Nashville Music Blog

The easiest excuse I have for not even trying to blog last night's events is to say, simply, I do not remember a damn bit of it. But actually, the opposite is the problem. I remember everything, but now 12+ hours later (a span of time which unfortunately does not include sleep) it's far too much to process with the limited cognitive capacity in what's left of my brain at the moment. However, I'm still going to pretend I'm a professional and recollect it as best I can.

After a two-hour Mai Lai of hip-hop, funk and punk rock hits by the Beastie Boys, I happened to wander into the Budweiser Troo Music lounge to find Music City outlaw legacy Justin Townes Earle crooning away to a packed house that could definitely care less that David Byrne was rocking it just a football field away. Almost everything about Earle's schtick -- at least on paper -- seems like it could be the most contrived shit ever: a pomade-drenched country boy in a Depression-era suit singing folk songs about things that happened nearly a century before he was born. But hey, it works. Earle manages to pay homage to the golden era of radio without coming off to labored or affected.

Skipping ahead a few hours past the stroke of midnight, an incredibly large and ardent crowd waited ever-impatiently for Crystal Castles to weather their technical difficulties and put on a show. Almost 25 minutes later after their scheduled start, the trio did actually come through with a crowd-shaking set of strobe-lighted Atari death house. The repertoire was relegated entirely to their debut LP, which was only minor, hair-splitting miff to those like myself hoping to peep some new tracks.

Crystal Castles seemed to end about the same time as Phish's 3 hour jam sesh which brought mass exodus of folks straight from the main stage to That Tent where Girl Talk was prepping for another sweat-soaked mash-a-thon. The rest was pretty much par for a Greg Gillis performance: lots of folks on stage, balloons, toilet paper guns, and a nearly endless stream of sliced, diced, scattered, covered, and smothered clips and samples of prerecorded favorites. While essentially, we're still talking about a guy pushing buttons on a laptop, if there was anyone disappointed, they were strongly outnumbered. Slightly different from his album releases, the live songs are considerably less erratic, and Gillis spends a little more time letting the samples flow and grow into more organic and traditional segues.

From there on out was mostly just a series of increasingly bad decisions that led to me watching Paul Oakenfold end his set just after sunrise. 6 hours and no sleep later, I'm currently daydreaming of a cold, dark oasis in which i can catch a little shut eye before the day ahead.