Thursday, April 7, 2011

Broke Is The New Black-

Ha. We've been in a pretty unbelievably tight spot since we got back from Austin for the South By Southwest Rubber City Rebels show. The boys played a fantastic and impressively tight set, utterly slaying the new single; Annoyed, Destroyed, And Unemployed b/w The Ballad Of The Rubber City Rebels which is amazing especially when you toss into consideration the fact that they've never played it live before AND they haven't toured for a hot minute. Their show was the high point of the trip, even more so than usual, and there were few bright glimmers of a good time in an otherwise insanely expensive and ultimately sort of depressing money pit of a show/s. I did, however, finally meet the incredibly badass and beautiful Texas Terri, although both Rod and I got horribly sick and we missed her show, humiliating since I'd gushed on and on about how stoked I was to be finally about to see her play. We still have to track her down to apologize. She is truly an awesome woman, a phenomenal lead vocalist, and deserves a hell of a lot more recognition and acclaim than she gets. She was also totally wearing a Peter Pan Speed Rock hoodie that I am super jealous of, and she came out to see the Rebels play, always an endearing quality in my book. I sat next to Darryl of Bad Brains on the flight from Orlando to Austin, which was rad, as he and Dr. Know turned out to be really sweet and cool. Sadly, I was unable to make it to their show since Rebels practice ran too long and I missed my shot. He did, however, hook me up with his email and wants to check out The Brand songs I send in, wait for it, the odd possibility he may like to produce it. Weird, huh? Pretty amazing and cool, too. Obviously I have serious doubts since we were just shooting the breeze, but it's very flattering to chill with a musician who I have listened to since I was a kid and have them take me seriously to such a degree as to merit showing a business interest. In fact, Darryl asked me about two minutes after we met if I were a frontman.  I did manage not to miss Dax Riggs, he played some really odd little spot at the farthest end of 6th Street called the Easy Tiger Lounge (easy in what way, begs the question...) outside at 1:00 in the morning. He was even better live than on record, and I was deeply impressed. I have to mention however that I was pretty unimpressed by his total lack of crowd interaction, barring his thank you's after he'd finished. We're talking, NO eye contact through out the entire set. I'm a firm believer in the frontman having a responsibility to actually *entertain* the audience, a la Chuck Berry, Iggy Pop, Stiv Bators, Mick Jagger, et al. The other added and much welcomed bonus in going to SXSW was the happy presence of our good friend Bruce Rave, who not only works (and has worked, for about 20 years give or take) at Capitol Records as an A & R guy, but blogs at  Rave's Raves,  and has a particularly killer radio show too (think: Lykke Li, Echo & The Bunnymen, PJ Harvey, TV On The Radio, Duran Duran, and Cage The Elephant for a recent set list). The man lives, eats, sleeps, and breathes music. We haven't seen Bruce since our mutual dear friend Doug Fieger, singer of The Knack (yes, THAT Knack, as in My Sharona) passed away and we went to Los Angeles for his memorial, so it was great to see him under much happier circumstances. Bruce is a fantastic human being and a lot of fun to be around, and we saw a Brit Pop band who he was interviewing for his show the next day, who were fabulous and very talented: Bombay Bicycle Club. Think: lots of bright, beautiful, glittering guitar riffs, haunting but still very hook heavy and catchy clever lyrics, and really great band chemistry. They're also very young but have already been together for about 5-6 years, if I'm remembering what Bruce told me. I enjoyed that show thoroughly and we caught up with their singer after, he turned out to be charming, British, polite, and intelligent. I wouldn't have seen them were it not for Bruce, and like I said, I had a lovely time with him. As I mentioned previously however, we spent a lot of money to get there and back, and on a spot to stay (which is a horror story that deserves it's own post, if I can just relive it long enough), in addition to the cash put out for the new Rebels single. Add to that my ridiculous medical expenses and I've been unable to shop AT ALL. I mean, really, really, NOT AT ALL. It's driving me mad. Happily, (YAY YAY YAY) a  Buffalo Exchange is opening in Charlotte, and I couldn't be more excited for reasons not quite share-able yet. I'll be writing up a post of it upon the grand opening. It's HUGE, the shop is almost 3,000 square feet which is truly incredible, and I can say with utter certainty that this particular location will be one of the best in the entire company. That also means that soon, I can go sell some clothes and get new ones in return! Whee! I'm sorry I've been so MIA lately, and promise to try to do better. My health has really been messing with me lately, which is inevitably the reason I don't post for awhile. I wanted to share some tunes with you guys, fill you in, and post some photos of my most recent lust worthy finds. More soon, I hope this finds you all well, and I've missed you. :)












(Sam Edelman, Shakuhachi, Jeffrey Campbell, Nasty Gal Vintage, Celine, Chanel, McQueen, Jeffrey Campbell, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Pixie Market)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

All of these heels are stupid. And you know when I say stupid you know I mean good.