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Sunday, March 14, 2010
SXSW preview: Ray Davies
Ray Davies, former leader of the The Kinks and author of a staggering number of rock anthems, admits even he didn’t like the idea at first.
“I always said one thing I never wanted to do was rerecord those songs like so many oldies artists, because I think they stand up as they were and don’t need to be done that way again,” Davies said by phone recently. “We tried it out first for a BBC concert with the choir and it was a huge success, so the record company said it’d be good to do a whole album that way. At first I didn’t want to but I saw a chance to kind of reinterpret them in a new way and that seemed interesting, so I gave it a shot.”
The reinterpretation Davies speaks of is the material he composed for “The Kinks Choral Collection,” which finds 15 Kinks tracks - “Waterloo Sunset,” “Picture Book” and “See My Friends” among them - rewritten in the tradition of Andrew Loog Oldham’s symphonic reworking of classic songs from The Rolling Stones.
Davies won’t have a full choir with him when he visits Austin this week for a South By Southwest appearance at La Zona Rosa, playing instead with another guitarist until the end of the show when the pop-rock band The 88 will join him for a run through a handful of Kinks songs as they were originally recorded.
“With this your I can do completely different shows, with another guitar player, sometimes with a drummer in as well and every performance brings out new sides to these songs I thought I knew everything about,” Davies said. “Working in that collaborative way brings about a whole new energy, and that’s been one of the best things about doing this.”
Recordings of shows from the tour, especially those with a full choir, give off a loose and often joyous feeling that Davies said translates to whatever configurations wind up on stage.
“The concerts wind up becoming kind of community events by the end, and we’ve got people calling out songs to us during the shows because they want to hear what we’ve done to them,” Davies said. “And then at the end when we bring out The 88 for a full band, they’re so dedicated to the songs and that material sounds amazing with them playing it.”
As excited as Davies is about the choral album, he said there’s not another one in the works and is instead already at work on an album of collaborations that was sparked in part by “Postcard From London,” his recent duet with Chrissie Hynde. Other artists in the loop for that album include Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen and (no kidding) Metallica.
“We just reached out to as many people as we could that there was some sort of relationship with. The song with Chrissie went so well, I wanted to find as many interesting partners to work with as I could.”
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SXSW2010: 10 questions for Awesome Color
All those stories you hear about a band getting plucked from obscurity and put on the road to the big time? Pretty much bad fairy tales.
That is unless you’re Allison Busch, drummer for Detroit by way of Brooklyn band Awesome Color, who caught the ear of Sonic Youth honcho and indie rock legend Thurston Moore not long after the band formed in 2004. Moore liked what he heard and put out two albums of the trio’s noisy psych rock on his Ecstatic Peace label and twice took the band on tour with Sonic Youth.
About to make her first trip to South By Southwest, Busch talked about the excitement of playing three shows a day for half a week, why Michigan ginger ale is essential for the Texas heat, and why it doesn’t hurt to keep a rock ‘n’ roll legend waiting on MySpace.
So you got started how?
I moved to Brooklyn from Michigan when I was 22. I met some people when I was in school at the University of Michigan who had moved to Brooklyn as well, so I got back in touch with them and we started playing.
And when did Thurston Moore get involved?
We had been playing together for a while when a friend of ours needed another band for a show he was putting on and we said we could play the stuff we had been doing. After that we got a weekly gig and then one of (Moore’s) friends saw us at another show and told him we were good, and that he should check us out.
So he just called you?
We got a MySpace message from someone saying they were Thurston Moore, and that they wanted to put out our record. At first we were sure it was one of our friends pranking us and we didn’t do anything.
How long did you make him wait?
We took a couple days, maybe a week. We were trying to figure out who it was that was playing a joke on us because we figured there’s no way something like this really happens. Finally we called the number on the message and it was him. We couldn’t believe it. After we called him, it all came together really quickly.
What was it like having your first big tour happen with Sonic Youth?
It was pretty surreal, especially for me since I had never traveled that much when I was younger and I’d never been west of Texas before. So the first time I get out there, and it’s with Sonic Youth.
I assume you were a fan, then.
Totally. The first music I listed to that wasn’t from the radio was Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.
Who else?
The Who, because of their distortion and what they could do with a guitar sound back then, and The Kinks because there are just so many great songs. And The Beach Boys, too, because I still sing to those songs whenever I hear them.
Even though they’re a successful rock band, it seems like Sonic Youth would be pretty manageable to tour with.
We’ve been out twice with them and they’re such nice people and they have a great family atmosphere on tour. Like their son is selling merch for them and I tease (Moore and bassist/wife Kim Gordon’s daughter) Coco, asking her if she realizes how cool her parents are.
This is your first trip to SXSW. What are you expecting?
It should be wild because we’re playing a bunch of shows, like three a day or something, and I really love to play as much as possible. I can’t wait. Otherwise, meeting up with people and seeing as many shows as I can when I have the time. I’m also looking forward to eating some great tacos.
What are your survival items?
We’ve got a 12 (pack) of Vernors ginger ale from Michigan and we’re going to try to make that last. What else? Oh, my skateboard! I can skate off somewhere if I’m feeling grumpy. Though I hear there’s so many people everywhere I guess I’ll be lucky if I have room to actually use it.
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Review: Flaming Lips at Austin Music Hall
Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne on Friday night at the Austin Music Hall. Photo by Jordan Smothermon/AUSTIN-AMERICAN STATESMAN
Not 10 minutes into the Flaming Lips show Friday at Austin Music Hall, the five members of the Oklahoma psych-rock group had reached such a fever pitch with the sold-out crowd that the show could have ended there and people would have left satisfied.
More confetti was strewn about than at a Super Bowl celebration. Numerous white, orange and yellow inflatable balls were dispatched into the audience. Strobe lights flickered in pandemonium. Dozens of dancers, flanking both sides of the stage in neon orange and fuzzy conehead hats, danced and pumped their fists. And smoke machines made thick, thick fog.
Frontman Wayne Coyne was already in his signature clear blow-up bubble, risking limbs and lungs traversing the upraised arms of the crowd. Santa, Dorothy and the Tin Man were among those helping. Indeed, the full spectrum of the scene was a riot—exhilarating no matter your first or 100th time.
“We’ve played some of our greatest shows in Austin,” Coyne would later say, after finishing up that intro song, “Enthusiasm for Life Defeats Existential Fear.” He recalled one with the Butthole Surfers at the defunct Ritz theater and one at SXSW in ‘99.
The new Lips album, “Embryonic,” is dense and sprawling. It takes a bunch of listens to attempt to comprehend. So as not to alienate their fair weather fans any more than they already have with it, the Lips tucked mediocre numbers “Worm Mountain” and “Silver Trembling Hands” into the show’s initial thrust and later on wisely showcased the album’s jams, “See the Leaves” and “Convinced of the Hex.”
Outside of that the Lips played singalong hits like “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” and “She Don’t Use Jelly,” which they said they play almost every single show. Coyne proved himself a consummate showman throughout, facilitating his props with the mastery of a magician. At one point, during the song “Waitin’ for a Superman,” he wound up a mechanical dove and, wings flapping, waved it through the air.
Coyne said the song was dedicated to musician Mark Linkous (aka Sparklehorse), who earlier this month committed suicide. He said the Lips had played it a lot when they were touring with Elliott Smith, another musician who had committed suicide. He said the song was about “making your own happiness.”
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