1) I know y’all have shit to do in preparation for Thursday’s celebration of gluttony, er, bounty, so I’ll try to keep this brief. Wednesday night, Quaker City Nighthawks play at Lola’s. They’re fresh off a two-week tour of “Heartlandia,” (aka the Midwest, their word, not mine) and they’re ready to party amongst hometown friends. If you want to be hungover for Turkey Day, this is a great way to unlock that achievement! Here’s QCNH on the Chevy Music Showcase from a couple years ago. Funny thing: the video is 4:20 long!
2) Also on Wednesday: There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Last Waltz at the Tanstaafl Pub in Arlington. This is an annual concert (now in its 4th year) that pays tribute to The Band’s final performance, aka the most famous Thanksgiving concert of all time. Filling in for the classic rock luminaries like Dylan, Neil Young, and Eric “Cocaine Throatbeard” Clapton are a cavalcade of talented local players including Neil Schnell, Carey Wolff, Ryan Thomas Becker, Ben Napier, Katie Robertson, Lannie Flowers, John Stevens, Brandon Bumpas, Tony Diaz, Alan Davis, Dan Zimmer, Chris Watson, Jace Bersin, Wade Johnson, Jack Watkins, Jim Kisselburg, Philip Johnson, Tom Urquhart, Chris Bellomy, Terry Koontz, Jason Shelly, Jason Kabakoff, and many more, including the Tanstaafl Singers. Will there be someone playing the role of Martin Scorsese? If your eyebrow game is on point, maybe it could be you! This video is the whole shebang from ’76 – all 4 hours, 19 minutes, and 32 seconds of it, apparently:
3) Welp, so much for brevity; each one of these blurbs is getting longer than the last one. You know what I’m thankful for? That I have a weekly forum to bloviate about bands. When I was in college, that was pretty much the only job I thought I’d ever enjoy. Thank you very much, Fort Worth Weekly!
And now back to bloviating!
Work off that third helping of green bean casserole (okay, okay, fourth helping) by shaking your hips (and dreads, if you happen to have dreads) Friday night at Lola’s during Soundclash 2015, the annual reggae-oriented groovefest headlined by Pablo and the Hemphill 7. Soundclash has been a thing for more than a decade; those of us music fans who are getting increasingly long in the tooth will have fond and fuzzy memories of this event happening at Axis and the Wreck Room (2005 and 2006, I believe) before settling in at Lola’s every year after those clubs went the way of the dinosaur; my own faded recollections involve opening those shows with my old band, Darth Vato, ahead of hard-hitting, now-defunct local reggae outfits like Dallas’ Code Red. DV played it every year until we went on indefinite hiatus in 2009, but I’m stoked to announce that we are reuniting to dust off/fumble our way through our old jams before PH7 takes the stage. Sally Majestic is also on the bill; if you’re too fresh to remember these names, suffice to say, it’ll be a rowdy mix of reggae, rocksteady, ska, and rock, and people usually end up pretty shithammered. Book an Uber, and blaze ’em if you got ’em! By the way, not sure if this is from a Soundclash or not, but it is PH7 playing at Axis from a long time ago:
4) If you end up getting so many hot deals and saving so much money on Black Friday that you are more or less broke, there’s good news: Doc’s Records annual, free ThanksMas celebration is on Saturday, and the music starts at 2pm with stoner rockers FTW followed by none other than the Fort Worth Cats (and then Vincent Neil Emerson and other local luminaries). No, this is not a band crewed by some minor league outfielders who have nothing to do without a baseball team to play for; the Cats are a legendary punk outfit that arose in Fort Worth in the late ’70s when disco was dying and New Wave was (wait for it…) new. They play at 3pm; if you can’t go, I hope whatever you’re doing is worth it. I can’t find the video that blew my mind when I learned of them years ago (it was live from when they were current), but this video is of a CAT PLAYING A KEYBOARD!!! Have you seen it??? Oh my god! Is there anything a cat can’t do?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J—aiyznGQ
5) Holy fucking shit! Dirty Rotten Imbeciles are playing at Trees in Dallas on Sunday night! Yes, it’s only half the original lineup (singer Kurt Brecht and guitarist Spike Cassidy), but if you’re under, I dunno, 38 years old, that shouldn’t mean much to you anyway. And speaking of people under 38 years old: without D.R.I.’s Crossover album, there’d probably be no Suicidal Tendencies, so all you kids who flip the bills of your hats up as part of your ’80s thrash metal costume (I’m looking at you, 10th grader who just discovered Municipal Waste) owe this band a debt of gratitude. Don’t think I’m a hater – my hat has a bill like that too; it says “SPORTS” on the underside, but I scrawled it in that Venice Beach cholo font. The show starts at 7, with Protest, Exploder, and Chemicaust in the opening spots. Here’s D.R.I. in ’89:
