Concerts

“That girl weighs like, 60 pounds. I’m serious.”

“White belts are okay, as long as you wear them with irony.”

“There are so many bald guys here. How am I supposed to tell Michael Stipe from Moby from some random dude?”

When walking down 6th Street at 4 p.m. on a Friday during SxSW, pedestrians hear all sorts of music spilling out of the clubs. Sometimes they peek inside, sometimes they stop for a brief moment, and oftentimes, they just keep walking. Today, there was a performer at the Chuggin’ Monkey that not only filled an empty club, but drew a crowd of dozens outside the window that continued to grow and stuck around for his whole set, staring through the windows while bobbing their heads and smiling.

Phoenix-based hip-hop artist Intrinzik is a consummate performer. Before Intrinzik took the stage at Volume, Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys jumped onstage and busted out a fierce freestyle rap that left the audience pumped up and delirious. It was a hard act to follow, but Intrinzik managed to pull it off.

I was gonna kick sooo much ass at Rhino Records’ Geekus Musicus Maximus challenge today at the Austin Convention Center. The 305-question music trivia test (dubbed the RMAT, for Rhino Musical Aptitude Test) wasn’t supposed to lead me to this rattling revelation: I don’t know nearly as much about music as I’ve always thought.

What the hell am I doing here? It’s 11 a.m., I drank an entire bottle of red wine by myself last night, I have a bad hangover, and this brunch dealio at the Four Seasons looks way more swanky than I feel.

Actually, I don’t feel swanky at all, and aside from my friend and independent musician Jody Gnant (the reason I’m at this thing), I don’t know any of these hundreds of people who are dining on crepes, drinking mimosas (yeah, gimme three, please), and lounging around in the shaded grass by the lake.

I don’t consider myself an emotional person. I rarely cry at sad movies, I don’t dote over puppies and babies, and naturally sappy people annoy me. But Sia, the Australian sensation who’s been building a buzz via distribution through Starbucks around her sixth album, Some People Have Real Problems, made me cry. I’ve seen hundreds of shows in my lifetime, but I’d never seen a performer who could actually make me weep. Until Sia. And she did it with a single note that left an audience of hundreds absolutely breathless.

Shortly after the last Concrete Blonde reunion tour (for the Group Therapy album in 2002), front woman Johnette Napolitano gave me an interview for a small press publication called Musik Kulture magazine (now-defunct). One of the things she said toward the end of the interview was, “If the world went to hell tomorrow, we’d all be out in the desert, stomping our feet and clapping our hands.”

By: Jonathan McNamara Green food coloring and clover do not a happy St. Patty’s Day make. It takes proper Irish food, proper Irish brew and of course proper Irish music. Enter our friends Flogging Molly who will be paying Phoenix a visit this March 16-17 at Tempe Town Lake. Haven’t…

A lot of people think things like catchy band names and cool album covers are irrelevant in the Digital Age, when most people download their music and nobody can afford to pay $18.99 for an unheard CD based solely on how cool it looks. (That’s not a good idea, anyway – the last time I did that, it was a Blowtorch Betty CD, and I regretted letting my eyes make decisions for my ears).

But I don’t whole-heartedly agree with the idea that a band’s name isn’t as important as a band’s sound, especially at a massive festival like SxSW, where thousands of unknown artists are clamoring for a break and playing all over the place. I have gone to see bands I’ve never heard of play at SxSW, based on solely on their band names. Last year, I went out of my way to catch this band from India that was cleverly christened Menwhopause, and I didn’t regret it. The music was a great mashup of acoustic rock, heartfelt harmonies, and complex compositions – sorta like Dave Matthews Band, but with a better moniker and fewer sweaty gesticulations from the singer. And I was eternally amused at the crass name one band from Houston took – The JonBenet. I never got a chance to catch one of their shows last year, but they’re slated to perform again this year.

But now they’ve got more competition. Going through the 2008 SxSW performer schedule, I found a whole slew of mostly-obscure bands with outrageous (and sometimes, outright stupid) band names. If you’re going to be in Austin for the festival this year and find yourself with some down time, consider checking out some of these intriguingly-named acts:

Tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane – son of music (and not just jazz) giants John and Alice Coltrane – performed two 50-minute sets with a foursome that showcased drummer E.J. Strickland, pianist Luis Perdomo, and bassist Drew Gress.

With more than 1500 acts at this year’s SxSW music festival, it’s pretty obvious that festival-goers won’t get to see everything, even if they could make hella clones or disperse themselves into cognitive atoms. For me, SxSW is all about running around the blocks to catch such-and-such band at such-and-such place, before shuttling off through the melee to catch the next thing. And while there’s plenty of cool, undiscovered stuff to serendipitously stumble upon, I always like to make a rough guide of the shows I want to catch at SxSW. Here’s a day-by-day breakdown of the acts that will inspire me to run even faster through the streets to see their sets. My “absolutely-cannot-miss” gigs are in bold:

Last night Diplo short for “Diplodocus” hit Clubhouse Music like a primeval force from the Jurassic period

After an extended leave of absence, Future Shock returns to give y’all the lowdown on some of the biggest “just announced” concerts coming to the Valley. Speaking of comebacks, yo, a few of the biggest and most influential musicians in the world are gonna be making a return to P-Town’s stages in the coming months.

How do the Dropkick Murphys prepare for Saint Patty’s Day? Try two weeks of warm-up shows.

A guitarist wearing nothing but an oversized diaper. A white girl sporting a cat costume, then later, roller skating around stage with a fake fire extinguisher. A fit specimen of a man wearing a white fur coat. And an old dude in a peacock-esque headdress who can still bring the P-Funk.

These were just some of the things on display during the George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic (http://www.georgeclinton.com/) show at Marquee Theatre Wednesday night. At times, it didn’t all make sense. But when/if it starts making sense, it’s probably a sign that Clinton has died and gone back to the planet he is from.

Better than:Being too cool to dance.

The Blue Man Group’s “How to Be a Megastar Tour 2.1” is like a mini pop-psychology lesson, embedded within an interactive, multi-media extravaganza. The premise behind the performance: a fledgling band of Blue Men order an instructional videotape titled The Rock Concert Instruction Manual that tells them how to be rock stars and give audiences a stellar concert experience.

Shows to see before I die:

Björk
Led Zeppelin
Radiohead
Stevie Wonder (check)

When I was a fourth grader at Tempe’s Curry Elementary, a couple of kids cornered me on the playground. Their agenda? They wanted to let me know how they truly felt about me.

I love a good rock show, but one of my complaints about modern rock “concerts” is that there aren’t enough spontaneous jams. If a “surprise guest” comes out at a rock concert, it’s usually only a surprise to the audience, and the singer’s not gonna just hand the microphone to whomever jumps onstage while the band maintains some extemporaneous groove behind it all. Everything is so planned out, so meticulously calculated, that the rush of a “surprise” is almost impossible for rock.

Not so for hip-hop. What I witnessed at the KRS-One show tonight brought music back to its source – the people. The former front man of Boogie Down Productions performed for almost two hours, and capped off his set with a freestyle jam that included Phoenix’s own Grime and Cut Throat Logic, as well as a surprise (for everybody) appearance by Luckyiam of the Living Legends. Quite frankly, it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen at a local hip-hop show. Or any hip-hop show, period.

I don’t know what it is, but I have a sick obsession with Japanese noise/punk music. Like, a for-real manic obsession bordering on a permanent stay in a padded cell at the loony bin.

I think the fixation started when I discovered John Zorn’s Naked City in the ’90s. Mind you, the sick-o group was made up by a bunch of maniacal white dudes (Zorn, Joey Baron, Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Fred Firth), but it’s Yamatsuka Eye’s Tasmanian Devil timbre on select LPs that speak to my inner weird-o. Plus, I love that Eye’s inaudible, wordless vocals are backed by an anything-goes, straitjacket-esque ensemble.

A lot of people out there despise the Aquabats with a passion. Jaded music critics, surly rock fans, and even the security thugs at Aquabats shows love to drink the hater-ade on the Orange County ska-pop group. They usually crack on their simplistic and silly lyrics, obnoxious stage antics, and ostentatious superhero costumes. One particularly nasty diss came from the pierced mouth of some bitter record clerk at Zia, who labeled them “KISS for 12-year-olds.”

I have a confession to make: Robots used to scare the shit outta me. I mean, really scare the shit outta me.

I don’t know what it was about automatons and androids, but during my pre-pubescent years, these mechanical menaces used to give me Texas Chainsaw Massacre-sized levels of terror, particularly the junky, lo-fi kind of machines that looked like they were cobbled together by some mad scientist. (Cartoon robots like The Transformers and Voltron were a-okay, though). Remember all those freaky mechanoids that filled that weird-ass, early ’80s video for “Rock It” by Herbie Hancock that aired in heavy rotation during MTV’s embryonic years? That shit used to give me nightmares, as did the vid for Lou Reed’s “No Money Down” (where a robotic doppelganger of the rock icon tears its face to shreds).

Herbie Hancock brought the electronic funk and (surprise, surprise) lyrical jazz to Orpheum on Friday night with a lesser-known quartet lineup that wasn’t any less worthy of sharing the stage with the funk master.