Oh, it seems like yesterday when Cole from The Black Lips came up to my friend Pete who was visiting from England while we were at Stickfigure on a Saturday afternoon. Within 10 seconds of introducing himself, he thrust a copy of their debut single on Die Slaughterhaus into his hand…. And with that, a love affair was born. Since that moment some five years ago, the band has cranked out some damn great albums, equally great singles and their fireworks-laden live shows? Hoo, nelly. Top notch. And so, what do you think they do for their first release on Vice Records? They put out a live album recorded in Tijuana!

I got to download the album today thru the Vice Records press alcove, and it’s a fairly "standard" (yet obviously outstanding) set that the band’s been fond of playing the last year or so, it’s just that the fidelity is slightly improved. Just slightly. And you heard it here first, John Reis recorded it! Yes, Speedo! God bless ’em. So there’s three shows that I personally concocted to coincide with their album’s release. All three bands (by my estimation) are well known for their killer live shows, so I thought "What a better way to get even better shows than by pairing them all up together?"

Dark Meat are a 20-piece mega band from here who have an other worldly sound somewhere between Albert Ayler and the MC5 if all of those artists were living in Athens in the past few years. Very over-the-top, borderline orchestral and extremely enjoyable! And the Fatal Flying Guiloteens? Well, Chunklet’s had a big ol’ boner for those Houstonians for years now. Their new album is due in the late spring on French Kiss Records and is a kinetic interpretation of The Jesus Lizard discography crammed thru a kaleidoscope of dark 90’s spazz rockers like the VSS. And again, their live shows are quite galvanizing and have only improved in all the times I’ve seen them. And hell, Tim Kerr adores them! That should be enough for anybody.

The shows start in Birmingham at the Bottletree on a Thursday. The Friday show will mark the third concert Chunklet has put on at Whirlyball Atlanta which is a non-venue planted 30 miles north of Atlanta in a strip mall where there’s batting cages, a video arcade, a comedy club, putt putt and go-cart tracks. The first two shows (Mogwai and the Melvins) were so memorable that having this line up will only add to the legend that is Whirlyball Atlanta. And the final show will be at Chunklet’s home-away-from-home, The 40 Watt Club in downtown Athens.

I can’t begin to convey how excited I am about these shows and hope everybody comes out. And yes, there will be plenty of surprises in store.

I should also mention that The Black Lips are performing tomorrow night here in Atlanta backing The Mighty Hannibal which is probably going to register as one of the most unforgettable shows I’ll ever witness. Oh, and to add to the mystique, The Reigning Sound and Gentleman Jesse open. Yes, it’s good to live in Georgia.

And if that weren’t enough, Mission of Burma play the EARL on Saturday. The missus and I will try to make it after Monster Jam at the Georgia Dome. No, I’m not kidding.

I can already think of the litany of jokes now, but man, if you save up your pennies and nickles, you can place the first bid (starting at $795,000) for this one of a kind item that can neither be confirmed nor denied as Robert Johnson. And to think that the Velvet Underground LP for sale last month set a new benchmark…

Maybe somebody could hit Eric Clapton up for a few dollars. I’m sure he’s got plenty lyin’ around off the song he made about his dead son. And hey, can’t you hear the grimey, muddy Delta blues dripping off "Tears In Heaven". Wow, yeah, you’re totally right…

You know, earlier last year, I co-hosted a day at Shake It Records in Cincinnati where me and my co-host Billy took people out of the Hall of Fame that clearly didn’t deserve to be in and inducted many who so painfully deserved it. Of course, along the way, Billy and I became lovers. So it’s with great pleasure that I noticed that Van Halen are FINALLY being inducted. They’ve been eligible for four or five years but (as with most industry oogie-boogie rituals) there’s no rhyme or reason as to who gets in or who doesn’t. And the Ronettes? Doesn’t it seem like they would’ve been in ages ago.

This year’s inductees are:
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
R.E.M.
The Ronettes
Patti Smith
Van Halen

Feel free to list any bands that should be inducted in the comments section. Me? The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Troggs and The Sonics seem like no-brainers, but I know I don’t have mass popularity in the front of my mind very often. Call it a curse.

Van Halen – Live at US Festival 83
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Don’t know much about this other than Keith Richards officially isn’t an old fart as of this moment.

The first time I even considered Athens as anything other than the home of R.E.M. was in the summer of 1988 when I first rented Athens, GA: Inside/Out from the local video store in York, Pennsylvania. By this time, I was already on a fevered search for the most fucked up, obscuro music that my 20 year old noggin could find. For fear of sounding like an old fuddy duddy, 1988 wasn’t only a time before instantaneous information thru the internet, but living in York, Pennsylvania made things almost impossible. Sure, there was the occasional trip to South Street in Philadelphia to hit the Philly Record Exchange (where I bought the first Nirvana 7" in 1989), Y&T in DC or Tower in NYC, but other than (say) The Trouser Press Record Guide, I had zero idea how to find cool music other than by frantically cross referencing everything that I could. From my initial discovery of R.E.M. in 1985, I found out about any one of a number of bands from any one of a number of different sounds. The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Green on Red, The dB’s, Wire, The Undertones….. All of those originated in some form or fashion from my high school adoration of R.E.M.

And then there was Inside/Out. At the time I first saw the movie, I didn’t even know what a college town in the South was. I was in York and well, there was a band called Public Affection who covered R.E.M. and U2 and were later to become the insufferable cuntballs known as Live. Oh yeah, York was a charmed city.

Upon seeing I/O, The BBQ Killers became my new favorite band. Seeing this "thing" ferociously strutting around on stage with its equally hip/cool bandmates just clicked with me. Almost exactly how The Minutemen clicked. It was that simple. It wasn’t until I pored over the credits to their "Comely" LP (which I played religiously on my radio show) that I found out that the "thing" on stage was actually Laura Carter. "Wait, it was a woman?!", I thought. Unreal. With my cross-referencing kick in full swing, I found out about every other Athens band in a matter of weeks thanks to magazines like The Bob, Bucketful of Brains, MaximumRockNRoll, Flipside, Option and even Pulse put out by Tower Records. Again, I was working at a fevered pace to get up to speed on everything that was going on in this tiny college town hundreds of miles from where I was in Shit Splat, Pennsylvania.

Then there’s the first time I drove to Georgia with my then-girlfriend Lisa. It was right after I graduated from college and was looking for somewhere to move that wasn’t near York. I knew Athens was the town to move to when, upon tuning into WUOG about 30 miles outside of town, I heard the first track off the newest Thinkin Fellers record. "Is this heaven?" I thought.

Well, obviously, I moved to Georgia shortly after my first trip and the rest was mere academics at that point. I consumed Athens music for my entire residency there, and one of the very early records I purchased upon moving to town was the "Some" EP which was put out by Alan Connor, Brian Cook and the legendary Dave Barbe back in the fall of 1986. "Some" was the second (and final) release on their DRG (short for Dominant Rock Gods) record label, the handmade aesthetic immediately grabbed me and I’d lie if I didn’t say it wasn’t an all-time favorite Athens record. The hand crafted inserts, incidentally, were all made by the BBQ Killer’s Laura Carter.

Dave Barbe’s Mercyland, Eat America and Time Toy turned in fantastic tracks on this EP and as I found out, they did a tour of Florida to promote this album shortly after its release. The tour consisted of approximately 40 people in a bus which sounds disturbingly similar to those early Olivia Tremor/Neutral Milk tours in ’96 and ’97. Upon returning from tour, all parties were $2000 in debt to the bus company. The 40 Watt staff generously turned the club over to them for two nights to resolve their debt. And amazingly, Michael Stipe offered his services (even allowing them to put his name on the billing) on the second night performing on guitar to an adoring capacity crowd of frat boys and girls.

As years passed on, Laura Carter (not be confused with the "current" Orange Twin/Elf Power Laura Carter) became the presence behind the JackONuts and subsequently wrote for the Flagpole during the same time that I was. Unfortunately, Laura and I hated each other for reasons that, to this day, I still don’t understand. She’d smack talk me in the Flagpole, I’d volley by throwing out drunken heckles at their shows at the Shoebox or Club Fred. I don’t know, I think it boiled down to one of those things where we were so similar that we just butted heads. Of course, I say this, but at the core of it, I always regret that she and I were never friends because it is her performance on that Athens, GA: Inside/Out tape that was a major contributing influence in me moving to the South almost 20 years ago. Laura moved from Athens around ’96 after having massive back problems and (from what I’ve gathered) a slight pain killer addiction. She retreated to  St. Croix, got married and had a child. Even with her aggro, contrarian ways, I always admired Laura. Sadly, Laura died in the winter of 2002 with her son and husband by her side in St. Croix. I’m sure if she would be reading what I’m writing, she’d invariably tell me to kiss her ass. Then again, that was all part of Laura’s unusual, yet charismatic, charm.

It’s records like "Some" that succintly define a music scene at a particular moment. And now, with the full permission of Dave Barbe, I offer up the "Some" EP to all those who haven’t been fortunate enough to get one of the hand-assembled copies that never got much distribution beyond Georgia.

BBQ Killers – Chester Drawers
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Mercyland – Amerigod
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Time Toy – Windowsill
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Eat America – Hands of Murmansk
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Chunklet has a rather glaring distrust of so-called critics and their laziness. Oh sure, we know the drill, they get free records from publicists (who are paid to like the record they sent), they write about said record and then the publicist reminds the writer to include it in their top 10 wrap-up. "Fuck that," I say. All of the below releases I purchased and was happy to support in any capacity I could. And yes, this is an open challenge to any writer/publisher out there to compare receipts from the last year for new music and no, you can’t include credit received for shitty promo CDs that you traded in to get that gay-ass Bjork box set.

Vincent Black Shadow self titled (Heart Break Beat)
Major Stars Syntoptikon (Important/Twisted Village)
Rye Coalition Curses (Gern Blandsten)
Russian Circles Enter (Flameshovel)
Warhammer 48k An Ethereal Oracle (Papa Slag)
Jay Reatard Blood Visions (In The Red)
Bardo Pond Ticket Crystals (ATP)
Jack Rose Untitled (aRchive)
God’s Temple of Family Deliverance self titled (Notcommon Records)
Growing Color Wheel (Troubleman)
Black Helicopter Invisible Jet (Ecstatic Peace!)
Goslings Grandeur of Hair (aRchive)

Pissed Jeans Don’t Need Smoke To Make Myself Disappear (Sub Pop)
Om Coference of the Birds (Holy Mountain)
Boris Pink (Southern Lord)
Melvins A Senile Animal (Ipecac)
Boris/Sunn O))) Altar (Southern Lord)
Cheap Trick Rockford (Big3)
The Thermals The Body The Blood The Machine (Sub Pop)
Be Your Own Pet Self Titled (Ecstatic Peace!/Universal)
Dan Sartain Join Dan Sartain (Swami)
The Hold Steady Boys and Girls In America (Vagrant)
The Drones Gala Mill (ATP)
The Long Winters Putting the Days To Bed (Barsuk)

Okay, so the new Cheap Trick record wasn’t hyped at all, but I do have to give it up to Brian Walsby for convincing me that Rockford is easily one of the best summer records ever made.

1. Jon Jon-Having the opportunity to introduce Mogwai at the 40 Watt and then The Shins, Big Business and Elf Power as Jon-Jon, Head of Security, at ATP in April. Made even better knowing I did okay next to David Cross’s crucifixion the night before bringing out Sleater-Kinney.
2. Paul Stanley–People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest – A collection of mp3s featuring Paul Stanley doing extremely painful and/or long-winded lead-ins to every KISS song you could possibly imagine. An inarguable, yet sometimes pleasurable, room clearer.
3. Rob’s House Parties-The closest thing to the explosive Athens house party scene from the mid-90’s I’ve seen here in Atlanta since I moved here in ’97. Seeing Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control, Jucifer or Elf Power back when they couldn’t get arrested is akin to seeing The Black Lips, Beat Beat Beat, The Carbonas or King Khan on a Saturday afternoon. If you’re in town, I’d hope it’s understood that these parties are mandatory. Duh.
4. Dethclok Metalocalypse-Adult Swim’s first grand slam home run since the first season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Metal humor for metal geeks, but you don’t have to be a metal geek to get it. Posehn and I nerded out a lot about this last month in LA.
5. Touch & Go 25-Yes, I know, I was in the mountains of North Carolina during this, but jesus christ, every band that ever meant a damn for this label over 3 days in Chicago? Having  bands kiss and make up all in the name of Corey Rusk was awesome, but then to have kick ass shows for an entire weekend?! Fuggedit. I know there’s a slew of people who were there who can adequately explain what happened. All I know is that it looked like a record store employee refugee camp. Hilarious.

6. Whirlyball Concerts-What started as a stupid idea became reality with two shows in March with Mogwai, Torche and Growing and then followed up in October with The Melvins with David Yow, Big Business and the Men of Porn. Black Lips are already confirmed for the new year. A couple soo-prises in store. I’ll keep you posted.
7. The Comedians of Comedy-Two stellar tours through the midwest and east coast kept me out of town, and we had a great time while we were at it. Recorded the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company tour CD, did the one off Troubadour show. A lot of fun. I also got to meet Barry Hennsler (Necros, Big Chef) and Chris Thompson (Ignition, The Faith, Circus Lupus, The Monorchid, Red Eyed Legends, etc.) while in Chicago. I don’t know why, that was a big deal to me.
8. The Chunklet 13th Anniversary Weekend Extravaganza Blowout-Four of the most memorable days of my life. Check elsewhere on this site for more info.
9. Working With Indie Record Labels Can (Sometimes) Suck My Balls-You’d think it’d be easy, but I had a horrible time getting work completed and then getting paid by the "cool" or "popular" labels in the indie scene. I won’t smack talk, but goddamn, I’m so fucking fed up with lame ass, cheap, flaky labels that get away with murder in the name of business. I’m so glad I married a lawyer.
10. Shake It Records-I can’t think of one other time (other than going to Amoeba) in the last 10 years where I walked out of a record store spending almost $500 and thinking "Man, this was a steal!" Without a doubt, one of the greatest indie record stores left in America and would you believe it’s in Cincinnati?! I’m anxiously awaiting my return.
11. "Led Around By The Nose" Critics/Bottom Feeders-Even if you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t think of one redeeming thing about The Decemberists, Ratatat, Cat Power, Danielson or that wood nymph Joanna Newsom. God damn, do critics or on-line schlubs even BUY records any more? I swear, every critic’s end-of-year list has turned  into one big carbon copy of each other’s list. Christ, let’s show some originality, you dopes. I don’t trust one critic’s Top 10 list with any of these bands featured prominently in them.

12. Chunklet SXSW 2006-An unrelenting 16+ band, 2 stage all-day event at Sound on Sound in Austin. Ted Leo/Pharmacists (who opened with a Rush cover!), Swearing at Motorists, Elf Power, Part Chimp, Torche, Rye Coalition, Baroness, This Moment In Black History, Fatal Flying Guiloteens, Black Heart Procession, Carbonas, Selmanaires and an assload of other bands I can’t remember off the top of my head. It took me a week to recover.
13. Grammination-‘Nuff said.
14. The Overrated Book-My first book came out this year (after designing probably 30 for other people). Traveled the US promoting it and even filled out my record collection in the process. Definite props go to Baltimore, Boston, Chapel Hill, Greenville, Nashville, Charlotte, Houston, Austin, Chicago, Bloomington and Cincinnati for helping me along. Also big thanks to Oneida, Black Taj and Birds of Avalon who played the release party during a neighborhood-wide black out back in August.
15. Anybody involved with Death Cab For Cutie-Say what you will about their music, but some of the raddest dudes I’ve ever encountered. And, again. ’nuff said.
16. Putting on Multiple Shows With My Favorite Bands-I got to put on a lot of shows this year with Boris, Growing, Torche, Thrones, Harvey Milk, Mogwai, Part Chimp, Melvins, The Hold Steady, Pelican, Mono, Minus The Bear, Russian Circles and Jason Molina.
17. I Paid A Grown Man $50 To Go On Stage Naked At A Mates Of State Show-It’s on youtube. You should check it out. Thanks to Destroyer for helping.
18. Live Music In Small Rooms Still Rules-Scratch Acid, Negative Approach, Man or Astroman?, Sonic Youth, Black Lips, Be Your Own Pet, The Carbonas, Drive By Truckers, King Khan & BBQ, Oneida, The Reigning Sound all completely ruled. I know there’s more I’m forgetting, but those stand out.
19. The Purge Of Dissidents-Having Tom Hazelmyer (from Halo of Flies/AmRep) recording music again gives me hope. I don’t know. It’s totally art damaged and demented as shit, but having him do soundtrack work for Dalek is better than nothing at all. And plus, it makes any 23-year old dweeb with a stomp box look even more feeble next to him.
20. Paying A Grown Man To Get A Tattoo On His Leg-Tad from The Hold Steady got a tat that I paid for. No, I’m not kidding. Just search for a jpeg on this site. I was actually giggling when I was cutting the check to the tattoo artist. Best money I’d spent in ages.
21. The new Chunklet.com site-How could I forget? It was redesigned by my good buddy Mark Wasserman at Plinko and then coded by the kids at Mission Media. A splendid job by all parties. Good job, gents.

Now who’s ready for a killer 2007?

Any soul, gospel or funk reissue released by the Numero Group label
Dead C Vain, Erudite and Stupid (Ba Da Bing!)
Dead Moon Echoes of the Past (Sub Pop)
Coyle & Sharpe These Two Men Are Imposters 3CD/1DVD set (Sharpeworld)
The Fix At The Speed of Twisted Thought (Touch & Go)
The Birmingham Sound The Soul of Neal Hemphill vol 1 (Choke)
Chavez Better Days Will Haunt You (Matador)
Kenny Smith One More Day (Shake It Records)
Botch Unifying Themes Redux (Hydrahead)

The New Sound of Numbers Liberty Seeds (Cloud)
Carbonas Self Titled (Raw Deluxe)
Harvey Milk Special Wishes (Troubleman)
Zoroaster Self Titled (Battle Kommand)
Dark Meat Universal Indians (Cloud)
Jucifer If Thine Enemy Hunger (Relapse)
Liz Durrett The Mezzanine (Warm)
Mastodon Blood Mountain (Warner Brothers)
Black Lips Party At Rob’s House 7" (Rob’s House/Die Slaughterhaus)
Elf Power Back To The Web (Ryko)

Yet another year of shockingly great Georgia music. None of Williamsburg’s ‘tude, Chicago’s bitter cold, San Francisco’s astronomical rent or Seattle’s greyness. Nothing but lovely weather, no egos and killer local bands. And I’ve been saying this a lot recently, but Atlanta is totally firing on all pistons right now. Of the above list, it’s about 50/50 Athens to Atlanta. When I moved to Atlanta in ’97, I thought the music scene here was abysmal, it’s now bursting at the seams. Massive props go to local clubs like The EARL, Lenny’s and The Drunken Unicorn while local labels like Rob’s House, Die Slaughterhaus and Douchemaster harken back to a simpler, more earnest music scene. And I fucking love it all.