Live Like This

The Oxford American Music Issue showed up in the mail this morning, along with the annual two-CD anthology of Southern music.

This one's got the 1987 track "So Much" by the Windbreakers, the '80s college rock band co-fronted by Tim Lee, who's been a Knoxvillian for going on a decade now and currently leads the Tim Lee 3 with his wife, Susan Bauer Lee on bass and Rodney Cash on drums.

In the accompanying essay, novelist Will Clarke doesn't say much about the Windbreakers' music ("It's gorgeous," in reference to "Stupid Idea," is the extent of his analysis) but muses on songs and bands he missed during his own adolescence. It's pretty typical middle-age nostalgia, but the Windbreakers are indeed a classic example of a band that should have been bigger. As Clarke writes:

"The Windbreakers' undeserved obscurity defies my explanation. They had the songwriting chops. They had the sound. They even had the indie-hitmaker producer. If this was all laid out on a spreadsheet, the sum total of this equation should have equaled rock stardom."

It's been a rumor for months, and now it's official: Terry Riley, the high priest of musical minimalism, will be the featured performer at Big Ears 2010, the second installment of AC Entertainment's festival of avant-garde and experimental music.

The 74-year-old Riley will be the official artist in residence at the festival, scheduled for Friday, March 26-Sunday, March 28. The weekend is a celebration of Riley's 75th birthday, which is in June. Riley will perform several concerts over the weekend with other musicians, including a performance of his 1964 masterpiece In C. The Calder String Quartet, a Los Angeles group that has worked with Riley since 2006, will also present a program of his work.

In C is generally regarded as one of the foundational pieces of minimalism, the mid-20th-century style of composition based on repetition and drone that's associated with Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass.
 
The first Big Ears last February featured Glass and his partner, the cellist Wendy Sutter, as well as a range of artists from around the world, with notable appearances by experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, Australian jazz trio the Necks, saxophonist Ned Rothenburg, Baltimore dance-rock guru Dan Deacon, and New York cabaret-pop singer Antony Hagerty. The festival, held at the Bijou and Tennessee theaters, the Knoxville Museum of Art, Pilot Light, and the Woodruff Building on Gay Street, drew press coverage from The New York Times, Pitchfork, Atlanta's Creative Loafing, and the Baltimore City Paper.
 
"It's a tremendous honor to have Terry Riley participate in our festival this year," says AC Entertainment's Ashley Capps in a press release. "It's a dream come true."

The full lineup will be announced in early December. Tickets will also be available then.

The first official announcement about Big Ears 2010 should be coming later today or early tomorrow. Some news worth noting is that the festival website has the date for next year's event listed as March 26-28.

That's a few weeks later than the first Big Ears, which was held in early February. But it seems very likely that the festival is indeed happening again. 

I expected Peaches to be pretty trashy. I didn't quite expect just how spectacularly and gloriously trashy she would be during her performance at the Valarium last night. It was a hour-long celebration of appetite--a marked improvement over the warmed-over synth-rock of opening act M.E.N., and, I think, a more fully formed political statement than the Le Tigre spin-off's sloganeering. Maybe "Shake Yer Dix" and "Lovertits" aren't part of the standard vocabulary of political discourse, but as a statement of dancefloor hedonism and pop indulgence, they beat cardboard signs reading "Silence=Death." (I agree with the sentiment, and it's an important message, but you're preaching to the choir here. And who wants to dance to that, anyway?)

The rock dynamics--the guitars and the encore, especially, and closing the set with the crowd-pleasing "F--k the Pain Away"--were a little disappointing, but Peaches and her band worked them well. She ruled the stage from the moment she appeared, wearing a rubber or maybe latex cartoon porcupine suit and a wrestling mask. By the end of the set she was down to a flesh-colored nylon bodystocking. She crowd-surfed, spewed a bottle of champagne over the audience, and played something that looked like either a fluorescent light bulb or a lightsaber. 

When I was a kid, my mom was terrified of rock concerts, I think mostly in response to KISS and the stampede at the Who's 1979 concert in Cincinnati. I had vague ideas about the debauchery that happened at concerts; last night was about as close as I've ever gotten to actually seeing what I thought a rock concert was like when I was 10.    

The second installment of the Square Room's Sound Off competition on Wednesday night ended in triumph for Vinyl Thief, who broke out all their high-school band instruments for a rousing set.

Most of the bands--Vinyl Thief, Seeing Skies, Madre, Kamuy, and Enigmatic Foe--were only vaguely familiar to me, but each one had significant charm and/or promise. (As someone who thinks Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle" is one of the great singles of the decade, I especially appreciated Seeing Skies' tight and polished radio emo.)

More details soon.

Conventional wisdom around town the last couple of years has been that two Knoxville bands seemed to have the potential for Superdrag-style breakout success--the Royal Bangs and Tenderhooks. Royal Bangs just released their very good new album, Let It Beep, on Black Keys' drummer Dan Auerbach's Audio Eagle label, to some enthusiastic--if not exactly widespread--reviews. The Tenderhooks, on the other hand, have been supporting their second album, New Ways to Butcher English, for a year now, frequently performing in New York but apparently unable to land the kind of label deal they want.

So, about a week and a half ago, just after their performance at the CMJ Music Marathon, the band called it quits. Singer/guitarist Jake Winstrom and drummer Matt Honkonen are heading into the studio soon with Tim Lee; guitarist Ben Oyler and bassist Emily Robinson haven't announced any plans. It's disappointing news from one of the city's best bands.

Mic: "You can edit this, caintcha?" Todd: "Nope." Mic: "No? Aw shit." Local singer/songwriters Mic Harrison, R.B. Morris, and Todd Steed discuss their upcoming show at the Square Room on Dec. 11.

I took a shot Wednesday at a particular club about a show that we didn't provide any coverage for because we didn't know it was happening. That wasn't really fair--it was a little mean, and the show was listed on its website in advance.

The club's management apparently thought our staffers would be looking there for info--that's how it was done until a few years ago. It was a lot easier just five or six years ago to keep up with all of Knoxville's entertainment options--there were far fewer of them than there are now. Now that there are dozens of clubs, bars, and theaters that offer live music every night, it's sometimes hard to keep up. We rely on musicians, promoters, and venue managers to provide information for our calendar and also so we can conduct interviews, write stories, get photos, and all the other stuff that goes into providing the coverage we do. Sometimes we (and mostly I mean me) miss shows, either because I don't look in the right spot or because the aforementioned people I rely on for info don't know how to reach me.

For clarity, the best way to get a listing in the Metro Pulse calendar is to send an e-mail to calendar@metropulse.com or submit an event directly to the website. (Full guidelines for submissions are here.)

 I do my best to know what's happening and when, but a little head's up is always appreciated. (And I'll try not to be so grumpy about this stuff.)

I don't want to name names (it's the one named below) but there's at least one club in town that apparently is way too popular and profitable to bother with promoting its shows. And by "promote" I mean just announce--you know, send an e-mail to let somebody know you're hosting a well-regarded '80s icon like Mitch Easter. (I did get a last-minute notice from somebody in one of the opening bands, but too late for any meaningful coverage.)

So, yeah, Mitch Easter (the dB's, Let's Active, and producer for R.E.M., Suzanne Vega, Game Theory, and more) is playing at Patrick Sullivan's in the Old City tonight. If you're not already occupied with Tennessee Shines or Warband/Stinking Lizaveta, it should be worth the trouble. Econopop opens.

A few updates from Catalyst since it closed last week:

• Hank Williams III and Assjack with Those Poor Bastards on Nov. 2 has been moved to Southbound in the Old City.

• Evol Intent on Oct. 28 has been moved to the Cider House.

• Crome Molly on Oct. 29 has also moved to Southbound.