End of Silence

All the national press last week about the TABC crackdown in bars is following the inevitable progression. Of course, the bars, restaurants and tourism boards went running to the Lege as they saw dollars exiting Texas for more permissive pastures. We can’t have any irresponsible drinking in bars unless it affects the tourism dollars and tax base, so I guess it’s ok again. There’s a hearing between TABC and The House Licensing and Administrative Procedures Committee on April 17th about the issue. The question now is what the TABC will decide to do next with that extra funding and people that it got last summer, but now probably can’t use cracking down on people in bars. I’m sure they’ll find some other parade to rain on.

I didn’t link it last time, but Kelso had a mildly amusing take on the whole thing.

You’ll want to avoid South Congress between Town Lake and Oltorf this weekend unless you’re attending the Lone Star Rod & Kustom Round-Up. Steve Wertheimer’s Contintental Club will be ground zero. Trophy’s has got a good looking show tonight with Grady and Honky for $10 as part of the festivities. I’d point you to their site, but it appears to be offline. The Google cached version has my band as the last night listed back in November. I swear we didn’t have anything to do with it.

Speaking of my band, I’ll shamelessly plug our in-store performance at End of an Ear tomorrow at 6pm in celebration of the release of our new CD on Mortville Records. If anything, it’s not on South Congress, but I’ll probably head over that way afterwards to check out the Bloody Tears and Red Light Burlesque at Continental Club. We played a part in the festivities at FlyRite Choppers last year.

If you listen to 101X at all, you’ve been hearing promos from the relatively new program director, Lawless. They had a poll on their home page up until today asking for music preferences and other input. I filled it out, but since I lamely waited until today tp post about it, you can’t see for yourself. I was going to give them shit for asking a question that expected a single response, but allowed multiple (side effect of being a geek who worked at a market research firm), but I missed my chance. They do still have a link on the site to call or e-mail, so I included it as well.

I’ve been spending more time than usual with them this week because it was fund drive week on KUT and we all know how much fun that is. 101X seems to be paying attention to it or at least making an attempt. I heard “God Save the Queen” on either Monday or Tuesday morning and then “Losing My Religion” was on Tuesday morning. I know it’s not that much of a stretch, but at least it’s not playing Fall Out Boy over and over again. Lawless was at KNAC KNNC, arguably KROX’s predecessor from the early 90’s. He replaced Melody Lee, who also worked at KNAC KNNC and took off at the end of last year for greener pastures.

StoryCorps is coming to Austin for a stay from 4/6 – 4/30. It’s a partnership between NPR and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The idea is to preserve oral histories of Americans through interviews recorded in the booths. There’s a suggested donation of $10. You take an hour to record an interview with someone whose story you’d like to preserve. At the end, you get a CD for yourself and the interview will be added to all of the other StoryCorps interviews and archived at the Library of Congress.

This is the perfect opportunity to get stories out of your grandparents and get them on record. Very cool. I really regret not having done this with my grandparents. I wish the few remaining relatives that I do have from the WW II generation lived locally because I’d have them over there in a heartbeat. As it is, I’m signing up for something anyway.

You can reserve a spot to record your own interview starting tomorrow morning at 10am.