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Rock ‘n’ Roll Photog: A.A. Bondy, Brendon Urie/Pete Wentz

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Now here’s DJ Jen to take you into the all-request hour…

Total Request (Not Quite Live)

For April, from Ohio: A.A. Bondy

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I took this one last winter, during soundcheck at the Bowery Ballroom. (Also on the bill: Willy Mason, The Duke & The King.) It is probably the best picture I took all night, of anyone. It is certainly the best lit picture of Bondy that I have, because he seems to like to sing in the dark, or at least in extremely low light, and I don’t use a flash.

I had (slightly) better luck when I saw him again earlier this year at Union Hall, in Brooklyn. He still confined himself to four red stage lights, but I was closer to him, which made it easier to work with the low light. The shot below, a variation on the “tuning my guitar” pose, is my favorite from the evening. It is, again, a moment of stillness amid a flurry of activity. And there’s the totally incongruous picture of the colonial lady above his head, as if he’s in someone’s very fancy parlor, and not in a shoe-box-sized basement room in Brooklyn where there are dead animals nailed to the wall behind the bar and people playing bocce ball upstairs. (Yes, really, bocce ball. There’s also book-lined shelves and functioning fireplaces. Union Hall is a very interesting place.)

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For Alina, from Moscow: Brendon Urie and Pete Wentz

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I took this picture at Angels and Kings last August during Brendon Urie’s solo acoustic set. Pete Wentz was kind of but not really a surprise guest, in the sense that a) Fall Out Boy was on the Blink-182 tour with Panic! at the Disco, at the time and b) we were all crammed in his bar. When he appeared on the stage the first time — practically out of thin air — I was too startled to take any pictures. This shot is from the second time, when he came out to sing Don’t Stop Believin’ with Brendon. All I had time to do was point the camera at their faces and hope for the best.

I’m particularly fond of this picture partially because that evening marks the start of my rock and roll photography adventure – I had never bothered bringing my camera to shows before – and partially because it’s a moment where they both look happy.

The next one is just Brendon Urie by himself. You can’t tell from the expression on his face, but it was about 900 million degrees in that bar at that moment, and the audience was practically in his lap. I think he may have been trying not to laugh at whatever was going on in the front row.

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Bits: Rekkid Store Day, Hell & Half of Georgia show, Hank’s Pulitzer, Rush for real, Prine tribute

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  • Record Store Day is coming April 17! As the NTSIB hermitage is newly-equipped with a rekkid playa after years of watching the old vinyl collection sit quiet and sad, we are super jazzed for this Christmas of the music world this year. I’ll be celebrating the day at Music Saves, so if you’re there that day and happen to grab the last Black Keys 12″ before I’ve gotten my hands on a copy and you feel a sharp blow to the back of your head and then wake up in a pool of your own vomit to find that TBK 12″ gone, well…
  • Hell and Half of Georgia have a free show coming up on April 24 at Canter’s Kibitz Room in Hollywood. They also have new swag in the form of a pretty rockin’ Tee-shirt.
  • Did you know there’s a Pulitzer Prize for music? Yep, and Hank Williams was awarded one this year. I spotted a blog earlier answering the question of why Hank was awarded the Pulitzer for music, but was that really a question? Is “because he was fucking awesome” not answer enough?
  • Rush is touring. That’s right. Rush.
  • A John Prine tribute album will be hitting stores on June 22 featuring contributions from the likes of Old Crow Medicine Show, Justin Townes Earle, the Avett Brothers, Conor Oberst, Deer Tick and more.

We’ve been a little undecided on our feelings about Megafaun, but this performance they staged for La Blogotheque has certainly gone a long way in endearing them to us.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10851413&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Megafaun – His Robe / A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

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Notable shows in the greater Cleveland area & BiiiiiiiirdMAN!

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Shows worth checking out this week in and around Cleveland:

The Beachland Ballroom & Tavern

  • Sun, Apr 11| 8 PM (7 PM door)
    Drive-By Truckers
    Langhorne Slim
    SOLD OUT!
    Ballroom | All Ages

  • Mon, Apr 12| 7 PM (6 PM door)
    The Legendary Rhythm
    & Blues Revue
    featuring The Tommy Castro Band / Joe Louis Walker & Debbie Davies / Brickhouse Blues Band
    $20.00 adv / $22.00 dos
    Ballroom | All Ages

  • Tue, Apr 13| 9 PM (8 PM door)
    The Hold Steady
    The Oranges Band
    $18.00 adv / $20.00 dos
    Ballroom | All Ages

  • Thu, Apr 15| 7:30 PM (7:30 PM door)
    Meet & Greet with Baby Dee
    LGBT Fundraiser
    Price of Tix includes concert
    $25.00
    Tavern | All Ages

  • Thu, Apr 15| 8:30 PM (8 PM door)
    Baby Dee
    Lighthouse & The Whaler
    Adam Apple will perform a silent word piece
    $10.00
    Tavern | All Ages

  • Fri, Apr 16| 8 PM (7:30 PM door)
    Blue Grass Barn Dance
    Hosted by Miss Firecracker
    feat. Hoots & Hellmouth
    Heelsplitter (11:40 PM)
    Hiram Rapids Stumblers (10 PM)
    One Dollar Hat (9:20 PM)
    Timberwolves (8:40 PM)
    Two Far Gone (8 PM)
    $5.00 adv / $7.00 dos
    Ballroom | All Ages

Grog Shop

  • Sat, Apr 10| 10 PM
    Queens of the Iron Mic
    Hosted by Erica Kayne
    Indica
    Chimera
    Mz Crazy Tee
    Summer Azul
    True Poetry
    Chevy Blue
    Mami
    Erica Nicole
    FREE

  • Thurs, Apr 15| 9 PM
    Pissed Jeans
    This Moment In Black History
    Homostupids
    $7

  • Fri, Apr 16| 6 PM
    Adam Green
    The Dead Trees
    $12

Musica

  • Fri, Apr 16| 9 PM
    Over the Rhine
    Ellery
    $20

Annabell’s Bar & Lounge

  • Sat, Apr 10| 10 PM
    This Moment in Black History
    If These Trees Could Talk
    As If

House of Blues

  • Sun, Apr 11| 8:30 PM (7:30 PM door)
    Galactic
    Cyril Neville
    Corey Henry
    T Bird and the Breaks
    $20 adv
    $23 dos

No, not Harvey, but a birdman one-man-band. This fascinating street performer is Claudio Montuori, and you can find a few videos of him on YouTube. Including an interview, but it’s in Italian (if anyone can translate it, I’d be happy to post it).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzod3CotfAg]

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Slackday: And Ohio boys ain’t too bad, either

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As it’s Slackday, I’ll just drop the (very thin) veneer of objective professionalism and admit it: I am currently obsessed with all things Dan Auerbach. I’ve always dug the Black Keys, but the release of the new songs from their forthcoming album have compelled me to spend quality time with their catalogue and to get into Dan Auerbach’s solo work.

I learned that my favorite song on Dan Auerbach’s album, Keep It Hid, is a cover of a song that was written by Wayne Carson Thompson – who was also the writer of the fantastic song “The Letter” that was popularized by the Box Tops, sung by a very young Alex Chilton – and popularized by a duo called Jon & Robin. I had never heard the song, so I went looking for it. I was a little apprehensive that I might be faced with the fact that Dan didn’t conjure magic and awesome from thin air. But I needn’t have worried. As with A.A. Bondy, I’m finding I can always trust Dan.

You see, here’s the Jon & Robin version:

It’s cute, but after the promise of the intro, it feels limp and uninspiring.

Now, here’s what Dan did with it:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLsANH1tFoY]

Fucking. A.

He took the promising intro of the Jon & Robin version, stretched it throughout the song and even ratcheted it up a few notches. I absolutely love that big-stomping carnival rhythm. I love the drop-out echo effect when he sings “more”. And, as always, I love the soulfulness of his vocal delivery. This is what covering a song should be all about, taking it and making it your own – keeping the bones, but practically rebuilding the rest from the ground up. Dan took something that was cute and twee and made it fun, sexy and absolutely rockin’.

Dan Auerbach MySpace

Dan Auerbach page at Nonesuch

Dan Auerbach KCRW In-studio Session at Rollo & Grady

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Game Changer: Shudder to Think

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It seems every music fanatic has at least one: a game changer. A band or album that slapped them upside the head, jarred them from complacency, shocked them into a different way of hearing or a different way of thinking. We’ve read the stories, about how, either through words that spoke to them in a way no one had spoken to them before or through an arrangement of sounds that were nothing like they had ever heard before, their internal worlds were forever changed.

My biggest game changer to date has been Shudder to Think. In 1994, I was heavily into Jeff Buckley and made a point of listening to the artists he covered and the artists he noted as favorites. Jeff had good, eclectic taste, and one of his well-documented favorites was Shudder to Think. S2T’s fifth studio album, Pony Express Record, was newly-released, and their video for “X-French Tee Shirt” was getting some play on MTV. It sounded weird to me. It was jagged and aggressive with frequent time changes and unconventional melodies. I had no idea what to make of it. I couldn’t even determine if I liked it or hated it. I wanted to hear it again.

Eventually, I bought Pony Express Record, and the whole album was a revelation. Everything that was contained in “X-French Tee Shirt” was on show, spread around and turned up. The album was pointy and electric and psychotic. It was, at turns, creepy, frightening, obscene, sexy, clever, ugly, beautiful. It was invigorating, and my mind opened up to what music could be in a way it hadn’t been since I first heard Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Pony Express Record cemented for me the idea that, while music could also go on just being fun and simple, it was important for music to move forward, open out, shake up, swallow whole and regurgitate as a new entity.

I went on to become a big fan of S2T in the short time they had left as a band at that point. I had the pleasure of seeing them live at Bimbo’s in San Francisco thirteen years ago this month. It was the day before or day after my birthday (my memory is fuzzy at best), and I got birthday hugs from Craig Wedren and Nathan Larson, who are two of the sweetest guys I’ve ever met. While the band has since dispersed to their own projects – with a reunion in 2008 – with varying degrees of success, S2T is still one of my favorite bands and Pony Express Record still serves as a mental measuring stick for me for all other music.

Shudder to Think MySpace
Craig Wedren Official Site
A Camp Official Site

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Rock ‘n’ Roll Photog: Bad Rabbits/The Young Veins/Foxy Shazam

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NTSIB is very pleased to introduce a new series to the blog. Our good friend and rock ‘n’ roll photographer Jennifer will highlight some of her favorite photos from her various rock ‘n’ roll escapades and talk about the photos, the musicians and related minutiae. Please enjoy the first installment.

HELLO INTERNET,

My name is Jennifer, and I’ll be one of April’s partners-in-shenanigans in Mississippi this summer. I live in New York. I go to a lot of shows. I take a lot of pictures. This past week the Foxy Shazam/The Young Veins/Bad Rabbits tour stopped at Webster Hall in the East Village in Manhattan and also at the (new) Knitting Factory, in Brooklyn. The tour continues through April, and all of you should see them if they pass through your neighborhood.

These are some of my favorite pictures from those shows:

Bad Rabbits

These gentlemen from Boston really bring the funk. (Their MySpace sound really does not do them justice at all. Let me put it this way: I walked in having never heard them before, I walked out willing to pay money to see them at their own show.) Most of the pictures I took of them at Webster Hall were not that great; I was much more successful at the Knitting Factory. I’ve picked two to share today.

One of their bits of stage business is boy-band style synchronized dancing, which I tried to capture here:

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And as for the second one, mainly I just like the wash of blue light:

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The Young Veins

True confessions: This was the band I went to these shows to see.[1] Their sound is closer to classic rock than to funk and they’re so new they only have two songs on their MySpace. Their record comes out in June, but, based on what I’ve heard so far live, my favorite songs are “Capetown” and “Young Veins (Die Tonight)” mainly because they remind me of the wry pleasures of being young, running around in ridiculous clothes and falling in love with inappropriate people. (She says, like she doesn’t do that anymore. Well, all right, but perhaps not on quite the same scale.)

The first couple of pictures are from Webster Hall, specifically, the basement space, known as The Studio. The light down there is kind of awful but I got several pictures I liked:

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Ryan Ross as a point of stillness amid a flurry of on-stage activity. The stillness is actually what I like; they were setting up and soundchecking at the time, so there were people all over the stage fiddling with wires and whatnot; that’s Jon Walker behind him.

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Ryan Ross with Andy Soukal in the background; I like this one because I managed to capture the spotlight hitting them just right.

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Ryan Ross again, this time playing the tambourine. I should delete it – I have other, better ones, and it’s all blown out — but I love it. Possibly I love it because it’s all blown out. Or because I have a soft spot for Ryan Ross playing the tambourine. That could be it, too.

Foiled by bad lighting at the first show, for the second night, at the Knitting Factory, I was on a mission: get a decent picture of Jon Walker. These are some of the results:

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Here he is singing a song. This one is one of the better attempts at the same picture, but I’m still not 100% happy with it. They’ll be back in June, and if I can get to their show, I’ll try again.

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In the classic “tuning my guitar” pose. I’m fond of this one because I had finally managed to get the right combination of light and activity.

Other highlights from the evening:

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Nick Murray at his drums during set-up and sound-check.

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Nick White, with Jon Walker’s arm in the middle there. This is probably one of the better ones, in terms of crispness and clarity.

Foxy Shazam

If you have never attended a Foxy Shazam show: you owe it to yourself to remedy that situation, because they are amazing. Eric Nally is a tiny tornado on stage, bunny-hopping onto the shoulders of his guitarist, eating cigarettes, doing headstands and rolling somersaults, and jumping into the audience. At the end of the Webster Hall show he was literally shirtless and swinging from the rafters. Here are some of the highlights of the shows:

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Eric Nally does a headstand (mid-song!) at Webster Hall.

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Eric Nally addresses the crowd at Webster Hall, in one of the very few moments in which he was standing still.

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Alex Nauth comes up to the front to play the horn, at Webster Hall. I love both the lights on him and his dramatic pose.

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Eric Nally, facing Daisy, who is balancing his guitar on his fingers. Sky White is playing the keyboards to the right. The Knitting Factory used a bunch of different colored lights, which is always fun. I think “green” was a great decision for this bit of stage business.

[1] Two members, Ryan Ross and Jon Walker, are formerly of Panic! At the Disco, one of my favorite bands. They left Panic last summer, and this is their new project.

Upcoming Dates
Apr 7 2010 7:00P The Basement Columbus, Ohio
Apr 8 2010 7:00P The Eagle Theatre Pontiac, Michigan
Apr 9 2010 8:00P The Mad Hatter Covington, Kentucky
Apr 10 2010 7:30P Beat Kitchen SOLD OUT Chicago, Illinois
Apr 11 2010 5:30P The Vault Buffalo, Minnesota
Apr 13 2010 8:00P Marquis Theatre Denver, Colorado
Apr 15 2010 8:00P El Corazon Seattle, Washington
Apr 16 2010 7:30P Venue Vancouver, British Columbia
Apr 17 2010 8:00P Satyricon Portland, Oregon
Apr 18 2010 9:00P Bottom of the Hill San Francisco, California
Apr 19 2010 7:30P The Boardwalk Orangevale, California
Apr 21 2010 8:00P Troubadour West Hollywood, California
Apr 23 2010 7:15P Martini Ranch Scottsdale, Arizona

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Bits: Lolla’10, Yuri’s Night, Lou Barlow tour, TBK in NYC2, new Big Boi jam

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  • While we don’t post too many festival line-ups unless A.A. Bondy or the Felice Brothers are involved (we play favorites, we admit it), the Lollapalooza 2010 line-up is pretty great. Standouts for us: Jimmy Cliff, the Black Keys, Cypress Hill (we saw them on a previous Lolla go-’round, and they had one of the best sets of the day), Mavis Staples, Mumford & Sons, Dawes and Royal Bangs. It’ll be a something-for-everyone weekend.

  • If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you should be getting tickets for Yuri’s Night at the NASA Ames Research Center this Saturday because the entertainment lineup is straight-up awesome. Les Claypool, The Black Keys, Common, N.E.R.D. and more. We ain’t got nothing like that going for the CLE celebration.

  • Lou Barlow will be touring with Mike Watt’s missingmen, though sans Watt, in June.

  • After the quick sell-out of the Black Keys’ upcoming Summerstage show, a second date has been added. Go get you some, NYC.

  • Pitchfork has a new Big Boi track, “Shutterbugg”, for you to listen to. BB has signed with Def Jam, so his solo album should finally see the light of day.

If it was possible to have carnal relations with music, while we would have a steady conjugal visiting schedule with the entire Black Keys catalogue, we would also have a tawdry affair with Lou Barlow’s “Gravitate”.

http://www.lala.com/external/flash/SingleSongWidget.swf

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Conrad Plymouth: I could have been a preacher if I suffered fools

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We’ve talked Conrad Plymouth up before, and we’ll continue to do so if they keep it up. If you don’t like music that moves you, that can fill you with yearning, a little melancholy and a strong sense of place – even if it’s a place you’ve never been – then stay away from these guys. If, however, you are a fan of beautiful music, heartfelt vocals and exceptional songwriting, go download Conrad Plymouth’s new EP and throw some bucks at them.

If you already took a listen to “Fergus Falls” when the band posted it previously, you already know you need this EP. If not, here’s your chance.

Conrad Plymouth – Fergus Falls