End of Silence

As a part of my post on Sonic Youth’s Austin City Limits taping earlier this month, I mentioned speculation about who will be the final guest at the ACL’s current location in the Communication building on the UT campus.

Well, speculate no more, and though it was a good guess, Corcoran was wrong. Austin City Limits has just announced that the final taping will be November 8th and the guest will be Lyle Lovett.

From the release:

AUSTIN CITY LIMITS is the longest-running music series in American television history. More than 500 episodes featuring more than 800 performers have originated from the modest and unassuming Studio 6A since tapings began in 1974. The AUSTIN CITY LIMITS story is one of unparalleled passion for music, commitment to excellence, and perseverance against many odds. What began as a modest Texas music series has gone on to become the only television series ever to be awarded the prestigious National Medal of the Arts. And it has made so much history in one small room that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum declared that it was one of the few rock and roll landmarks worthy of official recognition, an honor that was bestowed upon the show in March 2010.

Lyle Lovett’s history with AUSTIN CITY LIMITS runs deep. When he first came to Studio 6A it was as an audience member, and he made his first appearance on the show as a backing singer for Nanci Griffith in 1985. Since then, he has come to know the stage well, appearing on the show no less than 12 times, making him one of the most frequent guests in the show’s history.
When it comes to presenting live music, AUSTIN CITY LIMITS embodies its motto of “Great Music. No Limits.” Accomplishing what no other show has done in the history of American television, the series has, for nearly four decades, presented audiences with the most diverse, original, cutting-edge talent music has to offer. Past performers have included Willie Nelson, Asleep at the Wheel, B.B. King, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, John Fogerty, Robert Plant, Neil Young, The Dixie Chicks, Dolly Parton, Kenny Chesney, Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, R.E.M., Allen Toussaint, Arcade Fire, Patty Griffin, Spoon, Coldplay, Wilco, Norah Jones, The Flaming Lips, The Dave Matthews Band, Jimmy Cliff and many, many more.

The show’s next chapter continues in early 2011 with Season 37, originating from its new home at The Moody Theater in downtown Austin. The new studio location will enable more fans to watch future live tapings and provide an enhanced experience for all future shows, while maintaining the intimacy, character and integrity that have been the hallmark of AUSTIN CITY LIMITS for more than three decades.

Since it’ll be pretty much impossible to get in to that taping, they’re offering a simulcast party at Hogg Auditorium as well. A new episode of Austin City Limits with Robert Earl Keen and Hayes Carll airs this Saturday at 7pm on KLRU (or you PBS affiliate).

William Gibson made a stop at the Arboretum Barnes & Noble last night to promote his new book, Zero History. He read from Chapter 16 of the book and took some questions from the audience, some of which were enlightening. Not sure if he was just using it as an excuse, but he cut it short because the feedback from the sound system that the store provided was annoying him. I was disappointed because I was enjoying his answers. Someone asked him about a recent short story and why he didn’t do more of them. He answered that there’s no money in them these days and that he feels like he’s got a limited number of ideas and any that turn into short stories take away from the pool that he can use for novels. He also discussed his admiration for Inception. During the signing, the guy in front of me had him sign his electronic copy of Zero History on an iPad. That was a first, but fitting, I suppose, for the author who is credited with coining the term “cyberspace”. You can follow him on twitter @GreatDismal. He’s pretty active when he’s not busy writing. Zero History is the third book in a series. The first two were Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. I’d recommend starting with Pattern Recognition. I’ve really enjoyed the first two and am looking forward to reading the third.

I first heard about The Roots living in NYC in 1995. I picked up their first major label album Do You Want More?!!!??! and couldn’t stop listening to it. I completely wore out “You Got Me” from their third album, Things Fall Apart. Their latest album, How I Got Over, was just released in June.

I pretend to be a drummer on occasion and had always admired ?uestlove (aka Ahmir Thompson), drummer for The Roots, but developed a serious man crush after seeing him at a live show during SXSW in 2006 for Before the Music Dies. I didn’t know about his bandleading skills until that performance, something that would become much more evident when The Roots began their stint as the house band for Jimmy Fallon’s takeover of Late Night from Conan O’Brien  (the only redeeming aspect of that change, in my opinion).

?uestlove also does guest DJ stints displaying his encyclopedic knowledge of music and will do one tonight immediately following the Austin City Limits taping at Red 7 at 9pm. It’s $8 in advance (try End of An Ear records) and $10 at the door and probably will sell out.

Tonight’s Austin City Limits taping will be with John Legend. Their collaboration, Wake Up, will be released on September 21st. I caught one song at a Central Park performance on Good Morning America a couple of weeks ago. The collaboration is inspired by the presidential election campaign of 2008 and is a mix of covers and originals. VH1 has a bunch of behind the scenes videos promoting the album. I’ll post a review of the taping tomorrow.

Here are the air dates for Season 36 of Austin City Limits which airs locally on KLRU on Saturday nights at 7pm:

October 2, 2010         Jimmy Cliff
October 9, 2010         Spoon
October 16, 2010      Patty Griffin & Friends
October 23, 2010      Alejandro Escovedo / Trombone Shorty
October 30, 2010      Robert Earl Keen / Hayes Carll
November 6, 2010     Steve Martin / Sarah Jarosz
November 13, 2010   Rosanne Cash / Brandi Carlile
November 20, 2010   John Legend & The Roots

Cheap Trick opened the 36th and final season for Austin City Limits in its current location on the University of Texas campus. They’ll be moving to block 21 just north of city hall sometime near the end of this year or beginning of next year.

I had an amusing moment before the show at Terra Burger across the street. I saw a guy with platinum blond hair decked out in cowboy rocker gear and just wrote him off as a SXSW hipster wannabee. I passed him as I got a drink refill and headed out to wait for the interminable light to cross The Drag back over to the communications building. He came out at the same time and stood next to me. I looked over at him and it dawned on me that it was probably Robin Zander, Cheap Trick’s front man. Turns out that I was right that it was Robin and wrong that he was a wannabee. If anybody’s entitled to walk around like that, it’s him.

If Robin was inconspicuous with his presence in the Terra Burger, Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos is conspicuous by his absence on this trip through Austin. He wasn’t at the taping last night or at an interview with CNBC on St. Patrick’s Day and he hasn’t been mentioned in any of the interviews that I’ve seen so far (including an interview from Austin360 where they give a shout out to Sam’s BBQ on east 12th street). It’s almost like they’re trying to avoid talking about it (is this punishment for that Hanson/James Iha side project?). Guitarist Rick Neilsen’s son Daxx filled in admirably during the taping. He’s definitely of the Bun E. school of drumming. The band is rounded out with amazing 12 string (!?!?) bass player Tom Petersson and two keyboard players, Phil “Magic” Cristian, who’s played with them on and off since the 80s and Roger Manning from Jellyfish and Imperial Drag.

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Photo by co-worker friend Jay Harrison via Facebook

Like me, you’re probably getting most of your news updates via Twitter, Facebook or other social media, but a small plane crashed into an office building near Mopac and 183 this morning around 9:50am. A co-worker came in breathless having seen the whole thing as it happened. In retrospect, we felt the shock wave a few blocks away.

Initial reports are that it was the Echelon building and may have housed IRS, FBI and St. Edward’s University employees. I’ve also seen that all but two people have been accounted for from the building and that the plane may have been out of Waco and went full throttle into the building.

Of course, this is all pure speculation at this point since it’s so soon. More as it develops.

Update: Follow the Austin American-Statesman twitter account for the latest.

Update 2: Statesman blog post now has quotes from aforementioned co-worker.

Update 3: Note left by the plane’s pilot, Joe Stack. He was clearly targeting the IRS criminal investigation division. We’re lucky he didn’t decide to target the much bigger and more populous regional service center a few miles away.

Update 4: Stack was an Austin resident and set fire to his house just before getting the plane. There was a report on the Statesman’s Blotter blog at 9:42 about the fire. A quick check of tax appraisal roll confirms that it’s an address owned by Mr. Stack. It’s a house not very far to the north of the site where he crashed the plane.

Update 5: T35 Hosting has taken down Stack’s company web site (he was an embedded systems programmer) and his manifesto. I, like a lot of other people, kept my own copy. You can probably still get to it at the Internet Archive. The markup indicates he wrote it in Microsoft Word which conveniently records the create and last update times. He created it on 02.16.10 at 7:24PM and went through 27 revisions with the final one this morning at 6:24AM. Here’s the City of Austin’s info page in the incident (what’s up with that URL?).