Sep 27, 2025
The Gotobeds,
Goner Fest 22, 09/27/25
seen from Canada
seen from Czechia
seen from Canada
seen from China
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Czechia
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from South Korea
seen from Thailand
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
The Gotobeds,
Goner Fest 22, 09/27/25
Two days down for Gonerfest. One and a half to go. Yesterday was a big day. Standout bands were Vintage Crop, 1-800-Mikey, Tee Vee Repairman, c.o.f.f.i.n., and Sweeping Promises. Also we went to an after show and saw The Shitty Stones, a great Rolling Stones cover band, and The Jack Oblivian Band. Mr Quintron played a short set as well. (The first day was great, too. Osees were brilliant.)
New Audio: PRIORS Shares Post Punk Anthem "Optimizer"
New Audio: PRIORS Shares Post Punk Anthem "Optimizer" @MothlandSounds
Led by singer/songwriter, creative mastermind, and producer, Chance Hutchinson, Montréal-based punk outfit PRIORS have been wildly prolific, dropping six releases, including three full-length albums since 2017. Each of those efforts have seen the Canadian punk outfit firmly cementing a melodic and dynamic punk sound. During that same period, PRIORS have developed a reputation for a wildly…
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Spray Paint,
Goner Fest 19, 9/23/22
Rocket 808,
Goner Fest 18
9/23/1
Record of the Day: TEN HIGH 'Fakers' (Plus New Album Sneak Peek)
Record of the Day: TEN HIGH ‘Fakers’ (Plus New Album Sneak Peek)
BEING WITHIN A RELATIVELY CLOSE proximity to the rock ‘n’ roll capital of the world, Memphis; Fayetteville, Arkansas is often overshadowed and occasionally even snubbed by its more cocksure counterpart when it comes to all things music. This by no means excludes punk rock, a world where -let’s face it- there’s more terrible bands than good as well as random onslaughts of unwarranted pretension…
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THE HIPSHAKES - UK garage punk mainstays premiere new single ahead of US tour. (Nerve Centre Records)
THE HIPSHAKES – UK garage punk mainstays premiere new single ahead of US tour. (Nerve Centre Records)
The Hipshakes seem to be having a second creative apex at the moment as evidenced by their latest 7″ single, set to be released by Falmouth, UK imprint Nerve Centre Records. There’s been a flurry of Hipshakes releases lately, matched only by the volume of output during their first apex in the mid-aughts. This is possibly due to the fact that while Hipshakes have always been reliably consistent,…
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I WILL ALWAYS BE A TOURIST
Written By Ryan Mo
I am standing outside the American Airlines customer service office with someone I met off the Internet. We are in Memphis, Tennessee and it is 10 in the morning. A woman, distraught, is raising her voice to the attendant. She is about five feet with crows feet and a shawl, and she is livid because she can’t find her luggage at baggage claim.
“I have to go to court tomorrow and you’re telling me my bags could be in Denver?”
The attendant asks her to please lower her voice. She’d like to help, but not if the woman is yelling at her. So the woman yells louder.
“I’m not yelling; I’m upset!”
She charges out and pushes through my friend, says she can’t believe American Airlines would have such terrible service, and threatens to call her husband. We are stunned. The attendant, with strained effort, waves me in. Me, red-eyed from the late-night departure, bad-postured and all. Revisiting the reason I bothered to visit the American Airlines customer service office in Memphis, Tennessee at 10 in the morning.
“Sorry, I’m here to ask if you guys might have my water bottle and carabiner? I had them in the pocket of this backpack when I checked it in.”
She asks, “Where did you fly in from?”
“Los Angeles. I had a layover in Dallas.”
She says that it was probably long gone. I think I would have been upset, but seeing what the woman before had put her through, I felt pretty stupid. It was just a water bottle and a carabiner.
So I ended up apologizing to her. And she told me to have a nice day.
Memphis is quiet and a little bleak on Thursday morning. The sun shines white and the city looks lived in, shrinking back from the shadow of its heyday to a small-town working class suburbia. We see auto shops, liquor stores, a Scottrade building, dilapidated stores and fenced up lots with really tall grass. Then the art bar Canvas, a couple cigar hookah lounges and smoke shops. One of them is run by an old lady who sold spice well after it was banned, until the police came and had a thorough talking with her, and shut the head shop down for a couple of days. But my friend maintains that the lady rips people off anyways, so it was better not to go there. Marijuana is illegal in Tennessee.
We take a detour to where my friend used to live, and see shuttered houses adjacent to prim ones with white fences. She tells me that it would be so easy to steal in a neighborhood like this. One house is graffiti’d. Turning out, she tells me there was an assault on Kroegers, where a bunch of students—allegedly black—threw pumpkins at customers in the parking lot. Some shoppers were lightly injured.
This was around the time that the Black Lives Matter movement began, she said.
Joe’s Liquor has a sphere with chunks lined in neon sticking out of it.
It looks better at night, she tells me. We’ll probably come back before I leave to take pictures of it, if we remember. As we walk in, three men are discussing wine over glasses of wine. An attendant strikes up conversation with her—a man maybe 6’ with gentle eyes and a buxom beard. He’s wearing sneakers with Kid Buu designs his friend painted. We agree that painting custom sneaker designs would be a profitable trade on Etsy or something. As he heads back to the counter, I feel the urge to pee. I also see a bottle of Kraken spiced rum, and she picks out Gotta Get Up to Get Down, a milk stout with coffee. They only just ran out of Gonerfest specially brewed beer.
On our way out we run by a middle-aged, stern-looking kind of man holding a paper bag. He’s parked next to us, but lets me by to the passenger’s side before he gets in.
As we back out, I notice the left side-view mirror to his pickup. He looks somber. The car had government plates.
It took me a while to figure out that the Goner Fest entrance was in the back. Her friend (“I guess you could call me that, we’ve been going on a couple of dates—did she really tell you I was her friend?”) dropped me off in his Prius and declined my open invitation. Garage rock wasn’t his thing; he’s in jazz. I walked along the sidewalk until I saw a food truck completing a fence-off of sweaty socialites, and of course people wouldn’t go in conventionally through the front door otherwise they’d loiter outside the front door. So in a panic, I walk the opposite way back until I spot four guys in caps who clearly just pre-gamed.
“Which way to Goner Fest?”
One of them points to where the truck is and I don’t say anything; I just wait for the last guy to pass and follow along. Naturally they’d fall for the food truck too, and I’d use their moment of bewilderment to further observe where the entrance was. We find the crack into the alleyway almost at the same time and make a beeline through. Someone had already thrown up near the stairs, so that half the walk smelled like beer, burgers and bile. It was $25 per night, and I could not bring my bottle of water in so I had to kill it outside. That didn’t deter me from getting a tallboy at the counter, to the chagrin of my bladder. I grabbed a program and flipped through.
“Music for those that seek independence.” That’s what the ad said Goner Records is about.
I was careful to walk down the stairs as the runny noses hovered outside the restrooms. It’s a good 50 feet from the stage—visibly decorated in red—and everyone looks half-preoccupied with the band and half-ready to shove everyone off. Dads with whiskey fingers and cargo shorts kinda bob their head or sway, can’t really tell. It takes nearly two surf pop songs for me to realize I shouldn’t be this far back, and I don’t have to be. Squeezing through the pockets of space, I can sorta see Matthew Liveradis’ head cover Carolyn Hawkins’.
People are bobbing, just chilling. It’s a 21+ venue and there’s zero high school energy. Almost zero movement. The photographers huddle in the right corner and Chook Race is packing up by the time I make it to the front.
They look kind of glum but also elated. I’m sure they had a good time.
Few things are scarier than a sea of mildly interested, inebriated onlookers. Jim Mangrum’s onstage emceeing in his leather vest sewn with pelts and patches. The man’s off-blond, greyed out mane adds to the majesty of his enduring past as Black Oak Arkansas frontman, like the final bright solar flares of a dying star. He’s got the characteristic smirk with a hand to the mic and another holding a plastic cup as if it were goblet. Mangrum salutes to his Dandylions and to the half-buzzed faces turned his way.
Counter Intuits start when Ron House gets up the stage and a layer of tinnitus has developed from twenty minutes’ worth of feedback. He’s nearly on top of me and I instinctively grab my camera because I’m restless and if I can’t move then at least I can try to convey the spirit of the show.
By their last song, House walks off the stage and into the audience. They give him space. I try to shove House hoping he builds momentum and pinballs off some other burly guys—everyone can say they opened a pit with Ron House. I immediately feel bad for pushing him.
He laid on the ground and curled up into the fetal position. Photographers raised their cameras overhead. I thought it was all some sort of sick joke.
It’s been some years since the prolific punk transplant Seth Sutton—protégé of the late Jay Reatard—left for California and settled in San Francisco where he cultivated his depopulationist bedroom project Useless Eaters into a cohesive live band. He used to live here, in Memphis, and he was last here in May, on tour for the new concept LP Relaxing Death.
It sounds like dying vacuum cleaners and the decline of Western civilization. Some diehards in the crowd went nuts. I immediately scoot over to a handful of people getting rowdy. Then someone spills their beer. And again. And again. Surly dudes maneuver around us to protect their girlfriends—that kept us from losing foot as we danced to the scratches of Sutton’s white Strat, all compelling, chaotic and dissonant. Well before long the entire half of the stage was freaking out, and some of the photographers had even shielded their cameras away. Opposite to us, near the door to the corralled patio, were older residents or some-other, dressed to posture—admittedly, they were very well-dressed.
They looked at us with morbid curiosity. Garage rock is different in Memphis, and I guess the concerts are, too.
The 13th Gonerfest at Hi Tone was a broadway for crust pride and Memphis bravado, though I’m not sure how many were born-and-raised Memphians. It’s not a matter of importance anyways—you don’t wonder how many kandi kids are local to a rave if you’re a tourist. Chances are there are as many tourists as there are locals and transplants trying to fit in, but for better or worse, Gonerfest was a safe experience, a reason to be smashed in one of the most dangerous cities in America. The fest has a devout following of older residents and young out-of-towners split among the states, parts of Canada and Australia. At the entrance, I discover a good number of the crusties are volunteers.
An older man from Toronto sat on a sidewalk that I happened across. He had long, thin white hair and he looked less drunk than I felt. This was his fourth time at the festival, and he left it at that. There are deathrockers chilling across from me.
A Ron Swanson-lookalike father-of-four from Portland complained about online dating and remembered me from the mosh pit. He was a left-handed guitarist, and he happened to sit across an engineer who knew of a creative collective in Memphis. A woman with a streak of curled blue hair looks annoyed and wasted. She was part of that old creative collective called Courthouse. She corrects me—she is Courthouse.
Her head is guillotined on several occasions when Buck Biloxi & the Fucks play because she slouches over, but she also uses her butt to buffer space from the college drunks so she can catch her breath. That was admirable.
I was told to Uber over walking back late at night. It was half past 1 AM, and I had enough of Black Lips. My jacket smelled of beer and sweat and tobacco. People were making out and chainsmoking.
A soccer van picked me up. The driver was a man from Yemen, who moved here after finishing university in Chicago.
He asked me if I knew about the country Yemen. I ask, “Isn’t there a civil war?”
After some hesitation, he said yes.
The car was silent for the rest of the trip.
It’s 4 AM. I’m in an Uber. I can’t understand what this man is saying, but I hear smooth R&B. His accent is thick, but he’s singing smooth R&B. My eyes are red and I can feel the oil weighing my hair down. I remember the after-party at Murphy’s, the one I’d said I’d visit before leaving. The one I had no excuse to miss. The after-party was when the real party would start. That was when I would get to see Memphis.
But a chance to see Memphis doesn’t trump a 6 AM flight. And I can, in fact, see Memphis anytime I want. And perhaps it’s because of that that I have an excuse to miss it. I have the luxury to.
I will always be a tourist.