If I just look that way maybe I will remember the lyrics photo by jeff barringer - staff photographer

New Disaster
Hometown: Austin, Tx.
http://newdisaster.com
New Disaster Concert Photos
Monday, March 26th, 2007
The O Cabaret (Austin, Texas)

Mondays can really suck if you want to go watch live music, even in a music town like Austin, but I rarely have the free time on a Monday to see a show so usually it's not a big issue.

This Monday it was a gray drizzly day, and I actually found myself with a free evening. Just as I was trying to decide if I wanted to suffer through another night of microwave dinners and re-runs of the Simpsons, a MySpace event invite popped into my in box from New Disaster inviting me down to the O Cabaret to catch their set.

Honestly, the last time I can remember going to a gentleman's club, in fact I think the last three times I went, were all for bachelor parties celebrating my three brothers' marriages. Don't get me wrong, I like girls (er, women), A LOT, I am just not big on the whole strip club scene in general. When I went in the past I usually spent my time at the bar sipping a coke and hiding the fact that I was blushing, trying not to break eye contact with the staff, or look.

Anthony Lovato, 26, former lead singer for the band Mest, was booked on suspicion of murder and held on a $1 million bail after he called police and claimed to have stabbed a romantic rival in Studio City. The victim, Wayne Hughes, 25, of Cathedral City, was declared dead at a nearby hospital, police said. Lovato was freed on Tuesday after prosecutors determined he had acted in self defense after Hughes had sent him threatening messages, climaxing in Hughes challenging Lovato to a fight on Sunday.

Velvet Revolver lead singer Scott Weiland is out $10,000 worth of clothes (his estimate) after his wife torched his wardrobe outside their Toluca lake home after the couple brawled at the ultra chic Graciela Hotel on Pass Avenue, causing over $400 in damages. Mary Weiland, 31, was booked for investigation of felony arson vandalism after officers responded to a call Saturday night that a female was burning clothes. The couple's children, ages 4 and 6, were placed in the custody of family friends. No telling how this impacts plans for the forthcoming Velvet Revolver tour, scheduled to launch April 10 in Chile.

Rush has announced its "Snakes and Arrows" tour (we like the title too) starting June 13 in Atlanta, and will have 45 more North American dates before it heads over to Europe. You think Geddy Lee would wear a "My Snake Is Bigger Than Your Snake" t-shirt?

Jeff Barringer Interviews Paul Collins and The Beat

One of the world's great levelers is certainly the internet, and the music industry's great leveler has got to be MySpace.com. Forget all the high school (and junior high) hijinks and shenanigans, if you really look deep into its soul, MySpace is an incredible resource for the music journalist, whether they are writing for Rolling Stone or writing for their own blog.

In the old old days of music journalism, before the internet, to hook up with a band there were really only two ways to go: The front door, which meant tracking down publicists, promoters, or venue management, or the back door, which was literally the back door, hanging around at the clubs and venues until you could pigeonhole someone who looked important enough to get you in.

While I still use these methods, my most successful connections seem to be coming primarily from MySpace these days, and like as not with a MySpace contact I end up dealing with the artists themselves.

Paul Collins Beat - Rock and Roll Girl Paul Collins Beat - Don't Wait Up For Me

A perfect case in point would be how we connected up with Paul Collins. When I tried to hook up with him 25-odd years ago at the Dillo when they opened for the Jam all my attempts to connect with him and the band failed, though I tried both the front door and the back door. This time, for his SXSW appearance, I contacted them through their MySpace page, and I'll be damned if Paul the man himself didn't reply. Because of that MySpace connection, I did a podcast interview with him, and when he and the band came over we not only filmed an interview, they invited us to film their whole SXSW set! Now, I'm not going to tell you if you run off to Slayer's MySpace site and send them a message then Kerry King will send you a personal reply, and Sting is actually unlikely to be the one approving your friend request on the Police's page, but for the other 99.9 percent of the bands and artists online, you stand a good chance of connecting some way.

My thanks go out to Paul Collins and the Beat for doing the interviews and letting us film. It really helped make our 2007 SXSW experience memorable.

Well, it looks like we're finally coming to the ends of our memory cards. Best I can determine is that we (the club kingsnake staff) got photos of at least 58 bands or musicians in one form or another (and Dan Rather) during SXSW 2007, as well as several hours of HD video, numerous interviews, and a whole lot of articles. We still have a lot of little things left to publish and post but the majority of our SXSW experience is now online. Enjoy!

Pubic Enemy Pete Townsend

The Zico Chain Hugh Cornwell Iggy and The Stooges Bird Blacklist The Hourly Radio The Gray Kid Lions In The Street Cog Canada Pete Townsend Dan Rather Lemon Sun Voxtrot Loudon Wainwright III Del Castillo Patricia Vonne Wes Hutchinson The Hush Sound Say Hi To Your Mom

Pawn Shop Roses Thomas Dolby Apollo Sunshine Apostle of Hustle New Violators Minsk Spod Paul Collin's Beat The Dollyrots Bible Of The Devil Krum Bums Burning Star Core John Ralston Nothington Slough Feg PB's The Breakup Society Clorox Girls Rock Plaza Public Enemy

Kenny Wayne Shepherd Hubert Sumlin The Buzzcocks Garland Jeffreys Shirock Robbers on High Street Pela Oakley Hall Mink Lions in the Street Robert Rodriguez and Chingon What Made Milwaukee Famous Brothers and Sisters Kings of Leon Serena Ryder Tom Morello X Clan Melee Mobile

First Place Winner - photo by Gary Miller Second Place Winner - photo by Jay West

club kingsnake is now accepting submissions for its 2007 concert photo contest. Last year's contest attracted over 500 photo entries. This year we timed the announcement to occur during Austin's SXSW festival and handed out about 1000 flyers to music photojournalists from around the world.

The 2007 contest will be handled a bit differently, with monthly winners instead of weekly, and with larger prize incentives to the winners. This year's contest prizes are as follows:

Monthly Prizes: (selected at the first of each month)
1st Place - $100 B & H Photo Gift Card
2nd Place - $50 B & H Photo Gift Card
3rd Place - club kingsnake T-Shirt

Year End Prizes: (selected at the beginning of 2008)
1st Place - $2000 Camera Shopping Spree at B & H Photo
2nd Place - Fuji F31 Point N Shoot Camera
3rd Place - $100 B & H Photo Gift Card

This year's contestants will not have to worry about last year's winner. Moondog (Gary Miller) has decided to abstain so that he may join our volunteer staff as a staff photographer and help us with this year's contest. Moondog is not only SXSW's official photographer, but also a staff photographer for the Austin Chronicle, as well as the house photographer for a number of Texas major concert venues.

So how does it work? Simple - just upload a concert photograph that you have taken yourself (with a camera, not off someone else's web site!) to our photo contest gallery. Make sure to include the artist's name and any other pertinent details such as the camera and lense used in the description. Every month 3 winners will be chosen, and at the end of the year the 3 best will be selected from all the photos submitted throughout the year. This is kind of like American Idol for pictures except our contest judges have been told to keep their rude snickering to themselves.

The 2007 club kingsnake concert photo contest is now live! Post your images at http://clubpix.kingsnake.com/index.php?cat=521


Contest Rules

• You may enter as many concert photos as you like AS LONG AS THEY ARE PHOTOS YOU HAVE TAKEN!
  
• Entries must be posted before the end of the day on the last day of the month, according to the clocks on our systems.
  
• You must include a valid email address on your post for it to qualify.
  
• Staff and volunteers of OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc. and its associated sites are ineligible to participate in the contest although they may certainly post their photos as well.
  
• Anyone may enter, regardless of age, although for persons under 18 a parent or guardian must claim the prize.
  
• No purchase is required to participate.
  
• You must have a physical address somewhere on the planet earth that can receive parcels sent through the U.S. postal service.
  

Jeff Barringer Interviews the Zico Chain

Returning to SXSW for a follow up appearance this year at the Dirty Dog, the Zico Chain from the U.K. invited me to their soundcheck, and then later we went out for dinner at the Iron Cactus (I had the chicken breast and too many beers) and over to Stubb's to catch a bit of the show by the Automatic. It was great to get the chance to hang around with the guys, talk off the record about the music industry in the U.K., their career direction, making records and touring. I also got to spend a bit of time chatting with their manager, Matt Willis, and it was gret to find someone older, like me, who actually knew who the bands Camel and BrandX were.

Later that night, at their gig, we were able to do some filming. Unfortunately, we wouldn't have the trick mic setup for our HDR-FX1 until the following day, and so we have some awesome 1080i video footage of their set but the band's SPL (Sound Pressure Level) swamped the little built-in microphones and the audio was unusable. This is unfortunate as the band was hoping to use some of the footage for a live video. There was at least one other videographer at the gig. so we're hoping to track them down and get the audio. If you are that person or are have an audio copy of this show, please let me know.

On Friday, before the guys packed up and headed west towards their gig at the Knitting Factory in L.A. , and after the guys at B & H got our mic situation sorted out, we hooked up with the Zico Chain one last time and got to put a nice interview on film. Now that we have our sound, light and video issues resolved we expect to be doing a lot more of these video interviews. If you have a band coming to Austin and have 15 minutes to spare before your gig, look us up. And if you run a major TV network looking for some nice HD content, you can call me too.

The Zico Chain soundchecking at The Dirty Dog

photo by clint gilders - staff photographer

SXSW 07 ended Sunday. The barricades are down in Austin, the swarms of international press have left, most of the bands have returned home, a few stayed behind, and the general tone and tenor of life has returned to Austin's entertainment district.

One thing that hasn't left is a persistent hacking cough that seems to have impacted Clint Gilders, at least one of the SXSW official photographers, and me. I'm still exhausted and ill, having seen my doctor twice and blown about $400 on meds since Monday. This afternoon I started to finally feel a little better, though, so maybe there's still hope. If not, I wish to have my ashes scattered throughout Austin's entertainment district, with a little left over for where the Dillo used to be. I'm sure we aren't the only ones still feeling, or reeling from, the after effects of SXSW 07.

The Zico Chain pose with Austin's infamous Leslie photo by jeff barringer - staff photographer

I talked to Chris Zico on the phone today. He and the band are somewhere in Arizona, trapped in an SUV with a couple of NME guys, watching for snakes on the highway, and heading off to some gigs in L.A. they landed while at SXSW. Wish I felt well enough to jump on a plane to catch them, but I'll send a few friends their way. I talked to a label today that may send an AOR guy to check them out, and I may send a bunch of reptile heads to their set as well.

Paul Collins and his band The Beat made it back to Spain after some nasty weather-related delays, and it appears Hugh Cornwell made it back to the U.K safely as well. I've already posted Hugh's video interview, and am finishing the edits on Paul and the Beat, as well as the Zico Chain interview. I should be posting those tonight. I'm very happy with how most of the videos have turned out so far; it looks like we have most of our technology issues finally ironed out.

photo by clint gilders - staff photographer

A super big thank you to Gabriel and Matt over at B & H Photo, they were lifesavers. After the guys at the Sony booth recommended I try to trade in my brand new 3 CCD Sony camcorder for a new one that was just released with XLR inputs that cost $2000 more (DOH!), Matt came to my rescue with a third party add-on designed to do the same for about $400. Not only that, he got in touch with his audio guys and set me up with just the right microphone combos. Over the last year, I've bought a lot of gear from a lot of different camera companies, and this is the first time I didn't feel like I was dealing with someone just wanting to "sell" me something - and this from a camera company based in New York! Matt set up the deal and Gabriel got it delivered to their hotel room, and by Thursday morning we had the hook-up. B & H has basically scored us as a corporate customer for life. Maybe we can talk them into working with us on our photo contests.

Speaking of the photo contest, we must have handed out close to 1000 business cards or flyers to photographers we saw at the trade show or at gigs. It should make for a much more interesting contest this year, but as of yet we haven't had a huge influx of photos for this month's contest. At the moment this would be the easiest month to have a chance to win something, but that could change tomorrow if everyone starts posting. Tom Zinn did post a few SXSW pics to our galleries, including a nice Pete Townsend performance shot. Anyone participating in the contest may request their photo gallery space be bumped up to 100Mb of storage, rather than the standard 10Mb we give everyone; just let us know when you need it.

SXSW, illness aside, was a blast for all of us and we will definitely return again next year. I want to thank everyone who helped make SXSW so special for us this year, including Christie Keith for working in the booth, doing all that live blogging, and the interviews and reviews, Christie's mom for taking care of her dogs, Clint Gilders for coming all the way from the great white north to shoot all those great pictures and videos, his wife Andrea and their kids for allowing him to be away for 9 days, Therese Kopiwada for doing the toughest job of all, just working that trade show booth, John Rucker for coming up from Houston to work the booth and reviewing some shows for us, my sister Susan for working at the booth, and making emergency runs with supplies when we ran out, my brother Jim and his wife for printing our flyers on short notice, and my parents, who took care of my large and varied menagerie (four tortoises, two hundred-pound dogs, two aquariums, and an African Grey parrot who would make Joe Pesci blush) for ten days.

A huge thank you to the staff of our PetHobbyist web communities for keeping the regular business going while we were all away, and the users of those communities for choosing not to start the revolution at that moment. I would also like to thank our winners of last year's photo contest, Jay West and Gary Miller, for showing up at the booth every 30 minutes and making us all jealous with who they just shot. Also a big thank you to Bob and Sherry Ashley over at ECO for helping us get all the "My Snake Is Bigger Than Your Snake" shirts in time, and to Brian Potter whose attempts to hook us up last minute with our ever elusive Slash interview were most appreciated, but in the end proved futile. We tried, buddy, maybe next time.

Finally, I would like to thank all the great bands and artists we saw, met and interviewed, especially Hugh Cornwell, Chris, Paul, and Ollie of the Zico Chain, Paul Collins and his band The Beat, Miles Winter Roberts, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Troy Campbell, Roky and Sumner Erickson and The Explosives and the 1300 odd other bands and artists that made SXSW so special.

Now... who's ready for ACL Fest?

where did you guys get those cool matching t-shirts? - photo by clint gilders - staff photographer

Jeff Barringer Interviews Hugh Cornwell

SXSW is all but a memory, but here at club kingsnake we are still editing videos and uploading photos. It will probably be a week before we get all caught up, because we interviewed several performers and filmed several performances, and captured somewhere around 60 Gb of raw still images.

Hugh Cornwell was nice enough to do a follow up video interview to our audio podcast, and it turned out great. We caught him right after his SXSW panel discussion with other musical contemporaries like Kathy Valentine of the Go Go's, Michael Des Barres, and Marco Pirroni of Adam and the Ants, as well as a much older set of two Hanson brothers.

Hugh's acoustic set the night before was certainly one of my highlights of all of SXSW. I was really surprised to hear how well the acoustic arrangements of some of the old Stranglers' classics worked, and his new songs showed that he had lost none of his songwriting talents after leaving the band. I had a great time remincising with Hugh about the good old bad old days in the punk days of the 70s and 80s, and to catch up with his newer projects, like the new Dirty Dozen album. Thanks to Hugh for spending time for us, for the guys at his label, Invisible Hands, for providing me so much background material on his new stuff, and Jo Murray at Musebox for keeping us both on schedule and arranging everything.

Hugh Cornwell performing at Elysium

Roky Erickson and The Explosives - You're Gonna Miss Me

Though not an "official" SXSW event, Roky Erickson's annual Ice Cream Social at Threadgill's is an Austin tradition that attracts not only SXSW badge and wristband holders, but SXSW performers such as Robyn Hitchcock, Spoon, and REM's Peter Buck. Essentially a day party that runs a little long, many special guests and performers have come to help fete Roky Erickson over the years. This year they came to help celebrate Roky being emancipated, becoming, for the first time in many years, legally his own man, not having to have a legal guardian represent his interests.

The line "What A Long Strange Trip It's Been" by the Dead could certainly be applied to the life and times of Roky. I was first introduced to the music of Roky Erikson and the seminal psychedelic band he co-founded in 1965, called the 13th Floor Elevators, by my high school english teacher. Long a proponent of marijuana and LSD use, in 1969 Roky was arrested in Austin for possession of one joint. Faced with the prospect of a 10 year prison term, Rocky made the horrible mistake of pleading insanity, and was sent to Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane where he was forced to undergo electroshock and Thorazine treatments until 1972.

His treatment changed him forever, both personally and musically. In 1982 he asserted that aliens had entered his body, and later was arrested for mail theft after it was found that he had taped unclaimed, unopened mail to the walls of his room at the halfway house. I remember him myself at this time best from a series of odd solo acoustic video performances that would appear very late night on Austin public access TV, where he appeared disheveled and disoriented, playing an acoustic guitar, sitting crosslegged at town lake.

In 2001 Roky's brother Sumner was finally granted legal custody as his guardian, and this year, 2007, Roky is finally a free man again. Almost 38 years after his arrest for a single joint, Roky's time has finally been served, and Roky, performing more vibrantly and clearly than I have ever seen him play before, is back. It's good to see you again, Roky.

Thanks go out to Troy Campbell, Sumner Erickson, Roky Erickson, and the Rocky Erickson Trust for inviting us out to film this year's performance. We couldn't get there in time for Spoon, Robyn, or Peter, but we got to see Roky and that's all I cared about.

Roky Erickson and the Explosives at Threadgill's - Photo by Staff Photographer Jeff Barringer

I need out, coach....

We tried to do too many things in too short a time period with too few people. The killer was probably the trade show booth.

Not that it was a bad idea, in fact we did so well "My Snake Is Bigger Than Your Snake" t-shirts were probably seen second in number only to SXSW t-shirts. I saw them in virtually every venue I went to, I saw them in restaurants and bars, and time after time I was stopped in the street by people asking where they could get one. That sure gave me a warm fuzzy.

Unfortunately, that warm fuzzy wasn't enough to stave off the wickedly variable Texas weather, and combined with being constantly on the move from air conditioning to the outside, to hot steamy clubs, with intermittent rain showers to crashing thunderstorms and temperatures that varied from the low 50s to the upper 80s, I was bound to at the least come down with a cold. On the second day of the interactive trade show (Monday) my voice was starting to get a little froggy, and by yesterday it was struggle just to force sounds out to do my last interview with the guys in the Zico Chain. My average sleep was about 4 hours each night, and by today I was existing on bottled water, a few cigarettes, and a handful of Dayquil/Nyquil liquicaps. My $17 Hilton omelette went half uneaten, as did the chili-cheeseburger from The Iron Cactus the night before. At breakfast today I asked for a pitcher of ice water and just gulped as much as I could after I couldn't force the omelette down, just to try to at least rehydrate. I have lost 9 lbs. since SXSW started. No joke 9 lbs... Literally a pound a day. And I live here.

I have come home now. Tonight my platinum badge goes unused, I will miss the Buzzcocks, the Stooges, the Meat Puppets, Peter Case, and Les Claypool and his Electric Apricot. While I am sad that I won't be going to their shows tonight and that the last night of my badge will be wasted, I know that I'll have the opportunity to see most of them again in the near future along with a number of the smaller bands I missed out on earlier. I did get an opportunity to see about 100 bands and performers during the 9 days of the SXSW Interactive and Music festivals. I also got an opportunity to meet a few neat people like Thomas Dolby and got to interview some of them as well, like Hugh Cornwell, Paul Collins and the Beat, and the Zico Chain. I even got to film a few live performances as well.

I did leave the festival in the good hands of Clint Gilders and our new staff photographer Gary Miller, and I'm sure Jay West will be posting a few of his shots from tonight in this year's photo contest as well, so we should have considerable coverage without me being there.

All in all, I would say we more than accomplished the goals we set out for ourselves during this year's SXSW.

I'm going to take a few days off, then I'll start planning for SXSW 2008 while this year's event is still fresh in my mind.