Archive: 2010

The Bamboozle Festival has just announced that MGMT will join the ever-growing roster of artists scheduled to perform at the 2010 dates set to take place at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, NJ May 1-2. This year’s high energy lineup includes the previously announced Mute Math, Girl Talk, Paramore and Tom Delonge from […]

Two months after Jeff Beck performs at Madison Square Garden along with Eric Clapton, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist will release his solo album Emotion & Commotion, his first studio LP in seven years. April 13th’s Emotion will boast both originals and covers, including renditions of Jeff Buckley’s “Corpus Christi Carol,” The […]

This Saturday night, New York City’s Sullivan Hall hosts the tenth annual Freaks Ball, aka Freaks Ball X, featuring longtime Freaks’ favorite Scott Metzger with drummer Eric Kalb and bassist Ron Johnson, New Jersey natives The Black Hollies and roots rocker Anders Osborne starting around 9PM. Freaks Ball X celebrates ten years of the influential NYC-Freaks e-mail list which has helped launch the careers of Robert Randolph, The Duo and the American Babies among others in its decade-long existence.

We recently spoke with NYC-Freaks list creator – and one of the original Hidden Track contributors – Aaron Stein about how the e-mail list started, how the first Freaks Ball came together, his favorite Freaks Ball moments and much more. Here’s what Aaron had to say…

Scott Bernstein: How did the NYC-Freaks e-mail list start?

Aaron Stein: The story is long and not that interesting. The back story was moving down to the area, living way out on Long Island for graduate school and having to schlep into the city to see music. I knew a handful of people who were occasionally interested in seeing live music with me, but more often than not I went by myself or my girlfriend/wife. After a while I’d start to recognize people at shows and it was quite clear there was a community out there waiting for something to bring it together.

There was a small number of people on the WSP list (Spreadnet) who lived in the city and we got together once or twice or bumped into each other at a few shows in the city, or pre-Panic get-togethers, etc. Finally, one night in January of 2000, we all went out together to see the Justice League of America (w/ Jimmy Herring, T. Lavitz et al) at Wetlands and had a raging, debaucherously good time. I took one day to sleep it off and then started the Freaks list (on the now-gobbled up eGroups site). Around the same, other regional Panic fan list groups were popping up in Atlanta and Chicago.

Even though the list started with a bunch of Widespread fans, I think one of the keys to what it became and what it is and isn’t today is that I made a conscious effort not to make it the “NYC Panic fans” — it was the NYC Freaks from day one. The second major factor in what made the Freaks list the Freaks list is that it wasn’t *just* an email list with the normal shade of anonymity and blowtorching of each others opinions. The point of the list was to get together with other people in the real world and see live music.

READ ON for more from Aaron about Freaks Balls’ past and future…

To promote Big Red’s upcoming tour, the Phish YouTube channel has been updated with two classic Trey videos – one of 8 Foot Florescent Tubes debuting First Tube at Higher Ground in 1998 and the other features TAB throwing down Last Tube at Red Rocks in 2001. Here’s the latter… Trey Anastasio Band – Last […]

While indie-rock act Spoon have long been critic’s darlings, their 2007 release Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga helped bring the band’s music to a larger audience with the help their catchy as hell single – The Underdog. Today, Britt Daniel & Co. release the long-awaited follow up to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga with their […]

Ballad Of A Thin Man is the fifth track on the 1965 Bob Dylan album Highway 61 Revisited. There are many theories regarding who the song is about, the most common one being that it’s about a reporter who can’t fully understand the meaning behind Dylan’s lyrics.

The Contestants:

Elliot Smith: This is a very popular download on the Live Music Archive, over 100,000 people have downloaded this show, and if you’re not one of them – you should be. Smith channels Dylan’s vocal delivery in a way that I’ve never heard him do on his original material. And I’m pretty sure he nails every single word which is pretty hard for a live Dylan cover. Source: 10-11-1998

READ ON for the rest of this week’s contestants…

Long before it played host to Phish’s Festival 8 last October, the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA has been home base to the indie-centric Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. Now in its eleventh year, festival organizers Goldenvoice Presents revealed the initial line up for the 2010 version early this morning which will be […]

To me, Hidden Track features a staff of intelligent well spoken contributors who host the only blog on the web that cover all genres with no rules or regulations. It is the tipping point for a beautiful online community that exists in today’s social networking world with a focus on soulful & meaningful music. Filled […]

moe. is celebrating its 20th anniversary later this week with a pair of shows at Roseland in NYC, and such a momentous occasion seems like the perfect time for Volume II of the moe.jams series here at Stormy Mondays. [Photo by Jeremy Gordon] This time it’s a personal favorite from the summer of 2002 at […]

The Killers have announced that they are due to go on an ‘indefinite hiatus’. The band who are about to play a series of shows in Asia and Australia, have revealed that their show in Melbourne on February 21, will be their last for the foreseeable future. "I’m not sure if people are aware of […]

Sunday night, Anvil, currently one week deep in a tour that stretches across the entire country and parts of the world, brought their heavy metal to the Theatre of Living Arts in Philadelphia.  The three piece metal band brought the experience to a group of fans who have been longing for the band to hit it big for years.  The crowd, made up of a wide demographic ranging from hardcore thrash fans to avid music fans, all took part in the celebration of a lifelong dream of a band that deserved much more than they were dealt.   

For a festival known to hint its lineup, Bonnaroo might just have uncovered the the names of two of the acts set to headline its 2010 festival in Manchester, TN, Earlier tonight the festival’s official twitter sent out the following two tweets: Festival partners @AC_Ent & @SuperflyGroup have some big announcements coming soon! 2010’s gonna […]

Soul revivalist, Mayer Hawthorne, will have a busy Spring ahead of him.  After announcing a handful of dates supporting Passion Pit, the Detroit-born crooner has announced even more tour dates, including a stop at this years SXSW. His debut, A Strange Arrangement, is available now. Mayer Hawthorne Tour Dates: March 4 New York, NY – […]

Jay-Z, Muse and Gorrilaz will headline the 11th annual Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, to be held April 16-18 at Empire Polo Field in Indio, Calif. Also confirmed are LCD Soundsystem, Faith No More, Thom Yorke, Pavement and the Specials. Other bands and DJs confirmed for the event include Vampire Weekend, Them Crooked Vultures, […]

Last week, PBS aired the latest installment of their fantastic biography series American Masters which focused on the ever too brief life and career of soul music legend Sam Cooke. Cooke, who paved the way for the likes of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, charted an astounding 29 Top Forty hits from 1957 to 1964 […]

With the late night war at NBC coming to a head (or more accurately, chin), the week of January 18-22 will most likely be Conan O’Brien’s last on the air at the Peacock. Keep an eye out for special guests – musical and otherwise – to wrap up Conan’s all-too-brief stint as host of The Tonight Show. […]

Late last year, surfer/singer Jack Johnson released his first-ever live concert DVD, En Concert. The movie, which documents Johnson’s 2008 European tour, is directed by his longtime friend Emmett Malloy who brings a surf movie aesthetic to its mix of live performances and offstage footage. Here’s the opening performance of Belle/Banana Pancakes… Jack Johnson – […]

We expected to ease our way into 2010, but there’s been so many good shows, festival announcements and outrageous adventures to tell you about that we’ve had to hit the ground running over the past two weeks. Here’s a summary of the best of last week’s Hidden Track articles… For this week’s Cover Wars, DaveO […]

Knitting Factory Records is very excited to announce that the first set of Fela reissues will be released on February 16, 2010. Since the reissues are being made available in chronological order, these six CDs, that contain nine albums total, represent the earliest period of the Nigerian legend’s oeuvre. The timespan of the releases is […]

Southern California’s multifaceted prog-psych-rock quartet RX Bandits are once again taking to the road in support of 2009’s highly-successful album Mandala. Touring begins next month in Australia as the group joins the massive multi-city traveling Soundwave Festival alongside Faith No More, My Chemical Romance, Jane’s Addiction and more. US dates follow in March with The […]