Moonrunners 2014 Music Festival Lineup Announced

"Why, yes, we are only three months out of our inaugural festival, but, if you recall, the end of July 2012 was the exact time we announced the lineup for the 2013 Festivities. We prefer to announce it early as possible, for the fact that many of the fans will be traveling from out of state, and will need to make flight and hotel reservations. Plus, we are a bit excited!

Because the first Festival was so amazing and well attended, we here at MoonRunners decided to expand the festival to two days in 2014.

It will once again take place at the VERY intimate and great venue, Reggie's in Chicago, IL. We recieved a few offers from larger venues in the area, but the hospitality and kindness that Reggie's showed us this year made it an obvious choice for 2014. Everything went so well. Every member on the Reggie's staff was top notch and made sure that everyone had a great experience.

MoonRunners Music Festival II will take place over two nights, on April 25th and 26th, 2014. Tickets will be $80 for a two day pass. That is a steal if you know the size of the venue, and take into consideration this years lineup. We will have hotel options once again, and tickets will go on sale on November 1st through Ticketfly.com.

Again, 2014 will sell out QUICK! This year, many folks were left out and traveled many miles in hopes of getting a ticket outside the door. It did not work! Get your tickets ASAP. So, with no further delay.... Here is the INITIAL lineup for MoonRunners Music Festival 2014.... One more headliner will be announced before tickets go on sale!

We are so proud to bring a country music legend, and original Outlaw to MoonRunners Music Festival 2014, as the headlining act will be....."

Find out more on Moonrunners

1074 Miles And Good Times At the Buckeye Bash

Our riding crew consists of quite a few folks from varying states and we are only able to get together a few times a year. Starting in late July every summer we are now having a summer run up to the great state of Ohio called the Buckeye Bash. Looking forward to 2014 when we also a big music blowout on the Saturday night at Tootles in Circleville, OH. 

Check out some more of the pics on our flickr page.

Perfect roadside view on the river front in West Virginia

Photo of Tom Reiser built custom drag bike

Tom Reiser on his legendary V8 engine motorcycle

Hanging out with motorcycle mechanic of legend, Tom Resier at his shop

Fred Workman owns one of the rarest Harley's a 1957 KR

Fred Workman unique carburetor setup with an Edelbrock on an Evo motor

Hanging out with Fred Workman of Columbus, Ohio's Big Bike Shop

Brad working on his Shovelhead with our new Wrench N' Roll tool bags.

Late night tattoos after a long day of riding and drinks equals good times.

Hick Hop Is Alive And Well In The Dirty South

Is Hick Hop here to stay or is just a passing genre that will tire quickly? Understanding how big both country music and hip hop are on a world wide scale, I can easily guesstimate that it will be around for a long time to come in one form or another. I doubt the genre will dissipate as fast as Horror Rap or numerous other micro genres simply due to the fact that it blends the flow of hip hop and an easy going country vibe so well. 

Does this make us a fan of the genre? Not in the least, but then again hip hop has never been our calling card. What is far more interesting overall though is music tastes of fans. With the amount of music available, many of us tend to have a vast array of choices into what we enjoy. Not a day goes by that metal, punk and country aren't blasting our stereo system and that is where our direction is as a label. 

Do yourself a favor and read upon the interesting article below about Average Joes's music output and the rise of Hick Hop. Like it or not, they have made a name for themselves. Now if the roots music folks would just realize that their time is go ready for explosion and give the fans what they want, damn great live shows!

Lenny Cooper is a big seller in the Hick Hop genre

Read original post on the Wall Street Journal

"From Georgia to Texas this weekend, the stars of a budding musical genre known as "hick-hop" will perform in swamp-like off-road-vehicle parks. Singing songs that fuse hip-hop with country music, the bands will celebrate the popular rural pastime of driving trucks, lawn mowers, golf carts and even jacked-up grocery carts—all through the mud.

Watch a clip of "Country Boy Fresh" by The Lacs. They represent a new genre of hip-hop, practiced by good old boys who rap about driving oversize pickups into mud and hunting for deer out of season. Video courtesy of Phive Starr Productions.

The music, anathema to country-music traditionalists because of its heavy drum and bass, doesn't get much airplay on major radio stations. But the all-ages mud-park shows, which feature dancers that shimmy around chain-link-fence poles cemented onto truck beds, can draw upward of 10,000 fans. They tend to spend freely on CDs and merchandise, from moonshine to Mason jars filled with the mud used in a band's music videos.

Three of the genre's top artists — Colt Ford, Lenny Cooper and the LACS (short for the Loud Ass Crackers)—have albums among the top 75 on Billboard's country music chart this week with 1,800 Wal-Mart WMT -0.27% stores around the country stocking their records. Average Joe's Entertainment, a Nashville, Tenn.-based independent record label that specializes in the emerging genre, has sold nearly 200,000 "Mud Digger" compilation albums featuring its various artists; the fourth "Mud Digger" album hit stores Tuesday.

The unlikely rise of this niche genre, despite its near-absence from radio, shows how radically the music industry's playbook for success has changed in recent years. Record sales have tanked nearly 60% since their peak in 2000, with the proliferation of outlets offering music free or at a nominal cost. So live performance and merchandise sales represent an increasingly large chunk of a typical band's income.

To maximize concert revenue, hick-hop artists are using some of the same technologies that have eroded record sales to ferret out paying fans. They're routing tours based on data from services like Songkick, TuneCore and Pandora that track where people are buying or listening to their music most frequently.

Big retailers like Wal-Mart have also become a way for artists to reach millions of listeners without radio or record-label deals. Wal-Mart, which accounts for about 10% of total music sales in the U.S., according to the market researcher NPD Group, has taken to buying music directly from musicians in recent years, selling millions of albums even as industrywide sales decline.

Colt Ford is the top of the food chain in Hick Hop

The increase in bands circumventing traditional channels has given rise to a number of quirky musical styles. Though hick-hop has been more commercially successful than most, Internet radio service Pandora counts 400 genres popular among its 70 million active users, from psychobilly—a fusion of rockabilly and punk—to trap, a hip-hop-influenced subset of electronic music.

Mud bogging has been a popular activity for decades, especially in the South, but the mud world's musical tradition is recent, with live-music stages sprouting up in at least 162 off-road-vehicle parks over the past five years. Fans typically pay about $40 a weekend to cook out with friends and play in the mud with a wide range of vehicles, from $100,000 trucks to homemade contraptions fashioned from tanks, lawn mowers, even king-size mattresses, all jacked up on giant tires forbidden on city streets.

The scantily dressed crowd includes grade-schoolers, teenagers driving their parents' farm equipment and professionals who burn thousands of dollars each week on truck repairs, only to demolish their rides again the next weekend in events like truck tug of war. Daisy Duke shorts, bikinis and anything camouflage are popular fashion choices; homemade moonshine and beer are on tap and truck brands tend to be American, as Colt Ford notes in his "Drivin' Around Song": "U.S.A., Chevrolet, Dodge and Ford, raising a little hell and praising the Lord."

The underground world even has its own magazines: Mud Life sells about 70,000 copies a year, thanks in part to its "Mud Girl of the Month" feature. The community's official after party is known as Club Mud, started by two friends who constructed a makeshift stage with speakers and lighting on a yard cart made for hauling hay. Now the pair throws weekly parties for up to 8,000 people from Missouri to Michigan.

The culture's unofficial soundtrack was born during the summer of 2008 after Colt Ford—a former pro golfer with a devoted Myspace following—decided to launch the record label Average Joe's with veteran hip-hop producer Shannon Houchins. The music featured catchy country hooks and traditional country instruments like fiddles and washboards, but Mr. Ford spoke the lyrics instead of singing them, focusing on rural themes like hunting, fishing and driving big trucks through mud. After releasing Mr. Ford's debut album on iTunes, Mr. Houchins got a call from the owner of an off-road vehicle park in South Carolina offering Mr. Ford $3,500 to play a show there. About 4,700 fans turned out, snapping up $10,000 worth of merchandise, as many fans had gotten so wet and muddy that they were happy to buy a fresh change of clothes.

Mr. Houchins, who helped artists like Bubba Sparxxx mix country and hip-hop in the past but had never before tried to hawk the final product, said he realized he'd found an untapped market. He began reaching out to scores of other off-road-vehicle parks. Since most weren't equipped to host concerts, he connected them to ticket printers, security staff and stage builders. The parks booked a string of mud-bog dates for Mr. Ford, and the LACS played as an opening act.

Thousands of fans jammed onto rural two-lane roads to see Mr. Ford and the LACS rap about the mud lifestyle, and they soon began seeking CDs in local stores. Mr. Ford's "No Trash in My Trailer" has lines like: "I'm mud boggin, camouflagen, a ballgame is what I'm watchen. I work hard, mow the yard, fish, hunt, knuckle scar, change oil, plow the soil, love a boat country boy." Mr. Ford has sold more than one million albums to date.

That year, Wal-Mart started getting calls from stores across the Southeast from customers complaining that mud-themed music was only available online, said Tiffany Couch, sales director of Select-O-Hits, a division of closely held Anderson Merchandisers that Wal-Mart hires to supply its 4,000 Supercenter stores with CDs. Cautiously, she said, they began stocking several hundred Wal-Mart stores in the region with the music, waiting to make sure it sold before expanding to other locations.

Wal-Mart has long been supportive of little-known community artists—especially in the country-music world, Ms. Couch said. The company sponsored a free concert series in its store parking lots in 1995, for example, that featured up-and-coming country acts such as the Smokin' Armadillos and the Moffats. But hick-hop's quick success came as a surprise. "It's atypical in country music to have achieved this level of success without radio being the main driver—this has been kind of an enigma," said Ms. Couch.

To be sure, Wal-Mart's power in the music industry is fast diminishing as demand for physical CDs shrinks. But country fans have been far more reluctant than others to go digital. Big-box retailers account for about 50% of country-music sales, compared with 25% of music sales in all genres, according to Nielsen Entertainment analyst Dave Bakula.

Wal-Mart has made a string of exclusive deals in recent years to release new works by aging superstars like the Eagles and Journey. For budding acts, the stores present a valuable opportunity to connect with millions of potential fans on a national scale.

Jason Lathrop, an air-conditioning contractor in Jacksonville, Fla., said he bought every album in Average Joe's catalog he could find because he spends most of his free time driving his souped-up Ford Excursion "out in the middle of a cow pasture somewhere," where the music has fast became ubiquitous.

To assure Wal-Mart about its prospects for selling more mud music outside the Southeast, Average Joe's last year showed the retailer "heat maps" drawn up by Pandora. The maps showed where Pandora users were listening to the new genre most frequently, landing the records in nearly half of Wal-Mart's Supercenters nationwide. Average Joe's also began using Pandora's heat maps to route artists' tours through unlikely areas with high fan concentrations, like Ohio, Indiana and the Pacific Northwest.

Pandora founder Tim Westergren said he started a pilot program over the past year and half which shares these maps with about 50 different groups. The company has finally amassed enough listeners so that bands can convert the data into significant concert ticket sales. More than 10,000 of the artists Pandora plays have now been listened to at least 250,000 times each, he said.

"It's the folks that can really make the live thing work that are going to thrive," said Mr. Westergren, adding that Average Joe's "has been way out in front in terms of understanding how valuable" the maps can be.

The LACS Clay 'Uncle Snap' Sharpe, left, and Brian 'Rooster' King.

The LACS have now sold nearly 200,000 albums and an additional 25,000 singles on Apple's iTunes store, despite hardly any play on radio. They will release their third album in August, as they quadruple their touring business.

Country rap dates back to at least the late '90s, and before that country legends like Johnny Cash used recitation instead of singing on some of their most popular tracks. But in the past, country rappers have struggled to sell records for lack of a defined audience. Though the two genres share the same roots and many of the same general themes—drinking, driving around and having a good time—their fusion has been controversial, says Adam Gussow, a Southern Studies professor at the University of Mississippi.

"Country and rap have achieved much of their contemporary popularity by configuring themselves in the national imagination as proudly radicalized genres: the voice of the unreconstructed Southern pastoral and the rural white-working class on the one hand, and the voice of inner-city frustration, gunplay and rump-shaking Vegas-style fantasy on the other," Mr. Gussow wrote in a 2010 essay in Southern Cultures journal.

But the new hick-hoppers have targeted a specific audience, taking more care than their predecessors to keep their language relatively family-friendly and the themes lighthearted and violence-free.

"We never killed nobody, so we can't rap about no gangster stuff," Mr. Sharpe told a half-baffled, half-riveted crowd at the Country Music Association's flagship music festival in Nashville last month, as the band used synthesizers and 808 drum machines to accompany their hit tunes like "Kickin' Up Mud." Lyrics reflected their lifestyle: "Everyday get stuck in a big mud hole/Just sit right there and watch the sun get low."

Hick-hop artists say the mud world is endlessly inspiring. Lenny Cooper, an artist better known as the "Mud Digger King," said that after he noticed scores of fans in Florida and Georgia installing homemade stripper poles in the back of their trucks, he wrote a song called "Rodeo," an ode to truck-bed strippers. He also wrote a song about a technique many of his mud-crazy fans used to center themselves: "Just somethin bout chillin out where the corn grows/I like to clear my mind down an old back road."

Mr. Houchins, of Average Joe's, said he has been receiving about 500 demo tapes a week from country rappers lately. "That tells me that we're creating a new genre," said Mr. Houchins. "But they haven't made a Grammy category for us yet.""

Probie Joe Explains Custom Motorcycle Features On His Ride

The Top 39 Annoying Things That Local Bands Do, From Metal Sucks

Cheesy cover bands always want huge pay

Check out this post on MetalSucks

"I’m sure a good portion of our readership are in bands, and I’ll bet 99% of those are guilty of at least some of the below. A venue called The Creepy Crawl in St. Louis has the following posted on their website [via The Lefsetz Letter], and every single bit of it is so, so true. Enjoy.

Top 39 Annoying Things That Bands Do

1. Bands that feel compelled to bang on their drums and guitars in an annoying display of lack of talent before the doors open. Usually this occurs when we are trying to talk to someone on the phone or give instructions to employees. There is a place for this type of behavior, its called your basement.

2. Out of town bands that show up and say “We decided to bring another band with us, don’t worry, they just need gas money and pizza.”

3. Out of town bands that watch you order their pizzas with “the works” and after they arrive tell you “Oh, we’re all vegetarians, can we get buy-outs instead?”

4. Local bands with managers.

5. Local bands that have a girlfriend as their manager (Can you say annoying pain in the ass?). This usually marks the beginning of the end for most bands at the Creepy.


6. Bands that bring their own “personal” sound-tech. After seeing him try to operate the soundboard for 5 minutes the house soundman concludes that this guy has absolutely no clue how to operate a PA. Accordingly, the band sounds like total shit.

7. Bands that have more roadies than band members.

8. Bands that spell their names with a strange spelling twist e.g., junkeez, katz etc. After meeting the band, however, we are left with the impression that they didn’t intentionally try and spell their name with a twist but rather they probably just don’t know how to spell.

9. The out of town band that was lucky to get the gig, brought absolutely nobody, bitched all night long about their time slot, when told they had 1 song left in their set play 4 more anyway who when being paid out $50 in gas money asks “Is this the best you can do?”

10. Bands that arrive and state that they talked to someone at the club and were told they get to play 3rd at 10:30 and can play for an hour. When asked the name of the person they talked to they suddenly forget their name but are sure they talked to “someone”.

11. Bands who all arrive at the same time but no one is willing to play first. Subsequently the show doesn’t start until 11:30 and everyone has 10 minute sets.

12. Top 3 signs that the band will bring no one to the show – 1) 2 Weeks before the show they say “We’re gonna pack your place!” – 2) 1 Week before the show they ask – “What’s your capacity?” – 3) Upon arriving at the gig they ask “So how many people do YOU usually get on a Wednesday night?”

13. Bands who draw is so bad that even their guests don’t show up.

14. Bands who have no guests because they have no friends.

15. Bands who bring absolutely no one to their first gig and then call back incessantly to ask for another show and can’t understand why they haven’t gotten asked back. That’s fine, we don’t have to eat this month and we really dig watching you guys rock out to our empty club. Bands who fit this category don’t need to bother calling back because the booking guy will always be away when you call.

16. Bands who after drawing no one at the end of the night apologize by saying, “geez, after you booked us we booked ourselves to play at the Hi-Pointe last night and we told all our friends to go to that show, that’s probably why no one came tonight. BTW, when do you think we can play here again?” (Note: see above for our response).

17. Bands who pester you to book their bands “side-project”. Side-project is another name for self-indulgent crap so embarrassingly bad they can’t dignify it with a name and gives them a cover why none of their friends will come see them “perform”. (Would you go see your friend masturbate if they asked you to come watch?). Note to bands: think of your side-project as a project never to get booked again.

18. Bands who show up wearing “All Access” laminates around their neck. (Note to these bands: We honor these laminates for the bathroom and parking lot areas only.) I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up but you don’t see me walking around wearing a spacesuit at the club. We’re convinced these people are recovering air guitar addicts from the 80′s.

19. Bands who right before their set ask to play without a PA so it won’t be deducted from their pay. (This has actually happened before). Sure, we’ll just ask the sound guy to go home for a 1/2 hour.

20. Bands that want to play in front or the side of the stage.

21. Bands that suck and then ask if you’ll swap them out a shirt. You know, our shirts actually cost us money and I really doubt anyone at the club wants to wear your shirt. How about if we swap stickers and call it even?

22. Band members that ask 10 times throughout the night for a water or soda (usually in a nasally whining voice). Typically this occurs when your in the middle of doing something important like counting down the drawer or dealing with actual paying customers. They usually like to precede their requests with a “Do you think its possible I could get a….” etc. etc. We feel like responding “Do you think it’s possible you could shut the fuck up and go away?”.

23. Parents of bands… this could be a whole top 39 list on its own… Parents who either a) insist on standing next to the owner all night and talking his ear off about how great their 14 year old kids band is (who BTW sound like they had never picked up an instrument in their lives before they started “playing” that night) b) insist on standing next to the the sound person all night and making stupid suggestions on how to improve the sound of their kids band to the sound person all throughout their set c) going to the bar while they wait for their kids band to play, consuming way too much, and then going to stand next to the owner and talk his ear off about how he used to jam in a band that was huge 25 years ago but now their kids band is going is going to hit mega-stardom any day now and makeup for his missed…. oh right, this is only supposed to be a paragraph.

24. Bands that leave gear behind. This happens at least several times each week and then we get the deluge of frantic phone calls in the following days about have you seen this or that piece of equipment and on the phone act like we should know where their stuff is. Its amazing how something that is so important to them the next day gets so carelessly left behind the night before. We’re the Creepy Crawl, not Bob’s Nightclub and Repository of Leftover Band Shit. Keep track of your shit and take it with you when you leave!

25. Bands that send us emails that say: “We’re XXX from XXX. We wanted to play your club on XXX date. How about if you book us a show, put a bunch of good drawing locals on that bring a lot of beer drinkers and then you guys can make a lot of money and we can put on a great show in front of a big crowd and get paid. That way we all win!” Here’s an idea, why don’t we book a show with a bunch of good drawing locals that bring beer drinkers, we make a lot of money from the show and you can keep your sorry asses the fuck in XXX? (Really, we’re not making this stuff up, we actually get these emails).

26. Bands who when you tell them they have 1 more song left because they’re running late into their set decide to play a 45 minute opus full of self-absorbed guitar solos which in the course of playing covers in its entirety side 2 of Pink Floyds’ Dark Side of The Moon.

27. Bands that pester you constantly to open for a particular touring band because they swear they worship their musical footprints and are the heaven endorsed guiding light of their musical lives. On the day of the show and after you told them sorry but the show was already filled up they don’t even bother to come to the show. However, someone at the show reports hearing they decided to catch the Story of The Year show at the Pageant that night.

28. Bands that can’t play longer than a 15 minute set.

29. Bands that can’t draw two people but keep telling you that they can play as long a set as you like. “We can play an hour, an hour and a half, two hours if you want.” That’s kind of a like a doctor rushing to the scene of a car accident and asking the victims “If you need me to help prolong your bleeding I can do that.”

30. Bands that bitch and beg to play a longer 45-50 minute set. They do this knowing everyone else only gets a 1/2 hour slot. We finally relent and rework the whole show to accommodate them and they still wind up playing the same rush-through-it-because-we’re-dip-fucks 23 minute set they play every other night they play. Apparently they live in a different time dimension than everyone else on the planet. They thank you profusely at the end of the set for letting them “headline” for their fans but we make sure they buy us and everyone around us shots at full price.

31. Bands that give big lectures on stage about how important it is to support “the scene” but at the end of their set want to get paid ASAP and don’t want to wait until the other bands get done.

32. Bands that give long-winded lectures about respect… how we need to respect each other, the world we all live in, ourselves, God, our fellow man, other “artists”, Picasso, Left-handed midgets, respect this, respect that etc etc… What are these guys in the Mafia? The next morning you discover the parking spot they were parked in the night before is completely covered with empty water bottles, soda cans and Taco Bell.

33. Bands that are booked for a show but email every 12 hours to tell you they have changed their name and to please update your advertising. Call yourself Bobby & the Blowjobs for all we care, pick a name and STICK WITH IT!

34. Pathetic reasons why bands cancel. Bands that cancel 10 DAYS ahead of time because they have to go to a funeral! We feel so sad for these bands. Geez, I didn’t know your grandpa was being stored on ice for 10 FUCKING DAYS! Who is he, Walt Disney??? If your going to friggin lie, try and come up with something half-way believable please.

35. Shows where the 4 local bands collectively can’t outdraw the one out of town band you threw on the bill for gas money but through their own initiative and hustle actually manage to outdraw the 4 local bands (this BS actually happens!) We feel sorry and embarrassed for the out of town band who usually when getting paid out their gas money ask us quietly “whats up with the locals, who don’t they have anybody come see them?” and we tell them as loudly as we can “BECAUSE THEY ARE PATHETIC & RETARDED LOSERS”. Invariably (and we do mean invariably) their has to be the one local band who shoves the out of town band on the way to the door guy, lives 20 minutes away and brought a negative number of people, (they sucked so bad they ran off our happy hour crowd early) ask how much did they make and we tell them zero “BECAUSE THE BAND FROM 1/2 A CONTINENT AWAY OUTDREW YOUR PATHETIC AND RETARDED ASS”. Actually we don’t say that because we’re so pathetically nice, we usually say ” you guys rocked, let us know when you want to play again!”.

36 – 38: Bands that don’t correctly understand the definition of these terms -

Load-In Time

CORRECT UNDERSTANDING: If a band has a load-in time of say 6:30 from that time they may attempt to enter the premises and inquire about loading in of their gear. If they by chance happen to arrive early they can occupy themselves with other activities to fill in the time, such as: visit the library, worship at a local church or synagogue or beating up the homeless guy living in the dumpster.

INCORRECT UNDERSTANDING: If a band has a load-in time of say 6:30 they arrive at 1:45 in the afternoon and knock incessantly on the back door. Usually they knock while the owner is in the basement knee-deep in standing shit working with a plumber to fix a leaking drain pipe. After trudging all the way upstairs to find 5 snot nosed kids asking if they can load-in now (and hang out all day!) they are politely told to fuck off and come back at 6:30.

Promoter

CORRECT UNDERSTANDING: This is a person who actively works to promote a show. They promote by distributing flyers, plugging the show wherever they can and try to get as many people as possible to come to the show. If they have an out of town band booked on the show they take financial responsibility to ensure they get paid and are taken care of in whatever way they need. They also take charge in organizing the show and making sure all the bands know when they are scheduled to play and how the money works for getting paid.

INCORRECT UNDERSTANDING: This is a person who after asking repeatedly to put on a show does the following 1) fails to promote show in any way 2) fails to communicate any show details like lineup or order of the bands to the club (or the bands themselves) 3) makes themselves very scarce at the show , assuming they show up (they sometimes make a pathetic phone call just before doors to say they’ve just contracted a rare disease called pussyitis and to please take care of the out of town band). If they do show up and when questioned about things like band order, who’s taking care of the bands etc. only respond with a blank stare.

Gas Money:

CORRECT UNDERSTANDING: Gas Money is a term used to designate an amount of money to get a touring band to their next show. It sometimes includes a little more than that so they buy themselves some fast-food on their way or if they are lucky enough to cover a room at a Motel 6. Generally gas money would be considered anything from $30 to $75 and depends on how well the show goes.

INCORRECT UNDERSTANDING: $200 is not gas money. $200 is we’re partying all night on the East Side and getting privates at Roxy’s for everyone in the band.
Touring Band:

CORRECT UNDERSTANDING: This is a band that is engaged on a “tour”. They come to the Creepy Crawl while on their tour and often come from far away places such as the far corners of the country, Canada, Europe or Asia. They are on the road for extended periods of time, sometimes for several months at a time, in a van or bus and experience many new places along their journey. These bands are always entitled to at least gas money or more.

INCORRECT UNDERSTANDING: Driving up from Festus does not make you a touring band. A “Following”:

CORRECT UNDERSTANDING: A “following” is a collection of fans that attend the performances of a particular band. This is what bands try to develop to get ahead in the business and grow over time and is a measure of their general popularity. The larger a bands following generally means they will be booked more often and on better nights at the Creepy Crawl

INCORRECT UNDERSTANDING: A “following” does not mean all the people that attended The Queens of The Stone Age show you opened for to cover the last minute cancellation of a contractual local opener counts as your bands following (perhaps the rush to the bar by the entire club and club staff when you started playing was an indicator). And, yes, this means the Jager girls at the club that night probably didn’t come to see you and probably won’t be following you to your next show.

39. Bands that read this list and then send us emails like this one: “dont take this the wrong way i am just a guitar player but ur annoying list was some what funny, but it makes u guys seem like a bunch of pricks u would not have ur joint with out the annoying bands. i frequent ur place when my friends play but if u dont treat the bands that deserve respect with respect they will not play shows and tell others and so on and so forth just a little concernced.”
rick branstetter

… This is just a small sample of annoying things that bands do that we came up with at the Creepy. We could go on and on with this…."

The Metalsmith, From Vimeo

Facing blindness, metalsmith Andy Cooperman renews his commitment to making things worth seeing.

View Andy's work at andycooperman.com
Music: Reflux by In The Nursery (licensed via Vimeo)
Produced by Visual Contact visualcontact.com

BTS info about how this video was lit: danmccomb.com/posts/2800/the-metalsmith/


The Metalsmith from Dan McComb on Vimeo.

The Coffin Maker

Every year, Americans bury enough metal in the ground to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge, says Vashon Island coffin maker Marcus Daly. His simple, handcrafted wooden coffins are an economical and environmentally friendly burial alternative. But Daly believes a coffin's most important feature is that it can be carried. Here's why.

I need your help. This video is a finalist in Smithsonian's "In Motion" video contest. If you enjoyed this piece, please vote for it here: smithsonianmag.com/inmotion/. Thank you!

Special thanks to Marcus Daly of Marian Caskets. mariancaskets.com
Original music by Jesse Solomon Clark. agentsdelfuturo.com
Produced by Visual Contact visualcontact.com.

The Coffinmaker from Dan McComb on Vimeo.

New Music In Our Playlist, The Week Of July 17th 2013

Loaded Gun Customs: Bucephalus Build

LOADED GUN CUSTOMS: Bucephalus Build from Kyle Pahlow on Vimeo.

Kevin Dunworth of LOADED GUN CUSTOMS brings us up to speed on his current endeavors and prepares to build his most impressive custom motorcycle to date. Combining advanced frame design with a vintage motor, Kevin aims to build a light and gutsy cafe racer for the 2013 Michael Lichter display at Sturgis.

Carolina Still Album Review From Kinston

"Carolina Still’s new album “The Color of Rust” is an impressive blend of bluegrass/country music delivered with the zest of rockabilly and punk. The album’s tight playing and fresh production make the Avett Brothers sound like a funeral band.

With an acoustic guitar/fiddle/banjo sound that’s tough to pigeonhole, Carolina Still exudes a joyous charm. There is nothing corn pone about the songs on “The Color of Rust,” but the songs do celebrate southern virtues that have stood the test of time.

The title track chronicles the way time has a way of steamrolling rural life, but the lyrics are defiant. To an outsider, “Hog Killin’ Time” may seem a bit harsh, but it’s a song about cold weather and bacon. Blake Shelton is probably too busy hanging out with Christina Aquavelva to record a song about breakfast meats, but thank goodness Carolina Still did it.

“The Color of Rust” is steeped in southern vibes and tones, but drummer Billy Smith drives the band as if he’s trying out for the Foo Fighters or Green Day. Bluegrass purists tend to go berserk any time a fiddle and/or a banjo is in the same building with a drummer, but this is a combination that works brilliantly for Carolina Still.

Shoot … bluegrass overlord Bill Monroe would have probably had a drummer if they could have fit the kit in the trunk of a Lincoln.

As for the string benders in Carolina Still — J. Alan Casey, Adam Jones and Robert Norman — there’s not a holder* in the bunch. These guys are pickers of the highest order, and their lead/harmony vocals turn “In the Barn” and “Six Strings and You” into massive sing-a-longs.

“The Color of Rust” is the perfect album for the bluegrass/country music lover who is tired of being sold pop music with a cowboy hat on top. Hopefully Carolina Still with have a nice long run, because there aren't many groups left who can sing and play at this level.

*A “holder” is someone who stands on stage holding an instrument as a prop. A “picker” is someone who knows how to actually play the instrument. (copyright Bryant Dawson, 1980)"

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Carolina Still - The Color of Rust - Album Cover Process Illustration from Rusty Knuckles on Vimeo.

Review of Carolina Still's album, The Color Of Rust