This has been happening practically under my nose (give or take a couple of hours northeast) and I have not been paying enough attention–definitely a sign that I spend too much time on etsy. But I consider this further proof that Mississippi is among the more awesome *states* (of existence). So, here is our answer to Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley, Aurel Schmidt and the like, as featured in Impose magazine.
Photos shamelessly stolen from Cats Purring tumblr site.
What The Columbus Dispatch left out…whenever my “journalism” gets edited into PR, I feel compelled to publish my own correction. Here goes:
Hailing from Mississippi and Alabama, Come On Go With Us played to their first hometown crowd in four months last Thursday at Rick’s. With gigs like South by Southwest and Nashville’s biweekly Billy Block radio show, the fresh college grads are beginning to attract national attention. Chase McGill, Dustin Hendrick and Christopher Hurt have been making music together since their days at Columbus High. Around the summer of 2008, McGill and Hendrick befriended Jacob Simpson, a fellow Mississippi State student and guitarist from Ripley, and the trio began to play under the name Come On Go With Us. They recorded a self-titled debut and held a release party in early March.
“It was our second-to-last semester and we were driving to Nashville three nights a week to record. We didn’t sleep much, grades sucked,” McGill recalls. Shortly after, Hurt rejoined his high school buddies, bringing along Taylor Mills, a drummer from Mobile whom he’d met while attending the University of Alabama. The new line-up took to the road. Continue reading
So I watched the documentary American Artifact: the Rise of the American Rock Poster (as yet unreleased on DVD) at a special screening at Mississippi State University Thursday night. Merle Becker, our director-cum-narrator, apparently quit some staid, high-paid 9-5 to travel the country talking to poster artists. In itself, this requires slight suspension of disbelief, but when she made the inflated claim that she was unaware of what she terms “the rock poster art movement” until roughly five years ago, my bullshit trigger immediately tensed; not optional audience sentiment at the start of an amatuerish documentary. American Artifact is mostly talking heads and posters that flash too quickly for real visual contemplation, betraying Becker’s background as the made-for-TV editor and producer that she’s been (often for MTV…I know it’s Industry, but come on, did she really not know about rock posters?)
But the film serves its purpose as a crash course in the poster art that accompanied the dawn of rock and roll and experienced a revival alongside the digital era’s disdain for handmade commercial illustration. It even manages to be entertaining, thanks to the gregariousness, passion and wit of the involved artists (Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin,Frank Kozik, Coop and Lindsey Kuhn to name a few). These guys are almost charismatic enough to rescue the film from its warm and fuzzy (and altogether viewer-alienating) personal journey narration and (always a bad idea) re-enaction scenes. With the exception of some amazing MC-5 concert shots, American Artifact also suffers from a lack of raw vintage footage or even stills—show footage, backstage footage, footage of the artists doing their thing—and the editing is often a cut-and-paste cheese-fest. In Becker’s defense, this footage may not even exist, and the outtakes during the credits are pretty fun. But in the hands of a more skillful filmmaker or a person intimately familiar with the material or the “community” (buzzword alert) being covered, this could have been a great documentary. Instead, it comes across like the Cliff Notes version of Paul Grushkin & Dennis King’s 2004 book Art of Modern Rock: the Poster Explosion, and I was the fifteen year old geek that devoured Crime and Punishment. So for me, the film was a disappointment—worth seeing, sure, but not worth seeing more than once.
Or at least, let’s chat about music.
Stream the Coathangers here.
Southern Fried Punk!
Ian Svenonius’s new band is the Chain and the Gang…much fun as ever live…
Also The Tourettes. Were. Awesome. Download their only album in it’s girls-rule-the-school entirety here.
At the Newport Folk Fest I managed to catch up with Robin Pecknold, frontman of Fleet Foxes, for some backstage banter. Except that as soon as I found myself sitting cross-legged on the grass, facing the person behind the ethereal songs that got me through last winter, I knew I wasn’t quite prepared to conduct a professional interview. I blame it on lack of sustenance (did I really expect a bagel to last upwards of 12 hours?) and dually, the sun.
Cheree: I guess, um, tell me about yourself. How did this whole thing happen? You guys have been together a long time, right? Someone just passed your tape to Sub-pop?
Robin: Um, we started the band about three years ago and I think we were kind of like, we started to work [for the record/on the record? This part is illegible due to me moving the voice recorder] and my friend Phil was helping us record it and he’d done a lot of records for Sub-pop so he knew the people there and once we were kind of like halfway done with it, and then um—
C: Well how did you guys meet? You and the guys in the band?
R: Me and Skye with to school together, and Casey and Christian we met once we started playing music in Seattle, doing this thing called Crystal Skulls.
C: And then, I guess, so this whole year has been when everything’s sort of blown up for you guys?
R: I mean, last year was a much busier year, I think for us.
Keeping reading at When You Awake.
