Austin music

Well, the place is slowly getting straightened out. I have spent the whole week opening boxes and sorting the contents. We now have a basically functional living room with TV, DVD and sofa/chairs in generally conventional settings.

Power requirements are the biggest headache in America. We had to buy a power transformer to be able to feed our electricals with 240V. Anything that requires 50Hz is debatable but the DVD player seems to work on 60Hz, thank God. Some things have universal power supplies that take either 240V or 120V but not everything does, of course.

Friday night we went to the Draughhouse for some beer, then up to Chilis for some food. Chilis serve really huge margaritas. This one was made with blue curacao:


Saturday, we had to do a certain amount of shopping but we went down to the Old Pecan Street Arts Festival, which consists of about 300 artists/vendors, three music stages and plenty of food/drink stands. We'd come down for the arts but mainly to see the band Vallejo, a local crowd which we have become aware of. They are a rock band with a heavy dose of Latino about them and they are most excellent.

Vallejo at the Pecan Street Festival.

After Vallejo's set, we figured we would try to get into Antone's club to see Fastball, a band who we have known for a couple of years. We only found out very recently they are actually from Austin. Anyway, we saw the gig in the paper but thought there would be no tickets left. As it turned out we got straight in :-) Two minutes later, Stef arrived, whose party we'd been at the other day, so he joined us.

A couple of other bands were up first. The Mad Dukes had some good tunes but needed to polish their delivery somewhat. They were followed by Stereovolt who we enjoyed a lot. Then came Fastball. They totally rocked! They played loads of tunes that we knew and every one was top notch. They had fun doing it, too. Afterwards, they came to the front to sign CDs. We now have a shiny new signed Fastball CD :-) They were very nice chaps. The show finished with Cruiserweight who seemed very promising, but unfortunately the sound man screwed the sound so all we were getting was distortion. So we left. Got home after 1am anyway. It was a very good night.


A bit dark for my phone but here's Fastball.