Yesterday, the blogosphere was shocked when the news broke that Jack White had teamed with Insane Clown Posse to collaborate on a new single which puts a modern spin on a song composed by Mozart. We asked HT’s writing collective Three Grown Men to weigh in on the track…

Kevin Smallwood

This combo makes perfect sense. If there is anyone on this planet that gives less of a shit about what you think then Jack White, it’s the Insane Clown Posse. Once you get past the third grade level lyrics, you might find that this is groundbreaking work.

First of all, the song is about Mozart getting his asshole licked. Now, whether the great musical genius of the 18th Century was the happy recipient of a regular rump trumpet is beside the point. This is new material. Scholars will now investigate this conjecture the same way that they tried to figure out if William Shakespeare smoked pot.

Secondly, Jack White is dropping beats. And not only is he dropping beats, he’s doing it all over Mozart’s public domain. Does anyone else realize how dangerous that is? Jack White is going to be the DJ Danger Mouse of the Van’s, Brahms’ and Bach’s.

READ ON for more of 3GM’s take on this controversial track…

HT’s Three Grown Men writing collective attended the Equifunk festival on August 19 and 20 at Eastern Pennsylvania’s Camps Equinunk and Blue Ridge and have filed a pair of letters describing this one-of-a-kind event. Here’s the first of the missives, penned by 3GM’s Kevin Smallwood…

Dear Diary,

Leaving from Virginia six and a half rain-soaked hours earlier, I arrived at Camp Equinunk during sunset on Friday evening. Now, I’ve seen Friday the 13th a few times, so spending a weekend at a camp that is nestled on a big beautiful lake made this festival one of the more frighteningly beautiful music experiences I’ve ever had.

First of all, there was an army of golf carts that carried everyone’s gear from the car to their respective sleeping arrangements.  Considering the mud, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to keep a pair of $5 tennis shoes clean. On the cart ride to our bunk we passed the main stage, an Olympic size pool with a 30-foot water slide, girls bunks…and more girls bunks.

As I walked into our cabin I was greeted with three bottles of liquor and a note on the floor that read “Welcome.” I thought I might be special, but it turns out that anyone staying in a cabin was greeted with the same warmth any 20-something could appreciate.

READ ON for more of 3GM’s Letter From Equifunk…

Now that we’re back and fully recovered from the largest music convention in the country, its time to reflect on exactly what happened to Three Grown Men during their first assignment on the road at SXSW Music in Austin.

Kevin Smallwood

When we decided to do SXSW, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew there would be a lot of skinny jeans and flannel -which is not exactly my scene – but most of my apprehension was due to the fact that I didn’t know 97% of the 2,000 bands.

With a cumulative sleep total of 17 hours in over four days, I can honestly say that SXSW is by and far the best music “festival” in the country. First of all the venue is actually the city of Austin. I have never been anywhere where I’ve literally been…everywhere. Indoor venues, outdoor venues, parks, lakes, rivers, monuments, crosswalks; if there was a free space and an open ear, someone was bound to be playing music there.  Overall I’d say we covered about 5 miles per day – and we rarely went to the same place twice.

• 3GM @ SXSW: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Day 4

I can’t say for sure how many bands we saw, but I know which ones gave me that “oh wow” feeling. You know the one – it’s that moment where your sense of hearing is so profoundly pleasured by something new that it fires off synapses that would otherwise lay dormant in the comfort of your musical bubble.

READ ON from Three Grown Men on their SXSW experience…

If the average music festival is a 26.2 mile marathon, then SXSW is a 140-mile Iron Man challenge. Waking up on day four, our skin was burnt, our ankles were swollen, and our ears were bleeding. But just when it seemed like all hope was lost and we’d spend the day sleeping – one brave, grown-ass man poured a red bull into his coffee, gave a stern look across the kitchen table and said the following words:

“…Tighten. The Fuck. Up.”

And just like that we were off for the final day of SXSW.

[Kanye and friends took over SXSW 2011 with a late night concert]

Our first stop was the MOG party for TV on the Radio and Big Boi. TV’s set at Mohawk was basically the same thing we saw of their set the day before at Stubbs. But to see them in a venue like the open-air, multi-level, very limited capacity Mohawk added a great deal of excitement. The energy was fluid throughout the venue, and the band’s huge sound was even more encapsulated than usual.

[Big Boi at The Mohawk]

There was about an hour break between TV on the Radio and Big Boi, and Yuck played the indoor stage at Mohawk. Despite their hype, we decided to hold our place to see Daddy Fat Sax in action. When he came on, he and MC Black Owned C-Bone led the excited crowd in a splattering of old school Outkast tracks and newer stuff from his own solo recordings. As the late afternoon sun started to fade, the onstage dance party kept energy and spirits high.

• Three Grown Men @ SXSW: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

READ ON for more on Day 4 at SXSW from Three Grown Men…

Nobody said it was going to be easy. The sun alone sucks energy out of you, not to mention the combination of constant walking and our search for seven different kinds of rail tequila (side note: we’ve only found three).

[Crowd surfing at MSTRKRFT]

At this point we’re on auto pilot. We’re drones, zombies. The main things that keep us going are Red Bull and disco bass lines. But we love it. There is great music on every corner and everything we discover is something we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It’s a freak show, a constant party, and we have no idea if the end is in sight. We could do this forever.

READ ON to check out how we’re doing on our scavenger hunt and the rest of what we saw yesterday…

At South by Southwest, sometimes you ignore your schedule completely and end up in places you wouldn’t have thought about going and doing things you wouldn’t normally do. You might wait in line for an hour for free booze and popcorn at the Fader Fort or you might find yourself in a private party thrown by Entertainment Weekly, again, drinking free booze during a funk show. When you should have been trying to get on camera at Widespread Panic’s show, you might instead wander off course a bit to a rather unknown wine bar and discover a singer who turns Gangstas Paradise into a melody played on glockenspiel. There is also a chance that you’d end up at a DJ set on a smoky dance floor or seeing a good band play in a small bar with a shitty sound system. Also, we saw Wu Tang, and the rumors are true. They ain’t nothing to fuck with.

Even without a plan, we knocked a couple more items off our scavenger hunt. Check it out how we did…

See 18 Bands in a Day

We saw 19 acts perform yesterday and we weren’t even trying. However, our feet feel like whatever happens to pregnant women. Here’s our list:

Givers, The Answering Machine, The Antlers, The New Mastersounds, Fitz and the Tantrums, Alyson Greenfield, Bo Bliz, Morning Teleportation, Ume, Times New Viking, Trouble Andrew, Rocky Business, Marz Lovejoy, Trae Tha Truth, Yelawolf, Fishbone, Wu-Tang, Erykah Badu, The Fresh and Onlys

READ ON for more from 3GM’s second day at SXSW..

At a festival with over 2000 bands, you thrive on the good ones to keep you going. At times you begin to feel as if mediocre is par for the course. You realize by the end of the first day, if it hadn’t already occurred to you, how important a good sound guy is and how energy becomes the most important thing in a live performance.

Forget creativity and tight harmonies, you can perfect those on the album. A good voice or some fast fingers? Those will only get you so far. What you need is stage presence and passion. If you can’t hold the attention of a crowd who’s been on their feet for eight hours in the Texas heat, you probably shouldn’t have the spot. SXSW is a natural selection bootcamp for bands and fans alike.

For those of you following our SXSW Scavenger Hunt, here’s what we were able to check off the list so far…

Find an Incredible Bluegrass Band – Trampled by Turtles

There should be at least one bluegrass band tucked away in a back corner or jamming collectively on a late night stage at every festival – especially SXSW. At 1AM on Tuesday, before the official music events even started, Trampled by Turtles stomped on the Bat Bar with a fiddle and acoustic bass. It didn’t hurt that our search for rail tequila started here (note: Cordoniz seems to be everywhere). READ ON for more from 3GM’s first day at SXSW…

The amount of weirdness converging upon Austin this week for South by Southwest is too much for even a three-headed beast to devour. To better make sense of the insane scheduling, inescapable hype and impenetrable venues, Three Grown Men has adopted an alternative coverage strategy.

[All photos by Conor Kelley]

We compiled the list below to help us get our fill of bands, BBQ and booze. Maybe we’ll hunt down everything or maybe we’ll find nothing, but check Hidden Track every day at 1PM ET to join us on our exploits. You can also follow us on Twitter, and friend us on Facebook for all-day coverage. From March 15-20 we are SXSW scavengers.

• Find the youngest band
• Find five bands that don’t suck from five different countries
• Find the best street musician
• Find a famous person in a band
• Find a great funk band
• Find the best brisket in Austin
• Find the best singer/songwriter
• Find the prettiest guitar in Austin
• Find the drunkest dude at SXSW

READ ON for more of 3GM’s South by Southwest Scavenger List…

Seeing Soulive last Friday at Brooklyn Bowl during their 10-night run got us thinking about what a force the band is in the world of live music. Soulive appeals to the old and young, black and white, jazz-nut and hip-hop fan alike. We danced our asses off and left Brooklyn satisfied at 2:30AM. Below are our musings on the history of the funk/jazz trio and why 3GM officially dubs them NYC’s band, along with photos from the all-star lineup that took the stage last Friday, including Robert Randolph, Living Colour singer, Corey Glover, and many others. (Photos and captions by Conor Kelley)

[Legendary frontman Corey Glover (Living Colour) channeled his '60s idols for an unforgettable guest performance, backed by the best possible soul/funk lineup going right now.]

Jonathan Kosakow on Soulive’s history:

My God, has it been 12 years already? I still remember rocking out to Get Down and Turn It Out like it was yesterday, driving my car through the twists and turns of Connecticut back roads, smacking the steering wheel and the dashboard along with Alan Evans’ drums and practically skidding off the road into the reservoir because Kraz was just wailing, man. Actually, wait, that does feel like 12 years ago, but those moments are still very much in my memory.

[Kraz shows pretty clearly that this was the highest-energy performance of Bowlive II so far and everyone in the house knew it.]

Another time, a friend and I were driving home from the Waterloo Village Music Festival in Jersey, sometime around 2001 or 2002, and needed some solid music to keep us awake through the stench of I-95 at two in the morning. We had just gotten through Medeski Martin & Wood’s Combustication and wanted to keep the groove going, so we put on Turn It Out, Soulive’s second release and first live album. Immediately, we knew something was missing: after the fullness, exploration, and ultimate groove of MMW, Soulive just wasn’t what we were looking for. The talent was there, but something else was missing. My friend ejected the disc and put on Slip Stitch & Pass, a never-fail. I was devastated. I loved Soulive, and I still do, but I had to concede defeat.

I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing until last March when I saw them absolutely destroy the Brooklyn Bowl during the first annual Bowlive.

READ ON for more from 3GM on why Soulive is NYC’s band…

The proper use of popular music in films is a delicate thing. Good music makes everything better and movies are no exception. It’s the reason why a subway ride or walk in the park seems almost cinematic when our headphones are in. However, a good song can easily be a crutch for a bad scene to lean on. The best placements of recognizable songs will supplement a visually arresting moment in a plot rather than distract the audience from it.

We enlisted the help of 3GM friend Kevin Coyle and started compiling a list of our all-time favorite “popular music + movie scene” combinations. We quickly noticed that two names kept popping up: Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson. These two men have become masters of cinema by drawing heavily on pop culture to create poignant moments. Having acknowledged that, we decided to leave them off our list entirely to make room for some of the more forgotten scenes that we love. Here is our list…

Movie: Boogie Nights (1997)
Song: Jessie’s Girl – Rick Springfield/99 Luft Balloons – Nena

This is, plain and simple, one of the best movie scenes of all time. It was the moment where Paul Thomas Anderson became an original filmmaker with distinctive style. The performances are all spot-on and the tension is palpable. PTA’s choice to use these ’80s pop classics instead of a traditional film score during this overwrought drug-deal-gone-wrong is the key ingredient in creating the scene’s uneasy yet engaging feeling.

READ ON for 14 more perfectly placed tunes in movies…

With Three Grown Men’s coverage of next month’s South by Southwest Festival quickly approaching, we decided to peruse the list of the hundreds of bands being showcased to weed out the acts we want to catch while in Austin. The alphabetical list of featured bands on the festival’s website is more than slightly daunting. What we discovered is, about 90% of the featured acts are brand new to us and lots of the band names are completely off the wall and ridiculous. 3GM decided to do an experiment in which we tried to guess what some of these bands would sound like based solely on their moniker and then actually listened to them. Take a look…

Jonathan Kosakow

Band name: Butts

What I think they’ll sound like: The simple and immature absurdity of this band name speaks to me in a way that not many things speak to me. And, it doesn’t hurt that when the band’s biography contains this sentence: “What started as a joke soon turned into something bigger as Butts exploded all over the place.” I’m going to wager a guess and say that Butts isn’t much more than a drummer farting on his snare and a fat man in a tight t-shirt jiggling across a tiny stage.

What they actually sound like: Two chicks – at least I think they’re both chicks – singing about being out of toilet paper over distorted guitar. I’m going to give myself half a point on this one.

READ ON to see how 3GM did identifying the music of SXSW artists Cheeseburger, Yiddish Cowboys, Fat Pimp and more…

February has been a month of heartache for music fans as breakups and rumors of breakups abound. First, the White Stripes amicably quit their courtship, then LCD Soundsystem announced they’d play their last show in April and there was even a rumor about the Gorillaz calling it quits at the top of their game. All of the tragedy aside, 3GM found it strange that these breakups, whether rumored or true, were uncharacteristically harmonious.

Conor Kelley on LCD Soundsystem:

It’s better to burn out than to fade away.

What could be more rock and roll than following through with that line? Although Neil Young is way past the age where he can burn out, and his new work shows absolutely no signs of fading into insignificance, his lyric is still a tried and true adage of the musician lifestyle. Going out while on top almost ensures a legendary reputation in the rock and roll record books.  It’s the George Costanza theory about leaving on a high note, and it works like a charm.

In the ’60s and 70s people would rarely leave the game by choice. It was mostly at the hand of drug overdoses (Hendrix), alcoholism (Joplin),  french hookers and baguettes (Morrison) or the occasional peach truck (Allman). These days people are hanging up their guitars for a different reason entirely: they see a project’s creative end in sight and walk away before it becomes stale. READ ON for more of this week’s Three Grown Men column…

Here’s what Three Grown Men are thinking about the possibility of the H.O.R.D.E. tour making a comeback next year…

Conor Kelley

The recent speculation about the H.O.R.D.E. Festival making a resurgence in 2012 has jamband fans buzzing, from the dreadlocked to the collar-popped. Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the tour’s first all-star lineup, which ripped listeners away from the Grateful Dead’s concert-opoly and fragmented the scene into dozens of successful nationally touring acts. The “jamband” world officially had a seat at the head table. Being present for the birth of any musical movement is an exciting spectacle I’m sure, though I’ve never had the perfect right time, right place, right hair, right clothes combination to witness it. It’s a rock and roll rarity when the crowd organizes itself and rallies around a group of like-minded and talented bands, but these are the moments that change popular music forever.

[Pass Scan via H.O.R.D.E. page on Bluestraveler.net]

The interesting thing about the first few H.O.R.D.E tours is that the players involved in the original 1992 and 1993 lineups went on to become, by and large, the most commercially successful jam acts of all time. The tour had nothing but pure intentions and backed up the old-world touring band credo: talent + exposure = success.

Bringing H.O.R.D.E back after a 13 year lapse is an interesting move, but will H.O.R.D.E. 2.0 be anything like the original? My hope for the festival is that John Popper returns as organizer, takes the reins and creates something truly special again. He should find a short list of dead-serious bands who just need that extra push from a 600-capacity club into an amphitheater in order to gain a following. That would be the only way to pay homage to what H.O.R.D.E. started in 1992.

READ ON for more from 3GM on the possible return of H.O.R.D.E….

Seems like this time of year everyone is making a list of some sort.  Worst this and best that.  We wanted in on that action.  You’ve been waiting, longing even, to hear our opinions, we know, it’s ok.  To keep it short: 2010 didn’t suck.   Here are Three Grown Men’s favorite moments of 2010:

Jonathan Kosakow’s top musical moments of 2010

3. Joe Purdy – “4th of July”

I stumbled upon Joe Purdy by way of coincidence, luck and lack of other choices.  The right place at the right time, he was playing his guitar alone on stage in one of the larger tents at the Mile High Music Festival this past August in front of a large crowd.  Nobody else happened to be performing at that moment.

His beard struck me first, long and unkempt, hiding his face just like his dark sunglasses.  His talent struck me next: a solemn and reminiscent voice, both lyrically and vocally, I thought of Ryan Adams and Ray LaMontagne; and a simple but catchy way of playing the acoustic guitar with single notes and melodies mixed into chord strums, I thought of Neil Young, among others.  I was able to learn through his onstage mumblings that he is somewhat of a loner, and recorded his latest album alone in a shack in Arkansas.  I went home tired and dirty later that night and found the album streaming online.  4th of July is simple: a lot of good songs.

2. Keith Richards – Life

For all the years he’s been in the spotlight, Keith Richards has somehow managed to stay somewhat of a mystery to the public.  There are hundreds of stories floating around about him and his time on the road, but he has rarely, if ever, confirmed or denied them.  Life is exactly that: a confirmation and a denial.  Keef tells you everything, from the street he grew up on as a child to whether or not he had a voluntary blood transfusion to rid his cells of heroin. His memories of the Stones’ first gigs and their many recording sessions, his obsessive and detailed knowledge of the music that inspired them, and his reasoning for playing a 5-string guitar.  It’s all in there: the music and the life.

READ ON for more of 3GM’s Top Musical Moments of ’10…

December 24th is Santa’s time to shine. By mid-September he’s already done his recon and he’s ready to judge the world’s youth like a bad episode of Divorce Court. However, delivering fine handcrafted toys to seven continents worth of deserving children in one night is no easy task. He’s already switched from White Russians to 1% milk with his snickerdoodles and he’s been religious with his Jillian Michaels workout DVD.

[Note: The attached picture is a rough estimation of Santa’s route, that was apparently drawn by an inbred elf.]

There’s only one more step in preparation for his annual circumnavigation: the perfect mix. Through tactics we are neither proud of nor able to discuss, Three Grown Men was able to get a glimpse of this year’s Christmas Eve playlist. Here’s a sampling of tracks Santa will be grooving to on each leg…

First Leg: 9:00 pm – 12:00 am
by Conor Kelley

45:33 – LCD Soundsystem

A strong first track is vital to any good playlist, but especially a playlist that fuels a nine-hour long game of global hopscotch. LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33 is the perfect kickstart to Santa’s travels. The James Murphy composed opus offers, go figure, 45 minutes and 33 seconds of pulse-raising funk. Enough time to settle into the sleigh, get the feel of the reigns, and cruise from the North Pole to the Scandinavian Peninsula while keeping his head centered and his nerves on edge.

Intil – Menomena

Being good all year and earning a spot on the Nice List is every kid’s New Year’s resolution for one reason: the Christmas morning payoff. This concept is not lost on St. Nick. When the drums finally kick in on the last track from Menomena’s Mines all is right with the world. Plus, “Intil” is the perfect song to listen to while gazing at the sparse and endless Siberian landscape.

READ ON for more of the songs on Santa’s iPod and for an embedded playlist so you can hear all of these songs for yourself…