SXSW 2011

SXSW AUSTIN TX MARCH 2011

THURSDAY 03-16:
2pm:  JL & SKULL ORCHARD - BALLARD PARTY at TROPHY’S - 2008 S. Congress
3.50pm: JL & SKULL ORCHARD - DOGFISH HEAD party GINGERMAN - 301 Lavaca St
4.30pm: WACO BROS - DOGFISH HEAD party GINGERMAN
7pm:  JL & SKULL ORCHARD & friends (acoustic) - YARD DOG
- 1510 S. Congress – (Skull Orchard Revisited BOOK LAUNCH)
MIDNITE:  JL & SKULL ORCHARD (SXSW Showcase) - Continental Club
– 1315 S. Congress

FRIDAY 03-17:
2pm-3pm:  JL – SXSW panel at convention center (room 16b)
5pm:  WACO BROS - Bloodshot Party at Yard Dog
8.15:  JL & SKULL ORCHARD - Roof top party at CHEERS SHOT BAR - 416 E 6th St

SATURDAY 03-18:
2pm: WACO BROS Twang fest Party at JOVITA’S - 1619 S. First St
5- 5.30pm: JL & SKULL ORCHARD – YARD DOG PARTY
7PM: WACO BROS (acoustic) Music Fog videotaping at THREADGILLS
– 301 W. Riverside Drive
11pm: WACO BROS – BLOODSHOT SXSW Showcase at Red Eye Fly
- 715 Red River Street

Free Deno CD

Deano has made a new cd available for download.

Deano from Waco Brothers: New Songs with Meat Purveyors

First 2011 Tour Dates

January 8, 2010
Dollar Store w/ The Mediums @ The Friendly Tap
Doors-9 p.m.
6733 12th Street
Berwyn, IL 60402
(708) 484-9794
www.friendlytap.net

Sunday, 16 January 2011 at 19:30
Skull Orchard Acoustic Show w/ Pinky
Irish American Heritage Center-Chicago, IL

Thursday, 20 January 2011 at 8:30
Waco Brothers
Mayne Stage-Chicago, IL

Friday, 21 January 2011 at 8:30
Waco Brothers
Bands for Bell School Benefit
Martyrs-Chicago, IL

Saturday, 22 January 2011 at 8:30
Waco Brothers
Bar None-Springfield, IL

Saturday, 05 February 2011 at 19:30
Skull Orchard Acoustic Show w/ Pinky
Barnabas Arts House-New Ruperra St Newport NP20 2BB

Sunday 06 February at 20:00
Jon Langford & Jim Elkington (Skull Orchard Acoustic)
Opening for DEAF SCHOOL
Leeds, UK

Wednesday, 09 February 2011 at 21:00
Skull Orchard Acoustic Show w/ Pinky
The Windmill-Brixton, London

Sunday, 20 February 2011 at 20:00
Jon Langford
Philly Beer Bash
North Star Bar-Philadelphia, PA

Saturday, 26 February 2011 at 20:00
Skull Orchard Acoustic Show w/ Pinky
Off Broadway- St Louis, MO

Jon Langford videos

Sept 22: Friendly Tap

Haiti benefit

BENEFIT FOR HAITI AT THE HIDEOUT THIS MONDAY 18TH JAN

THE WACO BROTHERS

ELEVENTH DREAM DAY

Show starts 8pm

Eleventh Dream Day at 8.15pm

Wacos at 9.15pm

$20 admission.  All door proceeds go to Partners in Health (pih.org)

Christmas time’s a comin

You can listen to Bob Dylan’s new one or you can see the Wacos (as usual). Look at the tour dates, they are forever changin.

There’s a new blog in town!

Welcome to the new Waco Brothers www home. I launched this site just a short while ago - and hope it’s an improvement to the old one which got terribly lousy over the years.

Waco Express: Live and Kicking at Schubas Tavern

Songlist:

Reviews:

Bloodshot says:

Full of shout-along manifestos and strident tomfoolery from each of their seven studio albums, Waco Express lives up to the mandate given to the mastering engineer to “err on the side of massive, fierce and overwhelming.” Critical darlings since their unleashing, featuring a scribe-ready lineup of members from the Mekons, Jesus Jones, Wreck, Gang of Four and others, as well as a genre-bending fearlessness, the Waco Brothers have always saved their best for the stage. The live shows, particularly at SXSW and CMJ, are events of genuine reverence for their leave-it-all-out-there-this-
should-be-FUN-dammit convictions. Over the years, this fervor has resulted in an onstage wedding proposal betwixt two fans (SXSW ‘02), a riot (Edinburgh ‘03), and a thousand and one lost nights of sweaty, happy reverie.

Sadly, there’s always been the undercurrent of grousing, as good as the studio albums are, that, well, it’s not like BEING there. Well, now it is. On Waco Express, you can practically feel the heat from the stage, smell the smoke on your clothes, taste the beery taste of beer and let your ears bask in the un-tempered wall of sound.

When the first Wacos CD hit the streets in 1995, punk AND country were lying torpid, shaming their respective populist histories. Fifteen years later, the problem has gotten nothing but worse, with one shilling for cruise lines and luxury cars and the other blathering on with a jingoistic fervor not seen since Remember the Maine! Quite frankly, we need the Wacos now more than ever.

“Everything here is bristling with energy, righteous anger and driving, emphatic rock’n'roll.” Iowa City Press Citizen

“It’s a potent mix, the headlong rush alongside well-worn skill, the half-drunken banter next to razor sharp social commentary, and it comes across as unstudied, no, as a force of nature in this uniformly excellent CD. The only problem with this album is that it reminds you, like a kick in the head, that you should have been at this show, instead of only hearing it second hand. That’s the acid test for the best concert recordings, and Waco Express passes easily.” “PopMatters.com

“While they’ve never risen above cult-hero status, this superbly recorded live document will leave you wondering why…the band is shit hot [and] they serve up all killer, no filler.” Mike Usinger No Depression

“This collection of songs is strong enough to sub for the Waco Brothers “Greatest Hits” album that in a better world would be filling an end cap at a newly unionized Wal-Mart.” allmusic.com

Greil Marcus: Elephant dancing: why the new Waco Brothers album is not just “live” but alive

Four songs into their uproarious Waco Express: Live & Kickin’ at Schubas Tavern (Bloodshot), the Waco Brothers combine pure blues, honky-tonk country, and stand-up comedy. They’re a so-called mutant country band composed mostly of U.K. expatriates–guitarist Jon Langford, mandolinist Tracey Dear, bassist Alan Doughty, drummer Steve Goulding–plus steel guitarist Mark Durante and guitarist Dean Schlabowske, both originally from Milwaukee.

With Waco Express it doesn’t matter whether you get out much or not; you’re right there in Schubas Tavern as if you’re there five nights a week. The musicians have brought their beers onstage, they’re pushing and insulting each other, greeting friends in the crowd, announcing themselves with “Waco Express,” which inevitably comes off as a version of “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees.” They bash their way through three songs. And then something breaks–a glass, the space-time continuum, lightning striking through the roof, it doesn’t matter. Everything is different.

It’s one of those moments that can happen only in a small club or a hall where the crowd is on its feet because there’s nowhere to sit down. It’s a sense of event: Something is about to happen. No, something has already happened–the emotional weather has changed. “This song’s about a red brick wall, arrrgggghhhh!” Langford screams, all but spewing Guinness along with the words. And then it’s as if the band isn’t playing the song but chasing it. An exploding pattern of low guitar sparks makes a sound so hard you can almost touch it.

Schlabowske is standing tall in the middle, telling his tale of woe–drunk in an alley, consumed by guilt, lost and abandoned, trussed up on a bed like a pig. That he sounds more corn-fed than James Stewart only makes the pictures his words draw in your head more ludicrous. And then he says something you don’t expect.

On the day of his death I built JFK a shrine
Well, on the day of his death I built JFK a
shrine

Suddenly, the classic form of thousands and thousands of blues songs, where the setup of a repeated first line (”I can set right here look on Jackson Avenue/I can set right here look on Jackson Avenue”) is completed by a third line that feels inevitable as soon as you hear it (”I can see everything that my good woman do”) is turned inside out. Inevitable? “I built JFK a shrine”? What could follow that? The music rushes forward, but the song suspends itself; the break between the repeated first two lines and the third is filled with suspense.

I’ve never heard anything like it–and that the third line, now the punch line, falls just short of the first is, somehow, absolutely right.

“Red Brick Wall” isn’t the best song on Waco Express–it isn’t even close. It merely raises the stakes, to the point where Langford’s even faster, harsher, brutally bitter “Hell’s Roof” can take so much out of someone who just stumbled in for a good time, you might feel the band ought to pay the audience rather than the other way around. Schlabowske is back with the gorgeous, swirling motel-room ballad “If You Don’t Change Your Mind.” “Harm’s Way” is a happy-go-lucky stampede so bright and mindless (”Well, every time I think of my baby, working in that old coal mine/I feel so doggone guilty, I–”) you know nothing can go wrong. One song before the throwaway closer that lets the band off the stage to join everyone else at the bar, there is “Revolution Blues.” With big, dramatic flourishes, voices making cheesy horror-movie “woo-woo-woo’s,” the beat moving like a runaway stagecoach without a driver, Schubas Tavern falls away.

It’s Neil Young’s song about the Manson family. When he sang it on On the Beach in 1974, the pace was slow, almost lazy, the voice laconic, a hipster’s knowing smile behind every line: “I’ll kill them in their cars.” As Langford races through the territory, half-scared, half out for blood, you catch that like a flash of light if you catch it at all. You feel the tension, all but scraping your skin. Something terrible is about to happen. No, it’s worse than that: Something terrible has already happened, and you’ve forgotten what it was. The song moves too fast, its words buried in its drive: The Waco Brothers aren’t going to tell you what happened, only that it did.

A lot of good nights out don’t give you that much to take home, that much to keep you awake.

Electric Waco Chair

Songlist:
1. It’s Not Enough (Langford vocals)
2. Make Things Happen (Deano)
3. Mighty Fall (Langford)
4. Jamaican Radio Obituary (Deano)
5. Walking on Hell’s Roof Looking At the Flowers (Langford)
6. Cornered (Tracy Dear)
7. Where in the World (Deano)
8. When I Get My Rewards (Langford)
9. Circle Tour — (Deano)
10. Nothing to Say (Langford)
11. Fox River (Deano)
12. Dragging My Own Tombstone (Langford)
13. Never Real (Deano)

Reviews:

(From Daryl Walsh who posted it to a bloodshot mailing list)

Waco Brothers new disc, Electric Waco Chair, is exceptional. The band left out the horns and, for the most part, keys on this one and created a collection of distinct songs only occasionally reminiscent of anything they’ve done in the past. There are no ‘See Willy Fly By’ or ‘Cowboy in Flames’ punk-country songs on this one–a mellower feel over all. Produced by Ken Sluiter (producer for many Chicago bands, including the Mekons) the songs all sound polished without sounding over-produced. Heard the Waco’s perform several of these songs live at goose fest (and even more during the waco’s 2nd set saturday inside the pub) andwhile they struck me as different from the rest of the waco’s songs, they make the live show that much more interesting.

1. It’s Not Enough (Langford vocals)
– a festive song, straight from the islands. Would fit well on the Mekons’ last release. The band played this one during the early set at goose fest and again at night inside the pub. “I’ll be trying to change the channel/As my life goes flashing by”

2. Make Things Happen (Deano)
– bouncy, upbeat song (yeah, odd words to describe a waco’s song);for some reason, evokes images of BJ and the Bear. great tune. also performed during goose fest.

3. Mighty Fall (Langford)
– slow, deliberate tennessee waltz pace to this song. sounds like a Sally song (maybe similar to something off of John and Sally’s summer release?).

4. Jamaican Radio Obituary (Deano)
– john rice’s fiddle all over this mid-tempo song gives it a loozyanna flavor. one of the best on the disc.

5. Walking on Hell’s Roof Looking At the Flowers (Langford)
– this one starts with just John singing Billy-Bragg-like over a guitar and then the band kicks in and the song takes off into a Sovines-meet-the- Clash lorry-stop special.

6. Cornered (Tracy Dear)
– Breezy, latin flavored song with desperado lyrics, makes you wanna dance.

7. Where in the World (Deano)
– crunchy,driving verses juxtaposed against a soaring, sing-along chorus.

8. When I Get My Rewards (Langford)
wacos version of an oft-covered Paul Kennerly tune.

9. Circle Tour — (Deano)
second song on this disc to reference Grand Rapids (not sure if the reference to Grand Rapids in Jamaican Radio Obit is in reference to Minn or Mich) this song’s explictily about Michigan… a train like backbeat behind the most interesting, sparse music on the disc ( with Kelly Hogan on backing vocals).

10. Nothing to Say (Langford)
– Plenty Tuff Union Made, Pt II (and yet it sounds a little like a john mellencamp song).

11. Fox River (Deano)
– Jagger vocals over Keith Richards guitar and an organ in the background.

12. Dragging My Own Tombstone (Langford)
– Mekons flavored song about working too much for too little.

13. Never Real (Deano)
— laconic song about drinking and moving on…perfect closer.

i’ve included some of the above tracks in the following myplay mix:
http://myplay.winamp.com/mp/playlist/now_playing.jsp? plid=277632&start=1
to listen, cut and paste the entire url into your browser’s address field. it ends with a ‘1′
DMCA rules restrict how these mixes are made (e.g, no more than 3 songs from an album per 3 hours, mix has to be at least 5 hours, no consecutive songs by the same artist, yadda, yadda, yadda) so the waco’s songs are at the following points in the mix:
mix-track 4 ‘It’s Not Enough’ (track 1 on the cd)
track 6: ‘Make Things Happen’
track 9: ‘Walking on Hell’s Roof Looking at the Flowers’
there’s a couple more Electric Waco Chair songs near the end of the mix (when the myplay filter was satisfied that they were far enough away from the above 3 songs.)

Assorted selections from others artists buffer the waco’s tracks.

Greil Marcus: On the “Salon” website:

It seems certain now that on record the self-proclaimed Last Dead Cowboys will never get close to their live sound, where a vehemence that seems to come out of the ground is summoned to overwhelm any mere songs, and so burns the songs into your heart. On record they’re closer to the ’70s English country band Brinsley Schwarz, which is nothing to be sorry about, unless you want to judge all those you find wanting, which dead cowboys tend to do. Here the vocals alternating between Jon Langford and Dean Schlabowske produce the sense of a conversation between friends who see the world in the same way and feel everything differently. Defeat is the primary condition of their lives, but while for Langford defeat is the only condition of life he trusts, and so in a way he loves it, can trust himself only when he’s looking up from the bottom, Schlabowske will never be at home in his misery, even if he’s never lived anywhere else. He’s Hank Williams, still singing about hope long after he should have learned it’ll never knock; Langford is Williams’ biographer, saying all those things Williams could never say out loud. CDNOW:

Take six Chicago-based British and American punk/industrial veterans and force-feed them Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, and you get the Waco Brothers. Known for their rabble-rousing live shows, until now the Wacos, fueled by who knows how many cases of beer, appeared to record their albums in a single day. Electric Waco Chair their fifth release, sounds like the band finally decided to make an album that stands up to repeated listening, and they’ve more than succeeded. The 13 tracks range from classic rants by Waco/Mekons frontman Jon Langford to Dean Schlabowske’s laconic alt-country offerings. “History’s written by the winner / This is a loser’s song,” Langford sings on “Walking on Hell’s Roof Looking at the Flowers,” whose title pretty much sums up the Wacos scorched-earth lyrical attitude.
But the faint of heart should fear not: Jangly, radio-friendly tunes, such as “Make Things Happen” and “It’s Not Enough,” add balance to the bluster, making for a truly satisfying listen.
Dan Kening
CDNOW Contributing Writer
Call it electric waco slippers:

From Checkout.com:

As The Waco Brothers mature into a real band rather than just another of Jon Langford’s many side projects, Dean Schlabowske and Tracy Dear have tried to carry a greater amount of the songwriting weight, and their sound has taken on a more individual personality, rather than the “Mekons-with-a-twang-and-faster-tempos” sound of their debut. This didn’t work out so well on 1999’s Waco World, a somewhat muddled set that lacked the fire and focus of the group’s best work, but Electric Waco Chair finds the Wacos firmly back on track; Schlabowske and Dear are learning to deliver material just as strong as Langford’s always top-shelf work (especially “Jamaican Radio Obituary” and “Fox River”), and the band sounds tighter, stronger, and more expressive than ever before (the three live cuts also testify to the Wacos undeniable strength on stage). If Electric Waco Chair offers a bit less pure fury than the Waco Brothers’ high-water mark, Cowboy in Flames, from a musical standpoint it finds this band sounding better than ever before, and their rabble-rousing anger is still very much in evidence if you’re looking for it; the Waco Brothers are one of the very best bands to emerge from the alt-country scene, and this album proves they’re only getting better with time.

~ Mark Deming

From DAA: Dancing about architecture:

Alt-country. I mean, what the hell does that mean? Here in Chicago, it’s thrown around with almost the same regularity as terms like “wind chill” and “political corruption.” But the latter, at least, defines something — say, when your alderman pockets a five-figure bribe in exchange for a cherry city contract. On the other hand, alt-country could be practically anything — Chuck Berry, Meatloaf, Pere Ubu, Liberace, At the Drive-In, Yanni — you name it. Anything that sounds like it wouldn’t have made the soundtrack of Coal Miner’s Daughter. Since you won’t hear Loretta Lynn warbling “Walking on Hell’s Roof Looking at the Flowers” or “Make Things Happen,” call the Waco Brothers alt-country, I guess. But also recognize that this, their fifth and best long-player, is where the shtick finally hits the fan as Dean Schlabowski shoves Jon Langford toward the sometime-Mekon’s best rock and roll since The Mekons Rock ‘N’ Roll. Not that they’ve outgrown honky-tonkin’; you’ll find snatches here and there of the twang that often gets them miscast as a novelty act. But Langford’s always expressed himself best over dirty guitars and a backbeat, and this time out, he’s clearly got something to say.
Rating: 8
Rob Brookman/Tim Frommer