Stevie Tombstone - Custom Lucky Keychains

Ol' Stevie Tombstone came up with the idea that he needed a new version of the luck rabbit's foot keychain, that was huge in the 70's and 80's. We decided to create a keychain out of aluminum blanks that are soda etched by TWT Motorcycle Parts and then are cut down and finished. Each keychain is cut by hand from aluminum plate and then sprayed with high temperature paint to help bring out the etched logo. The surface is sanded down and a hole is drilled for the key ring to be inserted.

HARD SOIL - The Muddy Roots of American Music, Needs Your Help

There are some great things afoot in the world of Roots, Americana, Folk and Country music. Not only is there an amazing amount of energy being poured into a new foundation of where this ensemble is moving, but the folks who are a part of it, are here for the long haul. 

Dig into the trailer and write up below as this project needs some sponsorship dollars behind it to grease the wheels and get the movie into full production.

Find out more on Hard Soil - The Muddy Roots Of American Music


"Nowhere is America’s cultural evolution and diversity as palpable as in the music of the people – folk music or alternately roots music.

Both terms are collective terms encompassing and compiling a variety of musical styles from Bluegrass, to Blues, from Country to Cajun and from Zydeco to Gospel.

In short:

American music has always been a wild cocktail of varied musical heritages and influences.
Over the years the roots of American music would evolve into Rock ‘n’ Roll, Rockabilly, R&B, Soul, Jazz and even Punk and such diverse sub genres as Psychobilly, Blues Punk, Blues Trash, Cowpunk and primitive Rock ‘n’ Roll to mention only a few.

In spite of the music business’ efforts of musical segregation and streamlining especially country music but also the blues since the early 1920’s a die-hard subculture emerged over the years dedicated to preserving a rawer, more authentic sound and conserving the music’s wild archaic beauty and its themes of love and loss, dreams and hardship, life and death.

However the aim has not been to simply preserve the past.

To the contrary:

The evolution is ongoing and today the roots of American music while cherished and respected are being infused with the sounds of the 21^st century keeping the evolution of American Roots music an ongoing one and one that is not only heard in the land of Lincoln but across the globe.

To many it has not only become the soundtrack to their lives - it has become a way of life…"

Poster for the film, Hardsoil, being developed by the folks behind Muddy Roots and Slowboat Films

Turning A Ball Bearing Into A Custom Knife

Doing anything that involves craftsmanship takes time. Since the internet has taken over our lives we can pour for hours over other folks projects and work to best understand the work they are creating. After a few searches around youtube I found this inspiring video about knife making from a dude over in Europe. I was sold as soon as I read the title of the video: A Knife From An Old Bearing. 

Keep up with Trollsky Custom Knives on facebook

Old ball bearing taking shape as a finished knife

Leather handle is of great quality

Trollsky Custom Knives workshop

Trollsky quenching the knife after coming out of the oven

Antiseen Is Wrestling With Pop Culture

Antiseen - Falls Count Anywhere - A Collection Of Wrestling Songs

Get your copy of Falls Count Anywhere

Click over to all things Wrestling With Pop Culture




"Given the self-destructive stage antics and confrontational messages of underground punk band ANTiSEEN, the band’s longevity is as impressive as a championship title reign. But these self-proclaimed Badwill Ambassadors have been piledriving eardrums and abusing themselves for audiences all over the world for 30 years now. And with numerous shows already logged this year, as well as an ever-growing catalog of new releases including the recent New Blood and Falls Count Anywhere albums, ANTiSEEN shows no signs of letting up on its destructive path of punk rock mayhem. As the band embarks on its Dixie Dynamite Tour with Hellstomper, front man Jeff Clayton talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about wrestling, rock and blood.

ANTiSEEN has done enough songs about wrestling over the years to fill an entire CD. How far back do the songs on this album date?

Our earliest wrestling song was “Cactus Jack” and that appeared on Eat More Possum, which came out in ’93. But the version that’s on Falls Count Anywhere is the single version that came out a few years later. But that’s still the earliest thing on that record.

Greatest hype man in the business, the Cosmic Commander. Photo - Lance Dawes

You’re clearly a fan of hardcore wrestlers like Cactus Jack, Abdullah the Butcher and Terry Funk. You portray a similar sense of violence during your performances. What attracts you to such extreme behavior and how does it relate to the music you create?

I’ve always liked wrestling and growing up in the South I loved seeing Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen. Later, when cable came along, we actually got to see the Freebirds and stuff like that. But I always liked the guys that were monsters and freaks. I loved it when Gary Hart brought in Kabuki. I remember being able to barely get a station on our television – we still had one of those rotary-dial antennas – and me and my brother would look for wrestling wherever we could find it. We found something that I think came from Texas and we saw Eric the Red. We thought that was cool, but the one thing that really left an impression on me and is why I still do what I do was when they brought in Abdullah the Butcher to take on Wahoo McDaniel. They had never shown nothing quite that brutal on the television show before, at least not since we had been watching it. They showed some pretty brutal stuff like the Andersons hitting people with the cast they had on for six months. But seeing Abduallah, the commentators made it seem mike it was the most terrible thing in the world. The audience was going crazy, there was blood everywhere and it went off the air while it was still going on. It was like, “Wow!” Then we found the show on another station and watched the replay, even though it looked like it was in a snowstorm, just to get to see it again. Then there were cage matches and barbed wire, which back then guaranteed one thing: there was going to be blood. A cage match was a brutal thing and we used to get wrestling magazines and see pictures of the Billy Graham/Dusty Rhodes bullrope match, barbed wire and all that stuff, wrestling just had a lasting impression. And I have an appreciation for all of it; I like luchadores, I like the mat technician guys like Guerrero, Malenko and all them people. But the monsters and maniacs were always my favorite, and still are to this day.

Wrestling has changed quite a bit since then. Do you still watch much of today’s wrestling?

I don’t watch it much because I don’t have cable. It was a big waste of money for a vast wasteland of nothing. I talk to people who do follow it, though. If something goes down that I think I really need to see, I’ll look it up the next day on YouTube.

Did you miss the Rock N' Rassle Apocalypse? Blame yourself for being lazy and the show of a life time! The Necrobutcher gouging Beast Master Rick Link with a beer can for a hardcore death match. Photo - Lance Dawes

What did you think of Mick Foley being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame this year?

It’s about time. He deserves it, man. He and just a handful of others were the ones who breathed life into that company. I know it was the efforts of a lot of people, but when you think about the Attitude Era you think of Foley going off the top of the cage, the Undertaker/Shawn Michaels Hell in a Cell, Stone Cold and all that stuff. And that whole attitude the WWF adopted at that time came from ECW. Foley came from there, even Stone Cold came from ECW to WWE. And they all brought some of that with them. It was a really exciting time for wrestling and one of them times you’ll never forget. It’s hard to picture that as being classic now, but it is.

Another CD came out around the same time as Falls Count Anywhere…

New Blood is a compilation of singles that were done over a three year period. We stopped being concerned with making albums, but we’ve put out a ton of singles in different countries all over the world. They’d be really small runs, so we sold out of all those within days. So we just compiled all those singles to make that album, which is why some of the tracks repeat on Falls Count Anywhere. But we just compiled all the wrestling songs in one place so people could just buy them in one place. I guess that’s not a very good business move since they’d have to buy ten CDs otherwise. Saying that aloud, now I think that was a really dumb move. Now we’re doing a truckload of singles again, so maybe in another year or two we’ll compile another album. We’re doing a split with a death metal group from Cleveland called NunSlaughter that will have two brand new songs on it. We’re also doing a split with Poison Idea that’s going to have a brand new original track and a cover of the Sex Pistols‘ “Belsen Was a Gas”. We’ve got a bunch of other projects lined up that we haven’t actually done yet. Those are the two that are done, sent off and going to be out soon.

The Cosmic Commander, The Ref and Jeff Clayton of Antiseen at the Rock N' Rassle Apocalypse, Photo - Lance Dawes

You’ve still been performing quite a bit and are now on tour again.

Yeah. We went on a three-month break because our bass player’s wife had a child. But we play at least one weekend a month when we’re not touring. But now we’re touring with Hellstomper and we also have a bunch of offers for one-offs overseas. So this year has been pretty busy.

What do you guys do when you’re not on tour?

Our bass player is going to school on his G.I. Bill. The drummer is about to finish college. Joe [Young] runs a record store and I work in a heating and air conditioner warehouse. ANTiSEEN keeps us busy, but it don’t keep us rich.

You guys are based in the Carolinas, an area with a storied wrestling past. Do you keep up with the local wrestling scene at all?

There’s a town here called Chester where Action Packed Wrestling runs every Friday night. They’ve had people like Ricky Morton and maybe some of the younger guys that are popular. It’s a fun thing. I only live about 20 minutes away from Charlotte and there’s a bunch of federations running out of Charlotte. There’s a real good one that runs out of Tremont Music Hall, where we play, called Xtreme World Wrestling and they’re really good.

Has ANTiSEEN ever performed at a wrestling event?

Yeah. But you know what? Only twice. We played at one in Philadelphia called Rule Breakers Rule back in ’96. That was the first time we had played one and that was complete and total chaos. Cops shut the thing down as we were playing during a barbed wire match. Last summer we hosted a show in Charlotte called Rock N’ Rassle Apocalypse headlined by “The Beastmaster” Rick Link and the Necro Butcher, so there was blood all over the place.

www.antiseen.com

Necrobutcher, Cosmic Commander, Rick Link and Antiseen - Photo - Lance Dawes

Beast Master Rick Link giving the Necrobutcher a good beating - Photo Lance Dawes

Missin' The Ol' 79' CB650 Cafe Racer

Decided to sell the 1979 Honda CB650 a while back, but damn am I missing that bike...

Hellbound Glory Will Launch Brand New Song For Download On June 4th

Poster for clubs during the Hustle To Get By Tour 2013 with Hellbound Glory

HELLBOUND GLORY has announced a summer tour for the month of June. The “Hustle To Get By” Tour will bring the band’s distinctive brand of ‘hillbilly hustle’ to Clubs and Festival Stages across the country.

 

The trek revisits tour-markets recently supported on the Kid Rock Rebel Soul Tour as well as Hellbound Glory strongholds across the country.

 

“I’m looking forward to bringing the energy of our arena-sized show into the clubs this summer. I think long time fans of the band will be every bit as stoked as folks who may have seen us for the first time just a few months ago,” says front man Leroy Virgil.
 

To coincide with the tour, the band has released the first track of the live recording “HELLBOUND GLORY | LIVE FROM NASHVILLE” exclusively via the band’s Official YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/hellboundgloryvideo

 

Subsequent tracks are slated for release, in set list order, leading up to the tour’s first date on June 3rd.

 

Virgil explains, “Playing Bridgestone Arena in Nashville was amazing and we’re fortunate to have every lyric, every note, and every bit of attitude caught on tape… The night Hellbound Glory came to town.”

 

The band’s latest single, “The Feud,” is set for full digital release on June 4th.

May 18 - Joe's Bar & Grill - Lockeford, CA
Jun 03 - Burt's Tiki Lounge - Salt Lake City, UT
Jun 04 - Larimer Lounge - Denver, CO
Jun 07 - 1884 Lounge - Memphis, TN
Jun 13 - The High Noon Saloon - Madison, WI
Jun 14 - Buck's Bar & Grill - Waterloo, NE
Jun 19 - The Well - Knoxville, TN
Jun 22 - Mainstreet - Toledo, OH
Jun 23 - Jackson County Fairgrounds - Jackson, MI
 

Enough With The Cover Songs, Let The Real Talent Shine

After perusing the news on NPR I happened to find this article about a whole new wave of musicians that use youtube to cover pop songs, in order to gather attention for themselves as actual artists. Does this sound like a crock of shit? Why yes it does. Matter of fact, I believe it's the absolute reflection of the shallow throw away culture that the internet has spawned and encouraged to blossom. This whole article reflects exactly what is wrong with pop music and corporate radio. I enjoy finding and reading articles such as these, due to the fact that it reconfirms our goals. The bands we work with and as a label, our goal is to leave a legacy, not just a ripple after walking through a rain puddle.

Read and comment on the article over on NPR.org

Tyler Ward is just one of the many problems with pop music karaoke

"The online video sharing site YouTube is this generation's MTV. Artists like Gotye and PSY have found mainstream success after their videos went viral. Yet the number of cover songs — from toddlers singing The Beatles to teens tackling Led Zeppelin — eclipses original work by a long shot. Between those two extremes is an alternative universe of aspiring professional musicians who use cover songs on YouTube to build fan bases of their own. What these musicians once did for love and fame is starting to pay off in cold, hard cash.

If you search for a song called "Payphone" by Maroon 5, you'll find the original, and you'll find the Jayesslee version, the P.S. 22 version and one by Tyler Ward, a 24-year-old singer and songwriter from Denver with an all-American look and a sound that lives somewhere between indie pop and country. Ward uses YouTube to promote his music career — he posts covers trying to draw new fans.

"I started, actually, doing cover songs in the bar, trying to make ends meet every weekend," he says. "So when I figured out what YouTube was, I just figured I could put these online, see what happens."

What happened was an opening slot for the Jonas Brothers, a performance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and a headlining tour through Europe, the U.S. and Canada. But he could have made more money back at the bar singing those same songs.

"The challenge is, when an artist decides to cover a song, they don't actually have the rights to make money on that song," says George Strompolos, the CEO of Fullscreen Entertainment. Tyler Ward is one of his clients.

He explains that, because YouTube is free in the same way that broadcast TV is free, all of the money that musicians, record labels and music publishers make right now is through advertising that runs with the videos. Until recently, cover songs were the exception. YouTube couldn't run ads on those videos. An aspiring musician like Ward could put hours of work into a video, hoping for attention, but not get a single dollar.

"The problem is," says Strompolos, "neither will the original songwriter, because, again, there are no advertisements."

The issue is the legal rights to the song. That's held by publishers or songwriters, and if anyone wants to make money on a recoding of a song, they have to make a deal. This can be tricky when talking about the thousands of people who upload covers to YouTube.

Enter Fullscreen and one of its rivals, Maker Studios. They're in the business of connecting YouTube creators with possible advertisers. These companies put talent agents, producers and ad sales all under one roof.

Earlier this year, Fullscreen and Maker struck a deal with one of the largest song rights holders: Universal Music Publishing Group. This opened up Universal's massive catalog — decades of music from Fleetwood Mac to Adele — for a revenue sharing plan. Now the musicians who work with Fullscreen and Maker can earn money on covers.

"What we've done with teaming up with Universal Music Publishing Group is allow the artists who cover those songs to have the license to run the advertisements," Strompolos says. "And that way if their cover songs on YouTube get hundreds of thousands or millions of views, it's actually worth money to that cover artist, and the original songwriter is also compensated."

None of the parties involved in the deal will disclose exactly how the money is shared, so I asked Josh Cohen, founder of online video news site Tubefilter, to give me a sense of how this all works for the YouTube musicians.

"The general revenue split for advertising on YouTube is 45 percent/55 percent. That's 55 percent to the creator, 45 percent to YouTube," he says. "There may be varying deals depending on the company that YouTube's working with, but that's pretty standard."

Ads pay content creators — that includes the creators of cover songs — based on what's called CPM, which is cost per 1,000 views.

"Content creators on the low end are making a $1 or $2 CPM from YouTube," Cohen says. "The benefits of signing up with a company like Maker Studios or Fullscreen is that those content creators can get guaranteed higher rates for their videos. So Maker Studios or Fullscreen might offer them a $2 or $3 CPM, or even higher for a period of time, which is more money than they'd be making from YouTube alone."

YouTube pays the music publisher and original songwriter, and the cover artists get a little money. They also get to make names for themselves while riding the popularity wave of hit songs. Meanwhile, businesses like Fullscreen and Maker Studios are, in a way, becoming de facto A&R departments for the music industry.

Maker recently got a $36 million injection of cash from Time Warner Investments. Courtney Holt worked with MySpace Music and is now the chief operating officer of Maker Studios. A serious music fan, he believes there are infinite possibilities to mine the back catalogs of the music publishers. The YouTube generation, after all, hasn't heard everything yet.

"I think in some ways we have a responsibility to reintroduce this generation to really great music, not just new music," he says. "Because if we have one talent who loves Justin Timberlake, maybe they haven't really discovered the Michael Jackson catalog or the Motown catalog or the Stax catalog. And you start to think about, 'What if I go back a little further? What am I going to find?' "

What musicians are finding is that cover songs can simultaneously launch their YouTube careers while helping to cover the bills. No more spending your post-college years singing in bars while living in your father's basement, like Tyler Ward did.

"He was like, 'You've got two years, son. You've got two years, and then you're going to have to get a real job,' " he says. "About a year and a half later, I started doing the cover thing and my whole world changed. I was able to move out to L.A., support myself, buy a car, buy a house — that kind of thing."

Music to any aspiring musician's ears."

The Modern Motorcycle Diaries - 503 Days & 82,459 Miles

Life is meant to be lived and after finding this video on youtube, I can definitely say that I am quite jealous of this adventure. Striking out into the wilds of the open road can be daunting, but with a bit of planning and prep work, good things tend to happen.

Find out more about Alex Chacon and his travels

"Alaska to Argentina in 500 Days, the sights and roads of a motorcycle journey, a one man video documentary of the craziest, most beautiful and intense roads the Western World has to offer.

Follow Alex Chacon from Texas, as he navigates through the dangerous and exciting Pan American route through the Americans on motorcycle, an Epic continuance to the famous motorcycle diaries with Ernesto Che Guevara."

Carolina Still Featured On New Releases Now

Carolina Still, out of Washington, NC, promotes a vision of early 20th century rural and small-town life, with a distinct Southern focus. They are a hard-driving, acoustic quartet with a distinctive new young sound and an old-time feel - the result of a potent blend of musical styles of old time, bluegrass, country, blues, rockabilly, punk and more.

The band's sound is deeply rooted in traditional music, but it is delivered with lots of energy and originality. The band will take you down on the farm, out into the tobacco fields, down a dirt road with a trunk full of 'shine; you never know where they might take you. 

Link to New Releases Now

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Carolina Still featured in New Releases Now for the week of May 14, 2013

Carolina Still makes their itunes debut for New & Noteworthy

Carolina Still makes their itunes debut for New & Noteworthy, for the week of May 14th 2013

Get your copy of Carolina Still's brand new album, which has just made it's debut on the itunes New & Noteworthy album charts. The 12" vinyl records are still in production as our main manufacturer for vinyl is running behind with the huge amount of orders they are producing.  

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