Party on It

Before I wrap up the quickly-bloating SXSW saga, I wanted to pass along some really great news that became real over the weekend: We were taken on by William Morris Endeavor Entertainment (formerly The William Morris Agency) who’ll be doing our U.S. booking.  WMEE is one of the “Big Four” entertainment agencies in the world, and they handle the careers not just of musicians, but writers, actors, directors, and producers across America and Europe.  Their musical roster alone is pretty ridiculous company.  (I mean - “All Four Original Members of Asia“??  TAKE ME TO SIZZLER!)  They came out to see us at SXSW and liked the show and the upcoming record, and after hearing their plans for the year, it was pretty much a no-brainer.

So aside from finally putting Zach in direct connection with the Jim Rose Circus, this means our entire team is finally in place – manager, label, lawyer, booking agent and press.  Now it’s about getting everyone on the same page and coordinating their efforts in advance of the album release (which hasn’t been officially announced, though it will be a Tuesday in July).

As for us, since we got home on Sunday, I’ve slept about 36 hours, eaten my way through two boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and haven’t left the house in two days.

Rad.

(R.I.P. David Mills)

We’re in Morgantown, West Virginia tonight, after having driven the width of Kentucky and up the spine of the Blue Ridge to get here.  We played in Louisville last night, and while the half dozen other times we’ve been through town have felt like strong flirtations, last night was outright consummation of the affair.  That place was bananas.  175 people paid to get in, and the crowd was bouncing so hard that the owner was worried the floor was going to collapse.  At one point, Rod had the entire crowd on its knees – literally – and had them springing back up in time to the music, while Zach thrashed shirtless.  (Favorite comment of the night, overheard by our merch man Zalamia, in reference to Zach: “Look at how skinny he is and how small his nipples are – that’s metal as sh*t!”)  It was a wild and joyous throwdown, and with all due respect to the rest of the crowds on what has been the craziest and best run of shows we’ve ever done, last night will go down as one of the best crowds we’ve ever played to, and maybe one of the best shows ever.  Today, the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote about last night’s show:

Bands such as J-Roddy Walston and The Business make you believe that rock ‘n’ roll will never, ever die.  And in these days of false “Idols,” hipster pop and Justin Bieber, we can’t assume its survival.

But when this Baltimore band is blasting through a set that sounds like Little Richard getting it on with Queen while Joey Ramone watches from a chaise lounge in the corner, all is right with the world.

Thank you, Louisville.  It was great for us too.

I want to pick back up with the SXSW story, but before I get into that, I’d like to talk about an underrated aspect of playing there that hit us hardest our first time through two years ago, but resonated again last week: If nothing else, for everyone that attends or plays at SXSW, the entire experience puts the act of playing in a band in perspective.  Among my family and friends, it’s a pretty unique thing to be in a band that’s serious enough to get out of town even once in awhile, much less spend half a month traveling to a festival in Texas.  But Fader magazine reported that there was an estimated 1,800 bands at SXSW this year; if you average each band to four members a piece, that’s 7,200 people down there solely to play music.  And if you assume that each band knows 50 bands that weren’t down there – which might be a conservative estimate – even with overlap, there could be nearly 100,000 bands in America at this very moment, littered across rest stops and clubs and highways, caught somewhere between the basement and Letterman.

So that gives you an idea of why great bands never get discovered, while bands that some might consider “lesser” become famous – there simply isn’t the bandwidth (no pun intended) for everyone to be heard.  There is just too much music for it all to be sifted through.   After a certain point – and it’s fairly early on – it becomes more about connections and politics and happenstance than anything having to do with raw talent.  All these things that should be ancillary to deciding who is going to have a career playing music and who has to move onto to Plan B loom larger and larger as the process of recording and touring become more democratic, thanks to computers and the internet.  Even at a place like SXSW, where virtually the entire American music industry is located for four days, the odds are still strongly against anyone being “discovered” out of the blue.  The whole process works best – in Austin and throughout the entire endeavor of trying to make a living playing music - when you already have people on your side letting people know that you exist, vouching for your quality, pulling what strings they can.  How you find those people, well thats another novella entirely.

Anyway, back to the story.

Friday

After getting two hours of sleep the night before the night after our Little Radio gig, I slumped through the entire day until our big Vagrant showcase that night.  This was easily the biggest show of our career, and I was so tired all day long that hands were shaking and I was inverting words in my sentences, speaking in near-Pig Latin.  I was even too tired to be worried about this.

After we loaded in at the club – La Zona Rosa – we filmed our electronic press kit (EPK) for Vagrant in our dressing room.  The EPK is sort of a video business card for the band, which will primarily be sent out to European booking agents and promoters who don’t have a chance to see us in person.  We were given a list of sample questions that we were supposed to come up with clever answers to – sample questions: “Is there a certain message you try and convey through your lyrics?” and “Your live show is very ‘sweaty’ in a sense. How do you approach your live performances?”  We haven’t done a ton of collective interviews in our career- especially not ones with a specific intended purpose.  We took a fair amount of coaching during the process – “Always repeat part of the question in your answer” and “Seriously – stop tapping your foot” – and I thought we rallied gamely over the second half of the interview.  The Vagrant folks seem to think they’ll have more than enough material to edit something relatively compelling together.  We finished literally five minutes before our set time.

The show itself, despite a late, stressful start, passed in a mad blur.  We didn’t have time to dial in our monitor mixes and were still sound-checking when the doors opened, and as soon as we confirmed that every microphone and monitor on stage was at least working, we were off.  I was so exhausted halfway through that I kept repeating to myself “The most powerful organ in the body is the brain” and I envisioned myself having to tell my parents and friends that I had fallen apart at the most important show we’ve ever played.  Either the threat of humiliation or the endorphins kept me together.  By the end of the second song – “Full Growing Man” – we were at full speed and the crowd of about 500 seemed to be warming to us.  We rammed it home in bracing fashion – “Don’t Get Old” into “Rock n’ Roll II” into “I’m Going Out” into “Stop Rip n’ Roll/Used to Did” almost without pause – and nearly collapsed our way off the stage.  Thankfully there were stage hands to take our gear off, or I was likely to have vomited having to lift anything heavier than a Red Bull.

Afterwards, I was too exhausted to care very much how it had gone – I knew it wasn’t a disaster, but where it fell in the spectrum of our shows was a bit beyond my reckoning.  The general consensus was we had played well, but manager and lawyer were ecstatic.  Apparently we had blown away some industry folks who had come out to see us, and the people who run SXSW wanted to interview us the next day for the website (which I am told is a sign they think we might be one of the success stories of the weekend).  We ended meeting a bunch of industry folks who represented some seriously amazing opportunities that none of us knew were even being discussed. (I’m am forbidden to talk about anything until it’s a done deal, out of discretion and the fear of The Jinx).  Plus, we got to see Murder by Death bring the house down with a killer set, and  - again making matters sweeter – free clothes, courtesy of Dickies, who sponsored the show and gave us all the free pants and shirts we wanted.

I intended to make it a much earlier night than the night before, but with how early our wake-up call was going to be for the Rachel Ray party the next day, I knew I wasn’t going to come near making up the sleep I’d missed.  Plus I was too wound up from everything that was talked about and everyone we met to be able to even hope of shutting my brain off.  But there was still one more day and two more shows to come…

(To be continued, once again…)

(Addendum – West Virginia just beat Kentucky in the men’s NCAA’s to win a berth in the Final Four next weekend.  We watched the end of the game in a burrito joint with a bunch of WVU fans and it was great to vicariously experience what might have been.  Then sirens and people running and screaming and a bunch of stuff allegedly got set on fire, even though it’s Spring Break.  Go Mountaineers!)

I’m writing from backstage at the Metro in Chicago, while Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is giving it to a sold-out room of 1,200 folks upstairs.  We played a little while ago and I’m treating this small cubicle as my decompression chamber – from tonight, from SXSW, from the last two weeks.  We have two shows left before getting back to Baltimore on Sunday, and I haven’t had nearly as much time to write as I thought I would.  Beyond that, I wanted to get a little distance from SXSW before writing about all that happened because between the severe sleep deprivation (15 hours over four days), a lower body sore from walking approximately cross-country, and the rush of other cities and other shows we’ve had since then, I’m only just sifting through what really went on.  (And I didn’t have my camera on me for a shockingly large portion of the weekend, so I’ll be relying on the photos of others where applicable.  Boo me.)

SXSW is unlike any festival in the world.  Rather than involving one or two stages and a gigantic field and an orderly progression of bands, it all happens simultaneously – 1,800 bands playing thousands of shows at hundreds of venues across square miles of Austin, literally around the clock.  It’s impossible to keep a plan or an itinerary, and in order to keep your sanity, you simply have to let yourself go with the tides and try to take it all in.  Every music fan should attend SXSW at least once, if for nothing else to experience complete musical immersion for four days.  But leave yourself about a week to recover.

But before we get into the details of how our stay went, here are some quick hits off the bat:

1)  Esquire Magazine named our performance “Full Growing Man” at the Little Radio Austin show at the Red-Eyed Fly on Thursday afternoon one of the Best Songs of SXSW.  This seriously improves our standing as Cougar bait.  (Click through the slide show to find us; as of this writing we were the 28th slide.)

2)  SXSW.com filmed our show at the Vagrant Records showcase on Friday night and posted two clips in HD:

“I Don’t Wanna Hear It” and

“Don’t Get Old”

They also interviewed us on Saturday evening, and that will hopefully be posted shortly.

3)  A picture of Zach thrashing about at the 40 Watt party on Saturday afternoon became the official image of SXSW for the Reuters wire service.  It has already shown up in the News York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo.com and papers across the U.S. and Europe.  I don’t know if Zach’s parents will see this as a good thing or bad thing.

4) Maxim.com blogger Allison Hagendorf included our song “Brave Man’s Death” in her list of the “Ultimate SXSW Soundtrack“.

5) We gave the Austin American Statesman a list of the “Ten Things We Hope to Experience at SXSW,” and later Rod did an interview with them immediately after our set at the Vagrant showcase on Friday night.  You’ll have to add your own sweat and panting.  (I lost #9 on that list in heart-breaking Real Time, after we finally picked up the game on a radio station just outside of Dallas for the final 1:22.  We drove the remaining four hours in virtual silence.  Adios, Grevius.)

6) LA radio station KCRW’s music blog named us their “Band I Will Absolutely See Again When They Play in L.A.”

7) NPR’s Stephen Thompson mentioned us in his recap of SXSW (around the 5-minute mark).

Billboard.com gave us a brief notice as “buzzed-about hard rock upstarts.”

But here’s what really happened:

Wednesday

We got into town around 5 p.m., after an inadvertently prolonged stay in Tyler the previous night (the Bermuda Triangle of Texas, it seems).   Austin, within all due respect to the greater morass of Texas, is like a diamond in a septic tank.  Once you leave Denton headed south on I-35, it’s two hours of flat farmland and semi-deserted gas stations until Austin suddenly looms ahead of you, gleaming like it could summon magi in search of BBQ and hangovers.  It’s the equivalent of three amazing cities rolled into one – one of the best college towns in America, a bustling downtown and capital city, and one of the world’s best music scenes splayed along Sixth Street for two full miles.  I wish I didn’t have to drive through four hours of the 15^th Century to get there, but seeing Austin on the horizon always gives me a thrill.

With that said, as soon as we barreled through the first wave of SXSW traffic that started about ten miles north of the city, we went straight to the house our manager rented for the weekend to rehearse a few songs that we hadn’t played as much as we’d hoped on the way down.  Then, we went to the Spoon show at Stubb’s outdoors but left before they played, choosing to spend our first night in Austin hopping from show to bar to show with our PR guru Charlie until what actually transpired that night was left a hazy mess.

Game on.

Thursday

Early in the afternoon, we headed over to the Levi’s + Fader fort to do an interview with East Village Radio, an online radio station that provides NYC with a daily dose of indie rock.  The Fader Fort has become a SXSW landmark: a small temporary village on the outskirts of town surrounding a gigantic circus tent where bands play all weekend long.  Levi’s and Converse have outlets here, and they issue a limited number of wristbands, which people wait in line for hours to get.  It almost functions as an ancillary Green Room to SXSW at large, and a Fader Fort pass could almost function as real currency by festival’s end.

Outside the East Village Radio booth

The  interview was brief was fun, and they played two songs from the upcoming record – “I Don’t Wanna Hear It” and “Brave Man’s Death” – which both sounded great booming through the Fort’s speaker system (if I do say so myself).  But the real kicker was when we emerged from the radio booth and were handed tiny medallions that entitled us to one free item from the Levi’s store and 50% off everything else for the rest of the weekend.  This would be the equivalent of letting a seven-year-old jump into a fifty-foot pit of Pop Rocks.  I needed new pants after I realized what we had been given.

After our spree, we made our way over to the Red-Eyed Fly for our first show of the weekend: The Little Radio Austin day party.  This show has become known for showcasing bands that are “up and coming,” and as such, it’s become a popular show in industry circles for spotting the Next Big Thing the year before anyone knows who they are.  We closed out the first day’s festivities, immediately following Jason Collett from Broken Social Scene, who sounded fantastic.  The room was packed, and our entire team was present, from the label boss on down to our merch guy.  An interesting subplot to the show was that this was the first time anyone from the label had ever seen us live – they signed and have spent a considerable sum of money on us on the basis of our recordings, and the recommendations of trusted folks who had seen us live.  We could have been a trainwreck and they would have been finding out that afternoon, in the Texas heat, after flying a thousand miles to see us play.  The free dinners probably would have ended right then and there.

Luckily for all of us, we played one of the better sets of the tour, and the crowd seemed to dig the new stuff as much as the old. (Granted, it was all new to them, but still).  Everyone seemed thrilled with the industry response to the set, and we felt good that we had one high-pressure show under our belt before the big Vagrant showcase the following night, and as yet, we hadn’t wilted.

That night we hung with our old pals and former tourmates Murder by Death, who had just flown into town and who we’d be playing with the next night at the Vagrant Records show.  We bar=hopped and saw a couple of shows, and ended the night entirely too late given the schedule we had the next day.

When in Austin…

(To be continued…)

There comes a point in every tour, usually about a week, where you hit The Wall. The combustible mixture of preservatives and carbonation in your stomach reaches peak pressure, and the lack of sleep leaves you running on sheer stubbornness and momentum. This lasts for a day or two where you drag around and moan before you’re forced to Break Through, emerging from the kiln hardened to the touch, impervious to bad nights of sleep and long drives, able to eat the quickest, foulest meals with glee – a modern scavenger let loose in a world that’s your’s for the taking.

Or least that’s how I like to think of it.

We hit The Wall in Athens, Georgia on Sunday afternoon, after a four-day run of killer shows and extremely late-nights. Raleigh was an old-school blow-out. Slim’s narrow length was packed solid and the Coors Original was flowing like wine. I looked up at one point in the set to see a girl crowd surfing above the mob, and by the look on her face, it might not have been entirely voluntary. At the climax of “I’m Going Out” – a song about tying one on with your friends that’s become a live favorite – someone reached up and commandeered a mic and the crowd lent their own voices to the proceedings. Joyously chaotic, as Raleigh always seems to be. We love that town.

In Atlanta the next night, we played the CD release show for our friends The Judies at a near sold-out Star Bar. We got to see all our friends like the Ponderosa fellas and Gringo Star, who we were supposed to play with last night (more on that below). After the bar closed, the owner rolled out the Cornhole boards and I got roped into a few games of increasingly higher stakes. By the time we got the boot at 4:30 a.m., I had just lost $40 for somebody. (In fairness, I started out like the Roy Hobbs of cornhole, but five straight games of long-toss is a bit much when you have the shoulder breadth of Screech. I’m really sorry Lynn, if you ever read this.)

Saturday night in Athens was remarkable on several fronts, starting with The Matt Kurz One, a literal one-man band who opened the show. He had arranged a kick drum pedal so that it would play the bass drum when he used his toes and the snare drum when he used his heel (I’d need a diagram to fully explain this), while he played the guitar with a drum stick in his strumming hand that he simultaneously used to play the hi-hats, as he tapped his toe along the appropriate frets of a bass guitar which was lying at his feet. (I have video of this which will be posted in the very near future.) Mind-boggling how talented that guy is. He made me feel lazy, and somewhat resentful of these three apparently excess dudes I’m traveling around with.

Sunday we lounged around our friend Jared’s house recovering, resetting our circadian rhythms for Tour Time, and enjoying Jared’s fantastic cooking (as well as watching Zach Galifinakis on SNL for about four solid hours). That night, we drove to Birmingham after our friend Eddie scored us a free hotel room on last-minute notice. (Thanks Eddie!) Yesterday we played in Oxford, Mississippi at the one-year anniversary party of our friend Parrish’s bar, after making a brief stop in Tupelo on the way in to town, which would clearly blow away like a tumble weed if everyone managed to forget that Elvis was born there. (It’s no Graceland.) At Parrish’s, we met a guy named Dusty King beforehand who could not have been more welcoming, aside from the fact that he looked like Charles Manson crossed with George Harrison crossed with an ashpit. I feel horrible writing that because he was a sweet guy who thanked us endlessly for visiting Oxford and offered to put us up in Taylor, Mississippi, but I was so unsettled watching him walk across the bar eyes fixed on us that I was sure we were going to end up sealed in someone’s drywall by the end of the night. To put a capper on the festivities, as we were playing our encore, Joey Lauren Adams – of Chasing Amy and Mallrats fame – walked into the bar and danced along to “Rock n’ Roll II” right up front. Turns out she lives four blocks away and comes down for occasional tackling/slapping contests with Parrish. This is now the third cast member of “Dazed and Confused” we’ve managed to meet in the last year. (Following Matthew McConaughey – an amazing story for another time – and that tall red-haired dude who beats kids with paddles with Ben Affleck.)

Last night, our show in Shreveport, LA was canceled at the last-minute, which is the first cancellation we’ve had in the four years I’ve been in the band (and, I’d like to point out, it came during the one show we didn’t book ourselves). So instead we barreled through Mississippi and Louisiana, past cotton fields and chicken farms, before making what was ostensibly a brief pit stop in Tyler, Texas for a late dinner. After several wrong turns, a series of bad directions and visits to two different El Charro restaurants on the promise of a free meal, we were miraculously saved by our friend Jamie Jeffries – who used to play with Billy in a band called The Newlyweds – who hooked us up with two free hotel rooms in town for the night. Too many heroes on this tour. This more than off-set having to eat our first Taco Bell of the trip after both El Charros closed before we could eat.

The new songs have been coming along well, with almost all of them feeling up to speed. There are still a couple of hiccups that we hoped to iron out in Shreveport, but didn’t get the chance. There will probably be a fair amount of acoustic rehearsal tonight in preparation for our first SXSW show tomorrow night, as part of the Little Radio Austin party at the Red-Eyed Fly (we play at 6 p.m.). The crowds we’ve played to on this tour could not have left us feeling better about the new stuff, so Thank You – sincerely – to everyone who’s come out and egged us on for the last week. And extra-special thanks to the Roys, Jared and Melissa, Eddie and Jaime for making our lives a ton easier and incomparably sweeter.

In a few moments, we’re shoving off for Austin and SXSW and Bar-B-Que and E.V.O.O. and tour vans and free happy hours and bats flying out from under the Congress Street bridge and music coming out of every corner of the earth for the next four days.

I can’t wait.

Sometime late last night, I found myself thinking “You know, it’s been entirely too long since I sat in an hour and a half of stand-still traffic in the middle of the night.” Thankfully, Northern Virginia was able to oblige with a tasty six-mile back-up at 1-in the-a.m. You would think most normal human beings would be asleep or cuddled up at home watching Cinemax. But not D.C. Zach theorizes that as soon as you buy a house anywhere in the D.C. metro area, you’re giving a “Make Traffic” pager – whenever it goes off, you’re required to hop in the car and make gridlock somewhere. Somebody needs to look into this…

But before the traffic, before the gnashing of teeth, and long before I bashed my head on the steering wheel so many times that I have no memory of second grade, we played a show at DC 9, opening up for the Vice Records tour featuring Pierced Arrows and Lullabye Arkestra. It was a swell kick-off, filled with friends and folks who were game for treating a Wednesday night like Friday. We had a short set and we played almost entirely songs off the new (and unreleased) record, which folks were great sports about. About a third of the next album was written through the demo process, so we’re still learning how to play those songs as a band and how to “sell” them like the older songs that we’ve been playing for years. The new ones began life several weeks ago rigid and clumsy in the practice space because we were all still memorizing parts and structures. But with each run-through, they’re becoming looser, more pliable, more like us. The six shows we have on the way down to SXSW will hopefully be the proving ground for them each to come into their own and be able to sit right next to songs that we’ve played hundreds of times.

Tonight is Raleigh, North Carolina, one of our best cities. Two years ago, the first year that we started touring, we set a goal to become a viable draw in Raleigh, one of North Carolina’s so-called “Triangle Cities,” (along with Durham and Chapel Hill) which have combined to be one of the east’s premier music locales, largely due to the 40,000-odd college students between UNC, NC State and Duke. We had a lot of help in that area, especially from our friends American Aquarium and Mike Roy, who put us on their shows, introduced us to club owners, gave us places to sleep, and convinced all their friends and fans that we were worth seeing. Now, we’re able to headline our own shows here, and at a smaller club like Slim’s Downtown (where we’re playing tonight – capacity 150-ish) the place will be packed and rowdy with people who know the songs.

This being the first true day of tour, we settled on a $10 per diem for us to eat on. In America in 2010, it is near impossible to make two meals out of $10 if you have any qualms about eating something the FDA hasn’t categorized as edible yet. Some genius needs to found a fast food chain that offers decent food (even better if it has vegetarian options). It doesn’t even have to taste great, it just has to be portable and not make me feel like I just ingested the rear axle of the van. To illustrate my point, as well to horrify my mother, I’m going do a running log of what I’m consuming on this tour (food only -liquids will not be counted). The take thus far:

McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish: 2
McDonald’s French Fries: 1
Bag of Gardettos: 1/2
Six-pack of crumb donuts: 1
Packet of Pizzeria Pretzel Combos: 1

And we haven’t even hit our first Taco Bell yet. Ye gads. Internist apply within…

Georgia Tech just beat UNC in the ACC men’s basketball tournament, setting up a rematch between the Terps and Yellow Jackets tomorrow night…the night we’re playing Atlanta. This calls for something obnoxious tomorrow night. Ideas?

Apparently Slim’s doubles as a hockey bar because the Carolina Panthers just scored and the place exploded like it just won Sheila Dixon’s Xbox on eBay. And Big Star’s “In the Street” is playing over top of it all. The South rules.

Over and out…

For the four last four years, I’ve played drums in a band called J Roddy Walston & the Business.  Don’t wrack your brain – unless you’ve come to one of our shows or work at the Weis my mother shops at, you probably haven’t heard of us.  But there’s a king-hell load of someone else’s money that says it won’t be that way for long.  (Just kidding, Vagrant.  Keep it coming.)

By my reckoning, we’ve played 342 shows over that time span, with all but two dozen of them somewhere other than Baltimore.  When drive days and off days are added in, there’s a year of our lives that was a mad blur of faces and foreign skylines and rest stop dinners and dingy bars and dingier living room floors, with the subtle hum of busted eardrums hovering over it all.  And it only just became my job in November.

Things changed for us in April of last year, when producer Kevin Augunas (Cold War Kids, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros) caught wind of some demos we’d recorded in our practice space, and he invited us out to his studio in L.A. to do some recording and to make the rounds of the industry.  By the end of our three-week stay, Kevin had introduced us to a small army of label and publishing folks, most having never heard us outside of Kevin’s recommendation.  On the strength of those demos, we drew interest from a few companies, and we spent the rest of the Summer eyeing up our options.

In the end, we were swept off our feet – and humiliated at Arkanoid – byVagrant Records (which partnered with Kevin’s Fairfax Recording for the album, the same arrangement that accompanied the release of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ “We All Belong” album, which is riding quite a wave of momentum at the moment).  Vagrant has a great roster with several bands we’d become great friends with – especially the Hold Steady and Murder by Death – and we heard nothing but great things about the folks at the label, the atmosphere, and – most importantly within the climate of the current music business – their financial and promotional acumen, making them one of the more stable independent labels in the country.  We signed a deal in November, and within days were on a plane back out to L.A., where we cut 13 tracks with Kevin in the legendary Sound City Studios, where Nirvana’s Nevermind and Weezer’s Pinkerton were made – among several dozen other platinum records – bringing my life full circle.  (I refer you to our website – www.jroddy.net – for a full recounting of that experience via photo blog.)

These are all things to elaborate on at a later date, when I’m not trying to cram all my worldly possessions into a duffel bag for the next two-and-a-half weeks.  Today we’re heading out for a two-and-a-half week tour down to Austin, Texas’s world-famous South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festival.  This will be our second time at SXSW, though the circumstances could not be more different.  In 2008, we played two non-official SXSW shows to a grand total of approximately 100 people over four days, and slept in tents in our friend’s backyard.  To make matters even sweeter, on the first night we were there, some drunken lout decided the best way to “win” the argument he was having with his girlfriend was to punch out one of the side windows on our poor, besotted van.  Between all this and the discovery of Texas’s bewildering frontage roads – which seemingly go everywhere but over the highway to the other side, where we needed to go – I was ready to sell the whole mess back to Santa Ana’s descendants with a box of Ferrero Rocher for their troubles.  Dispirited, but not defeated.

This year, we’re going down there with a different head of steam.  Once our album was finally mixed and mastered last month, our manager and the label were able to selectively shop it to folks in charge of SXSW happenings, and the response couldn’t have been greater.  We have four amazing shows, including a highly-coveted set at “Mr. and Mrs. T’s and Rachael Ray’s Feedback Festival at Stubb’s BBQ” – yes, that Rachael Ray – which has suddenly become one of the biggest and most highly-regarded best parties down there, no doubt because of Mrs. Ray’s generosity in providing lavish amenities, as well as their annually star-studded line-up. (Performers this year include Bob’s son Jakob Dylan, Andrew W.K., Neko Case, Dr. Dog and She & Him, featuring actress Zooey Deschanel.)  We’re also playing Vagrant’s showcase, held at the 1,200-seat La Zona Rosa and headlined by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.  As if to signify how much really has changed in two years, earlier this week, Spin magazine named us one of the “50 Must Hear Bands of SXSW” and in an interview on L.A.’s KROQ radio station, the editor of the magazine plugged us as the band he’s most looking forward to seeing at the festival.  Suddenly – people know about us.

Our itinerary looks like this:

3/10 – Washington, D.C. @ DC 9

3/11 – Raleigh, NC @ Slim’s Downtown

3/12 – Atlanta, GA @ Star Bar

3/13 – Athens, GA @ Caledonia Lounge

3/14 – Off

3/15 – Oxford, MS @ Parrish Baker Pub

3/16 – Shreveport, LA @ Hayride Diner

3/17 – Off

3/18 – Little Radio Austin party @ Red-Eyed Fly

3/19 – Vagrant Records Showcase (w/ Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Murder by Death ) @ La Zona Rosa

3/20 – Mr. and Mrs. T’s and Rachel Ray’s Feedback Festival @ Stubb’s; 40 Watt party @ Side Bar

3/21 – Little Rock, AR @ Whitewater Tavern

3/22 – Off

3/23 – Cincinnati, OH (via Newport, Kentucky) @ Southgate House

3/24 – Lexington, KY @ Proud Charlie’s (w/ Afroman “’Cause I Got High”)

3/25 – Chicago, IL @ The Metro (w/ Black Rebel Motorcycle Club)

3/26 – Louisville, KY @ Zanzabar

3/27 – Morgantown, WV @ 123 Pleasant Street

And all of that is happening…now.  I’ve left myself about 15 minutes to throw my entire existence into a duffel bag for the next two weeks, and that can lead to an existentialist quandry no matter how it turns out .  But I’ll be blogging plenty on the way down and back, so keep an eye out for frequent updates.

Over and out…