Austin Fanzine Project

Our friends from Columbia, Missouri arrived around 7 pm and we all headed down to Ellen's Soul Food for the best friend chicken I've ever had (besides my mommy's of course). Then, with out bellies so full we could hardly more, we headed down to Barrister's for the first night of the Dixie Fried Backalley Brawl. Amazingly, we ran into [Casey]] of Make Room fanzine fame, another proud Texan who had journeyed north to worship at the garage rock altar.

The entrance to Barrister's is on an alley, which makes it easy to take a between-band breather with beer in hand. Memphis seemed to have a lot of unenforced laws and the open-contained law was one of the, (Another curious Memphian alcohol law is that you can't sell a container of beer larger than 38 oz- that's right, folks... no 40s.)

Inside testosterone surged through the air. An ancient big-screen TV was showing clips from early 60s-ish sexploitation films. People were shooting pool, buying records from the merch table and drinking beer. The crowd was much livelier than the typical Austin crowd, and there were a lot more girls out!

The first band was the Hate Bombs, a classic 60s-style garage band who played more songs about girls than any other band I've ever seen. Everyone in the band sings lead except the bassist who, incidentally, bears a striking resemblance to a young Elvis. I thoroughly enjoyed this set. Next up was AMF (which stands for many things, including Adolescent Music Fantasy). Their drummer, Ross Johnson, who emceed the whole event (and who had played with Panther Burns, Gibson Brothers, Alex Chilton and Pink Slip Daddy) kept demanding that the proprietor "play more nekkid movies." AMF took it slow and easy (they were self-proclaimed "middle-aged, over-weight rock'n'rollers") and they played mostly covers, but there were fine choices like "Drunk Again," "Theme From A Summer Place," and "I Walked With the Zombies." '68 Comeback (or rather Jeff Evans + the Oblivians) was next. Not being familiar with Jeff's stuff, I didn't know what to expect, but I was very pleased with their set.

Then came the Oblivians. I'd only seen them once before (at that horribly ill-attended Thanksgiving-night show at Emo's) and I had almost forgotten how great their show are. I was speechless. Luckily we got some of it on tape, including most of "Motorcycle Leather Boy" as sung very

entertainingly by the guy from Guitar Wolf. These guys fucking shred!!

[The Royal Pendletons]] were next, but it was already 3:30 am and we were all crashin'. So we split.

Saturday, 24 June 1995.

Susan and I went to Brother Juniper's again for breakfast, leaving the boys happily asleep. When we came back to see if the guys had taken all our stuff and split town, we were informed that we would have to change motels again, because all the rooms were reserved for the night. We relocated to the Admiral Benbow Inn which is the scummiest motel in the world . It was clean and all, but there were all sorts of fucked-up people wandering around the whole time and the trashcans were from Holiday Inn and the soap was from Hampton Inn and the "Do Not Disturb" signs were from Best Western. According to Eric Oblivian The Admiral is Guitar Wolf's preferred motel choice. Sure enough, they were staying right down the hall from us.

This was the day I wanted to go out and sight-see. Jeff and I left Susan and Matt at the Inn and set off to see the town. I had planned out a path and we attacked it with vigor. We went to Beale Street to check out the tourist/museum/gift ship aspect. Some of it was kinda cool, but the

The Oblivians rock out in the Bluff City

best stuff was out of the Kreature Comforts Lowlife Guide to Memphis which you must get if you go there. But the best part was when we were on the way home and Jeff said, "oh, let's go see one more thing." He wouldn't tell me where we were going, he just gave me directions. We ended up in a vacant lot in a bad part of town and, just as I was beginning to have second thoughts about the character of my "friend", Jeff looked around and whispered reverently, "This was Stax. "

Round two of the Dixie Friend Backalley Brawl: First were the Cowslingers. I liked them more than I thought I would. Fucked-up-truck-stop-country-rock-d-roll. The the Woggles and the Royal Pendletons, I'm not sure of the order. Somehow, any time the Woggles take the stage, I miss them. I've heard I'm not missing much, but I don't know. I also withhold judgement on the Royal Pendletons who definitely have some good songs and, as we discovered Monday morning at breakfast, are some of the funniest guys on the planet.

Anyway, Guitar Wolf was next and I watched most of their set, although it was the exact same show I'd seen in Austin a week earlier. Sure, it was a good set, but I was in Memphis and hangin' out in the alley, drinkin' a beer and shootin' the shit with some local folk was just way more appealing to me at the time. I don't regret the decision at all since I ended up having the closest thing to a conversation I've ever had with Grifters drummer/van pilot extraordinaire, Stan (and his super-cool wife).

The moment I had been waiting for arrived: Man...or Astroman? were up next. If you know me well enough (heh, heh) you know that I have a sick, misguided, obsessive drive to own every single M...oA? release. I think I may be finally coming to my senses regarding this disease, but there's just something awfully appealing to me about a band that repeatedly goes through entire interviews without admitting to being from this planet (it's that damned geek thing again). The set was a bit disappointing to me musically and they were playing one person short, but they were energetic and fearless even when the sampling apparatus went on the fritz and the bassist started reciting all the samples to compensate for the loss. The multimedia aspects were pleasing. IF the music wasn't holding your attention (or,more accurately, if you were trying to drown out the rambunctious asshole next to you who was trying to get the bassist to check out his silly hand made, "Look at my fucking shirt! It says

Man...or...Astro...man!"), you could always check out the huge painted wall-hanging/backdrop thing or several black and white TVs playing choice snippets of old sci-fi b-movies. I also had a pretty good laugh when they started throwing out Little Debbie snacks and assorted candies and chocolate into the audience and some guy behind me shouted, "Fuck the chocolate, WE WANT TANG!!!"

Whew, we went back to the hotel and crashed so hard that we forgot to wake up in the morning to go to Al Green's Full Tabernacle Church. Oh, the things I missed. Guess I'll have to go back.

Sunday, 25 June 1995

We walked down to this shitty pancake house which I always want to call "Biscuit House," although I don't think that's its name. (Susan, Scott and I went there when we passed through Memphis on the way back from Chicago once. I couldn't remember its name then, and I still can't.) After breakfast, we saw the boys off and went to Sun Studios.

We were apprehensive, as we had just recently seen Mystery Train and were pretty convinced the tour was gonna suck shit. Boy, were we surprised. The tour guide was very informative and talked about all kinds of neat stuff. He also played parts of songs recorded there. I swear I got goosebumps when he played the first part of "I Walk The Line' and announced that we were standing in the very room that Johnny Cash recorded it in! Then he told us this story about this recording session where Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash and somebody else were all recording together, but they kept cracking up because Carl Perkins was in the adjoining office mooning them through the window.

That night we hooked up with a friend of a friend, the wacky Andy Biscuit of the Resort Theory Recording Conglomerate. Andy drove us out past this industrial wasteland, like a decrepit, vacant warehouse district. Through that, to this bizarre neighborhood that had these creepy houses. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong with them. Was it the paint, the architecture (I use that term very loosely here), the arrangement of them? Or was it that we didn't really know Andy too well (or the friend who referred us to him, for that matter), and there was the possibility lurking in the back of my mind that someone would be hauling my corpse out of one of these condemned factories the next day? Obviously, we lived. And I can say that Andy is a fine human, although he still owes us a visit.

Monday, 26 June 1995 (Susan's 19th birthday)

We went to breakfast with Eric Oblivian and most, if not all, or the Royal Pendletons at this cool anachronistic home cookin' place right next to some old railroad tracks. The Royal Pendletons had to sit at a separate table cause the tables weren't big enough for all of us, but they kept coming over to our table in shifts. They'd sit there for a while and talk and be funny, then they'd leave and another one would come over. After breakfast, Eric took us to the Wooden Indian Giftship across the street from Graceland so we could get stuff to bring back for all our friends who wanted Elvis shit. I was really low on cash at that point, so I only bought one souvenir, a gold bottle of "Love Me Tender Conditioning Rinse." I am not kidding. On the way back to our hotel, Eric told us a hilarious story about taking Guitar Wolf on a Graceland tour the previous year.

When we got back, we packed up the car and split town. We had decided to go to New Orleans for the night, then cruise home the next day. But we didn't make it that far. For reasons still unknown, the transmission decided to go out just north of Granada, Mississippi, between Memphis and Jackson. After a bunch of grief, the details of which I will spare you, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would be spending the next three or four days in the Holiday Inn in fucking Grenada, Mississippi!

I think the penance for any roadtrip, fiasco, party, good time or disaster that leaves you with a good story to tell is that you have to tell the story thousands of times even if you're already sick of it or you just wanted to forget about it in the first place. That's why most of this story is about the fun we had in Memphis and not about the fun we didn't have in Grenada. But I'll tell ya what, everytime I see "Blind Willie's Johnson]] and they do "Mississippi Dirt," I think about all the mosquito bites I go in that fucking swamp of a state and when they got to that line at the end of the song, I'm ready to scream along, "Yeah, New York City's bad, but Mississippi's WORSE!" -Jennifer Geek

Cartoon caption: "The rebel yell that was heard throughout the world"