The closest thing Austin, Texas has to a CBGB-style rock venue is the venerable shithole Emo’s, a dilapidated, barn-like dump with bathrooms that come close, but not quite, to the urine-soaked hell-holes of Hilly Kristal’s legendary Bowery punk venue.

Like CBGB, Emo’s has established itself as one of the great rock and roll venues in the world and, like CBGB, it’s a lousy place for bands and audiences to experience rock and roll. Fuck street cred, we’ve all outgrown rock venues that charge $30 and more for a ticket and in return offer an environment suitable for firing squads and hangings.

I’ve been pissing and moaning for years that rock audiences are masochists, willing to put up with the worst kinds of settings in which to listen to the music they love. I can’t imagine theater goers, opera or ballet fans lining up to take a shit in port-o-johnnys that are belching methane like over-stuffed plastic cows or suffering through security checks by no-neck thugs looking to find contraband like bottled water and video cameras.

I guess Emo’s arrived at a similar conclusion: rock audiences need to be treated with respect and so do the bands that entertain us.

This coming Sunday, Emo’s will be opening a new state-of-the-art music club with a performance by The Butthole Surfers and I think the new venue will be great for the bands and the fans.

What the audience will pay for (and, hopefully, benefit from) includes elephant bark flooring (great for acoustics and soft on the feet), 100 tons of A/C, a group of tiled bathrooms, three large bars, double sheetrocked walls (again, for sound), a large outdoor smoking patio and 500-plus parking spots.

The bands will kick back in a green room with flat screen televisions, a washer and dryer (life on the road is tough) and shower facilities; and, of course, they’ll have ample tour bus parking with a private back entrance.

For smaller acts, the 1,700 capacity room can be partitioned into one with an 800 cap.

Great for both band and ticket-holders? A 48-foot ceiling that transitions back to a 12-foot height, meaning there is hardly a bad line of sight in the house.

The Butthole Surfers’ gig is a test run for the venue, not its official opening. The fact that the Surfers wanted to do this on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 seems either perverse or perhaps something else…we will see. I’ll be there and get back to you.

In the meantime, here’s Alex Winter’s homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre featuring Gibby and the boys.
 

 
For our female readers, here’s all you need to know on how to dress like a punk from former model and fashion expert Wendi Braswell.

The most important things to remember are: do not care what other people think, leather goes nicely with lace, and dress black, dark and dirty.
 

 
How to dress like a “rocker chick” after the jump (it’s easier than you think)...

 
No way The Hulk could ever replace Dee Dee. What were da brudders thinking?

Sion Sono and the 400 page script for Love Exposure.
 
I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of praise for Sion Sono’s (Suicide Club, Cold Fish) epically weird and wonderful Love Exposure.

Three minutes short of four hours long, Sono’s metaphysical black comedy is never boring and completely unlike any film you’re likely to see now or in the near future. Imagine a diabolically funny mix of John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Hughes and David Lynch and you might get a sense of what Sono is up to in Love Exposure. Gory, romantic, spiritual and completely bonkers, this is a trip definitely worth taking. Somehow Sono (a poet turned film maker) performs the magic act of juggling what seems like a dozen film genres in the air with supernatural grace.

I dig film critic Simon Abrams’ take on the movie:

Love Exposure is, in a sense, Sono’s equivalent of the Great Russian novel. In it, his substantial disaffection for societal conventions is matched only by his monumental love for his spectacularly messed-up protagonists. These characters become deranged because they have to create their own belief system. There’s no God except for the ones that Yôko, Aya Koike (Sakura Andô), and Yû Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) make for themselves. God is represented by mundane authority figures, people who simultaneously project their own fear of loving someone else and lustful need to be loved. In other words, father/Father figures are all rotten to the core in Love Exposure, though they’re all rotten in unique ways.

Made in 2008, Love Exposure is finally receiving a limited American theatrical run two years after I first encountered it at Austin’s Fantastic Fest.
 

Jersey punk receives the 2011 Polar Music Prize from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf.
 
Patti Smith was awarded Sweden’s highest musical honor this past week.

Billboard reports:

The Polar Music Prize was first presented in 1992 and has gone to pop artists such as Sir Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and classical names such as Isaac Stern, Renée Fleming, José Antonio Abreu and Ennio Morricone.

Smith’s award was presented by one of her favorite authors, Sweden’s Henning Mankell. Speaking without notes, he credited Smith for inspiring women all over the world to write poetry and create music. He then read the citation, which lauded Smith for “devoting her life to art in all its forms” and for demonstrating “how much rock ‘n’ roll there is in poetry and how much poetry there is in rock ‘n’ roll.” Calling Smith “a Rimbaud with Marshall amps,” the citation said that she “has transformed the way an entire generation looks, thinks and dreams.”

In her acceptance, a visibly moved Smith had to stop for a moment to collect herself as she thanked her daughter Jesse Paris and son Jackson, as well as the musicians she has worked with for years, including “Lenny Kaye, who has played guitar by my side for over 40 years.” Smith also acknowledged the late Stig Anderson and “my late husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith,” guitarist for the rock band MC5.

“Receiving the prestigious Polar Music Prize is both humbling and inspiring, for it fills me with pride,” Smith told the audience at the Stockholm Concert Hall. “It also fills me with the desire to continue to prove my worth. I am reminded always how collaborative the music experience is and so I would like to thank the people, for it is the people for whom we create and it is the people who have given me their energy and encouragement for four decades.

No longer outside of society, punk’s elder stateswoman discusses her past, the present and the creative process with Stockholm journalist Jan Gradvall.
 

 
More early 80s synthpunk madness, this time from South Florida’s Futurisk. These guys are pretty obscure and information on them is limited, but according to their website they formed in 1979 when teenager Jeremy Kolosine won some time in a recording studio, and their music was usually:

recorded by Richard Hess and the band in the rooms of Ron K’s house. The drum sound, gotten in a bathroom, rocks, even today. Reportedly, Futurisk may have been the 1st synth-punk band in the American South…or something, and 1981’s track ‘Push Me Pull You (pt. 2)’ was an early pre-‘Rockit’ excursion into electro-funk.

The revival of interest in the band was sparked when James Murphy included one of their tracks on a DFA mix for the French boutique Colette in 2003. Last year the Minimal Wave label released a retrospective of the band’s work called Player Piano, and earlier this year the band put out a remix 12” of the track “Lonely Streets”, one of whose remixes came from the mighty Chris Carter. Here’s a couple of videos of Futurisk in action:

Futurisk - “Meteoright”
 

 
After the jump the original video for the classic “Army Now”, and more Futurisk…
 
If you like what you hear, and you want to pick up Player Piano, you can get it here.

 
The Units were one of the first “rock” bands in America to ditch guitars completely and focus their set-up on drums, vocals and synthesisers. Leaders of San Francisco’s post-punk synth-led music scene (a lot of which is now resurfacing with the current interest in “Minimal Wave”) the comparisons with Devo are clear, but still don’t detract from The Units’ cracking tunes and tangible influence on the new wave generation. Tracks like “High Pressure Days” and “I-Night” are still sought after by record collectors and forward thinking DJs alike, mainly because they still rock.

During live shows, The Units would perform to a video accompaniment of re-edited instructional shorts and found footage called the “Units Training Films”. Some of these films have been recreated and uploaded to Vimeo by founder member Scott Ryser. While still being very much of their time, they are excellent and definitely rank alongside similar efforts by the likes of Church of The Subgenius. Ryser has this to say about them:

The “Unit Training Film #1”, produced by Scott Ryser and Rachel Webber in 1980, was compiled from films that the band projected during their live performances. The films were satirical, instructional films critical of conformity and consumerism, compiled from found footage, home movies, and obsolete instructional shorts. In 1979 and 1980, Rick Prelinger was a frequent contributor and occasional projectionist at the bands live performances in San Francisco. The film was also shown sans band in movie theaters around the San Francisco Bay Area including the Roxie Cinema, Cinematheque, Intersection Theater and the Mill Valley Film Festival .

There was never a set length or definitive “finished version” of the original Unit Training Film. Just the current version. The film varied in length from about 10 to 45 minutes, depending on how long the Units set was on any particular night. Clips were constantly being added and others were deleted and discarded once their condition became too poor to project any longer. The film was constantly breaking, and the projectionists always kept a roll of Scotch Tape nearby for timely repairs.

This 5 minute version, compiled by Scott Ryser, includes some clips of the band playing along with a brief interview by a very young Fred Willard during the period 1980 - 1982.

Who’d have thought Fred Willard was a fan?!

Here is “Unit Training Film 1: Warm Moving Bodies”
 

 
After the jump, “Units Training FIlm 2: Cannibals” plus some more classics by The Units…
 
For a crash course in the awesome synth-punk sound of The Units, check out History Of The Units: The Early Years 1977 - 1983.

Probably the best documentary ever made about The Clash - Don Letts’ Westway To The World.

Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Nicholas ‘Topper’ Headon give their personal account of The Clash. The interviews are simply shot by Letts, who has mixed the interviews with live footage and rare film, which plays out against the individual memories of triumphs and frustrations. Listen to the emotion in Strummer’s voice when he talks about the band’s demise, or Headon’s humble (and moving) apology for his drug abuse. This is a classic piece of documentary film-making - catch it while you can.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

The Clash on Broadway

 
More from the interior of Lou Reed’s amplifier.

The Velvet Underground played Boston on March, 15 1969 at famed music venue The Boston Tea Party. Someone put a microphone inside Lou Reed’s amplifier and the result is pretty magnificent.

Bootlegged as The Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes, the recordings are formidable in their unadulterated rock and roll fire and fury and a revelation for anyone who hasn’t paid close attention to Reed’s dynamic guitar playing

A beautifully seductive, gently brutal and ultimately ferocious version of “Heroin” is followed by an incendiary “Sister Ray” driven by Moe Tucker’s shamanic skin thumping and Lou Reed’s electronic raping and pillaging of the small villages in our punk rock imaginations.

This is rock and roll at its magical best. And when I say “magical” I refer to that which draws our attention to the spirit that animates concrete, steel, meat and heartbeat. When it’s truly divine, and in this case it is, divinity pulses through radiant, vacuum tubes made of metallic alloys, ionic melts, aqueous solutions, molecular liquids, pumping mystic fire into the wet molecular slop of our hungry brains resonating from the head to the cock/pussy and all the way down to the balls of our feet. And then we move…and then we dance…and then…rock godhood descends upon us like a sweet cloak of diaphanous love juice.

Play this so loud that your neighbors pound the walls, begging and imploring you to rent a room in the Super 8 up the block. Ignore them. Or invite them in.
 

 
The Velvet Underground played Boston on March, 15 1969 at famed music venue The Boston Tea Party. Someone put a microphone inside Lou Reed’s amplifier and the result is pretty magnificent.

Bootlegged as The Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes, the recordings are formidable in their unadulterated rock and roll fire and fury and a revelation for anyone who hasn’t paid close attention to Reed’s dynamic guitar playing which in this set is a monolithic roar, a pulverizing electronic kaiju (strange beast) grinding whole universes into pebble and sand.

Listen as Louzilla annihilates the planets and their multiple moons with blasts of amplified frequencies as sublime as they are world crushing. This is the sound of heavy metal thunder!

I’ll be posting more soon.

The louder, the better.