In other songs, such as “Good Friends, Bad Habits,” he subjects even his closest friends to cutting criticism.
“New Leaves” represents many things. In the lush, string-laden title track, the new leaves are the experiences a wayward love interest has chosen over relationship stability. For Kinsella, they are the feelings of fulfillment and contentment he has found in his family life. For the album as a whole, they are the abundance of intricate, orchestral flourishes tastefully worked into each track.
But more than anything, they represent a season in Kinsella’s career that no one could have guessed was to bloom, but that is welcome nonetheless.
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Puddles at Zilker caused by blocked pipe
So it’s raining like the dickens right now (the afternoon of Sept. 22) and one wonders: How is this going to affect the Austin City Limits Music Festival?
As the stages are starting to go up around Zilker, there a few giant puddles on the edges of the park.
“The large puddle is caused by a storm drain pipe that is blocked,” said Gene Faulk, the Zilker Park Enhancement project coordinator for the Austin Parks and Recreation Department. “The blocked pipe is located on the south side of Barton Springs Road, which is not within the area that was renovated. PARD staff is in the process of repairing this problem. This will allow the water to drain from the large puddle near Barton Springs Road.”
There is no drainage system installed with the new irrigation system, Faulk said. “Small puddles within the park will occur as before the renovation,” he said. “The leveling that was performed was addressing the ‘humps and bumps’ that had developed over time, not providing positive drainage for the entire site.”
The improvements to Zilker Park were made in the past year and paid for in part by a $2.5 million donation from C3 Presents, the promoters behind ACL Fest.
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Brazos to release debut full-length, tour with White Denim
‘Phosphorescent’ cover art
Long-suffering fans of ever-evolving Austin indie rock and folk act Brazos, take heart: you won’t have to content yourselves with two measly EPs for much longer. The band will release their long-awaited debut album, “Phosphorescent,” Nov. 10 on Autobus Records, according to a release from the their publicist. The album handily coincides with a North American tour supporting raucous garage rockers and fellow Austinites White Denim, which kicks off Saturday, Oct. 24 at the Mohawk. (White Denim also plays a Red Cross benefit Wednesday night at Antone’s.)
Brazos started as the solo recording project of songwriter Martin Crane, a graduate of the University of Texas’ Plan II Honors Program and member of the Tonewheel Collective, a loose gathering of Austin’s best young musicians that included such luminaries as Jared Van Fleet and Ramesh Srivastava of Voxtrot and Bill Baird of Sound Team and Sunset. The group — now settled into a trio with Crane, Paul Price and Andy Beaudoin — has seen a series of lineup changes since the 2007 release of two expansive, lyrically dense EPs, “Feeding Frenzy” and “A City Just As Tall,” with Tacks, the Boy Disaster’s Nathan Stein and White Denim’s Josh Block both being members for a time.
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CD review: Girls ‘Album’
Girls
‘Album’
(Matador)
Grade: B
Releasing the debut album by San Francisco duo Girls two weeks after Labor Day constitutes a monstrous offense of timing. With its reverb-drenched harmonies, lo-fi production, jangly guitars and simplistic pop lyrics, it’s an ideal summertime record, a sort of Beach Boys-by-way-of-Guided By Voices delight that lends itself well to hot temperatures and lazy evenings.
Vocalist Christopher Owens, belting out his lovelorn tunes in a surprisingly faithful recreation of Elvis Costello’s 1970s croon, kicks things off with pop gem “Lust for Life,” which finds him acknowledging his sins and trying to “make a brand new start.” It’s a promise he makes good on with upbeat, catchy, spare rockers like the surf guitar-inspired “Morning Light” and winning head-bopper “Darling.” He’s less successful on the slower-paced ballads, like “Headache” or six-and-half-minute epic “Hellhole Ratrace,” with its vocals that sound as though they were recorded at least 12 feet from the mic and a guitar that seems to have wandered in, lost and confused, from another song.
But most is excused thanks to the record’s pervasive low-key charm, as Owen paints a picture of a utopia of California girls and beachside relaxation, a season when, as he sings on “Summertime,” he can “grow out my hair, go anywhere, and sleep in until afternoon.”
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CD review: Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band ‘Between My Head and the Sky’
Yoko Ono/ Plastic Ono Band
‘Between My Head and the Sky’
(Chimera)
Grade: A-
At this point, the only music fans who have heard Yoko Ono’s extraordinary 40-year body of work and don’t recognize her as an innovator are pretty easily slotted into two groups: folks who are still fuzzy on women’s suffrage and Beatles loons who still blame her for their inevitable disintegration. Even if you don’t have much use for her often extreme music, Ono was there before most folks, pushing envelopes in art and sound and doing it as a woman whom, for a while there, the entire planet seemed to hate just kind of on spec.
This is the first Ono album released with the Plastic Ono name since 1973’s proto-feminist screed “Feeling the Space” and her first all-new studio effort since 1995’s alt-rock infused “Rising.” This new model Ono Band includes her son Sean Lennon, Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto, and electronic-dance savant Keigo Oyamada, a.k.a Cornelius. “Between My Head…” rolodexes 40 years of Ono’s tricks. “Waiting for the D Trains” opens the album with spikey, no wave guitar flail and wordless yells, while “The Sun is Down” would be welcome at any rave. The jazz on “Ask the Elephant” owes plenty to Ornette Coleman’s harmelodic funk, while “Memory of Footsteps” and “Unun. To” (the latter in Japanese) are meditative, small group sketches which are alternately thoughtful and distressingly Steve Allen-ish. “Calling” could be a leftover “White Album” jam from a particularly “out” afternoon or a Sonic Youth rehearsal tape. In no way is this a bad thing. In no way is almost any of this album a bad thing — it some of the most vigorous, vital rock music a 76-year-old has ever produced.
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ACL preview: The Knux
If the overflow of words on The Knux’s “Remind Me In 3 Days…” wasn’t already a tip off, here it is laid plain; eloquent rapper Krispy can talk. A lot. About anything.
In the space of 15 minutes he holds forth on his cellphone’s downfall during the previous night’s romantic rendezvouz, the merits of Texas barbecue, the continuing allure of his native New Orleans, the missteps of hip-hop musicians exploring other genres, how recent tour mate and hero Q-Tip got him out of a legal jam, why his brother and bandmate Al Millio wasn’t up for interviews on this day (hint: a drug that rhymes with “brooms”) and his group’s ongoing playful beef with modern rockers Silversun Pickups on the 2009 festival circuit. A tiff that won’t keep up when the Knux plays Austin City Limits Festival since the Pickups are, sadly, absent from the ACL bill.
Most of the talk with Krispy can’t be published here (language concerns), but here’s what made it through. (The Knux are scheduled to play at 1:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 2, on the Xbox 360 stage during ACL Fest.)
American-Statesman: You guys came to Los Angeles because Hurricane Katrina destroyed your home in New Orleans, and it seems like you’ve taken to the city. Are you an L.A. guy now?
Krispy: Of course I’m an L.A. guy. Everyone becomes an L.A. guy when you move here, you just have to. We always make everywhere we go our home, even though I still have my New Orleans accent and New Orleans way of looking at things. We’re still our own people, though, and aren’t out here kissing people’s (butts) to get things. We’re not those type of dudes. We do our own thing and stand on our own, or at least with our own team of people. What we’ve got wasn’t based on some celebrity co-signing onto anything. I’m proud my brother and I did it our own way, playing the demo for everyone at the same time and letting them make their decisions based on the music.
The record has crossed over onto quite a few modern rock stations, even though it’s very different from what else is going on the rest of those stations. How did you manage to get so many different sounds and styles into what you were doing?
You have to be a real fan of the genre to make it work. Lots of hip-hop dudes will say they’re into rock but they don’t understand it and appreciate it as music. It’s just something they want to try. I was into punk as a kid and into skateboarding, and then my mom turned us on to funk and psychedelic music because that’s what she was into her whole life. War was a big band for us, kind of a coalition type band who were doing just crazy stuff musically. I’ve still never heard a harmonica played like it is on a War record. Most times you hear it in a blues song and it sounds pretty much the same, but they made it sound like a guitar.
I really like hybrid groups like that. Music was just music and people said to hell with genres, if you can do a new jack swing record and it sounds good then go on and do it. It’s also about knowing how to produce those songs. It’s a lot easier to write a song that sounds different than it is to record it and get it to sound good, which is why a lot of those really different records don’t work.
So do you think it’s a mistake for Lil Wayne to try a rock record? Seems like he’s just doing it for the sake of trying to.
You can’t make mistakes when you’re the biggest star in the world because anything you do, people are going to follow you and at least check it out. I respect Kanye West for doing (the mostly rap-free) “808s and Heartbreaks” just because he had the balls to do it. Really that was a one-star album, but I guess I’d bump it up to two stars just because it was something so different for him. If you have a certain level of success you can do whatever you want to. Neil Young has done that his whole career, like when he did a new wave album and not caring what his fans were going to think of it.
Once you have one hit record, there’s always going to be a group of fans who come out to a show, no matter what you do after.
You can’t let fans dictate how records sound. We’re the musicians and we know how what we’re doing is supposed to sound. It’s like people who don’t have kids telling parents how to raise their children. Get out of here with that, I don’t know anything about your kids and you don’t know anything about my music.
How are you handling taking up those afternoon slots on festivals this summer?
This year it seems we’re always on at the same time as the Silversun Pickups and it’s kind of become a battle between us and we usually end up in trailers that are near each other, too. I tell them I’m going to rip them and we have fun with it. We come out to “Genesis” by Justice and if Silversun Pickups are playing one stage over, I have the DJ turn it up extra loud so they know we’re there.
The thing is, I want to see them because they’re a good band I haven’t really gotten to see them all summer. There have been like a half dozen festivals we’ve played, where they’re opening the main stage while we’re headlining a side stage and it never quite works out.
Is it hard to stick out when you’re mixed with that many bands?
Our show is so intense, we stick out even though there’s so many bands. The economy’s so bad right now and people are paying good money in a recession to see us, so you better jump up and down, sweat like hell and maybe even shoot an apple off someone’s head with an arrow if that’s what it takes to win people over. I’d probably play Russian roulette up there with my own brother if they’d let me. Of course, in 10 years attention spans will be so short you’ll pretty much have to do that to get anyone to even look at you.
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Bon Iver live for $2!
Bon Iver’s Oct. 4 show at the Paramount Theatre is technically sold out, as is his appearance at ACL Fest, but there are tickets available to his Oct. 1 show, with Megafaun opening. They’re only $2.
The catch? You have to drive eight hours to Marfa. B.I.’s show is at the Crowley Theater.
With so many acts coming to ACL from the West Coast, Marfa is prime to be a stopover site. Maybe there might even one day be a mini-ACL Fest in Marfa the week before ACL.
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