Robert Baird

SWSX 2007. It was the year of the female singer. And of course of Iggy. Let's do Mr. Osterberg first. South By Southwest usually saves the best for last, which always seems to mean the final act at Stubb's on Saturday night. For those unfamiliar with Austin, Stubb's is a BBQ joint, once owned by CB Stubblefield or "Stubb," a Navasota, Texas native who opened his first pit out in Lubbock after returning from the KO-rean (as they say it in Texas). While C.B. and his Lubbock restaurant are gone now, his name lives on in a line of nationally marketed sauces and in the Austin location, which has what can only charitably called a "venue" out back. Big, slanty, mudhole is more like it. Instead of an amphitheatre, Stubbs is a hillside sloping down into a gulley which collects rain, trash and chicks showing their tits to whatever heartthrob (Iggy Pop?) is onstage at the time. If it rains, forgetaboutit. Last year I stood in the rain and watched the Pretenders and promised myself nevermore. This year I watched an earlier act on the same bill, the Kings of Leon, who were absolutely wonderful except for the fact that they've now adopted a weird, pretty boy kind of look. They played a set heavy with the material from their new record, Because of the Times which was Stereophile's Recording of the Month for March, and it rocked.

The latest brave adventurer to spend his evenings running off duplicate copies on half-inch or quarter-inch tape is singer/songwriter, producer John Vanderslice, in partnership with North Carolina-based Ramseur Records, has launched a new reel-to-reel tape venture. So far Ramseur is offering three records to be put on tape: Under Branch & Thorn & Tree (2015) and You Had Me at Goodbye (2017), both from buzzworthy singer/songwriter Samantha Crain, and Fences from the group Bombadil.

When you’re old, you begin to read obits and relate to the ages of the dead. Like this from this morning: the great Teddy Pendergrass dead at 59 of colon cancer.

So the big day, September 9, Beatles Day, has come and gone and after being away on a brief trip, I returned this morning to a number of voicemails that began, “Are the Beatles reissues worth the money?”

Why didn’t sets like this appear when CD as a format still had a vital future?

Walking to the train this morning I saw a woman who was a dead ringer for Sara Carter, wife of A.P. Carter, whose leaving to marry A.P.'s cousin Coy torpedoed the famous Carter Family.