What are you doing St. Patrick's Day weekend? Cancel it! You can't miss the Klubfoot USA Festival at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles, March 15th - 17th.

Six bands a night for three nights of pure Psychobilly madness from around the world!  With Mad Sin, The Klingonz, King Kurt, Frantic Flintstones, The Coffin Nails, Rezurex, Los Difuntos, the new Neo-Rockabilly band The Whammy (Tim Polecat with Slim Jim Phantom and Jonny Bowler), and so many more. 

This is an all-ages show!

Tickets are available at Amoeba Hollywood.

Here's some Coffin Nails to get you in the mood:
 

I have been excited about the new Wanda Jackson ever since I heard she was working with Jack White. I already loved her but I knew she could be even better with the help of Jack White! Jack White is, of course, from the White Stripes, who are now officially broken up. Not that Wanda really needed Jack White -- she was putting out some of the best rockabilly and country albums way before he was even born. She is the Queen of Rockabilly, after all! But I knew that he could be bring that greatness out of her once again. It had been a while. Jack White already helped Loretta Lynn make an amazing album a couple of years back, so we knew he could do it. Both Loretta Lynn and Wanda Jackson are two of my favorites! I obviously don't like anything new that comes out in the world of country but I have always loved the country music of the 50's and 60's. Wanda Jackson got her start back in back in the 50's, back when Rockabilly was very popular but there were not really a whole lot of women putting out rockabilly records. This is why she is known as the first woman of rockabilly. She paved the road for many who followed her. She later moved on to putting out more country albums and eventually gospel albums, but on this new album she is putting out the great rockabilly that made her famous. This is good stuff!

It has been almost a year and a half since the release of the debut album by Thieves Like Us. I'm still in love with that first album, Play Music. It just doesn't get much better than that. Records tend to get overplayed and then you sort of move on and get over them. It might happen for some fans with just certain songs... you sort of wear them out and there is always a new song around the corner to catch your ear. But some songs never get old and you never tire of listening to them. There have been certain albums that I have liked so much but ended up taking an intentional break from -- I had to sort of cut them off because I knew I would wear them out! It is like too much of a good thing. Sometimes you have to take a break from your favorite things just to keep them your favorite things. Music is often like this for me. I really almost wore out the album by The Teenagers a couple of years ago. And I almost wore out my Thieves Like Us album. Luckily there have been some great albums this year to keep me busy! I am still not nearly done with the Wild Nothing album but I now listen to it about once a week instead of every day. I was so in love with Thieves Like Us last year that it ended up at the top of my favorite albums of 2009, so I was obviously excited about this new album that just came out this week. It did surprise me a bit a couple of weeks ago when I first heard that they had a new album coming out already -- I didn't know if I was ready yet. I really was not quite done with the first album -- but I quickly got myself ready. This involved listening to the first album one more time and then doing some cleansing. I had heard the new record was going to be a different type of album for them, which was good news. I didn't want the first album replicated or replaced. I was ready for a brand new album from one of my new favorite bands.

Much of my youth was spent exploring older albums by my favorites. I didn't start listening to The Smiths until after I had bought my first solo Morrissey album. It is always fun to go back and explore the older albums of your new favorite bands or artists because they usually get better when you go backwards in a discography. My first cassette by The Smiths was Louder Than Bombs. I then picked up a copy of Strangeways Here We Come. Then it was Queen Is Dead followed by Meat Is Murder and the self titled debut. I bought Rank on cassette I think next because I found it a a record store and realized it was the only album I didn't own by them. I think The Smiths were the first band that I owned the full catalog of on cassette -- at least everything that I could find at the record store. I of course later updated to CDs and LPs. The same thing happened with most of my other favorite bands. I think Blue Bell Knoll was my first Cocteau Twins album and Into the Labyrinth was my first Dead Can Dance album. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was my first album by The Cure. It just all depends how old you were when these albums first came out, how cool your older brothers or sisters or cousins were, what albums your best friends listened to, or even when your radio station decided to start playing certain bands. At this point in my life I have pretty much explored all the albums of the bands that I already like or am ever gonna like, but luckily I still do love new music, so it is exciting to find a new band that you can follow from the beginning. Sometimes though I wonder if it is better to go backwards. It does always seem like the albums get better when you go backwards. Early New Order is obviously better as you go backwards.

Born in Denver on Dec. 3, 1932 as Ralph Joseph Reynolds, his family soon moved to Oklahoma, where he grew up listening to country music and Western swing acts such as Eddy Arnold and Bob Wills, eventually picking up the guitar as a teenager. In 1956 while performing in Yuma, Arizona, Reynolds wrote the song “Endless Sleep” after listening to Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" five times in a row on a jukebox. Two years later Reynolds met a music publisher named Herb Montei who forwarded the demo version to the Los Angeles based label Demon Records. Demon liked the demo but executives insisted on Reynolds tacking on a more uplifting end to the song; the revised finale has the suicidal girl saved from drowning by her guilt ridden beau. Another peculiar bit of history about “Endless Sleep” -- writing credits for the song went to Jody Reynolds and Dolores Nance, but according to Reynolds, Nance was a fictitious person created by the Demon Records to make it appear that there was songwriting team.

By the summer of 1958 “Endless Sleep” became a huge national and international hit, peaking at No. 5 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart, no doubt opening the door for several other doomed tales of love-death tinged million selling pop hits including Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel," Ray Peterson's "Tell Laura I Love Her," Dickey Lee's "Patches" and the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack," to name but a few. Reynolds' next single was not as successful. “Fire of Love” peaked at number 66 on the Billboard charts. It would be his last charting single. Still, he continued to record and tour into the 1970’s for several labels including Smash, Brent and Pulsar Records. His typically anomalous 1963 recording, and excellent single, on Titan Records, "Stranger in the Mirror" / "Requiem for Love" featured a very young Bobbie Gentry (“Ode to Billie Joe”) in her debut. Eventually Reynolds opened a music store in Palm Springs and worked as a real estate agent. He was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame in 1999.

A decade before the mayhem and lurid madness of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s “Paralyzed” there was Jerry Lott, a.k.a. “The Phantom,” recording his own blithering two minute psychotic-billy breakdown. Born near Mobile, Alabama in 1938, Lott played country music as a young teenager until he heard Elvis Presley and rockabilly in 1956. Something obviously went ping!

During the summer of 1958 in Mobile, Lott recorded Whisper Your Love. As he told Derek Glenister in a 1980 interview: "Somebody said, 'what you gonna put on the flip-side' - I hadn't even thought about it. Someone suggested I wrote something like Elvis 'cause he was just a little on the wane and everybody was beginning to turn against rock 'n' roll. They said, 'See if you spark rock 'n' roll a little bit' ... so that's when I put all the fire and fury I could utter into it. I was satisfied with the first take, but everybody said, 'Let's try it one more time.' I didn't yell on the first take, but I yelled on the second, and blew one of the controls off the wall. I'm telling ya," Lott continued, "It was wild. The drummer lost one of his sticks, the piano player screamed and knocked his stool over, the guitar player's glasses were hanging sideways over his eyes."

Love Me was that song, written by Jerry Lott in 10 minutes. Almost 50 years later that track is still startling, especially to the uninitiated. If the screams don’t stagger you at the beginning, perhaps The Phantom’s post-coital exhaustion at track’s end will. Yeah, most great Rockabilly records from the late fifties had more then their share of fire and dementia, but this track is insane … certifiably, wickedly, aberrantly insane! It’s beautiful!