Friday marked our one month anniversary of our arrival in Austin, the Live Music Capital of the World. Remarkable? Not really -- except that for two music-heads like us, it is sort of silly that we hadn't been out to hear/see any live music yet! We fixed that on Saturday night. Emo's, one of the most well known and popular music clubs downtown, was in the midst of a week of free shows. No cover, unless you're under 21 in which case you have to fork over $5. The assumption, I suppose, is that those 21 and over will imbibe at least that much. Some friends we met recently were planning to catch some of the acts on Saturday night, and invited us along (BTW, thanks for being so generous and thoughtful and including us newbies with few local friends in so many of your plans over the last few weeks!)
Emo's is located on one end of the notorious 6th Street District, on the corner of 6th and Red River. It features three separate stages, and on some nights -- like Saturday -- there are concerts going on simultaneously on all three. We got there around 10:30, and spent the first hour or so catching pieces of two of the acts: Brazos, who sounded a little bit like the Walkmen (who themselves played a free show at Emo's that we unfortunately missed), played the outdoor stage, which is only partly outdoors, while Masonic rocked the indoor stage at the same time. Both were pretty good. After meeting up with our friends, we headed over to the third stage, the lounge. We caught the tail end of the set by Quiet, Lovely and a strange, somewhat atonal and somewhat operatic set of electronic music by Kevin A. (from Moth! Fight!). By the time the headline act, Car Stereo (Wars) came on, it was almost 1 a.m. We fought off the yawns for the first 20 minutes or so but finally succumbed. Car Stereo (Wars) plays highly danceable hip-hop mashups, and by then there was no way we were doing much more with our feet than walking back to the car.
The main portion of Emo's has that great music club grunginess a la Toad's Place that sets the appropriate mood. The lounge is much cleaner and offers a nice, mellow contrast. Overall a very late, very fun evening. Can't wait for our second live music experience, whatever and whenever that might be. No excuse for waiting too long -- there are tons of great clubs with lots of diverse acts on their schedules. So while Willie and Stevie Ray might be the two biggest musical icons in Austin, there's much more than country and blues to this city. That's music to our ears.
Car Stereo (Wars) mashing up the party
Moth! Fight! -- odd interview with two of the band members who played at Emo's
The late Stevie Ray Vaughan giving a guitar lesson; his statue stands in Austin's Auditorium Shores park
Nobody is bigger in Austin (or Texas as a whole for that matter) than the well-preserved Willie
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