@ZackTeibloom The Coachella line-up dropped in the middle of the night Tuesday. Thankfully, I had just nodded off, or I would have been up all night obsessing and driving you crazy with a million tweets about it. I spent most of this morning pouring over it, letting it’s pure awesomeness come over me in waves. I can still barely process it. They managed to get 6/10 artists from my best albums of 2009. All 3 of my top shows of ACL.

My first reaction was: “COACHELLA LINE-UP: Jay-z, Muse, Gorillaz, Pavement, Thom Yorke, Vampire Weekend, Them Crooked Vultures, LCD Soundsystem, Phoenix, MGMT<-wow.” In my initial 10 I managed to leave off Jack White and The Dead Weather, Sly and the Family Stone, Spoon, Passion Pit, Miike Snow, Yo La Tengo, Kevin Devine, Ra Ra Riot, She and Him and the Dirty Projectos. I would travel to California just for the second set of performers I listed. It’s so deep that there are two festivals worth of acts. There’s something special going on here. Is this the best festival line-up we’ve ever seen? Let’s break it down. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom Picture yourself in the Waterloo parking lot. The nicest January day you’ve ever felt. A shield-your-eyes-it’s-so-sunny afternoon. Picture the biggest band to come out of Austin in the last decade playing for free. It feels like I’m quoting a Spoon song, doesn’t it? Actually, I’m kind of quoting two. It’s the kind of thing you pick up on when you see a band you really like, but don’t love for the fifth time. You notice how Britt does the same “I’m playing the guitar like a machine gun” squatting pose, plays with his frizzy/matted down hair (depending on how he pushed it off his face last.) You notice how much of a rockstar he looks like with the leather jacket and sunglasses. How Australian he looks with his sunglasses off. You notice they start two songs the exact same way. Picture it.  Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 1,000th Festival Crashers post. It’ll be a lot like our 500th post. Wait, you don’t remember our 500th post? Oh, yeah. We never posted it. Hopefully it makes this even more special for you. It’s a best-of. We dug through all our old posts, re-read them and found our favorites for you. It brought back a lot of memories. We didn’t even know what we were going to become when we started.

Our first ever post was a musing by Andy. It’s pretty hilarious to read now: “No, we aren’t going to literally crash festivals and sneak in without tickets or passes. It’s more of a challenge for ourselves. A way to set the bar for our festival participation and provide a view through the looking glass at our musical adventures.” So much for that plan. In the 1,000 posts (and almost 2 years) we’ve been to Langerado, SXSW, Jazz Fest, Lollapalooza (2), Mile High, Bonnaroo (2), ACL (2), Rothbury (2), Pitchfork (2), 10KLF (2), Summer Camp and Fun Fun Fun Fest. It’s been a lot of adventures to say the least.

Do me a favor. Bookmark this page. E-mail it to yourself. Something. You’ll want to come back to this. Unless you’re Sami or Hodge or our parents, odds are you haven’t read all of these. I hope you put in the time reading whatever links draw your interest. OK, enough groveling. Thanks for all your support in the first thousand posts. Here’s to a few thousand more.

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@ZackTeibloom With the festival season on hold until March’s SXSW, I decided to start a new blog dedicated to everything vinyl-related in Austin. “The Collectors” will be a regular feature of Austin Vinyl, where my blog partner @RachelDonnan and I go into the home of Austin’s vinyl collectors, gush over what they’ve amassed and wish we could afford it. WOXY DJ and vinyl-lover @Shivvy invited @RachelDonnan and me into his home to talk about our love of all things vinyl and let us dig through his 1,000+ records Saturday afternoon.

As we moved from room to room to dig through each box of albums, it was clear @Shivvy had a little speech prepared for us to explain the origins of his passion for vinyl. “My mother put those gigantic 1970’s headphones on her stomach when I was in utero,” he says proudly. He went on to say that the early exposure to music caused him to freak out whenever music wasn’t playing, so he was given a stereo for his third birthday. He only had two albums then (Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and the Grease Soundtrack,*) but that was all it took for his vinyl obsession to begin. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom Every week is free week for Festival Crashers, but now all y’all Austinites get to play. And you don’t have to fake-stamp your hand, attempt the backdoor slider, construct a badge or try the scoot-in. Free week’s been going strong in Austin for a few nights now, but lucky for you it’s still going. Festival Crashers huddled around a heat lamp for The Boxing Lesson and were so entranced by The Quiet Company that we edged closer and closer to get the full experience. It was a strong enough show for us to anoint The Quiet Company our “favorite band in Austin” tag. Check out all the shows coming up this week and find your new favorite. And when this week’s over I’ll show you how to crash again. It can be like this every week if you want it. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom At least we have best-of lists to get us through December. As great as it is to find out about all the music I didn’t get the rest of the year, I wish we could come to a consensus and make it like the all-star game and do lists at the halfway point. It gets to be overwhelming to see all these lists at once. Maybe these aren’t your favorites yet, but if you see an album on a list a few times, get yourself a copy of it. I advise that you take the lists as a to-do list. It’s really not about rankings (though I guess I do get obsessed with them the rest of the year.) Hopefully we’ll all have different lists of ‘09 in a few months. We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.

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@ZackTeibloom You might want to hold off on your best-of 2009 lists until we actually finish the year. I’ve seen a few “best concerts of ‘09″ lists that lean heavily on tour openers,** but there’s something to be said for tour enders. With nothing coming up, the band holds nothing back. They’ll take a longer encore. Run out into the crowd. Try alternate breakdowns. Let you up on stage. They’ll sing the chorus of their hit song over and over and over from the rafters. And, if it’s Phoenix, they’ll do it all with that “Really? You like us this much?!” genuine gratitude you won’t see from anyone not named Regina. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom Cinderella stayed home this year. All the top seeds moved on except for a slight upset of “Birthday Sex” over “We Made You.” I’d like to think that I swung that upset with my preposterous morning after pill argument and comeback rule, but odds are you’re just sick of Eminem. Unless you followed your indie-rock heart, you did quite well in round 1 (sorry, Laura and Joanne.)

Don’t fret, though. Last year Zelin went 6/8 in the first round and still won it all, so there’s hope for almost all of you. Points are worth one point in round one, so look for your name* and the score. Points double next round, so make sure to vote, and please spread the word. I gotta say, it would be nice to see a few more tweets and Facebook status updates alerting people to vote. How about this: We’ll throw in a prize to whoever hypes the contest the best in the next couple weeks. And we’ll make it a good one… Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom It’s Thanksgiving, and even though I’m spending the holiday alone at my desk with $20 worth of BBQ from Rudy’s, I really do have a lot to be thankful for this year. I have the coolest, most supportive, loving dad and sister in the world, a wonderful extended family, incredible friends in Austin and Chicago and all over the festival world and my life is full of music. I’m a lucky boy. Since I won’t be at a table making awkward thanksgiving toasts, I wanted to count my musical blessings here with you.

I’m thankful to be living in the “live music capital of the world” where festival season runs from March’s epic SXSW (where bars I’d never set foot in turn into three stages worth of rock) through November’s Fun Fun Fun. It’s Where ACL lives to bring Dave Grohl and Jack White to me with a new band every year. Where Fun Fun Fun happens on my birthday and is short a few hundred funs in its title. Where Stubbs has brisket tacos to go nicely with everyone (from Andrew Bird to Metallica to TV on the Radio to Animal Collective to Spoon) and there’s so many colored wristbands I can collect, I don’t have to pay for one show. Where Mohawk has the back door always propped open just enough for me to crash. Where Emo’s lets me get on stage to sing with Bang Camaro. Where Scoot-Inn lets me dance on stage with Neiliyo and The Hood Internet. Where everyone I know is a DJ or concert photographer or blogger or thinks they are. Austin, I love you. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom The first SXSW bands are out. They’re all international and, odds are, you haven’t heard of them. That’s OK. We’ve got four more months of SXSW prep work to do. I don’t know if there are any festivals until March¹, and the full band list is going to be jaw-droppingly large, so lets get started now. There will be several hundred acts on the list before everything’s said and done. Depending on how big a nerd you are, you’ll know between 5% and 15% of them. Any more than that and you probably book bands for a living.

In realizing that I hadn’t even heard of these bands, I decided to come up with a grouping of how intimately we know bands. I broke them down into six categories from your all-time favorites to the guys you’ve never heard of. Why? It’ll all make sense at the end. I think. Read the rest of this entry »