I love me some Schlotzsky’s.
They were one of the pioneering eateries to offer free Wi-Fi, and at least in Texas, they are pretty much everywhere. (Darn it. I saw something about a Schlotzsky’s opening in New York or maybe New Jersey after I just left there recently.)
Anywho … great sandwiches and you can just blog and tweet and Facebook and IM and whatever in their shops — that is if you can keep your hands off The Original for a little while.
Dave Grohl said he wasn’t the world’s best drummer and probably wasn’t even the best guitar player in the room at his SXSW Keynote Speech during the festival’s music week. But, along the way to superstardom he was left to his own devices and found his own voice.
The weirdness keeps on keeping on here in Austin for yet another day at SXSW — the South By Southwest Festival — which brings together the worlds of film, music and interactive for one big burnt orange rave – 24/7.
The PingWi-Fi contingent has drifted in and out between the three categories listed above for live music, film red carpets and blogger lounges. All over the city, we have sampled some of the world’s best Wi-Fi access from the funky blended juices at Halcyon at 4th & Lavaca to the mysterious tribal elixirs of SquareRüt way out south on South Congress to the perennial favorite coffee at Mozart’s on the lake.
I guess I just have a knack for being in the right place at the right time … sort of. Because out of all the hundreds of concerts where Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips has hopped inside his space ball and walked over the audience, flawlessly, the PingWi-Fi team picked the one show where everything went wrong. Two thirds into Coyne’s space walk over the people in the crowd, the power at his show in Denton, Texas went dead. The lights went black. The sound went silent … and there was Wayne, marooned way back in the back of the crowd, frantically trying to turn the ball around and head back to the safety of the stage.
Last night may have been one of The Fort’s finest hours. In a relatively small venue – Live Oak off Magnolia — Fort Worth music heads circled up around one of the best musicians in the world — Donald Fagen … composer, producer, studio musician extraordinaire, co-founder of and singer for one of the true supergroups — Steely Dan.
Rather than some arena rock spectacle or an elaborate black-tie classic concert for PBS, it was local band — Oh Whitney — that brought the Steely one to Cowtown for a little pickup game.
The Clash, 1983 – pingwi-fi.com
Do you know a band we should talk with while we’re at SXSW in a few weeks? Send us press information …
Meanwhile, as we prepare for SXSW music/interactive/film in Austin, we thought it would be fun to post a few things from our archives … a few of our favorite things from the art side of PingWi-Fi … MUSIC!. If only we had a post of our Stevie Ray Vaughan interview … (working on that). Hmmm … maybe even the Willie Dixon tapes with the founder of Buddy Magazine? Maybe …
Anywho, here’s some music from our back pages.
Rock The Casbah Director at SXSW:
The Flaming Lips further north, at NX35:
The Clash of course:
SXSE of Down Under:
Reggae from South Texas:
My cult is blue:
Ween in Boston:
Devo Is As Devo Does:
Cracker In Louisville:
Celeb Spotting at SXSW:
Smith Westerns, British Embassy
Up & Coming in Brooklyn:
More Brits at SXSW:
The Home of Tina Turner & Stax
Even Disco!:
We been Slaid:
Howdy Buckaroos:
Jerry Jeff Walker, Mr. Bojangles
Know what I sayin?
I opened my big mouth last year and said I would grow my hair long to be donated to Locks of Love. That was about 12 inches ago. Now, not unlike a perfectly straight part down one side of the scalp, my thoughts are divided into two camps.
On the one hand, I want to keep the long, Wavy Gravy look, because frankly, I just don’t care. It is fun, no matter what others think. So … hmmm … maybe I will keep the long hair hostage here with me.
On the other hand, it may be time for a rescue to find a better head for this hair.
For years I have received cool promo pieces from a certain PR group that specializes in promoting rock bands. I think we first hooked up on some SXSW music event in Austin. Anywho, for the most part, they send me notes on concerts that are out of my reach. But, recently, I received a news release about some up-and-coming artist playing in Brooklyn. I was working in Manhattan, so, “Let’s do this.”
The latest installment of The Dirty Gig led me to New York to work in the aftermath of Super Storm Sandy (SSS) … Have you noticed that post-disaster is almost the only time we use the word “aftermath” anymore.
“Why … I can still remember when I was a boy and ‘Aftermath’ was a Rolling Stones album.” Ha … The Stones also blew through here shortly after Sandy left and Ping arrived. Yes we contacted the promoters. They traded a few e-mails about press passes. And then the PR person — very unprofessionally I might add — just blew us off without a “yes” or a “no.” I am not bitter … but needless to say, when a young media relations type drops the ball, I can’t get me no satisfaction. I digress …
Sometime around the third quarter of the Heart of Dallas Bowl, we tweeted this line, asking readers to complete the sentence: “Oklahoma State is beating Purdue like a ……….”
The Pingtweet offered a visual clue. We coupled the tweet with a photograph of “The Worlds’s Largest Drum,” the gigantic bass drum that travels with the Boilermakers.
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