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Thursday, October 1, 2009
Live review: Them Crooked Vultures ACL taping
You have to hand it to Dave Grohl. His post-Nirvana career has turned into one long game of doing whatever cool musical thing pops into his head.
He leads, sings, plays guitar and song-writes for his full-time band, Foo Fighters, which is nearing the 15 year mark. He’s guest drummed on full-albums by bands he likes (Queens of the Stone Age, Killing Joke) and played fantasty heavy metal camp on the Dave + a-whole lot-of-extreme- music-dudes album Probot. Now he’s playing in a Cream-esque “supergroup” called Them Crooked Vultures with Queens guitarist Josh Homme and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.
Jones is an interesting case - he’s the one member of Led Zeppelin who didn’t make questionable career moves post-Zep by, for examples, dying tragically (John Bonham), playing in the Firm (Jimmy Page) or naming an album “Now & Zen” (Robert Plant).
Jones became a producer, making records with interesting bands (Butthole Surfers, Diamanda Galas) and generally keeping a comparatively lowish profile.
So seeing these three guys play together, two of them doing things in public they don’t do much anymore (Grohl drumming, Jones playing bass) was thrilling apart from the music they made. It also lent a buit of weight to the taping itself, the first time an unsigned band has recorded an Austin City Limits set, which they did Wednesday night. It was certainly the first time a band was playing its ninth-ever gig for the program.
Oh, the songs? Well, they sounded like the sum of their parts - essentially Queens of the Stone Age style riffs blended with a large helping of everything loud Led Zeppelin did well - blues here, art-rock there, rolling thunder everywhere.
Notably, they don’t sound like more than the sum of their parts - Featuring Queens bassist Alain Johannes on second guitar, TCV still feels very much like a project band, or at least a band who are still feeling out their strengths and weaknesses of their songs. The hour-long set’s opener, “Elephants,” I believe, rolodexed the band’s skill set -Grohl’s Bonhamy stomp mixed with punk speed, Jone’s hard-swinging, yet almost casual bass and Homme’s ovoid riffs and the bits of prog rock Zep loved the most (i.e. songs with lots of parts and movements).
“Mind Eraser, No Chaser” overcame its terrible title with lots of wah-wah. Jones hit the synths and Grohl found a nasty double-bass drum run for “Caligulove.” “Scumbag Blues” was all swing and drive, while “Daffodils” seemed to cut the “Immigrant Song” riff, only to loop into the sort of queasy ovoid shape Homme is so good at. (“Nobody Loves Me and Neither Do I” similarly repeated a dirty Zep-style buzz while Jones played a massive, lap-slide-looking thing that produced some vibrant drone.) And I may be the only person for whom “New Fang” recalled Aerosmith’s Ragdoll,” but, well here we are.
The closer, “Warsaw,” started with a chunky, brick-laying riff and ended with the sort of faux-jazzy, goofing-solos coda you just don’t see anymore. No wonder the word Homme kept using the word “classic” to describe the set. We’re not likely to see TCV songs replace Led Zeppelin on classic rock radio any time soon, but those two crazy kids and the guy who looked like a kind uncle sure seemed to have fun trying.
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ACL 2009 Preview: Phoenix
This isn’t French pop quartet Phoenix’s first rodeo — childhood friends who grew up in the Paris suburb of Versailles, they’ve been active under their current name for 13 years and played together in various configurations for even longer. Across three albums of infectious pop — 2000’s “United,” 2004’s “Alphabetical” and 2006’s daring and challenging “It’s Never Been Like That” — the quartet developed a reputation for penning the kind of songs that got stuck in your head.
But this year has brought the band a tidal wave of hype and adulation, with their fourth studio album, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” a collection of 10 fiendishly hook-heavy rockers, garnering universally glowing reviews and landing the band performances on seemingly every late-night talk show on network television. In the midst of a sold-out U.S. tour, guitarist Laurent Brancowitz spoke to us about their unlikely recent success, the trials of a French band that chooses to sing in English and the importance of friendship to the group’s work.
American-Statesman: The release of “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” seems like it’s brought you to a whole different level of critical acclaim and popularity. From where you’re sitting, have you noticed a shift in the kind of attention you’re receiving?
Laurent Brancowitz: Yes, for sure. In New York, the reaction was so crazy, and of course there was “Saturday Night Live” and all that. We’ve done a lot of shows on this tour and they were all packed and it was a really good feeling. We weren’t expecting it so the surprise was even bigger. We really thought this album was weird and strange. When we were making it we were talking about making it very French and very Parisian and having songs about Franz Liszt and being very futuristic in its sound and all that. We felt it was very complicated and all the songs were very complex. But actually it has been the album that has touched the most people, which is amazing.
You started out writing “Wolfgang”’s songs on a houseboat on the Seine River in Paris. What was the idea behind that, and what was the experience like?
The idea was to find a place that had romantic qualities. Because when we are touring we do not really write songs. We need a very long moment to just be in the right state of mind, and it was a good way to do that. We knew that we had to do the writing in France, and we wanted to do a very European album, so we went to the most French place ever, right under the Eiffel Tower, and we stayed there for two months. But some of us got seasick, so we could not stay. They were not very productive months necessarily but it put us in the right state of mind. We did the rest of the writing in a hotel room in New York.
There was a decent amount of time between “It’s Never Been Like That” and “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” — did you take that break to figure out what specific ideas you wanted to pursue on your fourth album?
We always need lots of time on an album. Our song writing and recording style is to do everything together, so it can be a very long process and hard to find a proper way to record. But the way we work is, we wait for something surprising to happen. The best thing you can do is let chaos be the ruler of the creative process. We knew we wanted a long instrumental in the middle of the album, which became “Love Like A Sunset,” but other than that you try never to have a plan. We had a vague desire to do something special but after a while, we forget all those things and just let things happen. The main thing is to forget about your plans. Let unexpected things happen.
The first single and first song off the album, “Lisztomania,” is named for Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt. He’s a tremendously unlikely subject for a pop song but it works very well — what was the idea behind selecting him as a song subject?
A lot of things made it feel very attractive, like a big magnet. We love the fact that Franz Liszt’s story was very old European culture but felt very modern and connected to the things that happen in the present. It was too good to resist. The lyrics are about the loneliness of the person that’s on stage. That was a thing we could relate to.
Phoenix, Air and Daft Punk all emerged from Versailles at about the same time, and obviously all of you were associated and had played together. All three of you have gone on to very successful careers. Was there something about the music scene in Versailles at the time that made it so fertile?
I think the key factor was that there wasn’t anything for young people going on at that time. So this isolation, it created a very strong bond between musicians. And we spent so much time together and we shared the same records for so many years and got excited about the same music. I would say that it was really a matter of being so bored that there was nothing else to do, so we met each other and we worked very hard trying to create music that mirrored the music that we listened to, so that there would be something there for us.
Phoenix has always chosen to write its songs in English. How has that gone over with French audiences?
It was kind of difficult for us in the beginning. When we were looking for a record company, everybody told us it wouldn’t be possible to sign a French band that sang in English. But all our favorite bands were from the U.S. or England and English is the universal language of popular music, like Latin was the musical language of the Middle Age. It’s just a convention. But French people’s sense of their language is very proud and they think the songs on the radio should be in French. So it was rough in the beginning. But even then we’ve always had an audience in France, and now they are very warm toward us. We have managed to conquer the French heart, I guess.
Phoenix has been together in varying forms since 1993 — is it hard to still get along and still be creative with one another after this many years?
You know, we are friends more than colleagues, so it makes our working relationship very unprofessional. Everything we do we try to do in a very amateur way, and we succeed in that. We are not the most mature band in the world, but it’s very important to keep it fresh and feel the same excitement when we are playing or creating a new song as we did years ago. And that’s the thing that makes it all work. Those moments of magic that you share with your best friends make it all worthwhile. We know it’s precious and since the very beginning we knew the most important thing was to keep this naïve friendship going. We knew it would be hard but we knew it was the most important thing.
Phoenix will perform on Friday Oct. 2 at 4:30 p.m. on the AMD stage.
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ACL airport box office: “Best idea ever”
The 8th annual Austin City Limits Music Festival got off on the right foot for hundreds of Austin Bergstrom International Airport travelers who were able to exchange their tickets for three-day wristbands Thursday at a makeshift Frontgate Tickets box office next to baggage claim.
“This is the best idea ever,” said Jose Cruz of Orlando, Fla. an ACL first-timer who stood in a short line with his friends Eamon Waters and Linda Agosto. “This is one less thing we have to worry about,” said Waters, who was impressed with the live music he heard after deplaning. “We can just enjoy Austin today and stroll right in (to ACL) tomorrow.”
The convenience went a long way with Seattle’s Mike Butler and Laura Noble. “We had to wait for our bags anyway, so we didn’t lose any time,” said Noble, who kept an eye on the baggage claim carousel fifteen feet away.
Brittani Graswich of Dallas picked up four wristbands for her and her friends who were flying in from Seattle on a later flight. She was the ninth person in line, but with each transaction lasting less than a minute, as the two agents scanned the bar codes on hard tickets or computer printouts, she had her wristbands in just over three minutes of waiting. “My friends are supposed to land any minute now,” she said, as she went off to look for them, holding the wristband stems like they were a welcome boquet.
A pair of women tried to buy wristbands at the airport, but were told they were for exchange only. ACL Fest has been sold out for six weeks.
ACL Fest started the airport box office as an innovative customer service touch last year. Jack McCarty of Frontgate said the line had been steady since noon. The longest waits in the late afternoon were about 10 minutes. The ABIA box office will be open from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. Friday.
Barry Hatfield of New York isn’t attending ACL Fest this year, but turned in a computer printout of a ticket for a wristband for his cousin, who was picking him up at the airport. “This is so easy, I wonder if some people who live in Austin would just come out to the airport to get their wristbands if they knew about it.”
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How to network at ACL without ruining the fun
Thom Singer, an Austin author and networking guru, says that while you take in the music, you can also do a little networking at ACL - as long you’re careful to not get booed out of the park.
Here are Singer’s tips:
Keep the networking to people you already know.
Be relaxed and friendly, this is a social event, not a business dinner.
If you see a client, prospect, or someone who could help you in a job search…be sure to talk to them. Just waving at them does not build the relationship.
Do not bring up business.
Ask them questions about what bands they have seen, and what they are planning to see.
Listen to them. Get them talking.
Connect. Meet their friends and family, but also be aware of their body language … as if they want to move on … do NOT trap them in conversation.
This is not the venue to remind them of the job opening or the pending contract, but it is OK to tell them you will follow up next week.
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Local elementary school students to take stage at ACL
Students from Barton Hills and Palm elementary schools will once again take the stage at the Austin City Limits Festival, performing at 11:30 am. Friday at the Wildflower Stage in Zilker Park as the festival opens.
It is the fourth year the group, the Palm School/Barton Hills Choir, has performed at the event.
The fifth- and sixth-graders work collectively as one choir under the direction of Austin music teacher and choir director Gavin Tabone.
Already, the choir has released six CDs and has previously performed with Lyle Lovett, Ruben Ramos and Neil Young. The students also have been featured in local media and on NBC’s Today Show.
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Streets closed for ACL Fest
Several streets in downtown and around Zilker Park are partially or completely closed because of the Austin City Limits Festival.
Those that will are completely closed are:
Barton Springs Road between Columbus Street and Robert E. Lee Road.
West Fourth Street between Nueces and Guadalupe streets.
Stratford Drive between Nature Center Drive and Barton Springs Road.
The right lane of West Fifth Street is closing this morning between San Antonio and Guadalupe Streets, and the parking lane on Guadalupe Street between West Third and West Fifth streets is already closed.
To see a map of the closures, click here.
In a statement, the city emphasized that there is no parking at the festival site. You can look at parking and transportation options here, and view a schedule of the free ACL shuttle here.
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ACL 2009 Preview: Alela Diane
Tom Menig worked as a dental laboratory technician in Nevada City, a sleepy, artistically inclined former mining community in Northern California, but music was always his real passion. The guitarist performed in regional folk festivals, had his own studio and played in a Grateful Dead cover band, the Deadbeats. Today, at 52, he has at last abandoned his day job, touring across Europe and living his dream — as his daughter’s guitarist.
Menig is the father of up-and-coming folk chanteuse Alela Diane Menig, a skilled acoustic purveyor of dark, spare Americana awash in chilly imagery and evocative lyricism. He and his then-wife reared their daughter on bluegrass music and brought her along with them to festivals and community radio station performances. Now, in the wake of Alela’s increasing success after the release of two haunting, powerful albums — 2006’s “The Pirate’s Gospel” and this year’s “To Be Still” — she’s returned the favor, calling on her father to play in her touring band and on her albums as she works her way through Europe.
“He’s a really easy-going person, and he always has a positive attitude. When you’re in really close quarters with a lot of people it’s nice to have someone who is always looking on the bright side,” said Alela, 26, by phone from Berlin “And he watches over me, in a sense. It feels more like home when Dad’s on the road.”
Music surrounded Alela throughout her childhood and adolescence. And though she participated in choir at an early age — an experience she now credits for her ability to recognize and parse the kind of harmonies and vocal complexities she’s mastered on her albums — she never quite shared her parents’ affinity for performing or songwriting. Though she experimented with the acoustic guitar in high school, she had no commitment to the instrument.
All of which changed after she left high school and set out for college in San Francisco. The tumult of her first brush with independence, paired with her re-discovery of the guitar, set off a creative chain reaction, and Alela found herself relying on songwriting as a way to cope with a rapidly changing life.
“Something about that experience of suddenly being out in the world on my own and being in a big city and having all my possessions in a dorm was very challenging,” said Alela. “And right when I moved away, my parents went through a divorce and sold my childhood house. So all that loss of home led to me writing songs in the first place. Everything was just kind of insane and songwriting became my way of getting all that off my chest.”
She eventually returned home to Nevada City, with a set of deeply personal songs in tow. She began to record in her father’s studio, and the result was “The Pirate’s Gospel,” a stark and intimate debut that quietly won her widespread acclaim. She opened for the Decembrists and Iron and Wine.
Newly settled into a quieter life, her follow-up album, this year’s “To Be Still,” was written during a period of relative personal tranquility. In contrast to her debut, it featured more instrumentation, more backing vocals and a fuller sound.
“It came out of a completely different experience than the first record. I did a lot of the writing for that album while I was living in a little log cabin in Nevada City, and I think a lot of it was about the experience of going back to the hometown and working regular jobs and not being able to leave town and being tied down by all the jobs and responsibilities of one place,” said Alela. “And a lot of it was about finding love and all the domesticity that came with that.”
The release of “To Be Still” has been accompanied by extensive touring throughout the United States and Europe. It’s a challenging, ever-changing lifestyle for the young musician — her eagerness to return to the United States and, soon thereafter, home is palpable. She will release the six-song “Alela and Alina” EP, recorded with longtime touring partner and vocalist Alina Harden, on Oct. 6, before a U.S. tour with similarly folk-minded singer/songwriter Marissa Nadler. But if any woman can handle the constant presence of the stage in her life, it’s Alela — after all, to her, it’s been a fixture since childhood.
“I remember when my dad would be up on the stage, when he was tuning or between songs, and I’d go to the front of the stage to ask for five dollars to go buy an ice cream or whatever,” said Alela. “That made the stage a realistic place. I was never scared by it. That made it just a normal thing for me. So going up there doesn’t seem too strange.”
Of course, it doesn’t hurt having that same dad around to play with her these days. And although she helps pay his bills, she’d rather not be reminded of that. “I’m officially his boss at this point. It’s a little nerve-wracking, but it’s good,” said Alela. “Although I really don’t like it when he calls me boss.”
Alela Diane will perform on Sunday, Oct. 4 at 11:45 a.m. at the Dell stage.
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ACL artist preview: Rodriguez
Zohar Lindenbaum
Plenty of the acts playing at ACL Fest waited a long time — or are still waiting — for their big break in the United States.
Sixto Rodriguez has them all beat: It has taken him 40 years to get some love from America. The story of the 67-year-old Rodriguez — who performs under his last name — sounds like the plot of a lousy rock `n’ roll B movie.
Rodriguez, who has spent nearly his entire life in the Detroit area, recorded two albums between 1969 and 1973 that received virtually no notice at the time, despite their tuneful nature, eccentric-yet-funky arrangements and Dylanesque brew of surrealistic and protest-oriented lyrics. So Rodiriguez, with a family to support, abandoned his music career and went to work on demolition and renovation jobs.
A half dozen years after he stopped recording, he learned that his albums, which had disappeared in his native country, had achieved a surprising afterlife in Australia, where he had built up a substantial fan base through word of mouth and bootlegs. In 1979 he played a series of shows there, co-billed with the similarly political-minded Australian band Midnight Oil. Then, it was back to his day jobs.
Nearly 20 years later Rodriguez’s first big break arrived, when two South African fans of his music tracked him down after a nine-month search. They informed Rodriguez that he was something of a star in their country, where many of his fans thought he was dead. (The stories that made the rounds included the claim that he had killed himself onstage — by gunshot blast or self-immolation — after singing the lines, “But thanks for your time, then you can thank me for mine, and after that’s said, forget it.”)
During subsequent tours of the country in 1998, 2001, 2004 and this past month, Rodriguez learned that his music’s raw political and sexual content had gained him a widely varied audience. “A soldier says to me, ‘We made love to your music, we made war to your music’,” Rodriguez says by phone from a restaurant in Grosse Pointe, MI. “He told me that like he was getting something off his chest.” (Rodriguez still hasn’t figured out how to respond to people who come up to him and say, “I thought you were dead!”)
Finally, the newly emboldened Rodriguez has begun to get some recognition in his own country. Last year, the Seattle label Light in the Attic put out a heavily annotated, lovingly remastered reissue of Rodriguez’s debut album, “Cold Fact,” in America. The 1973 followup, “Coming From Reality,” was reissued earlier this year.
Music is now, once again, a full-time job for Rodriguez, who has played in Ireland, France and Italy, among other countries, and hung out backstage with the likes of Wilco and Animal Collective.
Rodriguez has played a handful of US shows, sometimes backed by a quartet of young fans from North Carolina. He believes his ACL set this afternoon will be his highest profile American gig. “I think 500 people have signed up already to see the show, so I’ll have a little audience, anyway,” he says. “But check it out: One of the bands, 13,000 have signed up for them. So I’m working on, you know, getting people to the show.”
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Bright Light Social Hour wins ACL Sound and Jury Contest
Bret Gerbe FOR AMERICAN-STATESMAN
- The A-List: Sound and Jury Finals at Antone’s
A crowd of hundreds turned out at Antone’s Wednesday night, as five bands dueled for pop music supremacy and a Friday open slot at the Dell stage at the 2009 Austin City Limits Music Festival. And when the smoke cleared, Austin’s own Bright Light Social Hour, a funky rock quartet, stood triumphant. A combination of audience votes and an industry judging panel — including Voxtrot’s Ramesh Srivastava and 101X’s Jason Dick and Toby Ryan — decided the winner.
“When we played I was kind of expecting one-fifth of the crowd to be really into it and the other four-fifths to be really lukewarm but the crowd was receptive to us and really nice to us,” said bassist and vocalist Jack O’Brien. “And having hung out at Antone’s since 5:30 in the morning doing interviews and stuff, we just had all this pent-up energy from being still all day.”
The band will kick off the Dell stage on Friday at 11:45 a.m. It will be a long day for the band, who have a performance at the Beauty Bar the night before and are required to trek to Zilker well before dawn.
“We’re playing a show at the Beauty Bar Thursday night that we booked long before the Sound and the Jury. So we’re playing, I think around 12:15 a.m., so we should be out of the club around 2:30 a.m.,” said O’Brien. “And they want us to be at ACL around 4:30 in the morning, and available for press between then and 6 p.m.. So it’s going to be a long day. But we’re ready. We’re excited.”
The Bright Light Social Hour will perform tonight (Thursday) at the Beauty Bar, 617 E. 7th St., at 12:15 a.m. as part of Art Disaster No. 9. Other performers include the Lemurs, White White Lights, and last year’s the Sound and the Jury winners, the Steps. More about the band.
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