Chicago Is The Place To Be For MoonRunners Music Fest This Weekend

Find out more on Moonruuners Music Fest at Reggies in Chicago

Friday April 25th 2014

Music Joint Stage:
2:00- Joey Henry's Dirty Sunshine Club
2:50- Lou Shields
4:05- Coondog and the Stumpjumpers
5:45- Lonewolf OMB
6:35- Adam Lee Band
7:25- Ten Foot Polecats
8:15- Molly Gene One Whoaman Band
9:15- Hellbound Glory

Rock Club Stage:
3:15- Joey Henry's Dirty Sunshine Club
3:45- Nellie Wilson
4:35- The Tosspints
5:15- Pearls Mahone
6:10- Highlonesome
7:00- The Hooten Hallers
7:55- The Calamity Cubes
8:50- Cletus Got Shot (One Time only Reunion Set)
10:00- Possessed by Paul James
11:15- The Goddamn Gallows

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Saturday April 26th 2014 

Music Joint Stage:
11:20am- The Ghost Bandits
11:35am- Tony French
12:15- Rickett Pass
2:00- Carmen Lee and the Tomorrow River Two
3:50- The Hangdog Hearts
4:50- Carrie Nation and the Speakeasy
6:05- Whiskey Dick
6:50- Black Eyed Vermillion
7:55- Rachel Kate
9:00- Joseph Huber

Rock Club Stage:  
11:50- Jeff Shephard and the Jailhouse Poets
12:45- Six Gun Britt
1:25- The Imperial Rooster
2:30- Matt Woods
3:15- Filthy Still
4:20- C.W. Ayon
5:30- Last False Hope
7:20- J.B. Beverley and the Wayward Drifters
8:25- Fifth on the Floor
9:50- Roger Alan Wade
11:15- Scott H. Biram

Preservare // Keating Wheel Company - From Vimeo

Preservare // Italian for Preserve
pre·serve verb \pri-ˈzərv\
1: to keep (something) in its original state or in good condition
2: to keep safe from injury, harm, or destruction
3: to keep or save from decomposition

For more information visit: lucentproductions.com/2014/02/12/preservare-keating-wheel-company-mini-documentary/

Preservare // Keating Wheel Company from Lucent Productions on Vimeo.

Rival Sons - Open My Eyes - Official Video

Rival Sons - Open My Eyes

Open My Eyes - First single from Rival Sons forthcoming album
'Great Western Valkyrie' out June 6th EU, 9th UK, 10th USA.

Get it now on iTunes: http://bit.ly/gwv-itunes
Spotify: http://bit.ly/openmyeyesspotify
Pre-order "Great Western Valkyrie" now:
Signed CD/Vinyl/Box set - http://www.earache.com/rs14
iTunes - http://bit.ly/gwv-itunes
Amazon - http://bit.ly/greatwesternvalkyrie

Carolina Still - Cumberland Gap - Jam Session at Rascal's Garage

Carolina Still - Cumberland Gap - Jam Session at Rascal's Garage

Carolina Still got together for a quick jam session on March 28th and we let the cameras roll to showcase the tunes.

CarolinaStill.com
RustyKnucklesMusic.com

Rusty Knuckles Music © 2014

Kilian Martin: Altered Route (A Skate Film) - From Vimeo

Kilian Martin channels his inner Rodney Mullen in this killer short film

"Innovative, courageous, original: Kilian Martin sets new standards in the world of skating. We joined forces with him and filmmaker Brett Novak to create his next video "Kilian Martin: Altered Route". Read the interview with Kilian and Brett on mb! by Mercedes-Benz:" mb.mercedes-benz.com/kilianmartin

Directed, Filmed and Edited by Brett Novak
YouTube.com/Bragic

Music:
Patrick Watson - "Adventures in Your Own Backyard"
adventuresInYourOwnBackyard.com



Kilian Martin: Altered Route (a Skate Film) from mb! by Mercedes-Benz on Vimeo.

We Truly Appreciate All Of Our Customers

A customer of ours Mark Powell sent in a few photos to show our leather tool bag on his softail

Nothing better than seeing our work on someone's trusty steed. Thanks to Mark Powell for sending along the photos! Creating quality leatherwork is a dedicated passion of ours. 

Check out all of our leather work on Etsy

Mark added an iron cross to his bag after we made this one for him.

Thank You Ohio For Good Friends And Motorcycles

Oh Panhead, let me rescue you back to North Carolina

Weekends come and go like the sun sets each day and brings about the change of light to dark. But every now and then you get to have a weekend where it seems to shine in perpetuity. While up in Columbus, Ohio last Friday through Sunday we worked on a quick little documentary about Fred Workman of the Big Bike Shop and talked on quite a few of his incredible builds. Hopefully we will be able to launch that video project in the coming weeks.

If there is one bike shop to obtain all the information you need to know about how to work on any Harley of any make or to find that rare Knucklehead gasket, the Big Bike Shop is the answer. Fred is as humble as they come and seeing him smile while talking on his projects is truly a rare find. I feel honored to have spent a few hours hanging out at the shop and getting a few of his stories on film. Also big thanks to the entire Ohio Posse for always making a good time even better. Muchos Gracias to Tyke, Brad and Sherwood for being hombres.

Can't wait to be back in a few months to run the Ohio Mile

Fred Workman talking to one of his customers at the Big Bike Shop in Columbus, OH

Me, Tyke and Fred Workman talking on a few builds

Getting my first taste of a Little King in Brad's 55 Chevy

Fred explaining his dirt drag build

Fred Workman and one of his over long front ends

Need a primary cover

Brad working on the front headlight of his FLH Shovelhead

Good time wtih the fellas in Ohio

Tyke and I out checking the local scenery

A bit of oil blow by on the ol' Panhead

Bin of old carbs

Sturgill Simpson Is The Astral Explorer Of Country Music

Sturgill Simpson is the astral explorer of Country Music

Few bands plumb the depths of space and time in a way that challenges us the listeners to ask for me. Quite a few bands in metal tread these waters and it feels par for course due to the style of music and rebellious nature. Sturgill Simpson is asking folks on the country tip to go along for the ride and damn if it doesn't feel good to hear the fresh approach. Buy the ticket and take the ride.

Check it out on NPR

"Believe it or not: a country song can be about anything. People who seek out stories about Daddy's farm and fishing trips and Solo cups will easily find them, but the genre's most creative souls have long been interested in much more than sentimentality and a good old American time. Country and the rock that intertwines with it bears a rich legacy of artists asking The Big Questions in warm, relatable accents, from Willie Nelson and his friends at the World Armadillo Headquarters in the 1970s to the Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell today.

Sturgill Simpson is the latest to take on this challenge. The 35-year-old native Kentuckian, who played in the insurgent bluegrass band Sunday Valley before releasing last year's High Top Mountain, a dynamic (and fairly traditional hard country) solo album, didn't set out to blow minds with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, to be released May 13. He just found himself in a new place, both musically and in terms of his fascinations.

That personal paradigm shift is represented in the album's first track, "Turtles All The Way Down," the video for which debuts here. "There's a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there beyond this plane," Simpsons sings in his outlaw baritone as his band lays down a gentle arrangement reminiscent of Merle Haggard's "Kern River".

The next lyric might make you jump: "Where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain." Aliens? Simpson's having fun with a cosmic-scientific meme connected to an old myth that imagines the world perched upon an infinite stack of the green-shelled creatures. Simpson invokes the Turtle in connection to his own quest for meaning, which never does let up. The song's video, created using software artist Scott Draves's distributed computing project Electric Sheep, similarly blends a straightforward, intimate performance with synapse-stimulating, AI-generated effects.

After this detonation of the treasure chest of country stereotypes, Metamodern Sounds continues to flesh out a deep and unconventional relationship between traditionalism and new ways of thinking. The groove Simpson finds with his band is loose and immediate. At times the playing gets almost psychedelic. At other times players circle back on old styles like Southern gospel and do them right. At the center of it all is Simpson, a hot guitar player and mighty singer whose insistence on being complicated makes Metamodern Sounds far richer than most emerging artists' wrestling matches with tradition.

Simpson and I recently had a conversation via email about legacies worth resurrecting and making music that's "like life."

The new album isn't exactly what people might have expected from a guy often called a honky-tonker — though those classic elements are present, too. Where did you begin with these songs?
I just reached a point where the thought of writing and singing any more songs about heartache and drinking made me feel incredibly bored with music. It's just not a headspace I occupy much these days. Nighttime reading about theology, cosmology, and breakthroughs in modern physics and their relationship to a few personal experiences I've had led to most of the songs on the album.

Dr. Rick Strassman's book The Spirit Molecule was extremely inspirational,as were a few recent highly visionary indie films and a lot of Terrence McKenna's audio lectures. The influences are all over the place but they culminated into a group of songs about love and the human experience, centered around the light and darkness within us all. There have been many socially conscious concept albums. I wanted to make a "social consciousness" concept album disguised as a country record.

"Turtles All the Way Down," is a shot across the barricades. And you've made a video that matches it. Tell me about how the video came about and how it relates to the song. Do you think CMT will play it?

I expected to be labeled the "acid country guy," but it's not something I dwell on. I would urge anyone that gets hung up on the song being about drugs to give another listen ... to me "Turtles" is about giving your heart to love and treating everyone with compassion and respect no matter what you do or don't believe. The cosmic turtle is from a much quoted story found in publications throughout modern physics and philosophy, even ancient theology, that now essentially serves as a comedic picture or expression of a much grander idea.

The video is a tightly budgeted attempt to capture or represent a visual simulation of that idea. After some correspondence with Dr. Strassman and Andrew Stone at www.cottonwoodresearch.org I was introduced to visionary software artist Scott Draves, creator of Electric Sheep. After a few emails and hearing the music, Scott was generous enough to offer his assistance with the project. A friend of mine, Dex Palmer, knew some pretty tech-savvy kids at Cineshot Productions that I enlisted for the chore of filming and editing this thing.

As for CMT playing the video, I honestly never gave it too much thought. What they do is great to a lot of people, and it creates jobs for a lot of people, but mainstream country avenues weren't really a goal for me with this album. I'm interested in exploring various forms of newer media that might allow those who otherwise don't listen to country to find and connect with my music.

The song's title invokes Ray Charles's classic album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music — which was a huge, loving and very successful challenge to the genre. This album poses challenges too, and not just the obvious ones. It's not slick like mainstream country, but it also has a more adventurous and looser spirit than a lot of Americana music. How do you think these categories need shaking up right now?

Part of me still feels like I've never had the opportunity to properly express all my earliest influences, so for now I find isolation to be my biggest influence. Somebody told me once it takes an Americana song five minutes to say what a country song says in three — so I try to write country songs. But really, all good music is just soul music.

You're working with a traditional sound but your music still has a roughness and immediacy to it that's very vital. How do you protect that?

I want to make records that feel like life. So in terms of recording, I am very much a live performer and I've learned to treat the studio as an extension of that only with a much broader sonic palette to paint with. I cant even use headphones. We just set up extremely tight in one room and set the levels ourselves naturally with dynamics. This is how all my favorite records were made.

You cover of a song called "The Promise" on the new album and it sounds like a classic country weeper. I thought it was a Mavericks song when I heard your version. But it's a 1988 electropop hit by the English band When in Rome! Tell me about taking a song that's so different stylistically and finding the country in it. 

I believe it's one of about three thousand brilliant compositions from the 80's that got lost in production. I always thought the lyrics to "The Promise" made for a very beautiful, sweet love song and decided I'd like to lay down a somewhat "Countrypolitan" version.

You also have a trucking song on the album: "Long White Lines," written by Buford Abner but better known from a version by '90s country star Aaron Tippin. Mainstream country is full of trucks, but never mentions trucking — trucks in songs today represent leisure, not work. You turn that around here.

CB radios were a big part of the early 80's. They sort of became an obsession after Smokey and the Bandit. My grandfather had one in his truck when I was a kid and I would play on it constantly, in the garage or going down the road, until truckers started telling dirty jokes and he'd make me turn it off. Since the album is a figurative trip, I figured it needed a road song. I became familiar with the tune years ago on an old Charlie Moore & Bill Napier bluegrass trucker album by the same title. We started working it up on the road last year and it just keeps getting looser and funkier every time we play it. At this point it's basically hip-hop.

There's nothing more traditional in country than invoking family, but nostalgic songs about childhood can be so very corny. You have one on this album, "Pan Bowl," that avoids cliché by employing what seems like real details from your life. And you grandfather "Dood" Fraley announces the title of the album at its very beginning. How do you manage to invoke family without getting too sentimental?

Yeah, I wrote that song a few years back and honestly it probably doesn't belong on this album. I just felt that by the end of the record most folks might need some sort of "return to innocence," so I added it as a hidden bonus track. Every word of that song is true. As for the album intro, really I just wanted my grandfather to emcee the album, almost entirely for sentimental reasons, and I thought it made for a nice juxtaposition.

There are points with the band where you almost get into jam-band territory on this album. Is this a reflection of where you're going live? It's a different kind of stretching out than what you did with your old band Sunday Valley.

There is still so much room for sonic exploration in country music. You always have to serve the songs and the songs have to serve the records. Someday, if I ever get to a point where I find that I am repeating myself, that's when I'll know I'm done."

News and Updates From Altco Music With Stevie Tombstone, Black Eyed Vermillion, Joshua Morningstar and Kern Richards

Jeff Harris captured some great shots at the Black Eyed Vermillion Show at Stubbs in Austin, TX

The forecast for the future is dark and cloudy as we anticipate the release of Black Eyed Vermillion's single "Box Of Pine". They are riding high after some great shows, including a recent Austin appearance with Flogging Molly.The video release of Box of Pine is coming soon and more Altco releases are already in the works for the upcoming year. Word on tour dates will come after the single release. Be sure to look for them at Moonrunners . The digital single features artwork by none other than Alexandre De Meyer who recently designed the artwork for the latest Nashville Pussy Release. You can check out his work at right here:

Kern Richards feature review on No Depression

Kern has been getting a slow and steady foothold on his new release and he's about to hit the road this summer for the East Coast. Mr. Richards has been racking up airplay and great reviews already and we know he's just getting started. A word from No Depression- "Don't expect no "Happy go lucky" here but do expect much brutally honest lyrics and some great arrangements which I was pleasantly surprised. Anywhere but home is the perfect name for the record which tells stories of lonesome, highways, 24hr cafes,booze, lost love, injustices and everything that comes with. Richards voice really stands out and sounds like" its been in a smoke house for several days and placed on the highway only to be hit by a semi truck". Get the whole shootin match here.

Work has begun on the upcoming Joshua Morningstar release slated for late 2014. The singer songwriter was recently added to the ALTCO roster and will be appearing occasionally with Stevie Tombstone as they prepare to hit the studio. The release promises to be a honest portrait of Joshua and his talents. Be sure to keep and eye out for him on the road and check him out on Facebook for updates about his new project. He just may be at Moonrunner's as well so give him a warm welcome if you see him on the midway.


More copies of Greenwood will be available on vinyl soon so stay tuned for details. Until then enjoy the Altco version of " Lucky" the first track off the Greenwood release . Its available now on Itunes and Amazon and in your finer record shops.

Kern Richards Feature Review On No Depression

Kern Richards of Altco Music on No Depression

Check out the original post on No Depression

"Every once in a while I get blessed with something that sticks out in a high-definition world. I personally get tired of being fed "Happy go lucky" and need that black and white fix from the high-def culture we live in. My great friend Mr. Stevie Tombstone turned me to a ALTCO label mate Kern Richards and I can't thank him enough after listening to his latest released entitled "Any where but home". Kern hails from the great state of California and is a pure singer/songwriter who has the ability to make you believe in the stories he sings.  Don't expect no "Happy go lucky" here but do expect much brutally honest lyrics and some great arrangements which I was pleasantly surprised. Anywhere but home is the perfect name for the record which tells stories of lonesome, highways, 24hr cafes,booze, lost love, injustices and everything that comes with.  Richards voice really stands out and sounds like" its been in a smoke house for several days and placed on the highway only to be hit by a semi truck" . I would describe living where  Tom Waits drawl and Lenoard Cohen's lullaby echos over lap. In the title track of the same as album name Anywhere but home the singer explains 

"Monday drunkard bar-stool...Tuesday couldn't care....Wednesday night sick with fright and headed no where....Thursday's back in rehab....Friday getting stoned....from Sunday dawn to Saturday night I'll go anywhere but home"

After hearing those lyrics the great Krisofferson is kicking his own ass for not penning such. Its safe to say that Kern won't be playing many weddings but will speak to the working man, truck driver, the outcast, the beaten down, the guy who doesn't wanna go home from the bar, the cook at the Huddle House at 3am, and such. I for one really got into and still growing into this record for much of the things he is speaking of I too have been thru it. I can respect the hell out of a man who is honest in struggles of life. Not everyone can related to beach life and eating at Applebees. Thank god for folks like Kern Richards who tell it like it is and make you feel it's heartfelt under-belly Americana. Go pick up a copy of his new release now and thank me later."