ROCK N ROLL HELLRIDE: KADAVAR @ the masquerade

[iwishuwould]:  With the Kadavar show looming on the horizon, I'd been on a rock n roll hellride lately.

I guess I got a bad case of the nerves because I could barely sleep in the days leading up to the show. I kept having these off the wall dreams. The first was that we went to the Masquerade, and each band that was gonna be playing had their own bar, with a craft station. The other band touring with Kadavar were Mothership, from Dallas. In my dream their craft station was a tie dye curtains station: FUN.




Well the day finally came and we took our drunk asses down to the masquerade ready for a good time. The shows did not disappoint. We caught the entire Mothership set and it was fucking awesome. I gotta say, I had not heard much from them before hand and I was thoroughly impressed. They did a great deal of shredding and hair tossing (in sync!).

Here goes a shitty picture of Mothership rawking our fucking faces off.

They were great, and they're brothers.... not only did they totally fucking shred, but they also kept syncing up and tossing their hair all around, in a way that was reminiscent of Wyld Stallyns, like so, but with a metric ton of hair:

[area.personality]:  This would be where I drunk tweeted, "#Brothers?  I like where this is going, @mothership!"  For some reason they neither replied or re-tweeted.

[iwishuwould]:  Next up was Kadavar. They also did not disappoint. But more about that in a moment. At this time I would like to say that I thought it was fucking weird that they were playing Masquerade. I would have expected them to play the Earl. They are an awesome band, who should have at least enough fans (in Atlanta) to play the Earl. Its just the best choice. and plus its my favorite venue, and its right around the corner from Casa Nueva. But alas, they are from Germany, and therefore had no way of knowing about the Earl vs Masquerade. Although maybe there is some new thing going around why bands are playing the Masquerade. I've noticed several shows coming up that are gonna be there and it seems like a new trend.....that being said, Masquerade was actually a pretty good spot for this show- there actually were not so many people there as I expected (but it would've been enough for the Earl, IJS). So it was cool to be able to get up close. Also the sound was pretty good. The stage was just like a platform so you were really up close to them. that was fun. 

This shit was highly anticipated by the ladies of RawkTalk (and my neighbor, Thunder). They brought all the righteous jams out (I mean shit, they only have two albums, what were they really gonna do?) But they played a nice long set and lots of songs off both albums, and of course all the "hit singles" (that would be all the songs they got videos for, natch). Leading up to the show I actually tried to refrain from listening to their albums because I honestly had played that shit out so hard when I first got a hold of it, and I really wanted to get myself all in a twist for live version. Which would explain why I mistakenly thought they were jamming at some points, when it was really just songs off the first album. Also shit sounds different live. Also I drank my weight in Jaegar and beers before they went on, as per usual. this is also the reason that I will never be the kind of blogger who includes set lists- like I'd ever remember that much detail! I'm a nerd and a spazz over music, but not to the point where I'm taking notes, and thinking about what I'ma write about it while its happening. I like to let go and let God, as it were, in the presence of live music. That's also why you'll typically only see a couple of shitty photos out of me- just enough to prove to myself that i was actually there the next day. 

speaking of...

Here goes a shitty photo of Kadavar rocking our fucking faces off.

But why be satisfied with my shitty photos when you can watch the whole show all over again! courtesy of this man who filmed the entire thing and uploaded it- RIGHTEOUS:

You can totally hear area.personality holler at 12:43!!!

[area.personality]:  I am like a kitty!

[iwishuwould]:  They were tight as all hell- you can tell they been playin them songs the fuck out cause it was just tight and easy for them. and I think they had a fan going so their hair was like fluffy ass cotton candy just blowin in the breeze. That drummer was playing his fucking nutsacks off- and it looked like he never even broke a sweat. Nice job, Kadavar! 

Following the epic facemelt I wandered down to the ladies room and spotted the Brothers Mothership at the merch table. I had to stop them and tell them thanks for rawking our fucking faces off, and they totally also obliged for a photo. Here we go flossin our earthbling and haiyuh for the camera:

What a nice coupla brothers! Finally, they gave me their business card: wicked logo, yall!

I wandered back to find area.personality and she had cornered Tiger of Kadavar! Now I'm not gonna lie- I totally prepared a gift bag for them (perhaps inspired by my crafty dreams?) that included mixtapes and lotto tickets, along with several other small, ahem, tokens of adoration. So I presented him with the gift bag and told him in some mangled german what was in there. Then I think we begged for a photo, and he took off into the back, and I was like oh shit- are we supposed to follow him or is he running away from us? But we totally followed him and he took us back to get the photo with the bassist, Dragon, too!

Here goes area.personality with 2/3 of Kadavar. Scope their immense height, would you?! When I instagrammed this shit I totally hashtagged it #tallasallfuck #brickshithouse:

[area.personality]:  Like a goddam jungle gym, man.

[iwishuwould]:  Finally here I go with my rock hero, Lupus Lindemann. I was feeling pretty ballsy thanks to a wide array of beverages that I had consumed earlier in the evening, so when I seent him perched by the merch table, I just went right up and said along the lines of "Hey- thanks for rawking our fucking faces off, you guys shred! Hey you just came back from Nepal, right? OMG me too! How did you dig it, man?"

Dawg has the biggest balls of anyone on earth, so she asked him for an interview for Rawk Talk. Miraculously, and perhaps fatefully for him, he totally. fucking. obliged. 

[area.personality]:  Thank ye.

[iwishuwould]:  We asked the hard hitting questions that are on everyone's drunkass mind: what do you like to eat for breakfast? and tell me about your rings? 

(the answers are "coffee" and "this ring is from Tibet", although we had to wrangle those factoids out of him)

Snippets of info that I do know we acquired from this interview are that they have been writing new music in Austin in the time in between SXSW and the start of tour. How many? whats the inspiration? How has success and touring affected songwriting? Where do y'all plan to record the new album? All questions we did not ask.

I also seem to recall a brief discussion about snow on the bluff, and how the drummer was hoping to go drive through it. We did have enough sense to advise against that. As someone who has previously volunteered with the Atlanta Harm Reduction Center, I would advise people driving big ass tour vans full of expensive gear, and with European accents to stay clear of the bluff. you *might* be a target IJS. 

i also felt like a total fucking creeper because i had researched them ad nauseum for my previous piece about Kadavar, so I came off like a total psycho, as was confirmed when Lupus said " i think you know more about this than we do". Sorry. But I would like to take this opportunity to point out that Kadavar are not the first band I have delved into so completely. Before Rawk Talk I was obsessed with Ween, Black Sabbath, Dungen, the Allman Brothers, and Motorhead, among others (perhaps less intensely). I've read books about Ween and Ozzy. Not to mention watched documentaries, and really trolled deep into youtube for new shit to see. I hate to be a creeper, but its also what I was trained to do professionally, although about like neurons, and molecules, and whatever. Music just happens to be a thousand billion times more fascinating so I get to use my science creeper skills for that instead. Deadly combo.

[area.personality]:  I made some memes that I think would be helpful in describing our interview styles at this point.

[iwishuwould]:  after feeling like oh god we've quite possibly blown it- here is Honks giving us a pep talk about the positive power of the pelvic thrust: when things aren't going according to plan, just give a pelvic thrust and all will be right in the world.  (according to ol Honks-a-rino)

[area.personality]:  (Side note:  the Jabba the Hut defense mechanism, pictured here, works perfectly against pelvic thrusts.)

[iwishuwould]:  but to be honest, I don't think a pelvic thrust was gonna fix the lingering sense of dread and defeat that welled up inside of me after that night. I hate to be so fucking emo but I srsly like couldn't even eat for two days after that. (and i always want to eat). so i reached out to homeboy over at monster fresh.

[area.personality]:  It's totally ok to be emo in times like this.  I was drunk FB'ing Dungen at the beginning of the show.  It was exactly like drunk texting an ex on a first date with a new person.  WTF.

[iwishuwould]:  monster fresh is a a blog i like to follow (time permitting). I think i found monster fresh back when I was obsessed with ween, before they broke up (RIP). There was some great photos and the story of Gene Weens epic meltdown. ever since then i follow along, and on facebook too. homeboy is based out of Seattle, so when he has contests or posts about upcoming shows, it generally doesn't apply to me here on the east coast. but there was a contest for a Nirvana book recently and I thought to myself, Shit, I can win that. My sisters are both constantly winning shit online, now's my time. So I entered, and guess what: I fucking won that shit! like so:

so I started this email chat with homeboy from monster fresh. it was educational and awesome. we got some truly sage bloggin advice, that we both swear we will enact immediately (in a few months). The chat petered off, as chats tend to do, and I had not chatted with monster fresh for a few months until i felt devastated by the botched Kadavar interview. so i guess in an effort to cheer myself up I sent him an email to tell him how excited I was about having our first interview, and how bummed I was that we fuct it up. and he sent me back this inspirational tale of his first interview. its such a great story I'm going to share it here, now.


[Monster Fresh]: It was in a college paper.  I used a lot of profanity then too, I'm sure.  I didn't even have anything to record it; it was over 10 years ago.  Eek is like 7 feet or something ridiculous.  Probably not really that tall, but close.  He's a giant black man in a black mesh tank with hardcore scars all over his giant muscly shoulders.  His black leather jacket looked like it was made from half a cow.  We were sitting at little round pedestal table on stools and the table kept wobbling, as did his drink.  Little splashes here and there.  A woman would come up and he'd pause and snap a selfie with her, then go back to chatting.  I had dreadlocks, at the time, so he's spit out some jabber like "Wyo bomba skett, riddle bap danoo" and finish it off by confirming with, "You know dread?"  And I'd just nod.  

The New Jack shit was funny because he said, "I's in New Jack City" and we were just like, "What?!"  That movie was already old at that point and the statement seemed super fucking left field.  So he was like, "New Jack City mon.  Wesley Snipes, Judd Nelson.  I in that film."  And my friend Jon Rainbow (his real name, by the way), just just like, "No fucking way.  I have that movie.  You're not in it"  Then Mouse called one of the members of his Caucasian backing band that he was using while touring the states--they were called the 420 band--and used that guy to verify it.  "What movie I in?"  The guy responded with something like, "Oh shit.  This again.  What's that fucking movie with Ice-T in it, again?"  Then Eek asked that band member why he was asking so fucking pouty and why he's always bummed out.  "Smile.  Why so down?  You one of 5 billions sperm!  You made it!  Cheer up, you made it"

I can't really remember what else we talked about, but he told me that he's toured for so long and loves it because it's like a free vacation, playing spots like Hawaii, etc.  Eventually, he just kind of propped himself up and said, "Where my jacket?"  Then stumbling off back toward the stage was singing, "I got to find my jaacket."  It was on his stool, but he wasn't listening to me. 

Then I went up to him and asked him to sign this book of Mormon from the 50s that I used to get people to sign--Wesley WIllis, Mitch Hedberg, and Ike Turner signed it too.  He said, "I want to be a Moormawn."  And sang, "I got 9 wive."  He signed it to "From Eek-A-Mouse to Chris the eek-a" or something screwy like that.  Then I asked him to pick and sign a move in my 100 Deadliest Karate Movesbook and he got irritated.  "I don't know karate!"  Then we left.  That was that.

**********************************************************************************************************************************

[iwishuwould]:  This story provided me the only laugh I had in those bleak days following the show, and I truly appreciated the words of monster fresh wisdom. It provided me the strength I needed to pick myself up to rawk talk again another day.

I loved his story because it brings all the awkwardness, but its from the artist's side, not the interviewer's side. I wish Kadavar had been the ones slurring their words and going on and on about girly gibberish. But one good thing was borne of this debacle: we have a unified vision of Rawk Talk now. Before we were just bloggin haphazardly, without any real mission. But it has become apparent based on our interview questions that we are truly the Tiger Beat of Stoner/Psych Rock. Its weird to be a chick and be into all this heavy music because, like guys who are into heavy music, you really just dig the tunes, maaaan, and you really feel the sound, and get hype for the rawk, yet, unlike dudes, you get to develop debilitating crushes on the musicians if you like. And you get to look at them all lusty and imagine what their hair smells like, and totally photoshop your picture next to their picture and cackle about it with your BFF, and draws hearts and kittens all around pictures of them, and totally plan how you will ultimately come down on them and destroy them... wait... sorry...I mean all that's if you want to. You can also totally just appreciate the music and all the blood, sweat, and tears (and probably farts) that these guys put into the music, and have a damn good time with it. 

[area.personality]:  It might still be a little haphazard.

[iwishuwould]:  But if you thought that this was the end of our Kadavar shitshow, think again. In only two weeks time from this show we were going to be heading off to the Austin Psych Fest to get our eardrums assaulted by Kadavar yet again!! But that's still not the end of the story because right after that they announced they were coming the fuck BACK TO ATLANTA for ANOTHER show opening for Wolfmother!!!! Talk about shitting bricks! So stayed tuned for the third installment of the Kadavar Saga Trilogy™.........

Counterpoint: PTL for Jack White

It's been a good day.  Usually the earworms infesting my brain are just horrible, like they were yesterday, but today everything has been set to this new tune from Jack White.  This business meeting, for example, was set to "Lazaretto."  In my brain.  Nice.

And SRSLY, thank sweet baby Jesus.  You know why?  Because I saw this stupid fucking meme on facebook yesterday:

And so OF COURSE this stupid song had to be stuck in my head all day and all night.  I had forgotten about this song, actually.  But yeah, it existed.



At least YouTube has a killer live studio version of this song.  There's so few of those for the antiquated gems such as these.

Knock knock!  What do Jack White and Kenny Rogers have in common?  Earworms ahoy.

(And PS, in case you don't know what PTL refers to, here.  I would hate for any reader to feel excluded from the lexicon.)

earwurm du jour: werk version

I werk at a children's hospital and we get a lot of insane child names up in here sometimes. In particular I work in a unit where we have "frequent flyers" or children who return for therapy again and again. Some of them have names that just trigger my internal radio to start playing certain songs. It doesn't necessarily have to be the name of a song although that happens. It is often a rhyming name, or sometimes even a drug name with a particular cadence that matches a melody of a song.

Today our patient Deandre came up. I always instantly hear this song when I see his name. Instantly. 

dont ever let it a child named Layla pass thru my queue, or I will instantly hear this riff, and be losing my motherfucking mind by the end of the day. 

and the cadence of the drug Amlodipine perfectly matches this shit. Thankfully I now see this drug so often that the madness has stopped, somewhat...

finally a coworker named Frank inevitably summons this song onto internal radio (thank god he is only working like every other weekend or I might go insane)


There are loads of other workplace song association examples I could present to you here, but I'd rather test the waters and see exactly how crazy I appear after this. Does this happen to other people? Surely it must, but to this degree? Worse? How do you cope with it? I mean I always have some lil jam rattlin around in there, but the ability of certain names/drugs to conjure is noteworthy. But as far as earworms go you could do worse than fucking L7! 

Dammit Woods!

To properly engage in this blog post, please click the play button below and listen while you read!  We are interactive!



Nice, huh?

OK, Woods is a band that opened for Dungen in 2009, which is really the only reason I knew about them ever.  I bought their 2009 album "Songs of Shame," which is such a great name for an album btw, but I wound up not really liking it very much.  And srsly, can you blame me?  Pause the above now and listen to this shit for a second.



INORITE?  You can hardly believe it's the same band.  Neither can I.  Lead singer Jeremy Earl's voice sounds like some whiny castrato, and frankly, it sounds like they are all just barely learning to play their instruments.  Which I actually love to hear from new bands sometimes, but this was their fourth album.  Also, as an aside, this video sucks and it reminds me of when Dawg sent me that article on Katherine Knight.  Wait!  Are they Australian?  Oh no, nevermind, they're from Brooklyn.

OK, resume playing the first song now.  It's all going to be alright.

Oh, I mean it's going to be alright for everyone except me.  Why?  Because I had no idea that they are incredible now, and not only did I miss them playing at Austin Psych Fest, but I also missed them playing here in Atlanta at Masquerade on 4/29.

(BTW, what's up with the awesome bands suddenly playing Purgatory? That used to be the shit hole bar for local bands to play for drunks while the awesome bands drowned them out.)

Goddammit Woods!  Why did you have to go and get all awesome suddenly and not tell me about it beforehand?  Now who knows when they will be back here.  I am loving almost every song on their new release "With Light and Love," which came out on tax day.  They have mastered their instruments and the vocal production sounds superb.  I love the hit single (above) because it sounds like one of those Important Songs because it talk about Us, and because it has a great kum-ba-ya hippie vibe to it.  Great, great melody also.

I also am loving the title tune because it is 9 minutes long, rambles all over the damn place, and has some great solo work.


Unfortunately, they look kind of unfortunate.  Here goes Woods:

But whatever, man.  Their album art is cool and their music RAWKS.  So pleased to hear them mature into something really worth listening to.  But dammit!  When will they be back in Atlanta?  They seem to play here all the time, but now that I love them I bet they will never be back.  DAMMIT.

no jet lag? well what now?: jamz du jour

man, so the hostess of one of my fave radio programs is not on tonight! shes been gone for a sec but she had a substitute host/ess while she been gone, but with prescribed playlists for our listening pleasure. but not tonight. and man! i was ready to jam! and thats ordinarily no big deal, but i had left my ipod at home in my other purse, and i have presently played out all my cds in the car. and tapes. yes, i have a tape player in my car and actively listen to tapes.

NOW WHAT?

(behold: tonight's jams du jour):

quicksilver messenger band: fresh air



so i have these...playlists....

back in the day i used tomake mixtapes. like, so many motherfuckin mixtapes.

here they go (well, some of them, the ones i didnt give away):

and then when computers happened real good, i made playlists, but i burned them to CD, (stored them in cd books!) like so:

but anyway.

so basically, the moral of this all is, i had to resort to my youtube playlists ive been cobbling together slowly lately. its just borne of necessity really, and convenience. i think i first started just making these lists of shit i wanna watch again later, like when time permits. and as i shazam shit on my radio shows, i just find them on youtube and stick on them on these nonsensical lists, that in hard times, musically, i have something (semi) new to listen too and love. its like prescreened jams. like as in i heard it once and thought enough of it to tag it (generally drunkenly) and add to some playlist somehow. and ive enjoyed them again and again on many occasions, that were musically times of need. like at our sleazestaxx rehearsal in the mountains, after we were all over practicing and drunk, and needed jams, but had only some wee speakers to hijack, i just popped these on and i realized these will work . 

suck (from the righteously named album "Time to Suck"): (a cover of donovan's) season of the witch



i know many of these i heard on radio programs that i like on wras 88.5, and it makes me sad about all the drama going on with them and the university right now. i have much more to say about that, but thats another topic, for another time....

so forgive me for kind of making a playlist/mixtape of songs i heard elsewhere, but, really, thats how you hear anything, yes? through others, right? well anyhow, through the magic of youtube.....

 ...i got really stoked on this other youtube channel: this dude richaftersabbath posts all this great sort of obscure heavy rock shit and i just dig it! i dunno how i found his channel first- perhaps from that Fat album I go tin the redneck riveiera? like i think i googled that album to listen to it (after i had bought it just to be able to hear it on my phone or some shit) and he had posted it. so i looked at all the other shit he puts up and its great. plus he does all these other playlists and shit and its great!

so perhaps the mixtape is not dead, just... transformed? modified? evolved.....


jpt scare band: sleeping sickness




i got a guitar lesson from Isaiah from Earthless for xmas from my amiga buena, Teresa! he taught me the basics to three songs and this stooges song is one of them. and its really cool actually because a few weeks ago, when the drummer of the stooges passed away, a blog I like to read a lot, the Obelisk, featured this album as his "Monday full-length" (thats what she said), and i really, really dug this album. i played it like a bunch of times again and again, so its timely and fun to learn it. and easy. most importantly kinda easy...

the stooges: i wanna be your dog




i dunno, i feel like just sharing some jamz du jour tonight. i got an bunch of other stuff to RawkTalk about, but its so much to synthesize, and regurgitate, and whatnot, and i really just wanted to jam. i feel real bent out of shape about the shit with the radio station, and i got a lot to say about it. but another day. i also want to finish telling you all about pysch fest- the last day was great! i never felt tired there, and i really, REALLY never wanted to come back home. well not back to work ever, thats for sure. i could psych fest for the rest of my life.

and theres that highly anticipated Kadavar show at the masquerade like a month ago, with the totally mortifying, botched interview.i couldnt eat for like two days after that. thats a tough blog to write. but the show was killer, and i really dug Mothership, the tour partners. i really wanna RawkTalk all about it, but gimme some time, yall. lets just jam tonight,

 christopher: dark road

I Fell in a Hole While Shopping for Vinyl in Austin

We had a pretty packed weekend, really. But no weekend getaway can be properly deemed complete without a trip to a used record store. We came close to missing it, but as fate would have it, there was like a 90 minute wait for brunch on Sunday morning, and there just happened to be a vinyl shop a block away. Score!

We popped into Friends of Sound on S. Congress -- well, no, it has an address on S. Congress, but it's really on the back side of the block in the alley, and the ingress is really, really creepy. iwishuwould pointed out the newly cleaned bloody rags hanging on a rack outside the door, and I noticed underneath there were all these empty Jelly Belly dispensers... as if someone had been trying to lure children or maybe people with the munchies... In any case, Friends of Sound! Clean it up! Be friends of vision as well! Once we got inside, it was full of dusty records and filthy, music-lovin' types just like any record store. They had a pretty amazing selection, tons of records, but it was a little pricey. New Arrivals (to-be-sorted) were $25! That's too much for a used record that's not some special collectors' edition or something. I guess they change the price once they sort them? And the $25 is just if you have to have it before they have time to price it properly? Also I wasn't really excited about the prospect of taking vinyl back on the plane, and I was dragging pretty hard from getting out of bed before noon, so it was really more of a window shopping thing. But the way they had everything organized was kind of nuts. I always find the different used vinyl stores' taxonomy / etymology of the discs interesting. I was fairly amused to begin with, but then I ran across this:

Dad Rock?  WTF?  The thing that made it more hilarious was that I didn't recognize any of the bands in that group, and I don't mean to brag, but I Know My Bands.  I was just going to post this picture and say "Look everybody!  At this hilarious thing!  Tee-hee!"  But then, like a good journalist should, I did some half-assed, cursory research.  Dad Rock is a thing!  What?

Yeah, that's from the Oxford American English dictionary, so I guess I'm the last to know...

But this instantly clears it all up for me for a second.  All I have to do is think of Larry and his love of dinosaur bands, like his favorite, Grand Funk Railroad, plus other faves like Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, and America.  OK, yeah.  Dadrock. 

But wait, aren't there some Dads that aren't 70?  Kevs is a Dad in his 50's, and he has a totally different taste in music.  Johnny Foos just turned 40 and he's a Dad, and again, his music taste is completely different from Dad or Kevs.  My nephew Alex is also a Dad and he's just turning 21 this month.  And again, completely different taste in music.

Like many people my age, I turned to Jeff Tweedy for all the answers.  But I thought he came off sounding like a defensive, grouchy old Dad about it.  So then I turned to a stranger called dad-rock on tumblr to see if he could light my path.  He defines Dad Rock as "a genre of rock music popular among boomer-aged dads."  Which would be fine if he didn't then go on to define "the holy trinity of dad-rock: Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page" because that just makes it all super confusing for me.  I've said this before and I'll say it again:  Eric Clapton is the most overrated musician in the history of space and time.  I am insulted on behalf of all Dads everywhere.  Second, you would have to be deaf to not love Jimi Hendrix, no matter how guilty of a pleasure it may be.  I feel like both he and Led Zepplin have too much of a timeless appeal to be nailed to boomer Dads.  So, thanks for nothing, tumblr stranger.

Apparently, the National has been fighting the Dad Rock label, so it must be something good. (Sorry Zach, couldn't resist myself)

So then I popped over to flavorwire to check out their list of 20 Dadrock albums that I should listen to in the car with my Dad on a road trip, and I can assure you that this list would mainly just piss me and Dad off completely.  I think this list was written for someone who has a Dad that's about my age, but with crap taste in music.

I think I've spent enough time in this hole, the stupid articles just go on and on listing bands that don't make any sense to me.  I'll stick with the dictionary definition, but not necessarily its example sentence.  Dad Rock is just music that you can't like beyond a guilty pleasure because your Dad liked it.  Which would, eventually, include all rock music.

APF Live! Bo Nanigen and Loop

Loop!

Man, Loop, that used to be my eardrums. Those things you just decimated with your crunchy ass fuzz. Those little crumpled head holes that I used to listen to the laughter of my children through. Right on man!

Before we got over here we heard the tail end of the Bo Nanigen set. They played really hard for a long time. The ending was just epic waves of Rawk. 

Now we're sitting up here on the platform listening to Loop, the last act of the festival. It's perfect, mate.