A marathon weekend for music in Atlanta
Monday, April 20th, 2009
This Saturday turned out to be a monumental day for music in Atlanta.
I hit Record Store Day at Criminal Records around 10 a.m. and was lucky enough to score everything I wanted: Jesus Lizard 7-inch shower curtain pack, check. Slayer 7-inch, Tom Waits live at the Fox Theater 7-inch, Jay Reatard/Sonic Youth 7-inch, Sonic Youth/Beck 7-inch, reissue of the the first Bad Religion EP, reissue of Queen’s first EP, a 180 gram LP reissue of Walk Among Us by the Misfits… check, check, check.
When it came time for the moment of truth the man at the cash register asked for two Benjamins to cover my purchases, but it was worth it. Record Store Day comes but once a year, and I had been saving money for weeks in preparation for this. And besides, judging by the high prices that I’m seeing many of these things fetch on e-Bay this morning I think I did the right thing… Just no more record shopping for like a month. Maybe two months.
After performances from Death on Two Wheels and Thy Mighty Contract, the hangover lingering from the All Night Drug Prowling Wolves’ show the night before was catching up with me. After eating a life-replenishing burrito from a gigantic box of wrapped, silver burritos from El Myr that had surfaced in the store, it was time to take a nap before getting the party restarted for the screening of I’m Like This Everyday, Mitchell Powers’ documentary film about Dalton, GA songwriter Peter Stubb, followed by the premiere of We Fun at the Atlanta Film Festival. The screening was sparsely attended, which could be attributed to several factors. The Dogwood Festival was going at Piedmont Park, which meant that barbarian hordes had descended upon the area and had taken up every parking space within a three mile radius. Record Store Day was still going strong and pulling big crowds, and across town at the Earl Customers, NOBUNNY and Gentleman Jesse were setting up to play. The people of Atlanta were spread very thinly across the city, but mostly I think the real party was at Record Store Day where a lot of folks were drinking during the daylight hours and buying records, thus taking the wind out of their sales for later in the evening and keeping them at home. Or maybe people just don’t care about the movie…
After the screening of We Fun it was time to hightail it to East Atlanta to catch a free in-store from Peter Stubb. The crowd was about 20 deep, which felt pretty solid, considering the size of the store. Most of the people in attendance had driven down from the Dalton/Chattanooga area and kind of dominated the scene.
Stubb played an electric guitar and belted out raspy, folkie punk-strummed songs about his ex wife and oral sex and being institutionalized at Atlanta Medical Center, while deflecting a barrage of requests from the crowd. Several of Stubb’s people from Dalton were sharing shoebox detail, out of which they were selling homemade dubbed cassettes of Stubb’s songs with album titles like Ol’ St. Nick, Cutting My Flesh and Worshiping Darlene and From Hell to Victory. Earlier Stubb explained to me that he had spent a few days with his son preparing the tapes to sell them the show for $2 apiece. Each one had a separate but very distinct cut out from a porno magazine of a phone sex line ad glued to the tape cover, which was almost as unsettling as the hot dog tattoo that now adorns Stubb’s face.
