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* ND #69 Revisited

Continuing what ostensibly will be a new regular blog series -- now that our May-June issue is on the stands, what follows are a few comments upon some of the stories and reviews to be found amid its pages....

* You may have noticed a new department toward the front -- "Most Valuable Player," which will be a recurring piece for the foreseeable future that focuses on supporting players. The irony of profiling Austin guitarist Rich Brotherton as our first MVP subject is that nearly two decades ago (circa 1989), the Austin Chronicle was putting together a series of short profiles of local sidemen (and women) that they also happened to title "Most Valuable Players" -- and they asked me if I'd write one on Rich Brotherton.

As it turned out, I ended up not doing the piece for various reasons, but Brotherton reminded me recently that the guy who did end up writing it was my former UT college roommate, Rob Thomas. You can catch some more recent tag-team liner-notes work from Rob and me on the 2002 Dualtone reissues of the Reivers albums Saturday and End Of The Day. In his day job, Rob is the creator/executive producer of the CW Network series Veronica Mars (and previously of the ABC series Cupid).

* Mark Guarino's review of a star-studded show at Las Manitas Avenue Cafe during SXSW was rather more news-oriented than our live reviews usually are, but with good reason. The looming loss of Las Manitas (at least at its present location) to make way for a giant Marriott hotel is the latest in a long line of black eyes for the city of Austin in terms of how it has treated its cultural and musical landmarks. To the city's credit, there are plans afoot to help Las Manitas relocate; but of course that was also the case with the late, great Liberty Lunch when it was bulldozed circa 1999 to make way for a high-tech office building, and we never did see the Lunch resurface.

Austin's rapid growth is unavoidable, and there's no getting around the need for a certain degree of change to its infrastructure. But when you target for removal the very things which make the city unique in the first place, you lose that uniquity. Perhaps it's silly that I'm still miffed over the 1980 destruction of Armadillo World Headquarters only a couple years before I'd have been able to attend events there myself. But that was wrong when it happened. And the insistence on repeating such past mistakes continues to be wrong today.

Austin Chronicle music editor Raoul Hernandez wrote many years ago, in a vehement response to the city's Liberty Lunch demolition plans, "You do not tear down landmarks." I was with him all the way on that....and I still am.
Raoul's piece, by the way, is archived here:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/vol18/issue23/music.liblunch.html

* One fairly interesting side-topic from my interview with the Avett Brothers that didn't make it into the final print version of the article was the impact of YouTube on contemporary artists' live performances. The Avetts have been a heavily YouTubed band -- do a search and you'll find literally hundreds of clips that fans have posted from their performances. Which is great for publicity, of course -- but if you look a little closer, you'll presently find almost no clips of songs from the band's new album Emotionalism (which comes out next week) on YouTube. The reason being that the band has almost entirely avoided playing the new album's songs live yet, because they want the record to have a fresh impact upon its release. It's an unusual conundrum that bands now face in the everything-is-everywhere internet age.

Avetts bassist Bob Crawford and I talked a little bit about that in our interview. "With YouTube, it's the kind of thing where you can't beat 'em -- we can't stop it," Crawford acknowledged. "It's going to happen, whether we want it to or not. So, in many, many ways, it is a great thing. It probably helped our growth. We came to Seattle the first time, we'd never been there, we had 175-180 people. We came to Seattle the second time, we had 400 people. We didn't build this crowd from 15 like we have done in North Carolina. This crowd heard about us somehow. And probably MySpace, YouTube, the file-sharing sites, you know, word-of-mouth.... But yes, we have censored ourselves. We have not exposed these songs, because we would like to have the record come out first."

That said, don't be surprised if the new songs start popping up on YouTube in a few days, as the band should finally unveil its new material onstage at a handful of northeast shows this weekend. Meantime, here's a real nice clip of the Avetts at Merlefest 2006, including some footage from their unamplified set at the No Depression booth....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8B8ym5Ce_0

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on May 8, 2007 2:08 PM | Permalink