“I wonder if there’s one more guitar player in the house?” Joe Ely asked an expectant crowd at the Austin Music Hall as the clock closed in on midnight. “We need another guitar player.”
Sure enough, there was.
Jersey kid. Has a way with words and a certain degree of modest celebrity.
So, yep, for once the rumors were true. Bruce Springsteen did indeed put a finishing flourish to the 30th annual Austin Music Awards by joining headliner Alejandro Escovedo, along with Ely and New York singer Garland Jeffreys for the climax of Escovedo’s closing set.
Springsteen joined Ely and Escovedo for a dark and stormy rendition of Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Midnight Train,” and sang backup to Ely’s vocal on the traditional “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad. He chimed in on the chorus of Escovedo’s “Always A Friend” (Dueting with Springsteen on that song in Houston for the first time, said Escovedo, was “three minutes that changed by life”), and took a tangled, granular guitar solo as Jeffrey’s charged through the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden.”
Springsteen’s cameo was a not altogether unexpected treat (he and Escovedo share a manager), but had he not shown up, the evening would still have been brimming with great music. Read the full story
Are the former Led Zeppelin singer and “the Meadowlark of Hyde Park” in a relationship? That’s how it looked to bystanders at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport over the weekend, who said Plant arrived on a flight from Atlanta, then waved from the escalator to Patty, who’d come to pick him up. The two, who tour and record together in Band of Joy, reportedly made out, passionately, at baggage claim. Isn’t there a surcharge for that?
Today, the man born Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan , turns 70 years old. In an era when careers can be defined by a matter of months, he is a musician entering the eighth decade of life with a fanbase that still wants to buy (or steal from the Internet) his records and see him play live. That is pretty extraordinary. There aren’t all that many like him.
But there are certainly a few. The king of late-in-life career comebacks is, of course, Johnny Cash, whose Rick Rubin-produced “American Recordings” album was released in 1994, when Cash was 63. Many people have tried to duplicate his formula, sometimes at the behest of Rubin himself. (Hello, Neil Diamond.)
Are these folks still relevant? Well, yes and no. Are kids who are going to buy Lady Gaga’s new album today also going to plunk down for one of these folks? Probably not many. (Then again, many will probably just steal Gaga’s album off the Internet.) Are any of these artists going to be on the pop chart? Again, unlikely. But making the pop chart isn’t what is used to be.
This is a terrific time to be an artist of any age who isn’t necessarily a superstar, or was once a superstar and has aged out of the record-buying mainstream. Email, social networking, Twitter and the preponderance of smart phones and broadband Internet help artists choose their level of engagement with their fans. (And relevance is in the eye of the ticket-buyer.)
Jake Gyllenhaal gladly posed for pics aplenty at Friday night’s SXSW screening of “Source Code.”
But, according to Entertainment Weekly, when one fan allegedly snapped the actor’s photo “at an inelegant time” in a restroom at the Paramount Theatre, things got heated.
Gyllenhaal’s reps initially declined to discuss the incident after reports began surfacing on Twitter, but the actor himself confirmed the “rather heated scuffle” in an interview this weekend with the magazine.
Christmas-Spiced Pork Ribs, a tradition of Norway, can be made with other cuts of meat. Cloves, anise and ginger give it the Christmas spice. (Alberto Martínez/AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
By Addie Broyles
Instead of a ham or roasted turkey at the center of your Christmas dinner, what about pork ribs or spicy beef stew?
Just as Santa Claus looks and behaves a little differently than St. Nicholas and Papa Noel, Christmas dinners around the world are as varied as the way Christians and even non-Christians celebrate the holiday.
One of the universal truths of Christmas is that it inspires a sweet tooth in all of us, but instead of focusing on all the holiday cookies, puddings and fried doughs, let’s take a tour of the variety of non-desserts found during Christmas dinner around the world. Read the full story
Music from Joan Jett, Judy Garland and U2 all fit nicely into mixes for the holidays.
Do you hear what we hear? It’s the start of the holiday season, which can mean only one thing for music lovers: It’s on — the competition to create the perfect holiday mix CD.
The mix is all about impressing your friends and family with your voluminous musical knowledge and unimpeachable taste. Honestly, we know a couple of people who shoo away trick-or-treaters so they can get a head start on this year’s perfect playlist.
The great thing is, anybody with a CD burner and an iTunes account or something similar can do this, and it’s not too late. We have a friend who went to a lot of time, expense and effort to create a four-volume perfect holiday compilation last year.
If you’re feeling lazy and want to crib somebody else’s list, there are plenty out there up for grabs online, but perhaps none so plug-and-play as 8tracks.com, which has 35 pages of holiday-theme track lists for your streaming pleasure and an Amazon link to download each song.
But for those of you who are so inspired, we encourage you to do your own. To get you on your way, several staff members offered up their holiday mix ideas for 2010. Read the full story
Spike Lee doesn’t mince words, and during a roundtable discussion Sunday, the filmmaker was blunt in his take on presidents, disasters and the slowness of the country to come to grips with its basic problems.
Lee was in Austin for a screening at the University of Texas of portions of his Gulf Coast documentary, “If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise,” in which he revisits post-Katrina New Orleans as a follow-up to 2006′s “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.” His latest feature shows how the BP oil spill was affecting recovery efforts. Read the full story
More on that young Austin fan “stalked” by country superstar Taylor Swift, as reported in a Parade magazine profile Oct. 24: Her name is Victoria Schupp and she lives in the Belterra neighborhood, attending Dripping Springs Middle School.
While you were sleeping, Phish delivered virtually its entire touring spectacle to Zilker Park.
The video, lighting, audio equipment and other gear were loaded onto the Budweiser stage overnight Thursday to create the sort of show you might see if you were going to a regular Phish concert instead of a two-hour festival set. The noted jam band is tonight’s headliner at the three-day Austin City Limits Music Festival, which opens today. Read the full story
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