After coming back from DC, I had a completley different dinosaur act experience, catching Iron Maiden in the very last sweltering row of Madison Square Garden.  Where the Unrest show was a slightly tentative affair at a small, homey club, Maiden in MSG was about as shamelessly big business as rock can get.

But that’s sort of appropriate for Maiden.  I first got into them back in 1986, as I was starting junior high.  But it wasn’t their music that sold me, or at least it wasn’t entirely the music.  Instead, it was the time-traveling, protean, undead mascot of the band, Eddie the Head, that appealed to my geeky, tweenage self.

I didn’t get it at the time, but it seems obvious to me that what I fell for was a sort of brand.  And it’s an enduring one.  I just now spent a good 20 minutes checking out the various t-shirts available at the band’s official shop, most of which are the outer space-themed tour shirts with artwork from their new album, “The Final Frontier.”  You see, like some sort of zombie Barbie for geeky boys, Eddie has a new outfit (and level of decomposition) for every album, be it the skeleton of a WWII RAF fighter pilot or a futuristic alien bounty hunter with just a trench coat over his bare sinews.  That combined with the band’s easy appropriation of Heinlein novels and other assorted nerd culture references in their lyrics, and you have a coherent brand identity that I still find hard to resist.

And aside from that the show was actually a blast.  The band seem to all genuinely enjoy playing for the fans, and Bruce Dickinson in particular still seemed as energetic, well-spoken and operatic as he always has.  And the fans ate it up.  In fact, the sold-out crowd (front row seats were selling for as much as 20 grand on StubHub) seemed to go just as crazy for the band’s more recent material as they did for the classics.  And when a giant alien animatronic Eddie came out to battle the band members before playing a few riffs of his own, the crowd was completely sold.

So some time back, my friend Dan sent me an enthusiastic email informing me that Unrest was getting back together for a Teenbeat reunion tour celebrating their 26th anniversary.  Then 15 minutes later he sent me a follow-up email that I was going to be taking the bus down to DC to acccompany him to the show.  Dan is sort of like Sir Ben Kingsley’s character in Sexy Beast, in that he has both a shaved head and an ability to convince people to say yes to any proposition he might put forward.

But of course it didn’t take much convincing.  Unrest is great, and I’ve never seen them play (though I think I’ve seen a couple of Mark Robinson’s other projects), and what better place to catch them then at Teenbeat Records’ former ground zero, the Black Cat in DC.  Also, it was a great opportunity to hang out a little with Dan, Alia and their two hilariously energetic daughters.

I don’t want to really bang out a full review of the show, but it was totally satisfying.   All three versions of the band played, each introduced separately by Robinson, who also let each of the first two bassists do their own thing for a couple of minutes, which included both country blues riffing and a Brecht song.

The dominant emotion of the various reunited bands (Bossanova, The Rondelles and Versus) seemed to be a sort of giddy joy at getting to rock out again in front of a big crowd like they used to in the old days, mixed with a slightly awkward amazement at the earnest, younger selves they were impersonating.  And of course the crowd skewed a little older as well, your humble narrator included.

I normally don’t like dinosaur acts, but this was hardly a nostalgic cash-in, or at least not on the scale of a Billy Joel or even the Pixies.  It was a good time, and everyone rocked out plausibly, and still hit their marks with confidence.  And most of these folks are either still playing with their original bands or making music with others.

Record companies are big business, and of course they want to scare us into thinking that their needs are in fact ours as well.  This is obviously a simplification of a very complicated problem that is affecting all sorts of people in different ways, but this much is true:  music is valuable to people, and smart people will always find a way to make money off of that.  There will be upheaval, no doubt, but music isn’t going anywhere.

I’m still in Austin for another full day of panels and parties, but I wanted to take a minute to post about my interivew with Matthew Shipp, which has just gone live on At Length today.  We started talking about his new album but the conversation quickly got deep and awesome.

Shipp talked to me about a certain sort of mystical philosophy that underpins his music, and it’s one that I have long found fascinating.   And it’s reflected in the album’s title, 4D, a reference to multidimensionality of the sort the Cubists, the Theosophists and a host of science fiction writers all tapped into.  Anyway, it would’ve been right up my alley if I was talking to some random dude on the street, but seeing as how it was Matthew Shipp, one of the finest musicians in jazz or any genre, was a real treat.

As a side note, the first real jazz show I ever saw was the David S. Ware Quartet with Matthew Shipp at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, and it was that show that made me fall in love with the genre, and understand what playing free was all about.

A couple of quick notes.

First, I never blogged about it, but I read a short piece of memoir for the Soundtrack Series, a new reading series put together by Dana Rossi and Sean Williams in which people tell a personal story based on a song.  I read at the inaugural event, held at the Waltz Astoria Cafe in Astoria.  It was a lot of fun, and the first time I had written a piece of memoir since the events I wrote about, in the early 90s.  I’m thinking about polishing it up to a point that I can post it here.

But the real reason I’m posting about this now is that I’ve arrived in Austin for the interactive part of the SxSW festival, and I’m enjoying it immensely so far.  Friendly folks, big, cloudless skies, warm sunshine and affordable prices.  I’ve already had a chance to meet a lot of the great folks from Nokia, and I’m looking forward to meeting about a gazillion more people over the next four days.

I may even post more to the blog, because, you know, everyone is doing it.

I had an absolute blast interviewing author Jeff Vandermeer and Adam Turla (of the band Murder by Death) for At Length recently. Jeff had asked the band to write a soundtrack for his noir fantasy novel Finch, and they delivered a haunting chunk of music that perfectly complements the mood of the book.

The conversation was fun and fascinating, particularly when Jeff mentioned that foreign publishers were using the soundtrack with the translation, as a guide to tone and pacing.

I’m procrastinating on an interview transcription to test the wordpress app for my new Droid phone. I’ve named it Skippy, after the jedi robot protaganist in Peter David’s playful reimagining of R5D4, hero of the universe.

Speaking of the Droid, I’m creeped out by the way it is being marketed to men who think Apple products are too feminine. I’m even more dismayed that I think this is pretty likely to work in the geek community.

A bad snap of a great band, The XX.

For the first time this year, I lucked into a badge for the CMJ music festival here in New York, thanks to business associate, blogstress extraordinaire and all around swell gal, Jen Kellas.  Previously, the hefty price tag ($500 this year) has engendered a sourish, grapey taste in my mouth, and I’ve assumed that CMJ was just like an average weekend night in NYC — hundreds of bands playing in dozens of rock clubs and theaters scattered across Manhattan and Brooklyn.  But once you have that free pass burning a whole in your pocket (because really, who’s going to jeopardize their cool points by wearing it around their neck?) you sort of feel pressure to get the most of out of it.

Theoretically, the badge lets you get into any official CMJ showcase in the city (not to mention the film and discussion panels, but I do have a day job to worry about), so you could conceivably plan some ridiculous itinerary in which you planned to hop from club to club every hour, making your own special live mixtape of super-hip indie.  But realistically, you’ve got a lot of barriers that stand in your way.  For starters, a lot of bands are just scheduled against one another, forcing you to make the kinds of Sophie’s choice decisions that make hipsters wake up in a cold sweat at night.  Dent May or The XX?  Hot Lava or The Golden Silvers?  Then there’s distance.  New York has great public transit and is super dense, but this ain’t Burning Man.  Even if you want to blow your beer money on cabs, you’re still going to find it hard to get from Park Slope to the Bowery in less time than it takes the sound guy to get more vox in the guitar player’s monitor.  And of course there’s what I like to call “rock and roll time,” the strange chronometric system used by hipsters, musicians, tricky mics and very drunk people that runs much slower and later than Eastern Standard Time.

But my biggest concern was actually just getting into these shows, as most of them are open to the unwashed masses (though to be fair, many of the badge holders could’ve used a shower as well).  While many of these shows wouldn’t sell out, several of the ones that were high on my list seemed like they might, and I didn’t want to find myself getting turned away all over town after spending all that money on cab fare to get there on time.  So my plan of attack was mostly to just get to a club plenty early to see one band I really was crazy about, even if it meant my options for the earlier time slots in the evening were limited to whatever was going on at the club I happened to be at.

Over the next few days I’m going to describe my three nights of sleepless rocking out at CMJ 2009, along with some closing thoughts about the festival itself.

All of which reminds me that I have decided to try to dig deep into my memory to try to reconstruct my life as a concert-goer since my first concert (Metallica and The Cult at Pine Knob, if I’m not mistaken) to my most recent, which would probably be the Santana-esque blues guitarist I saw wailing a week or two ago at Macri Park with his whole family gathered around him grimly, holding up a sign about Jesus. A daunting project, and probably impossible, but I think that what I do pull back will be a delight.

Here’s a video of Feist dueting on a David Byrne track to close out the first half of the show:

The next post is a tossed-off backlashy piece on Asher Roth’s gross video full of facials, sadly dragging the inimitable Cee-Lo Green into his annoyinig fraternity.  You know, I worry that I’m being a little reverse-racist about this, holding him to some higher standard because of his whiteness.  But I actually think that I just don’t like his flow and find his smug sense of privelege too little to outweigh the usual crap I let more talented, equally-misogynist rappers get away with.    The production’s fun, though.