back forty

ghost house resurrected

little bird

hot hot hot

holly(wood) hobby

sushi break

everyone's a worker (aka: get to work)

thanks dave, thanks nigel

capitol bowl

a certain bowling alley you may have seen here is now having shows. played one with eat skull last weekend and it was fantastic.

day 3: the end

and that's that, right back where this started. a crazy house party show with thee ohsees, the intelligence and ganglians until the wee hours. good times, good people and plenty to celebrate. the car taking me to the airport picked me up after about 2 hours of sleep, and after a freaky, bumpy flight i was home sweet home.






... and a little more video (the last few minutes is from the party).

day 3: fancy beer break

... beer thirty! look at all this relaxing. actually, it was kinda stressful finding parking, and w.haus had a last minute freakout and decided to stay with the van while we hiked to a fancy beer bar called the gingerman. we had scoped this spot out ahead of time, and originally i thought we were going to be camped here for the whole festival, but i don't think i had fifteen minutes to sit down with my fancy regional double IPA before we had to saddle up and head out to our final show.

day 3: hangover party

this look sums up what happens when you bake in the hot, hot, mid-day texas sun for hours while drinking an endless supply of cheap beer after rusted shut pulls a complete train-wreck band-meltdown into an awesome 45+ minute sludge jam, then you have to play. more high fives and hanging out with good people. there was a dirt cheap tamale house that had 83 cent breakfast tacos (all the prices were weird like that for no reason, 71 cent veggie tacos, 96 cent lemonade). i think we got lunch somewhere good too (though, still no bbq) but truthfully i can't remember because jp did all the driving and i'm an inattentive passenger. went back to the hotel, woke up the arteests (who had finished their mural after a brutal all-nighter) and watched louis ck dvds until it was...

day 2: the zoo

this was our official sxsw showcase show, so we had to head downtown into the fray. everything was blocked off and mobbed with people, like a street fair x100, so it was tricky getting up to the club. there were lots of people to tell you "YOU CAN'T PARK HERE" but anytime we asked where to go, nobody knew. the festival staff didn't know, the parking dudes in orange reflector shirts didn't know, the cops didn't know. total chaos, and it continued from there. nobody knew where we could put our stuff, or what equipment we could borrow, or where our drink tickets were... so weird. good meeting all the WFMU peeps in person (some i had met before over a decade ago) and see some old friends. we smuggled in our own beer since the bar only gave us 2 drink tickets a piece for the night, which only bought you a miller light in a bottle (seriously). anything after that was bottled beer at 5 bones a piece (this place was a dump). xyx was awesome, and the rest i missed for the sake of shooting the shit with friends or trying out every taco/falafel/pizza truck in a two-block radius. we bounced 2 doors down to beerland to catch the last bit of the vivian girls and a killer ohsees set outdoors in front of the club. we rolled back to the hotel at 4AM, just in time to catch JH, Ferris and Arlo heading back for round-two on the mural, an all-nighter to finish it off.









... and here's a little video.

day 2: nature time

rolled out of bed about noon, got a big group breakfast at a vegetarian cafe (the only healthy thing i ate the whole time), and went on a waterfront nature hike with chloe and jp before the chaos of getting to our showcase show. the creeks feeding the river were lousy with turtles and the riverfront itself was a nice place to chill out for a bit. austin is eerily similar to sacramento, from layout to architecture. drove in circles and almost had an aneurysm trying to get chloe to her show before heading back to the hotel to pack up for ours.

day 1

got to the bbq/warm up show late, missed aids wolf. the first in a long series of "going the wrong way" issues caused by austin having one of the worst freeway systems in the u.s. (that's true btw, someone told us one of the designers of the on-ramps committed suicide over the amount of casualties caused by their crappy design). it was 80 degrees and the air smelled like cheap beer, pot and cigarettes (basically, like college). the cops came twice, but things kept rolling and lots of fun was had. eat skull were awesome considering they were all hung over and rob had gone "jim morrison" at their show the night before.

cop - "its cool, my brother plays in bands too"
dude from house - "yeah, he's playing here later"
cop - "no he's not, i just arrested him yesterday, he's in jail"

later that night we snuck into Emo's to see friend's play. i say "snuck" because once shows fill up, your free-show bracelet won't get you in. also, we had a bracelet-less JH in tow and the only way to get him in was to yell "BUT HE'S ON THE GUEST LIST, WE'RE ALL ON THE GUEST LIST!" (there were no guest lists) at the poor, 22 year old "i don't give a shit, mister" festival volunteers watching the door until they caved and told us to get in and shut up. fun times hanging with friends and avoiding watching bands, though thee ohsees & the homosexuals were amazing.

i didn't take any pictures on day 1 because every time i whipped the camera out someone gave me a face like this.



... and here's some video.

the setup

landed in austin and hit the ground running with about 20 minutes to get to our first show, an outdoor house-party with eat skull and a million others. we were planning to stay at the all-band tent-city at the house, when a certain radsman named jay howell phoned in to tell me he, ferris plock and arlo jamrog were being flown out by the keep a breast organization to paint a mural during SXSW, and that they had a sweet (suite) hotel room we could crash at the local embassy suites. sorry punks, but that's how we roll.

the start

Look at me, 35,000 feet in the air strapped to a bomb. I'm running on 2 hours of sleep at this point for no particular reason. Julian and I had the same flight out, I called him at 6 or 7AM to make sure he didn't oversleep and he was already at the airport having a drink in the bar. Atta-boy, a certain somebody knows how to travel. I couldn't sleep on the missle, so I watched 3 hours of Maury Povich paternity test episodes, after which I kinda hoped that plane would go down in flames. From the air Texas looked how I remembered it from tours past... miles and miles of hot dirt.