Tonight, I needed to be talked down from the ledge. The ledge of quasi-academia, that is. I’m reading Ellyn Kestnbaum’s Culture on Ice as part of my research for EMP right now and earlier this afternoon I had tea (how “cultured” of me, BAARF) with Margaret Atwood and a gaggle of feminists/English students. Naturally, these two things play a huge part in creating a Death Star-sized dent in my confidence to cobble nouns and verbs together for analytical intent. When hysterics usurp my mental and critical well-being, it’s obvious I need to step away for a breather.

So I went to the TLA for a rare event — an all-local show. If some concert promotion company had the sense to hire me (hint, hint), I’d book shows like this all the time. You don’t need to remind me of package tours and the fickle showgoing behaviors of audiences and How The Business Works In General; I’ve got my shit pretty down. I’ve always complained that one of the reasons Philly bands don’t Make It Huge is because they’re always playing smaller capacity spaces, the Indie Rock Ghettos, if you will. Believe it or not, but there are some bands in town worthy of playing to larger stages or being given the opportunity to expose themselves to larger audiences.

I’d like to think that one of the reasons these three bands found their way to a 1,000-person capacity venue is in some part (even a small one) Plain Parade’s doing. We saw these bands relegated to crappy mid-week opening slots at the Khyber and knew they deserved better. Because we made them headliners on our shows, this instilled some importance on these bands and encouraged more and more people to check them out over time. As a result, these bands were able to develop and tour, widening their fanbases at every step of the way. Should senility ever strike me, I’d like to take a moment and note that watching these bands flourish has been the most rewarding aspect of Plain Parade’s existence. It is the kind of thing that keeps me inspired to continue doing this.

So of course it kind of bums me out to see thirty folks tops, watching National Eye when I finally arrive on the scene. The rest of the audience was either non-existant or too busy in the drinking section. Allow me to state the following: I am a woman of many requests, all of them relatively simple. Could people give up the cool’n'jaded’n'aging thing for a moment to stand closer to the band? Give it a try for one song. I swear you’ll like it. I could understand if this was a smaller space, but this is the motherfucking TLA. Thankfully the stage lights are so bright you can’t see past the first three rows, otherwise it might have bummed those dudes. (But lucky for them there were rows of teenagers who looked totally fucking JAZZED to be there.) But they did a good job, doing what they do. Unfortunately, I only caught the last two songs.

I thought I was gonna have a long wait for the next band to set up, so I hunkered down with the stupid book that was driving me insane earlier. (I brought the ledge with me…) Expecting to blow through another 3-4 pages, you can imagine my surprise when I barely made it past 2 before the Teeth were ready to play. Were they sharing equipment or something?

One of the things I love about the Teeth is the rawness and energy of their performances, somehow made more impressive by shitty club PA’s. This made me curious to see if the band could hold its own with a professional sound system backing them up. It was like seeing the best Teeth show in my life times a jillion, made even better by the band’s friend Thaddeus coming on stage in a workout suit to aerobicize during their set. The crowd sensed this too and everyone was freaking out in their own way, even the frat dudes who stumbled in, the types I usually love to hate at shows, were having fun. Life was good.

Once again, another quick set change and the Spintos were up. The TLA might be the only stage in Philly large enough to comfortably accomodate the band and they looked excited to be on it. I love these kids. They’re like every crush you ever had in high school contained in six little sloppily dressed energetic bodies. They ran through a 12 song set, busting out a majority of tunes from Nice and Nicely Done with a couple brand-new songs thrown in. The second new song sounded like two separate songs mashed together but unwilling to coexist with the other half. But this is what touring is about — working out those ideas in a live setting where the audience can provide feedback (though I suspect indie rockers don’t want to make these nice lads cry and may display total indifference). Also, can someone please get Nick Krill some Thayer’s Slipper Elm Lozenges? He’s gonna have to sing “Oh Mandy” every night for the next three months, so he needs all the help he can get to preserve his voice. Poor kid sounds ragged already — what did the Arctic Monkeys do to him?!

Overall Analysis: B+, perfectly acceptable entertainment for a Thursday night. Amazingly enough, this show was finished by 11:30 PM, clocking in at 2 hours from the start of the first band. Afterwards I went to a little afterparty at Jon’s Bar & Grille down the corner (who hosted this thing?), a place I will always remember as the location of where that one guy on Real World Philly came out to his roommates, you know, the two dudes that looked exactly alike except that one was two feet taller than the other one. And! I got to meet a bona-fide reader of this here blog, which blows my mind on so many levels. You have no idea. (Actually, you do.) And so, I dedicate this entry to Mark. I salute you for slogging through countless entries filled with grammatical errors, harebrained ideas and oh so much more. Ain’t no stoppin’ us now.

I like the Yah Mos Def. A lot. They’ve always been super nice to me, to Plain Parade and all that good stuff. Needless to say, I’m totally annoyed by Myspace’s ineptitude on this. I know there’s a couple of lawyer types who read this, perhaps you can give them some advice/assistance? They’re not the first people I know on Myspace to deal with this via customer service and receive nothing back from the company.

Crap like this makes me happy to know I made the right decision in never using Myspace to aid in Plain Parade’s business dealings. [You have no idea how many bands write us there, even though we explictly state “Don’t write to us here!”] I was just perusing our email archives the other day and noticed they go back to 2003. Myspace doesn’t even come close to that.

From: Bryan

Ok..I don’t know if anyone out there has any advice they can lend.

Here is my problem. They keep canceling THE YAH MOS DEF account. Here is the email I get..

“Hello,

MySpace has deleted your profile because we received a credible complaint of copyright/trademark infringement or otherwise determined that materials posted on your profile violated the intellectual property rights of third parties.

MySpace’s terms and conditions prohibit the posting of any materials that infringe upon the intellectual property rights of third parties.

If we delete your account you cannot recover it.

Thank you,
MySpace.com”

Thing is we own the trademark for the band name, have rights to all the samples we used and put on the site. We OWN the federal trademark for “The Yah Mos Def”. But we have been deleted 3 times now. I wrote their customer service email a bunch of times, but got no response. Stinks because we lost contacts, our show history, and a bunch of other info that would have been cool to have long term.

It rotten because MYSPACE is a free service and there is pretty much no customer service. We were not mis-using the site in anyway, and found it a very useful and resourceful tool.

Just thought if anyone had any insight to how to handle something like this??

this seems like an april fool’s day prank a few days early: a reunited lifetime signs to decaydance, a subsidary of fueled by ramen records. decaydance is run by one of the dudes in fall out boy. mind? blown. this reminds me of the time when superchunk went on tour with the get up kids…

allow me to highlight my favorite comment out of the discussion:

First Pete Wentz has a band better than mine, then I learn he has a bigger penis than me, now he has Lifetime on his label.

» instead of my usual friday night [stay at home, watch new episodes of TLC’s “what not to wear”], i headed down to baltimore to the ottobar and caught part chimp, oxford collapse [dan has his bag back, adam’s finally got another pair of shoes] & this brooklyn band called dirty on purpose, who were shoegazerish. im not so into shoegaze unless its one of the following: medicine’s shot forth self living, that first lilys record and MBV’s isn’t anything. everything else… meh.

anyway, friday was fun and upstairs at the ottobar i saw john waters, just hanging out, having a drink and cig. quite possibly the biggest celebrity sighting of my life [excludes: crashing into justin guarini at work, being cornered by cyndi lauper in an elevator, being sung to jackson browne as a child, getting yelled at by donald trump and dealing with norman mailer]. yes, john waters trumps all — i adored hairspray as a teenager.

» what kind of world is this? i can wander the streets of west philly at 4:30AM [after parking my car from my b-more trip] unharmed but when a friend takes a quick phonecall in nolibs on saturday night, he’s mugged. read on:

Allow me to start by saying FUCK YOU NORTHERN LIBERTIES, again.

Last night I got mugged on North 3rd Street, on the east side of the street halfway between N3rd & Ortlieb’s. It was about 3am, I was walking with 3 friends but had taken a step back to answer my cellie. While less than 100 feet separated, 2 young African American men walked up to me and pulled an automatic pistol on me. they took all my cash and cell phone. I was not harmed, but clearly spooked and of course did all the Police procedures. Thanks to my friends who hung with me while dealing with the cops, as well as the staff at N3rd who were calm under pressure.

What can we all learn from this? Don’t walk by yourself in No.Libs., & Condos don’t get rid of the riff-raff. Please repost on BCO & whatnot.

» tuesday night scene dilemma! i totally cant do either since i have class but two great shows are happening — part chimp at the m-room and i love you but ive chosen darkness at the khyber. just because part chimp are on mogwai’s label [in the uk, stateside they’re on b-more’s monitor] doesnt mean they sound anything like mogwai, so banish that thought from your pretty little head. i hate throwing this term around but they _really_ sound like nirvana. and not in the sense that any one of the guys has a kurt complex, but in that they sound so _heavy_. and i like heavy. of course, chosen darkness sound like all those 80’s post-punk bands i like a lot too. why couldnt they both just play on the same bill? im tired of these competing shows. promoters need to join forces, like superheroes or something.

» something’s fishy with my last.fm counter in the sidebar, ’cause last week i certainly did not listen to the project runway podcast. for the record, i couldnt stop listening to superchunk and pinback… today i am all about the new nelly furtado single, “maneater”. it’s GOOD.

seriously. book your flight to sxsw in december or january and you’ll be fine. you’ll never have to resort to this. [via CSTB] interestingly enough, the article lists cat chow’s age as 33, meanwhile her band’s website claims her birthdate as 2/5/83.

OK, what? I thought it was a state law for Texans to drive around drunk in their pick-up trucks. [I know, I know, my Texan friends. You’re different.] Anyway, I have a few ideas as to how they can fix the drunk-driving issue, the most obvious being that they should stop selling booze at gas stations. But this? Ridic:

Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said Wednesday.

The first sting operation was conducted recently in a Dallas suburb where agents infiltrated 36 bars and arrested 30 people for public intoxication, said the commission’s Carolyn Beck.

Being in a bar does not exempt one from the state laws against public drunkenness, Beck said.

The goal, she said, was to detain drunks before they leave a bar and go do something dangerous like drive a car.

“We feel that the only way we’re going to get at the drunk driving problem and the problem of people hurting each other while drunk is by crackdowns like this,” she said.

suddenly, i feel a bit better about humanity. not by much, but every little bit helps:

“When Governor Mike Rounds signed HB 1215 into law it effectively banned all abortions in the state with the exception that it did allow saving the mother’s life. There were, however, no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. His actions, and the comments of State Senators like Bill Napoli of Rapid City, SD, set of a maelstrom of protests within the state.

Napoli suggested that if it was a case of “simple rape,” there should be no thoughts of ending a pregnancy. Letters by the hundreds appeared in local newspapers, mostly written by women, challenging Napoli’s description of rape as “simple.” He has yet to explain satisfactorily what he meant by “simple rape.”

The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.

“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,” she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.”

» i saw 34 bands this year, according to my notes. i thought i saw less this year but it seems i saw more compared to 2005.

» who i saw: i love you but ive chosen darkness, kiss me deadly, love of diagrams, low skies, capitol years, pidgeon, ted leo, rogue wave, serena maneesh, zutons, nethers, national eye, oxford collapse [2x], hudson bell, part chimp, thunderbirds are now!, clockcleaner, the new flesh, kelley stoltz, eugene mirman, band of horses, peter holsapple/chris stamey, the spinto band, love is all, air traffic controllers, +/-, superchunk, the bats and then some totally forgettable band at the chunklet/monitor party.

» who were the hot bands at sxsw ‘06? i’ve been asked this question a couple times so far [even when interviewed by chicago public radio on saturday] and honestly, i can’t really think of one band that was ridiculously talked about or reason to wait in long lines for. 2006 seemed like the year of secret shows, established artists [moz, flaming lips, bunnymen, gang of four] and reunions/bands on hiatus [glass eye, superchunk, lifetime, the bats] — bands that _don’t_ need to play a festival like this. perhaps this points to a growing suspicion that the market is too saturated or that the industry can’t figure out who really needs the help. take one look at the sxsw swag bag that’s given away to badgeholders and you’ll see what i mean.

» did i have a good time? without a doubt. will i do it again? i submitted my hotel request for next year… today.

OK, so it’s kind a true — I’m not one for film. I slept through all my film classes in college, but then again, I dare you to stay awake through all eight jillion hours of Warhol’s Empire. These days, my cinema knowledge is limited to the oeuvre of Reese Witherspoon, Apocalypse Now and being able to recite Spaceballs from beginning to end [no, its really true]. Take what I say with a grain of salt, but this film looks AWESOME:

Brothers of The Head
Great Britain | Run time: 90 min. | Director: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe

Temple University alumni Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) deliver their first fiction film, a mock-rock-documentary about conjoined-twin rock stars in 1960s and 70s London.

After directing two acclaimed feature documentaries on the films of Terry Gilliam (the Philadelphia-lensed 12 Monkeys production chronicle The Hamster Factor, and the widely acclaimed Lost in La Mancha), former Temple University grads Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe have crafted their first fiction feature –- and it’s an astute parody of the media documentaries with which they began their careers. In this case, Brothers of the Head, adapted from the novel by renowned science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss, is a mock-rock-documentary about a fictional pair of conjoined twins who become unlikely rock stars in the London music scene of the 1960s and 70s. Talented, introspective Tom (Harry Treadaway) is joined at the lower torso with his more aggressive, bad-boy twin Barry (Luke Treadaway), and the two are signed in the mid-60s as a novelty rock act by unscrupulous promoters. Initially beginning their careers with Small Faces/Kinks-inspired Brit-rock of the period, the twins eventually begin to channel their anger at their exploitation by embracing the punk scene of the 70s. Their increasingly hostile behavior –- and drug and alcohol abuse — combines with their betrayal at the hands of unscrupulous managers, agents and music journalists to cement their downfall. Fulton and Pepe structure their mock-rock-doc as a collage of contemporary interviews with surviving participants in the phenomenon of “Bang Bang” (the twins’ band name), and effectively recreated “archival” footage of the twins’ performances and behind-the-scenes documentary footage (much of which seems to consciously parody several Rolling Stones documentaries of the era).

– Travis Crawford

Check out the other music-related films here.

Silver Jews / Baird Sisters at Starlight Ballroom, 3/21/06

inside the golden days of missing you / animal shapes / smith & jones forever / pet politics /i’m getting back into getting back into you / random rules / new orleans / horseleg swastikas / dallas / trains across the sea / the poor, the fair and the good / black and brown blues / slow education / how can i love you (if you won’t lie down) / punks in the beerlight /// there is a place / sometimes a pony gets depressed

Way back when I was a freshman in college, on my first trip to Third Street Jazz & Rock [RIP], I picked up two records: New Radiant Storm King’s Hurricane Necklace [still their finest moment, i believe] and The Sliver Jews Natural Bridge. The latter has never left my CD player since and that’s not merely a saying — I mean, it really hasn’t left my stereo. That was fall of ‘96. Suffice to say, I’ve been waiting a long time for this show to happen. And they’re not even my favorite band! [That would be Superchunk.]

The line to get into the club wasn’t as bad as say, the line at the Sub Pop showcase days earlier in Texas, although at one point I had this thought, “Man, why do I have to wait in this line? I have a badge!” and then I realized SXSW was no more. And it pains me to say this but I’ve never seen a show at the Starlight Ballroom before. And if they’re usually as smoky as last night’s, I probably won’t see many. The girl with the Roy Lichtenstein tattoo at the base of her neck [?!] smoked five cigarettes throughout the course of the Joo’s 15 song set. In between my raging chest cold and that, I wanted to die.

And I suppose I could have at least died happy, because the show was fucking brilliant, quite possibly trumping anything I saw at SXSW but I’ll have to think twice before finalizing such a grandiose claim. The Baird Sisters opened up the show and perhaps if the audience kept quiet, everyone could have heard them. In fact, the audience was so loud that you could hear them being picked up by the mics onstage, rather than Meg [who also plays in Espers] and Laura’s instruments. You know, it’s not as if I don’t understand that shows are social events but this was seriously out of control.

Thankfully, everyone shut the fuck up when the Joos took the stage. I didn’t quite know what to expect in the live version but I was surprised with a) how faithful it remained to the record; b) managed to rock. It seemed like DCB’s guitar was more of a stage prop than actual instrument and most of the guitar duties were taken up by two dudes on opposite ends of the stage. Berman’s wife Cassie held down the low end and back-up vox, except on “The Poor, The Fair…”, where her honky-tonk-tinged vocals were brought to the forefront of it all. I try not to get nosy in people’s personal lives but I’ll just say that I was surprised she looked so young. I guess I had envisioned her much older?

Anyway, the night was made even more special by the addition of one Bob Nastanovich playing drums on a few songs [”New Orleans”, “How Can I Love You…”] and reprising his role in Pavement as professional screamer on “There Is A Place”. Time has been good to Bobby N, though I have to wonder about the suburban office dude gear he was rocking. Maybe he had a business strategy meeting to attend afterwards? And for those curious, yes, that was Mr. Steve West, also previously of Pavement, checking the mics before the set.

So what I’m trying to say is: this show was awesome, if you haven’t gotten a ticket to their gig in your respective hometown, you are a fool.