Nashville Music Blog

About 20 percent of the line at La Zona Rosa during Superchunk's set. :(

​Note: Gold will provide coverage of Superchunk, Les Savy Fav and Fool's Gold later.

My past 36 hours have likely been some of my blurriest ever. After The Love Language and Lou Barlow's remarkable sets Thursday night in Cedar Street Courtyard -- they played to a crowd that was probably just shy of half-capacity thanks to a post-She and Him outflux ... snooze -- I crashed at the hotel for the better part of 12 hours. When I woke up Friday morning, I discovered folks had started to turn. The vendors, sound guys and bartenders seemed to have exhausted their store of good vibes. After witnessing a hot dog chef completely melt down on his cashier, and waiting in line for what I discovered was a Hole show and not a Sharon Jones/Miike Snow show, I decided to say "fuck it" and head toward the Village Voice showcase, where Gold and Cross were already mad-chilling to the glorious sounds of Superchunk.

So look, I don't want to get in a whole big thing about it, what it is, what it isn't, or what it's supposed to say about me, but I fucking love punk rock. And it is punk that is often (for me at least) the saving grace of this thing. Nine times out of 10, trying to see any band that's regularly featured on your Old Kentucky Blogs or Stereogums is a dumb idea. Mainly because there's going to be several hundred blog-happy new music enthusiasts who'll beat you to the punch, forcing you to stand in a ridiculously long line. And secondly, most of those bands are going to play Mercy Lounge at some point this year anyway. Oddly enough, the bands that are probably never going to play Nashville are often the easiest to see.

More from the video camera-totin' Seth Graves as he free-wheels his way around Austin. Starring a weary handshaking Bill Murray -- probably the most gawked-at person in all of Texas this week -- and a very drunk dude trying to breakdance.

​This remembrance of Alex Chilton, who passed away Wednesday at the age of 59, was sent in by John "Bucky" Wilkin, aka Ronny of the '60s Nashville surf-rock group Ronny and The Daytonas.

I first met Alex Chilton in 1987 when we were part of an oldies package tour called The Great American '60s Cruise. The headliner was Gary Lewis and his band the Playboys, who backed up the rest of us -- namely myself as Ronny and The Daytonas, Alex from The Box Tops, Dennis Yost of the Classics Four, and Sonny Geraci of Climax and the Outsiders.

We toured off and on for two years. It was a well-organized affair, each of us living in different cities and rendezvousing at the gig city. The promoter lived in Minneapolis, the tour manager in Indianapolis. Sonny and Gary flew in from Cleveland, Dennis from Florida, Alex from either Memphis or New Orleans and I from Nashville. The band drove their big truck overnight between cities. Our plane tickets arrived by FedEx the night before and somehow we all met up on time in City X. Nobody got hurt and everybody got paid. A miracle.

​Preface: The following screed was composed last night during Lou Barlow's set at the Merge showcase at Cedar Street Courtyard, just before The Love Language played ... and also some time after Gold and I decided to take one of those two-seater bike cabs just to get about eight blocks away. I wrote it in that overly analytical phase of drunkenness that comes just after you start talking at great length about fashion and just before you start talking at great length about politics. It is transcribed verbatim from my notebook. Please forgive any egregiously misinformed assumptions I make.

By all informed accounts, South by Southwest is (aesthetically, functionally) a shell of what it once was.* Until this week, I was a SXSW virgin, so what do I know? But everyone who does know tells me it used to be about serving the artist. It used to be about serious industry insiders coming down to witness rising bands as they rode the wave of growing buzz. It was about networking opportunities for burgeoning artists. As a spectator, it probably hasn't changed much -- selection-wise, it's probably gotten much better, in fact. But for bands, it's now kind of an obligatory type of scenario. If you don't make a showing in Austin this year, you have no "buzz capital."

Many thanks to YouTube user tinycorkscrew, who just made my fucking day by uploading a bunch of footage of Fugazi playing at 328 Performance Hall way back in 1993, the year In on the Kill Taker came out (and also the year of The Velvet Divorce -- not a band, surprisingly).

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Check out the slideshows for more SXSW photos.

Although I'm sitting in the IFC Crossroads lounge enjoying a complimentary continental breakfast and cup of coffee, it's times like these I feel more like I'm carrying a bucket of fish guts to the tanks at Sea World, dangling gruesome morsels of sustenance over a bubbling, salivating tank of killer whales, stretching ever so carefully so one of you animals doesn't take my arm off.

If there's one thing the Cream knows, it's that during SXSW, whether they're here or not, it's all anyone ever thinks about. I've heard all about you guys hanging at your favorite bars during the day, drinking beers and pretending they're free and that you're at some fancy day party sponsored by 1-800-COLLECT and Axe Body Spray. Hence, I won't taunt you any longer and will get onto your daily dose of vicarious excursion.

Video! Cheap beer! The Protomen! A guy hula-hooping and playing guitar behind his head! Andrew WK! Austin! Woo!

​Hey, it's gonna be spring this weekend! Like, real, sunny, warm, nice springy spring. Like, pretty soon it's gonna be so damn hot all the time people can complain about that instead of complaining about how cold/rainy/snowy/wintry-mixy/cloudy/mild it is!

Now, I'm not the Photoshop ace that D. Patrizio is, and I'd also rather not start my day by cutting Gold's head out of a Facebook pic and pasting it on a baby chick emerging from a golden egg. Not that I thought of doing that or anything. So here instead is a spring chicken. Do with that what you will, and in the meantime enjoy the rounded-up weekend of sundry shows, and let us know in the comments if we missed anything.

​In this week's dead-tree edition, I profile Beulah co-founder Miles Kurosky's six-year journey -- from the end of that band to the eventual release of his solo album The Desert of Shallow Effects last week. Since I spent most of the piece explaining the ordeal of surgery and physical trauma that characterized the album's production, I wasn't able to fit in much of the unrelated stuff from the 20-minute conversation we had.

The full interview is presented here for your reading pleasure -- minus some chitchat about Nashville (dude is all about barbecue)--including his philosophies on letting kids see shows, complexity in music and whether or not he deserves his reputation as an asshole. You can catch him live on Monday (Mar. 22) at The Basement with Duqette Johnson. Check out the interview after the jump.