It’s a fuckin’ dark comedy (if you dig Jody Hill’s other stuff like The Foot Fist Way and Eastbound and Down) and the soundtrack is absolutely killer — The Band, Dwarves, Yardbirds and a smokin’ Pixies cover.  I figured they must have gotten Wayne Kramer to handle the music again since he’s done such a great job on EBAD but turns out it wasn’t him after all.  Obviously Jody Hill puts a high priority on locating only the finest tracks to aurally accompany his work.

SxSW 2009 is over. I’m back to the usual grind of NOT seeing fifty bands and drinking twelve beers a day. Or was it twelve bands and fifty beers? I wish I could remember. Fortunately I was documenting the experience by updating Facebook about every 5 minutes with a blow-by-blow account of the every mundane detail of my time in Texas.  I’m sure those of you that un-friended me for melting down your friend feed know what I’m talking about.

So here’s a quick recap in nature’s most lazy format… list form!

Bands that I had never heard of but discovered were awesome

• The Fresh & Onlys San Francisco, CA
• Blackholicus Austin, TX (listen to this band… and then think that the girl fronting the band is like 4’6″ tall and just SLAYS on bass)
• Capsula Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Thee oh Sees San Francisco, CA

Bands that I either knew or suspected were awesome and verified them as such

• Steel Panther Hollywood, CA (incidentally the best show by far… PS. here’s a video of Justin from the Darkness joining them on stage… PPS. Satchel is one of the most talented guitarists I’ve ever seen)
• Brimstone Howl Omaha, NB
• King Kahn & the Shrines Germany via Montreal
• Telepathic Butterflies Winnipeg, MB

I totally screwed the pooch and missed seeing these bands (despite 2 of them playing 4+ times during the weekend… how did I manage to do that?)

• Glasvegas Glasgow, Scotland
• Black Lips Atlanta, GA
• Priestess Montreal, QC

Some photos that I didn’t take… but I was there!

The Fresh & Onlys at Beer Land

Capsula at Agave

King Kahn & the Shrines at El Sol y La Luna

Priestess at El Sol y La Luna

Bruce Springsteen once said: “I play Buddy Holly every night before going onstage. It keeps me honest.”

Who knows if the Boss actually said it or not but I’ll be damned if it ain’t true that Buddy made some real honest rock’n'roll.

It was almost 50 years ago today (I’m a couple days late because I was busy turning my legs into linguine at Revelstoke) that Charles “Buddy” Holly, Richie Valenzuela (aka Ritchie Valens) and JP Richardson (aka the Big Bopper) died in a plane crash in Northern Iowa just after a show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake. A devastating day for rock’n'roll, but as luck would have it Buddy’s bass player — a young fellow by the name of Waylon Jennings — managed to survive.

The plane was chartered for Buddy and his band but Waylon gave his seat up to the Big Bopper, who was running a fever and had trouble fitting into the bus seats.  When Buddy found out that Waylon wasn’t going to fly he said, “Well, I hope your old bus freezes up.” Waylon responded, “Well, I hope your plane crashes.” This friendly joking would haunt Waylon for years.

Buddy’s drummer, Tommy Allsup, gave his seat to Valens after losing a coin toss. Valens got the seat and Allsup got the rest of his life.

Buddy Holly was 22.  Rock on.

Here’s the most excellent track “Gold for Bread” off that album.  Go buy it on Sub Pop.  (I feel extra compelled to support Sub Pop after going to the EMP in Seattle)

Eastbound & Down is pure comedy gold.  It’s a new series on HBO starring Danny McBride (Pineapple Express, The Foot Fist Way) and Will Ferrell’s an executive producer.  If you click through to that link and watch the preview video it looks like he’s also acting in the series.

I just grabbed a rough cut of the pilot episode by torrent and it is FUCKING FUNNY.  Everybody needs to PVR this shit immediately – looks like it’s coming out in February. This alone might be reason enough for me to finally bow down to (i.e. bend down in front of) the cable company and subscribe to HBO.

Maximum bonus points for using Freddy King’s “Going Down” for the show’s opening… in the pilot I saw at least.  I’m so pumped about this track that I’m going to include it here for your listening pleasure.  Possibly the most bad-ass Freddy tune ever recorded.

Congratulations, you are now enjoying “City Slang” by Sonic’s Rendezvous Band.  Yes, as in Fred “Sonic” Smith, Mr. Detroit High Energy Rock — former guitarist and founding member of the MC5. Shortly after the Motor City Five split up in 1972 Smith rose from the ashes — not unlike a golden phoenix — and formed the Rendezvous Band with a few Detroit hard rock cronies, including Stooges’ drummer Scott Asheton.  SRB enjoyed a short run from 1975-1980 and pretty much existed well under the radar until a slew of re-issues in the last decade or so put their music back in the hands of the record-buying fans.

I picked up their recently re-issued 1978 live album on vinyl at Zulu a couple weeks ago and have been spinning it pretty much in a non-stop loop since I got it. Rock on.

Check out the super catchy DXM off their debut LP Haute Voltage (which I just picked up today of InterPunk)

For the ignoramuses in the crowd, The Inbreds were a killer rock duo way before bands with only 2 people in them became the flavour of the month.  And they didn’t even play the blues.  They made straight-up indie pop using a bass guitar played like a guitar through a guitar amp — power chords, feedback, riffage and all. It ended up sounding more like a guitar than a bass, but not really like a guitar at all. After a few albums they called it quits in ’98 when they were just starting to get some traction.  Just before the break-up they were booked on one of those traveling summer festivals (maybe Edgefest) when Foo Fighter Dave Grohl (who was also on the tour) famously called the Inbreds his new favourite band… or something to that effect.  I’m sure that picked them up a few new fans but they packed it in soon after.

Since then, Mike O’Neill has released a couple of solo albums and played in Sarah Harmer‘s band for a few years.  Dave Ullrich opened up Zunior, blogs at Thick Specs (“classic indie rock”) and plays in a band called Egger.  So they haven’t been what you would call “slouches” or anything.

Speaking of Halifax Pop Explosion… it’s been 10 years since Mish and I flew from Ottawa to take in the festival (back when it was called Halifax On Music).  I thought I had died and gone to indie rock heaven. Behold this magical and wonderful 1998 lineup…

Admiral, By Divine Right, Cheticamp, Cool Blue Halo, Deadly Snakes, Holler, Julie Doiron, Lady Bug Transistor, Moon Socket, Mooney Suzuki, Neko Case, Number One Cup, Pansy Division, Papas Fritas, Plumtree, Rebecca West, Richard Davies, Rome Plows, Ron Sexsmith, Shallow North Dakota, Shyne Factory, Soaking Up Jagged, Starbeam, State Champs, Straight, Syrup USA, Teen Wolf, The Euphonic, The Grifters, The Inbreds, the Ten Cent Wings, The Vees, Thrush Hermit, Tricky Woo, Yo La Tengo

Highlights from that trip included:

• Seeing Thrush Hermit play in a venue not unlike my high school cafeteria a few months before Clayton Park came out so I got to hear all those songs before the album was released.
• Buying my first Tricky Woo album — The Enemy Is Real — which remains probably one of my top 20 albums of all time to this day.  Talk about having your ears ripped off your head and nailed to the wall.  Also… minimum 2 guitar solos per song.
• Discovering the Brian Jonestown Massacre.  Bit of a back story… BJM were supposed to be headlining the aforementioned cafeteria show (the festival finale) so they were on the front cover of the Halifax weekly arts paper but they got busted for drugs at the border and never made it to the show.  Regardless, I picked up Strung Out In Heaven (their “major label” debut on TVT) mostly because of the totally electric buzz surrounding the band and the fucking awesome album art.  I bought it from Sam the Record Man on Barrington Street where Inbred Mike O’Neill was working and a totally unknown punk band of pre-pubescent misfits called “Sum 41″ was playing an in-store performance to like 6 people.

Christ… that was a real Canadian indie rock fanboy trip down memory lane.  Back to regular programming.

Before I sign off, a seminal Inbreds track for your listening pleasure — “Any Sense of Time” off the most excellent 1994 album Kombinator:

As you might expect, King Khan’s apple doesn’t fall from the Spaceshits/Sexareenos tree.  His schtick is a bit of a sloppy James Brown-meets-garage-rawk-party type thing.  Fronting the Shrines, a 7-piece band and go-go dancer, King Khan is the master of ceremonies who occasionally sports a guitar but mostly just sings and mingles with the crowd.

Not a bad show but the whole thing kind of fell flat.  The place was packed and by the time King Khan hit the stage everybody was fully juiced up to get their collective rocks off but it didn’t seem like ol’ Blacksnake was giving the expected 110%.  Definitely worth the price of admission but not quite as good as I expected.

Here’s a track from the Shrines’ latest platter “What is?!” called “Took My Lady Out to Dinner”