Crib Notes

From CL Fresh Loaf

On Saturday, July 4, 2009, 529 in East Atlanta hosted a funeral benefit for B Jay Womack, aka Bobby Ubangi. The benefit, planned while Womack was still alive, helped raise funds for his funeral. Womack died of cancer on Wednesday, July 1. This image is from the performance by Carbonas, of which B Jay was a founding member. Womack’s funeral was held this afternoon in Conyers.

More photos from B Jay Womack funeral benefit

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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The last word on last weekend’s Corndogorama: squelching heat, phallic food, hot beer, mustache contests, tricycle racing, watermelon tequila shots and fifty indie rock bands.

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(Photo by Alan Friedman)

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It was a night of Afropop bliss on Thurs., June 9 at the Variety Playhouse with Femi Kuti and King Sunny Ade performing.

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(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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View more photos of Femi Kuti’s 2007 Atlanta performance.

Tonight one of my all-time favorite performers, Nigeria’s Femi Kuti, plays the Variety Playhouse. This photo comes from his ’07 performance at the Variety. It captures the spiritual nature of Femi’s show. His energy and passion comes across on stage as if he’s connecting with a force beyond himself — channeling his dead father Fela Kuti, perhaps. (more…)

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Outtakes is a series of blog posts in which CL staff photographer Joeff Davis talks about photo shoots from last week’s Music Issue:

The original idea for the Coathangers shoot was to photograph them in a junkyard. I always wanted to do a shoot in a junkyard and the Coathangers seemed like they would contrast well with that setting.

I stopped by three different car junkyards to see if we could shoot there and I got rejected at all three. One asked me for money, one denied me for “liability reasons” and the third just said “NO!”

I ended up finding some equally gritty locations, but perhaps they were too gritty. ’Cause before we could even set-up to take a picture at the first location we started getting hounded by people asking us for money or making comments about the pretty girls in tattoos. The Coathangers were obviously uncomfortable. So we only got to shoot briefly at two of the locations before bailing to more comfortable surroundings.

Nevertheless, one of those gritty locations — in front of a white hearse — produced the image we decided to use in CL’s print version (although it got cut due to space). I felt a little weird about using the hearse as a backdrop — especially when one of the Coathangers showed up wearing an O. J. Simpson t-shirt — but I liked how it produced an eerie, edgy vibe.

Mixtape Love: Outtakes, pt. 2 with Grip Plyaz

Mixtape Love: Outtakes, pt. 1 with the Balkans

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Outtakes is a series of blog posts in which CL staff photographer Joeff Davis talks about photo shoots from this week’s Music Issue.

Grip Plyaz, “Fuck Dat Hipster Shit”

Grip is a cool dude. We did the photo shoot on his birthday, and when we showed up to meet him at the pizza joint on Edgewood where he works he was wearing a hat that read “Teenage Millionaire.”

When I heard his name for the first time, I immediately thought of shooting him in a dentist’s chair with a dentist coming at him with a huge pair of pliers — which is my own personal worst nightmare. But I didn’t think we would ever find a dentist willing to let help make it happen. On a whim, I left messages at like 20 different dental offices and when I came in the next morning I was surprised that I had received responses from half of them saying we could do the shoot in their office.

We settled on the office of Jeffrey and Sarabess Baumrind because they were a father and daughter team which seemed really cute. They were also based downtown and claimed they had several other rappers as clients (though they told us they couldn’t reveal their names).

We got the huge pliers from a local store. In talking about how to pay for them with CL’s music editor, he suggested we just “rent” them — which meant buy them and return them after the photo shoot, he explained.

I was like, “We can’t do that. That’s not cool.” So I called the store and spoke to the manager, who also suggested that we buy the pliers and return them. That’s exactly what we did.

(more…)

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Outtakes is a series of blog posts in which CL staff photographer Joeff Davis talks about photo shoots from this week’s Music Issue:

The concept for the Balkans photo was to shoot these kids at a high school because they’re so frickin’ young. We wanted to try to capture some of that young teenage hyperactivity.

When two of them showed up over an hour late for the shoot it seemed like it would be hit or miss. But when they finally parked their car, they sprinted the last block like Olympic athletes so we forgave them. One showed up with four medals around his neck and the other took his shirt off and started blowing his nose into the other’s hand.

At the end of the shoot we accosted a dog that looked like royalty as it was walking down the street with its owner. So we posed the boys with the dog and had each band member hold a piece of the leash. The contrast between the very regal dog and these young crazy kids worked great, but in the end we decided to go with a photo for the CL print version that best captured their youthful energy. — Joeff Davis

See more photos from the Balkans photo shoot.

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On March 24, two very different Atlanta bands celebrated their record releases at Criminal Records with in-store performances just hours apart. Grammy Award-winning folk duo the Indigo Girls celebrated the release of their new record Poseidon and the Bitter Bug playing a six-song set at 4:30 p.m. followed by a 40-minute 8:30 p.m. set by Grammy-nominated metal band Mastodon. The latter was celebrating the release of its record Crack the Skye. The appearance of the two bands was Criminal’s second busiest day in its 18 years in Little 5 Points (the first was last year’s Record Store Day). “This kind of pairing is extraordinarily out of the ordinary, but at Criminal it made perfect sense,” said Criminal Records owner Eric Levine.

See more photos of the Indigo Girls and Mastodon at Criminal here.

(Mastodon photo by Perry Julien, Indigo Girls photo by Joeff Davis)

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