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Monday, January 11, 2010
Old Settler’s Festival announces partial lineup
The Old Settler’s Music Festival, the annual four-day place to go for all things roots music, has released a partial lineup for this year’s festival, which will take place at the Salt Lick Pavilion and Camp Ben McCulloch off Farm Road 1826, south of Austin, from Thursday, April 15, to Sunday, April 18.
The festival, in its 23rd year, will include appearances from Joe Ely, Patty Griffin and Mindy Smith, among others. Tickets — currently available in both camping and non-camping varieties — are available now online. If there’s a better way to put Tax Day behind you, I’d like to see it.
Thursday, April 15
Brave Combo
The Infamous Stringdusters
Bearfoot
Friday, April 16
Joe Ely
Blue Highway
Mindy Smith
Alison Brown with Joe Craven, The Infamous Stringdusters
Bearfoot
Saturday, April 17
Patty Griffin
7 Walkers featuring Bill Kreutzmann and Papa Mali
Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver
The Travelin’ McCourys
Fred Eaglesmith
Buddy Miller
Peter Rowan
The Lee Boys
The Band of Heathens
Radney Foster
Solas
The Special Consensus
The Wronglers
Elizabeth Cook
Ruby Jane
Sarah Mueller
Sunday, April 18
The Gourds
Fred Eaglesmith
Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver
The Special Consensus.
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Interview: Ray Wylie Hubbard
After cosmic cowboy country pioneer Ray Wylie Hubbard put the finishing touches on 2006’s greasy, gritty “Snake Farm,” a dirty-sounding but keenly intelligent journey into the backwaters of Hubbard’s imagination, the Oklahoma native and New Braunfels resident took the next logical step. He made a movie.
That meant a lengthy wait between “Snake Farm” and Hubbard’s appropriately lengthily titled 14th full album, “A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There is no C),” which hits stores today. But then, it’s one heck of a movie. Need proof? It prominently features a gun-toting dwarf. “It’s a real dark, weird movie,” laughs Hubbard, 63, over the phone, speaking from the pristine powder of the MusicFest in at Colorado’s Steamboat resort. “It’s not ‘Transformers,’ that’s for sure.”
Hubbard found himself sucked into conversations with Tiller Russell, who directed two videos for “Snake Farm” and shared Hubbard’s enthusiasm for the dusty, edgy westerns of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. For three years, Hubbard immersed himself in the project, penning the screenplay to “The Last Rites of Ransom Pride,” a story of love, vengeance and the acrid smell of gunpowder.
Russell directed the low-budget indie, lensed in Canada and starring “True Blood” vampire Lizzy Caplan, Dwight Yoakam and Kris Kristofferson. Plans are under way to release the film digitally early this year. For Hubbard, who forged a career of solo albums spotlighting intense, deeply imaginative characters, screenwriting was a natural — but invigorating — fit.
“I’ve had other people record my songs, and that’s great, it’s such a cool thing,” Hubbard says.
“But to see Kristofferson or Caplan say one of your lines, that you wrote, that’s a ‘Heck yeah!’ moment. That was really quite thrilling.”
For Hubbard, whose life defines long, strange and windy, a grim western is just another brick in the wall. He was born in Soper, Okla. — a town nearly wiped off the map by a tornado in “either 1954 or 1956” while Hubbard huddled for shelter in the cellar. His grandmother’s observation that heaven “pours down rain and lightning bolts” forms the centerpiece of the new album’s title track.
He went on to build a prolific career, rising to revered pioneer status in the progressive country movement in the ’70s, when he also penned the famous Jerry Jeff Walker anthem “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” But his career and his life stalled out in the ’80s as he struggled with alcohol addiction. His salvation came in the wise words of another legendary Texan.
“When I was younger I led a pretty rowdy life and it got really bad. In November 1987 Stevie Ray Vaughan and another couple of fellows came and talked to me,” recalls Hubbard. “And he was the first guy I had seen that had gotten sober but still had an edge. I was terrified that if I got sober I wouldn’t be able to still write and play music. That gave me hope.”
Hubbard kicked the bottle and emerged a fiercely inventive, raw singer and songwriter with a string of dark storybook solo albums in the ’90s and ’00s. “A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C)” continues the trend. Rife with full, well-developed characters — the substance abuser in “Opium” and the intoxicated songwriter of “Drunken Poet’s Dream,” co-written with rising Americana star Hayes Carll — it also boasts contributions from an impressive array of musicians. Singing group the Trishas bring a splash of old-school gospel choir theatrics to “Whoop and Hollar.” The Gourds’ Kevin Russell sings and strums the mandolin on the thundering, Edgar Allan Poe-inspired title track. Seth James and Gurf Morlix also pitch in.
But talking to Hubbard, one gets the impression the most important contribution comes from someone a little closer to his own heart — 16-year-old son Lucas, who plays guitar on two songs. Like any teenager, Lucas’ interest comes and goes, but the slightest mention of his son’s fingerwork turns Hubbard into a proud parent. And Lucas’ contributions lend the album the feel of a family affair, a joyful celebration that plumbs dark depths but ultimately comes up triumphant.
“It kind of comes where he’ll go in spurts, where he’s really into guitar and then he’s really into Halo and then he’s really into building a Mustang. He’s all over the map,” Hubbard says with a laugh. “But I like the way he plays. Hanging around and learning from the guys I play with, such great guitar players that play the song rather than the lick, he’s really taking after them.”
Hubbard plays a free in-store at Waterloo Records, 600 N. Lamar Blvd., at 5 p.m. Tuesday, and a CD release show Friday at Antone’s (8 p.m. $15, 213 W. Fifth St. antones.net).
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Video for “The Weary Kind” by Ryan Bingham
Ryan Bingham has come a long way since he and drummer Matt Smith lived in a travel trailer with no heat on Doug Moreland’s property in Manchaca in 2006. This video incorporates scenes from the film “Crazy Heart,” for which “Weary Kind” is the theme.
Bingham and song-tweaker T-Bone Burnett are up for a Golden Globe this Sunday for Best Original Song, with an Oscar nomination expected to follow.
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SXSW brings nearly $100 million to Austin in 2009
From left to right: Mayor Lee Leffingwell, SXSW’s Mike Shea, Greyhill Advisors’ Been Loftsgaarden and Mayor Pro Tem and Place 2 City Council Member Mike Martinez.
Just shy of $100 million.
That’s the comprehensive economic impact of the 2009 South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals on the City of Austin, according to an impact analysis sponsored by the festival and released by consulting firm Greyhill Advisors. The report — viewable online — was presented at a press conference this morning by Greyhill’s Ben Loftsgaarden, Mayor Lee Leffingwell, SXSW’s Mike Shea and Mayor Pro Tem and Place 2 City Council Member Mike Martinez.
In 2009, according to the report, SXSW was directly and indirectly responsible for injecting approximately $99 million into the Austin economy — with $20 million as a result of the year-round expenditures from SXSW and its sponsors, and $78.8 million in expenditures from the festival’s roughly 210,000 attendees. That number only includes the economic impact of officially sanctioned events — meaning it doesn’t factor in the considerable number of day parties and other unofficial events that take place throughout the festival that have become, for many, the primary attraction.
That’s a slight dip from 2008 — when the festival brought $103 million to the Austin economy — indicating that, despite a 30 percent jump in attendance for 2009, most spent less money during last year’s economic doldrums. Greyhill estimated that 90 percent of that $78 million in attendance expenditures were dollars from outside Austin.
“Last year alone South By Southwest directly or indirectly contributed almost $100 million to Austin’s economy. That’s a lot of barbecue,” said Leffingwell. “It’s also a lot of hotel rooms, a lot of rental cars, a lot of T-shirts and a lot of snow globes. All of those expenditures translate into sales tax dollars that help Austin taxpayers.”
Leffingwell also emphasized the festival’s impact in terms of its value in establishing Austin as a “a global creative action center,” a point also stressed by Martinez.
“We won’t go without hiccups,” said Martinez, addressing the traffic and sound concerns generated by the festival and comparing its positive impact on Austin to the Bowl Championship Series National Championship on Pasadena, Calif. “But one week out of the year, we are on the world stage.”
2009’s economic impact analysis also sought to quantify the value to Austin’s image of that one week of international prominence. In an attempt to put a price tag on the buzz generated for the city by the event, Greyhill worked with the festival to track broadcast, print and online coverage of SXSW. They eventually estimated the fiscal impact of SXSW’s media coverage at $21.4 million.
“I don’t want to say calculating that is arbitrary, but there is some art to it,” said Loftsgaarden. “It’s not just complete science. But it does try to capture the fact that this conference is being mentioned nationally and internationally and with it Austin is able to kind of ride the coat strings of South by Southwest and get favorable mentions in media. A lot of other regions pay big bucks to try to get that sort of coverage.”
The 2009 impact analysis is the third consecutive study to assess the festival’s economic impact to the city. The 2010 South by Southwest Film, Music and Interactive Conferences and Festivals kick off March 12 and run through March 21.
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Spoon will play March 17 at Stubb’s, streaming new album now
Can’t wait one more week to hear the hotly anticipated new Spoon album “Transference”? Fortunately, NPR has your back, as they’re streaming the album in its entirety online in the week leading up to its release Tuesday, Jan. 19. NPR and South by Southwest also announced today that the band will headline Stubb’s on the opening night of SXSW (March 17). The performance kicks off the band’s U.S. tour in support of the album and will be streamed online on NPR’s Web site and simulcast on KUT 90.5. The concert will be anchored by Bob Boilen, host and creator of “All Songs Considered,” NPR blogger and former Sleater-Kinney guitarist and vocalist Carrie Brownstein and David Brown, host of Texas Music Matters on KUT
“Transference” is Spoon’s seventh studio full-length, and, as NPR notes, their first entirely self-produced effort — which, considering drummer Jim Eno’s production bona fides (he’s a former semiconductor chip designer and noted producer who’s worked with Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, among others) is a little overdue.
We’ll have a full review next week, but the first impression: it’s a spiky, interesting work that’s a little less obliquely pop than “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” loaded with intriguing uses of the studio and resplendent with vaguely prog delights. It’s also a surprisingly groovy record even by Spoon standards. If you’ve got a case of the Mondays and need a pleasant pick-me-up, it should do nicely.
Update: The band will also play an in-store at Waterloo Records Tuesday, Jan. 25 at 4 p.m. To accommodate the sure-to-be-considerable crowds, the performance will be held in the store’s parking lot — but we still recommend arriving very early.
Update 2: Spoon’s announced the remainder of its Spring 2010 North American tour dates — check out the complete list below the jump.
17-Mar Stubbs Austin, TX
18-Mar Republic New Orleans, LA
19-Mar Workplay Soundstage Birmingham, AL
20-Mar Tabernacle Atlanta, GA
22-Mar 9:30 Club Washington, DC
23-Mar 9:30 Club Washington, DC
24-Mar The National Richmond, VA
26-Mar Radio City Music Hall New York, NY
27-Mar House of Blues Boston, MA, USA
29-Mar Sound Academy Toronto, ON
30-Mar Royal Oak Music TheatreRoyal Oak, MI
1-Apr Aragon Ballroom Chicago, IL
2-Apr First Avenue Minneapolis, MN
3-Apr First Avenue Minneapolis, MN
5-Apr Ogden Theatre Denver, CO
6-Apr Ogden Theatre Denver, CO
7-Apr In the Venue Salt Lake City, UT
9-Apr Moore Theatre Seattle, WA
10-Apr Moore Theatre Seattle, WA
11-Apr Orpheum Theatre Vancouver, BC
13-Apr Fox Theater Oakland, CA
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