Fun Fun Fun 2009: Pictures

Okay, now that I finally got the Fun Fun Fun write-up out of the way -- and only a couple of months late -- I can move on to my pictures. Here's a bunch of shots from Saturday, the first day of the festival. Let me know what you think!

Times New Viking

FUN FUN FUN

Shonen Knife rocks! From top: Etsuko Nakanishi, Ritsuko Taneda, Naoko Yamano

Melissa, Rachel and Chris rock, too!


























James Husband

Stylin' footwear. Why not DIY?

Melissa and I having our shirts custom-silkscreened

Bro and Sis with freshly-made t-shirts

Sexy cowboy






Dean Allen Spunt and Randy Randall, No Age












Spunt

Spraypaint artist doing Danzig



FUN FUN FUN

Death takes the stage

Bobby Hackney, Death

Bobbie Duncan

Dannis Hackney

Poster of late Death guitarist David Hackney

FUN FUN FUN

Festival folk

Yeasayer finishing up our great day of sights & sounds

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."

Yaktoberfest: Beerdrinking as fundraising (Part 2 of 2)

So, my two contributions came out pretty good. Steve sent out an email with word of the Yaktoberfest celebration to be held at the cul de sac the weekend after ACL. Not only would several homebrewers be contributing DIY concoctions, we'd also be raising money for Heifer International - hence the moniker. Can't beat drinking beer for a good cause! That's my kind of fundraiser.

The day came, and it wasn't the nicest weather, but the brewers all came out in force. In addition to my bottles of Nut Brown Ale and Baltic Porter, five different homebrews were on tap. Steve contributed an Imperial Ale and a Dunkelweizen, Sammy pitched in with a Brown Ale, and Nick had a nice Stout and a Pale Ale. Ben also chipped in with bottled beer -- his also was a Pale Ale.


The scene


Steve, the organizer


Choices!

It was great that most of the brews were on tap. People were able to try small amounts of many (or all) of the offerings. I couldn't resist using the small turtle device Nick brought to pour myself a haus bräu black & tan.


Black & Tan: stout atop ale

The party wound down around the start of the UT football game. The beer was great. I was also pretty stoked to hear from Steve that we were able to raise enough to buy a full water buffalo. So the party worked out for people in Austin and the Philippines as well. It didn't take long to start to hear talk that Yaktoberfest should be an annual happening. Sounds good to me.

Yaktoberfest: Ever bought a water buffalo? (Part 1 of 2)

About seven or eight years ago, Rachel and I had been feeling like we were following a boring and repetitive routine and mentioned that a new hobby might not be a bad thing. Around then I started making wine at home. I had been doing it for a few years when we moved to Austin. After we arrived, I was researching the area and saw mention of a highly regarded homebrewing store near where we moved. I knew that brewing beer was a similar process, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I've now been making beer since last Spring. It turns out a friend of mine from work, Steve, also started brewing around the same time. He knew a few other people who brewed. Most live in his neighborhood, just a mile or so from our place. It got Steve thinking, and he came up with the idea to get a bunch of the local homebrewers together to brew several batches of beer and throw a small Octoberfest-like event. Steve's house is in a perfect location, at the corner of a short road that abruptly dead-ends. After canvassing his fellow brewers, we decided to brew in September and have the party in early October.

To launch stage one, Steve had several of us over to his house to brew batches in his backyard. I followed that up the next week with what became my Baltic Porter. Making this beer involved a highly-concentrated fermentable liquid (wort), resulting in a rich, dark, high alcohol sipper.

You start out bringing 2 1/2 gallons of water to 160 degrees.


Next, toss in a mesh bag filled with with about 6 lbs of grain. Let it steep for 45 minutes or so, then pull out the bag, rinse it over the pot, and bring the liquid to a boil

Once the liquid is boiling, take it off the heat temporarily and add 8 lbs of malt extract (basically high-sugar syrups extracted from malted grains). Get it boiling again.

Most beers are triple-hopped. Your wort will boil for an hour. Start by adding hops at the start of the hour for bittering. 45 minutes in, add a second dose for flavor. Finally, five minutes before the end, add a final dose for aroma. In this case, we only added hops up front for bittering and at the second stop for flavor.

Hop pellets and the packets they come in. Nugget hops for bittering, Saaz for flavor.

Once the hour is over, put your pot in a big tub of ice and bring the temperature down, then add some water to bring it to a total of 5 1/4 gallons, throw your yeast in, and stop up the top with a fermentation lock that lets gas out but not in. A week or two later, you're ready to bottle.

Check back in later for a wrap-up of the party. Find out why it involves yaks and water buffalo. Doesn't that provide sufficient temptation?

ACL 2009: Day Three Review

So the rains stopped for the most part some time early Sunday morning. It rained pretty hard at times throughout Saturday and into Saturday night. When we left for the festival on Sunday, though, it was a bit cloudy but not raining. Couldn't be worse than Saturday, right? Except that when the rains and feet came and trampled upon the virgin lawn that was so alluring the day before, the result was that atop the grass there had settled a fresh, wet layer of mud comprised of yard trimmings mixed with treated sewage sludge. The whole place was wet, large portions were covered in stinky mud that was deep in bits, especially in front of the stages where the most energized fans are likely to wind up. So how does it compare with 107 degrees, no sun and a ton of dust like we got on day three of our first trip to ACL? It doesn't sound as bad, but we were able to hang in there a lot longer back on "Crazy-Hot ACL Sunday."


Hunkered down


Popular at ACL 2009: Rubber boots with funky graphics

We thought about trying to get there in time for the Alela Diane set that started before noon. Instead, we settled for arriving in time for the 12:30 set by Austin soul shouter Black Joe Lewis and his band, the Honeybears. Being early, getting close to the front was less about the thickness of the crowd than about the severity of the mud around the stage. After scoping things out and weighing the benefit of being close against the detriment of a dirty body, we picked a good "compromise" spot where the sound quality was high and we could see the band well.

We'd seen Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears before, but only in little bits. Last year at ACL, they played a lively set on the small Austin Ventures stage, where the music tends to get drowned out by the nearest big stages and the relatively narrow stretch of park becomes a choke point for the waves of people migrating from one end of Zilker to the other. We also caught the tail end of an opening set during Spoon's three-day residency at Stubb's several months ago. The little bits we saw and heard, though, were enticing. BJL has some of that front-man charisma, and the band is on-the-one without trying too hard to sound like they're a Stax house band from 1970. And how many bands out there really get funky nowadays? Let's not forget -- I was co-host of the funky funky "Loose Booty Show" on WMFO in the early 90s. While I'm not as obsessed with all things phunck to the degree that I was back then, hearing a band that really gets funky down-and-nasty always hits me in a sweet spot.

So back to ACL. BJL and his band tore into their set with a blistering rendition of "Sugarfoot," which it just played on its first big TV performance. The whole band sounded much more raw at last ACL. From the start and throughout the set, the band demonstrated that they had developed a good amount of polish over the last year. Not that polish is a necessary ingredient to being funky or soulful, but in this case -- trust me -- the shine was a good thang.


Black Joe Lewis & some Honeybears


The horns provide the spark to the group's engine

Showing off the tighter, more toned band, Joe sounded more confident. He and the crew pushed hard through a barrage of JB-centric hot tunes. Often when he shouts and screams, your mind tells you "James Brown," but at times Lewis sounded more like, say, Wilson Pickett. Toward the end, showing off his front-man star potential, the man definitely was Black Joe Lewis. He really owned the crowed during the humorous, build up-settle down R&B number "Get Yo Shit." Somehow, Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears manage to make you want to dance or at least shuffle your feet despite the stank mud, dreary skies and unfortunate time slot.


Credit: www.austin360.com
Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears performing "I'm Broke" at ACL 2009

After that, we thought about heading over to see Rodriguez toward the other end of the park. Problem was that the only paths involved walking through some pretty thick mud. Plus, who knew how bad things were on the other end of the park, where the ground is lower? Thinking we might want to see the B-52s coming up the next hour on the same stage that Black Joe Lewis had just played, we decided to stay close to home base and catch Here We Go Magic just over yonder. They were okay, not memorable.

The B-52s now tour with the four living original members who made up the band during their second wave of popularity at the end of the 80s and early 90s plus a few backing musicians. Sure, the foursome looked a bit more weathered than they did 15-20 years ago, but don't we all (and shouldn't we do so without shame)? Actually, drummer-turned-lead guitarist Keith Strickland looked fit and dapper. The vocalists sounded best when they weren't pushed, particularly Cindy and Fred. Kate's voice sounded better than I anticipated and her range is very well preserved. Early in the set, they mixed in a few things from 2008's Funplex album. I thought the group sounded pretty good on these numbers. The songs sounded to a degree like they had been crafted with the group's limits in mind. The crowd definitely got more into it as the band moved into more familiar territory, like early favorite "Private Idaho" and "Roam" from 1989 "comeback" album Cosmic Thing.

With the crap weather and mud, the audience was into it but still hesitant to get close or move too much. As the B-52s moved into the predictable closing numbers, the group sounded like it was going through the motions a bit. Fred said something about learning "Love Shack" at karaoke. I imagine that the poor guy's performed the song a few times too many.

(Okay, time for an admission. My siblings and I decided it would be fun to throw a 25th anniversary party for our parents back in 2003 at our house. One sibling wanted to get karaoke gear. I was not interested myself but decided to go with whatever the group decided. So they got it. And yes, my sister and I did "Love Shack." I did Fred natch.)

The band closed out its set with another number they've probably played a time or two, "Rock Lobster." Sure, it was predictable, and they did sound like they could sleepwalk their way through it. Still, watching the B-52s play such an iconic song live brought a smile to my face.

After the B-52s set, we caught a bit of White Lies. Like Here We Go Magic, they too weren't that interesting. Having seen Arctic Monkeys twice already, we looked further down the rest of the schedule, measured the stank and filth, and decided to bail. A festival that started with a bang was cut short of its full potential glory due to the weather and the ground conditions. Still had enough fun to make it likely, at least for now, that I'll be there in 2010. By the way, block October 8-10 off on your 2010 calendar.


ACL 2009 - by Jon