Posts by Ace Cowboy

I’ve had a real hankering for the keys since Monday night’s Page McConnell show at the Irving Fillmore Plaza, so today I thought we’d spend a little time with some of the best to ever sit down in front of the piano, courtesy of SugarMegs… Dr. John & The Meters — 3/5/73 — Chalmette, LA Elton John […]

  It’ll take an excess of positive mojo to erase the debacle of a certain Vermont music festival, but that state’s second most famous rock foursome is itchin’ to try.

You want it all? Well, you can have it. This video’s got everything: one of the funkiest bass lines in history, awesome costumes, coordinated dance moves, a pirate ship, a Coolio sample, wicked harmonies, catchy lyrics, swordfights and gun-play (and based on some of these dance moves and costumes, probably some ass-play, too). Ladies and […]

Bonnaroo organizers just announced the members of the famed SuperJam, and like the city of Springfield, it’s all over the map. This, from Superfly: Bonnaroo continues an annual tradition with an all-star SuperJam, starting at midnight on Friday, June 15. Former Led Zeppelin bass player JOHN PAUL JONES will anchor a trio featuring one of music’s […]

Wilco’s pissed. They’re not fond of everyone writing, inaccurately, that they made a major shift in licensing policy and sold out to Volkswagen, which has begun airing commercials featuring tracks from Sky Blue Sky.

Tweedy & Co. don’t quite get the hate, and they’ve weighed in on the band’s official website. In the missive, Wilco says it likes VW automobiles and sees this as another way to “get the music out there” given the state of commercial radio. As for the media inaccuracies, they’ve produced some actual research everyone should have done on their own days ago. It’s like disclosure. It’s called disclosure, you dickhead:

If you’re keeping track, this is not the first time Wilco has licensed a song to or even been involved in a commercial — most recently a TV spot for Telefonica Mobile in Spain used a Wilco song and some years prior Jeff Tweedy appeared in a campaign for Apple Computer. Wilco have licensed hundreds of songs to television shows and films worldwide… from festival-only indie films to major motion pictures and weekly TV shows.

So far VW’s used The Thanks I Get and You Are My Face, and right now plans call for three or four more to be used. For the record, I’d much rather hear Wilco on television in between my programs than another declaration of love for freedom and liberty and America in the latest Mellencamp composition.

Wilco’s recent performance on World Cafe will air this Friday, June 8. You can listen online here at WXPN. Read on for the full text from Wilco…

As the U.S. Senate convenes this very second to debate the seemingly endless number of curious amendments to the comprehensive immigration reform bill (hey, I ain’t just music), I figure it’s high time to check in with our favorite Mexican guitar duo. The innovators of what we like to call Mariachi Metal rocked our proverbial socks […]

Page McConnell and his new five-piece returned to New York City last night for the band’s second straight gig in a recently renamed Fillmore Brand^® venue. It wasn’t difficult to predict the contents of the setlist, but the former keyboardist for the popular rock band Phish still showed why we come out to see him play.

Much like the Gramercy Theater show in April, we knew we’d hear Page’s entire album with a couple of covers thrown in for good measure. Unlike his old band, there are rarely any major surprises on this tour. So last night was more a charting of the progress of Page’s new outfit, and I must admit I’m still on the fence about this project. Only five or six of the songs he played really made me glad I went (two of them covers), and I’m also totally perplexed by the current lineup.

Still, the last three songs — Beauty of a Broken Heart, the Rolling Stones’ Monkey Man and the Cars Trucks Buses encore — were fucking off-the-charts fantastic, and if the goal is to leave ’em wanting more, Page certainly did just that. Read on after the jump for more of Nate’s great photos from the 5/31 Boston show and more completely honest thoughts from last night at Irving Plaza…

Some of you may know Akon from such memorable moments as “Thug Rapper Dry Humps 14-Year-Old Girl On Stage in Trinidad Then Runs Off, Presumably, To Spank It,” and some of you know him for his music (he has music?). Ordinarily we don’t post much about Senegalese hip-hoppers, so there’s gotta be an anecdote here, no? There is. If you […]

This one should actually be called Pullin’ Googs, but that don’t make no sense… This post serves as the official end to our questionably extensive coverage of the Third Annual Mountain Jam at Hunter Mountain, so soak up this last shot and prepare to put your oversized Warren Haynes styrofoam finger in the closet ’til next year’s […]

For it surely looks like rain: Tropical Storm Barry’s creeping up the coast, and we’re praying to all that is holy for no inclement weather at tonight’s Tea Leaf Green boat cruise around Manhattan. C’mon, Mother Nature, don’t be a filthy whore. Photo courtesy of mule.net TLG’s Josh Clark sat in on a kickass version […]

Ozomatli just took the stage at the third-annual Mountain Jam, and six more bands are ready to play behind them. Later today it’ll be Earl Greyhound, Umphrey’s McGee, New Monson, G. Love, Tea Leaf Green and a second night of Gov’t Mule. Of course, you can watch all this transpire live on the official, crystal-clear […]

We’re eschewing our regular The Kidzz Are Alright end-of-the-week segment of ‘Tubes in favor of the following video, which can only be described as “sweet ass sweet,” or “fantastically bitchin’.” Let’s start with a little Robert Palmer, add a touch of Little Feat and a dash of an old classic like Man Smart, Woman Smarter, and the […]

For the life of me, I can’t think of a single thing that connects the artists on this week’s Mix Tape to one another, or each song to one another, for that matter. Well, that’s not true — stealing from everyone’s favorite fictional postal worker, these are all people that have never been in my kitchen. […]

Supergroup Awesomeness ain’t just for the first-tier all-stars. Whoever said the lesser-known jazz and funk musicians of our generation can’t have some fun, too?

The unheralded but probably pretty fucking awesome Fully Loaded resurfaced for a show out in San Francisco recently, and now they’re taking their “six shots of deadly funk” on the road. The band, formed by saxomophonist Cochemea “Cheme” Gastelum, features GBA’s Chris Stillwell on bass, Will Bernard on guitar, Chuck Prada on percussion, Anthony Farrell on keys and perpetual free-agent Adam Deitch on the kit. The potential for nastiness is on its way eastward…

Let’s take a quick listen to Fully Loaded rip a mean Bidi Man, a song written by Chris Stillwell and made famous by those lovable Greyboy Allstars.

• Read on after the jump for full(y loaded) tour dates
• All tickets for these shows are available at boomboomtickets.com

Everyone’s favorite new-shirted keyboardist returned to his familiar perch last night in support of the release of his eponymous album. Page McConnell gathered his four new bandmates and kicked off a brief 13-show tour of the East Coast, the Midwest and Georgia last night at Higher Ground in Burlington. You gotta hand it to the guy for really checkin’ out some new venues…

His ol’ bandmate from the popular rock band Phish, Mike Gordon, sat in on Back in the Basement (click here to watch the jam on YouTube), probably causing some serious “We’re Halfway to Phish” erections from the Vermont faithful. We’ll be seeing Page on Monday night when he rolls through Irving Plaza (sorry, it ain’t the Fillmore to me, yet), and I’m sure we’ll have a full report on whether he’s still sticking that foul thing in his ear.

5/30/07 Setlist: Heavy Rotation, Runaway Bride, Maid Marian, Memories Can’t Wait^, Beauty Of A Broken Heart, Final Flight*, Rules I Don’t Know, Close To Home, Complex Wind, Back In The Basement %, Everyone But Me

Encore: Strange Design**, Stuck In The Middle With You#

^ Talking Heads
* Vida Blue
% with Mike Gordon on bass
# Stealers Wheel

• Click here to watch Strange Design and Stuck in the Middle With You
• Previously on HT: Page at High Sierra; Turn The Page: McConnell Moves Forward and The Chairman Returns to the Boards
• Read on after the jump for full remaining tour dates

We’ll start the morning off with some lighthearted douchebaggery. Our friend bcrider dug up this video of Built To Spill‘s Doug Martsch performing I Would Hurt a Fly on the street somewhere. The music’s pretty good, but the visuals are fantastic. Check out this friggin’ doofus rockin’ out in Martsch’s face — as Monk says, […]

It might be strange to click on HT and find video post in this department about a country music singer-songwriter, but there’s more to this edition of Pullin’ ‘Tubes than a David Allan Coe tune from 1983. See, there’s a lead guitarist situated to Coe’s immediate right, and he kinda looks familiar. I’d say it looks like a […]

It’ll take an excess of positive mojo to erase the debacle of a certain Vermont music festival, but that state’s second most famous rock foursome is itchin’ to try. Come July 21-22, RAQ will welcome all comers to the second installment of the Lew-Au, the band’s very own festival on Hillcrest Farms in Newport, Vermont.

I’m not sure throwing a festival down the street from the Great Coventry Trainwreck of 2004 is the best way to draw a like-minded crowd, but if the rapidly growing, rabidly impassioned fanbase is any true indication of what’s in store, RAQ should have no problem expanding on the 600 attendees that braved a foul-weather weekend in August 2005 for the first Lew-Au.

The band made the initial Lew-Au II announcement at RAQ’s most recent trip to New York’s Bowery Ballroom, a truly raging part of last month’s otherwise lackluster Green Apple Music Festival. That night’s show displayed the immense kind of talent each individual band member possesses, and it’s always a genuine pleasure for me to watch a group of musicians so at ease on stage, having fun with each other and whipping the crowd into a total frenzy. I like a total frenzy.

I caught up with RAQ just before they went on stage that night, and I was surprised by how level-headed and grounded they were. Read on after the jump for parts of my conversation with RAQ, fantastic pictures from Jonathan Healey and a clear soundboard matrix of the audio sodomy unveiled at the Bowery…

The Police Week continues here on Hidden Track, and so does the so-called East Coast Bias many of you sports fans decry on a regular basis. First, SportsCenter shows nonstop Red Sawx-Yankees highlights, now The Police adds to more shows in Boston and New York. Hey, maybe Roger Clemens will sit in with the trio… Sting, Andy […]

Our friend Gragek recently implored us to forget all the versions of Frankenstein and Boogie On Reggae Woman that we’d ever heard and check out Marcus Miller‘s renditions instead. So I downloaded Miller’s 2005 album Silver Rain, which contains both covers, and I’ve already listened to the whole record twice over. Miller’s the former bassist for Miles Davis, […]