Fun Fun Fun and Eat Eat Eat 2009

Last year in early November, my sister Melissa and her husband Chris visited for a weekend. We ate a lot and went to the Fun Fun Fun Festival in Waterloo Park. Blogged it. Highlights were the double-BBQ lunch in Lockhart and some good live music highlighted by The National, Bishop Allen, Centro-Matic and Dengue Fever. Sound familiar, or does it just blend in with the rest of our posts about eating high-protein grub and attending music-related events?

They picked that weekend because of a four-day weekend where my sister works. She got the same break this year, so they came down again. Sure enough, the festival was going on again. And of course, we ate a lot this time, too. Straight from the airport more or less, we hit Green Mesquite to satisfy whatever barbecue cravings there were. We also chowed down at La Cocina de Consuelo, where we got our Mexican on, including some queso; had excellent banh mi at Tam Deli & Cafe; very good burgers at neighborhood hangout Billy's on Burnet after the festival on Saturday; and a hefty brunch at Hoover's Cooking where we had biscuits, sausage and gravy, a hoe cake, a sweet potato pancake, eggs, migas, bacon, cheddar-garlic grits, and -- just to make it "balanced" -- fruit salad on the table.

Of course, we didn't just eat. We strolled some of the lower part of South Congress, hitting up a few of the area's newer shops, plus some old ones. Blackmail, I think a pretty new one, has some funky duds and other items, mainly in black. Neighbor Creatures Boutique is a bit more conventional (but no less funky). Click on that link and shop online. Parts & Labour, which used to be further up the hill where the more established shopping area is, has some great, quirky t-shirts and other things. Melissa bought a handbag. And since we were walking right by, we couldn't skip coffee at Jo's.

We also hit up the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum, featuring the works of UT faculty member and famous sculptor Charles Umlauf. Here's the museum's website description of Umlauf:

Charles Umlauf, a prolific and internationally known sculptor, created works ranging in style from realistic and abstract expressionism to lyrical abstraction during his career. In 1985 he and his wife, Angeline Allen Umlauf, gave their home and studio with sculptures, drawings and paintings to the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum.

Learn more about the museum here. If you're in town and walking around the University of Texas campus, keep your eye out for Umlauf's sculptures there. Here's one.

And, of course, there was the Fun Fun Fun Festival. We made our way down there on a lovely Saturday afternoon. After checking out the grounds and the scene -- people-watching at Fun Fun Fun is top shelf, better than ACL even -- we made our way over to the center of the four stages.

As planned, the first set we caught was Times New Viking's lo-fi hard rock. The guitar-drums-keys trio was good for 45 solid minutes of short, loud, hooky tunes. Not much more than that. The band seemed like they were going through the motions at times. Maybe for a band like that a later slot in a club is a better milieu? But the show was still fun if you like that sort of thing. Rachel and I just recently heard them for the first time and were quickly drawn in. We'll be seeing them again in a few weeks.

Next up was the classic Japanese power pop of Shonen Knife. Been rocking the act since 1981 and they're still adorable (actually, only one of the three members is an original, but still). Can you imagine a cuter rendition of the heavy metal salute than these three? Musically, Shonen Knife's set was full of winks to late 70s punk like the Clash, Ramones and Buzzcocks, who they evoked during the peppy "Devil House." Songs from old and new albums all blended together well. Hard to leave that set without a smile on.

After a short walk to buy some cool freshly-screened t-shirts and check out things like the graffiti exhibit and the mechanical bull, where we got to watch a poor chubby guy pay like ten bucks for the privilege of being jerked around and tossed off a machine while his friends laughed at him and took pictures, we roamed over to a small stage and caught the end of James Husband's set. Better known as Of Montreal's multi-instrumentalist James Huggins, although the twangy material we heard he and his band play didn't sound all that much like Of Montreal.

After that, we returned to where we started, where we remained for the next few bands. No Age, an L.A. duo consisting of guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Allen Spunt, performed with some of the energy that Times New Viking only flashed. They thrashed through a high-octane punk set. "You're a Target" was about as good as anything we saw that day (scroll down and see for yourself).

No Age performing "You're a Target" at the 2009 Fun Fun Fun Festival

Next up was the band behind one of the great music stories of the year, Death. This band -- three brothers from Detroit in the mid-70s -- were punk before punk was punk. They made a few singles, almost broke out, then were forgotten for decades. The brothers moved to rural Vermont and started a reggae band called Lambsbread. I actually saw them play at a reggae festival in the late 80s. But as far as their previous incarnation, before the first death of Death, that was a moment in time that seemed destined to be lost forever. One brother, David, died of cancer in 2000. But you can't kill Death. Some 30 years after they pressed a few hundred copies of their handful of singles, one of the brothers' sons, himself a musician, recognized one of his dad's long-lost band's songs being played at a party in San Francisco. When son told pops that the people at the party went crazy over the song and that the record was a collector's item due to its scarcity, pops dug the master tapes out of storage. The music made its way to Drag City Records, who reissued the songs. The resulting raw music caught on. Think Hendrix-esque vocals over raw, guitar-driven hard rock like the Stooges or sometimes even Thin Lizzy, but with more of a punk accent, foreshadowing bands like Bad Brains. The reissue even made some "best of" lists at the end of the year.

So the idea of seeing Death play live is itself pretty cool. Because of that, I was willing to give them a pass for coming out a bit late. Once they emerged in their Robes of Death and got warmed up, I thought they sounded pretty good for a band that had until recently been on mothballs. It doesn't hurt that the trio -- two remaining brothers Dannis and Bobby and guitarist Bobbie Duncan -- all play in Lambsbread together. But the songs were new to them. At times it showed, but that didn't stop them from putting on a raw, energetic show, right up to the closing, anthemic "Politicians In My Eyes."