Capitol City A&E Magazine
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EL FLACOPicked to be in this years Local Licks Live!Triple Crown, San Marcos
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| Upon arriving at the teensy Triple Crown bar in San Marcos my cronies and I knew that we were in for an exciting show by the line of Harleys parked out front...I figured that if anyone besides us Austin slacker-types were going to be capable of getting El Flaco, it was gonna be bikers. Our fortunes momentarily turned sour as the scrawny doorman attempted to bar us from the premises on the basis of a potential fire ordinance violation (this stuff hasn't happened to me in years in Austin...didn't this guy know who I am?), but a well-placed bribe by my kid brother and a kind word or two from El Flaco bassist Rob Gray on our behalf were more than enough to gain us passage. The Triple Crown is even teensier on the inside than it appears from without...yet another vital ingredient for the optimum El Flaco environment. As the openers the Kevorkians were wrapping up their fine punk-rock set, my cronies and I enjoyed the impressive beer selection that tasted almost as good as it looked flowing down the fronts of our shirts (okay, so the scrawny door guy had a point, but he got his five bucks). The buzz about the room was of El Flaco guitarist Chris Hay's impending wedding; in fact this gig was to be his last as a single man. The opening notes of El Flaco's set separated the men from the boys as the blasting single-column stage right PA main seemed to blow everyone in the crowd to the left with some infernal wind. El Flaco have always amazed me with the pure heaviness they lay down with only three members and minimal equipment (overdrive has never been done tastier), and Hay's spring-loaded slight-of-hand guitar technique is plenty to puzzle your average heavy-metal noodler. | ||||||||||
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| Amazingly, Gray at one point wielded his low-end bass frequencies precisely enough to shatter a pint of Guinness right out of my kid brother's hand (he took credit for it, anyway). Not a biker boot refrained from stomping the sticky Triple Crown floor as our heroes pounded through 'Unflappable', 'Sister', 'Farmer' and several others from the now-out-of-print Thub CD, as well as fine yet-unreleased tunes such as "Party" and the amazing 'Harvey Korman'. Not only do Gray, Hay and drummer Brad Turner divvy up the vocal chores about equally, they each do their thing in exactly the right place. Some of the greatest live bands, El Flaco included, thrive in the cramped but intimate setting of a place like the Triple Crown, and I hope that El Flaco's big-time overseers at Lone Wolf are capable of bringing them to big-time success without spoiling that precious intimacy. As the employees and our fellow patrons at a nearby San Marcos Taco Bell discovered after the show, El Flaco did a damn swell job of filling me and my cronies with the fire of spastic movement. | ||||||||||
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http://www.monsterbit.com/elflaco
