bluegrass to lonestar

Small and cozy, check. Close to home, check. Neapolitan style pizza, delicious check. 512 beer on tap, check. Water in swing top bottles, check. One of the best jukeboxes I’ve encountered, yes. I think we’ve found out new favorite place to eat in Austin.

So you may have noticed some issues with the site.  The shitty host I use had a server failure and I’m having some issues with the DB restore.  Hopefully I can get it all sorted out soon.  Thanks for reading.

Yesterday, everything at Little Woodrows, beer, burgers, etc., was 50% off.  This is the only reason I would ever step foot in the bland Austin chain’s Guadalupe location.  The food is supplied by a burger trailer in the back, F. N. Goode’s, goofy name run by goofy, likeable guys with Clerks-style cartoons of their faces on the sign.  The one who took our order could easily get work as a Silent Bob stand-in.

The burgers were actually really good.  The bun was a bit too thick, and it could have used a bit more mayo, but those are minor complaints.  Lauren and I pretty much had the patio to ourselves.  There were a few people scattered indoors, but it was mostly a ghost town because of some light rain.  How bad does your business have to be to not even draw a crowd on half-off day?  I pity the good burger that’s stuck in a crummy bar like this.

I biked down to Stubb’s Friday night with Kady to see Animal Collective. When I got there the opening band, Black Dice, was already playing. This was quite possibly the worst opening act I’ve ever seen. Shitty cacophonous noise is not music. I’ll leave it at that. The Animal Collective set made up for it though.

The show had all the crazy visuals and lights you would expect but it wasn’t as energetic as I had anticipated until the encore. The encore was awesome. Saving the best for last? The setlist was quite Merriweather heavy, but I guess that’s to be expected when a band is on tour for that album. I would have liked more variety(anything off of Feels or Indian), but they what can you do? They did work in a few older tracks and a couple new ones. They ended up playing for an hour and a half in total.

A couple other thoughts:

- I decided that I do not like Stubb’s. I thought that RATATAT might have been an anomoly but no. The sound is medicore and the crowds suck.

- Hippie dance pits are funny.

- The did not play Peacebone, which made all the frat boys sad, which in turn made me happy.

Feeling a bit worse for wear from the previous day we started Friday out in search of free food and drink once again. Maggie Mae’s was a bust, and we got one drink ticket each at Habana 6, but the bar wasn’t open yet. Lauren opted to stay there for Parenthetical Girls and That Ghost (both good in very different ways, says she), but the rest of the gang walked up to Red Eyed Fly for free, spicy bloody marys and PBR tallboys. Matt Ellis provided some crappy country music as soundtrack to our drink.

(more…)