Its been a crazy summer with lots going on largest of which is that this bird has flown the coop! That’s right, cuckoobird.net is now coming to you from the live music capital of the world, Austin, TX! It’s been a long muggy, rainy, hot summer here in Austin but so far I’m loving it.

I’ve taken in many excellent shows which will be the subject of future posts. Some of those shows include:

• Sonny Wolf at Friends
• Erik Hokkanen at Flipnotics
• South Austin Jug Band at Threadgills

Austin City Limits Festival is just around the corner and I’m really looking forward to it. From this point forward, this blog is dedicated to all things Austin, music and otherwise. Thanks for reading!

Last month, the 34th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival was amazing and hosted one of the best lineups in years including Los Lobos, Alison Krauss, Peter Rowan and Tony Rice Quartet (featuring the angelic Sharon Gilchrist), Guster, Greensky Bluegrass, Jackie Greene, Yonder Mountain String Band, Sam Bush, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Chris Thile, Sparrow Quartet , The Infamous Stringdusters, Crooked Still and tons more.

The Peter Rowan and Tony Rice Quartet was what I might consider to be the best set I’ve experienced in 10 consecutive years of going to Telluride Bluegrass. I love Peter Rowan, but what he’s done is to create the ultimate musical atmosphere for Tony Rice to showcase his jaw dropping guitar. And I also think that Sharon Gilchrist is one of the most amazing new mandolin players on the scene. I’ve seen her play with Uncle Earl and Mary and Mars and its so great to see her up on the stage with two Bluegrass gods!


Jackie Greene was another highlight of this year’s festival for me. He’s such an amazingly talented young songwriter and he reminds me of a cross between Tom Petty and Bob Dylan. The combination of his songwriting and musical sensibility make him one of my favorite new acts. If you check him out, give his album Gone Wanderin’ a listen.

Crooked Still was another highlight of the festival that caught me completely by surprise. Their cello player, Rushad Eggleston is out of this earth doing things that I didn’t know could be done with the cello. Not to mention the sweet smooth vocal stylings of singer Aoife O’Donovan

I was delighted to see the Leftover Salmon reunion on the Town Park Stage. They were billed as Drew Emmitt, Vince Herman and friends but nobody was fooled, this was the first time that LoS has played the festival in three years so it was quite a treat and caused me to wax nostalgic a little

If you were at the festival and want to relive some of the fun or even if you weren’t, you stream or download Bela Fleck and the Flecktones entire set at archive.org. You can also stream or download Yonder Mountain’s set from Telluride Bluegrass 2007.

I was having so much fun that I only got to take a couple photos and none were of any of the performers. Fortunately flickr has got you covered!

There is a video out for the first single off the Beastie Boys new album The Mix-Up which is entirely instrumental featuring no sampling or vocals.

The song is called The Rat Cage and the video is very cool in an old school sort of way. I love how these guys can put out amazing music no matter what tools they use to make it. I can’t wait to hear the whole album.

Check it out:

Check out this very cool homemade video that the boys from the south of Austin put out. What a cool Beck cover. Its as if the song was written to be played on bluegrass instruments which doesn’t surprise me because Beck has very traditional influences.

Unless we do something about it now, Internet radio will cease to exist on May 15. The Library of Congress judges that oversee copyright statutory licenses have decided to enact a per play royalty model to replace the profit based royalty model that exists now. This causes a 1200% raise in royalty fees for small time radio broadcasters.

This is an atrocity that is sure to put just about every Internet radio broadcaster out of business and forcing radio fans back to the half dozen top 20 radio stations that FM has to offer. Here is an excellent article in Newsweek that features David Byrne . If you care about Internet radio, please check out Savenetradio.org to see what you can do.

Here is an excellent performance that Ryan Adams and his band The Cardinals did on The Henry Rollins Show. One thing that this video makes me realize is that Adams is a killer guitarist. (via)

Stereogum has posted a new Flaming Lips song called The Supreme Being Teaches Spiderman To Love that is to be featured in the Spiderman 3 soundtrack. The song is very cool and remains true to the bizarre sound the Lips have perfected. Check it out!

I’m such a YouTube junkie. I’ll go on YouTube in search of something and find myself browsing videos for hours. One cool side effect Youtube is having is that it is bringing back music videos. Cuckoobird favorite Todd Snider has some excellent music videos on YouTube including the following two which I hope you get as much of a kick out of as I did.

The first is a hilarious video for a song Called Looking For A Job which features Todd driving around in a van convincing people to quit there jobs and go party with him:

The second is a video for the song called Iron Mike’s Main Man’s Last Request which features some well placed footage of Mike Tyson. The video was produced by Fifth Column Films who’ve done a very good job, really driving home the point of the song:

A friend told me about an art exhibit called Sacred Art: The Tibetan Mandala going on at Xavier University. The university is hosting a live video feed of Buddhist monks from Drepung Gomang Monastic College in Mundgod, India creating a sand mandala. If you’ve ever wanted to see the creation (and destruction) of a sand mandala here is your chance. The web cam will be streaming over the next four days.

According to the website:
Explore Tibetan traditions with Buddhist monks from Drepung Gomang Monastic College in Mundgod, India. During five days at the University, the monks will create a sand mandala and teach such arts as butter sculpture and sand painting. The mandala will be dissassembled in the closing ceremony and, in accordance with tradition, each attendee will receive a bag of sand.

Gomang College is the oldest of four colleges of the Drepung Monastery, which was founded in 1416 near Lhasa, Tibet. Following the Communist China invasion of 1959, about 100 monks fled Tibet with the Dalai Lama. In 1969, the 62 surviving Gomang monks set about reestablishing their college in India. Events such as Sacred Art provide support for the monks’ community and other Tibetans in exile.

For more information about the Gomang Monastery visit www.gomang.org.

I’ve always loved the vintage aesthetic to this recording. It gives me a good sense of what it might have been like to live in San Francisco during the sixties and bear witness to all sorts of spontaneous musical events. Janis‘ heart wrenching voice is accompanied by the fingerstyle sounds of Jorma Kaukonen on the guitar.

Recorded on June 30, 1964, they call it The Typewriter Tape because you can hear a typewriter in the background played by Margareta Kaukonen (Jorma’s wife at the time) as a percussion instrument. Check it out:

1. Trouble In Mind

2. Long Black Train

3. Kansas City Blues (false start)

4. Kansas City Blues

5. Hesitation Blues

6. (strumming)

7. Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out

8. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy