​Last week, Hollywood Shuffle told you about a new documentary, Thunder Soul, featuring Houston's legendary late-'60s/early-'70s funky high schoolers, the Kashmere Stage Band. The director, Mark Landsman, is currently in Austin prepping for the world premier of the movie at SXSW Film.

A couple of years ago, Landsman, a film director from Chicago, was listening to NPR in his Los Angeles office when he heard a story about the KSB. (Absolutely worth a listen, here, including MP3s of performances.) "I was just blown away," Landsman said. "They were interviewing [late bandleader) Conrad Johnson, and he was talking about the band's CD release."

Landsman, who typically directs feature films, was looking for a new idea to bring to producers. "I thought this would make a good movie. So I just started calling every Conrad Johnson in the Houston and phone book," he says. "I got in touch with one guy and said 'I just heard you on the radio,' and he said 'No, you just heard my dad.'"

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Welcome back to Five Spot. Every Friday, we'll examine a recent bit of music news and, albeit sometimes awkwardly, tie it to a bit of Houston rap. It's five videos and occasional cussing. Send tips to introducingliston@gmail.com.

​Yo, maybe you heard, maybe you didn't, but there's some concerts and whatnot going down in A(wf)u(l)stin soon. As part of the celebrations, Bun B will be headlining this year's Noisemakers showcase.

In an interview with Peter Rosenberg, the man behind the show, Bun name-dropped Trill Connection, a blog run by Percy Mack dedicated to cataloging the vast, vast history of UGK features. For any fan of the Port Arthur twosome, it's an absolute necessity. Mack has spent the better part of a year and a half making accessible some of the rarer UGK features.

Mack isn't a Houstonian, so we tagged him with an email interview to get his thoughts on five of the more obscure UGK features. Hit the jump to see which songs made the cut.

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Surfer Blood, seen above covering Guided by Voices' "Game of Pricks," has quickly become huge. Not Kings of Leon huge, not headlining a North American arena tour huge, or the biggest thing to hit Europe since, well, the euro huge. At least not yet. Stick with huge for a band from West Palm Beach that has firmly entrenched itself in the national indie set. Suffice it to say, the band is huge enough to have earned itself a staggering ten gigs at South by Southwest this year, including our Village Voice shindig at La Zona Rosa (also featuring the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Superchunk, the XX) and as the stacked Pitchfork party at Emo's.
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If you're heading to Austin for the SXSW Interactive or Music festivals and have a Gold or Platinum badge, you can use it to get into screenings at the SXSW Film Festival, which starts today and runs all the way through the end of the Music fest next week. SXSW Film has made a name for themselves in recent years as a platform for both super-indies and cool studio features, but they also showcase some of the better (and, better yet, weirder) films from around the festival circuit. With that in mind, here are six films screening at SXSW that I've seen, that you absolutely must try to check out.

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Photo by Laughing Squid/ Scott Beale

​ It's T minus 19 hours until the annual liquid re-union that is SXSW. While the more massive crowds show up for the music festival on the 17th, SXSW is also home to the world's biggest tech-fest, SXSWi, which runs from the 12th to the 16th.
 
That means a huge contingent of the bay area's tech community is currently flying to Austin to see all their San Francisco friends get out-of-their-mind-wasted while disclosing trade secrets (like who accidentally slept with whom last night). I'm kidding, people go to SXSWi for other reasons too -- say to replenish their t-shirt drawer or cover their laptops with promotional stickers.

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Dope production from twin St. Louis emcees QB and Rep courtesy of MadeMonarchs.com and AnonymousInsolence.com.

Family Affair "Still The Same" from MadeMonarchs on Vimeo.

If you're headed to SXSW check out Family Affair and the rest of local hip-hop collective The Force on Friday March 19 at the Creekside Lounge.

Seven years ago this week, the Dixie Chicks had the No. 1 country single in the U.S. with Bruce Robison's lump-raising "Travelin' Soldier." Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the Bush Administration was putting the finishing touches on its Iraqi invasion strategy, which prompted Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines to tell a London audience the evening of March 10, 2003, that "we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas."

​Oops. Although lefties flocked to the Chicks' defense - some even admitting that hey, maybe their music wasn't so bad after all - several mainstream country stations, especially in the South, went from spinning "Soldier" once an hour to organizing anti-Chick rallies where DJs encouraged listeners to bring in CDs, posters and other paraphernalia to either be crushed by bulldozers or thrown on Farenheit 451-like bonfires. In the Chicks' hometown of Dallas, they needed a police escort from the airport to American Airlines Center because someone called in a death threat against Maines.

The Chicks came back in 2006 with Taking the Long Way, an album geared both in sound and marketing strategy toward NPR and adult-alternative listeners. Tickets never even went on sale for the planned Houston stop of the Chicks' subsequent Accidents & Accusations tour when no radio stations here would sell them advertising time. (Way to make us proud, assholes.) Long Way won the 2007 Grammy for Album of the Year, with Maines' song about "The Incident" and its near-bloody aftermath, "Not Ready to Make Nice," taking both Record and Song of the Year.

Ever since, though, the Chicks have been in limbo. Sorry, "on hiatus."

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www.myspace.com/jodyseabodyandthewhirls

Houston psych-rockers and Overflow artist Jody Seabody & the Whirls

​Thursday marks the beginning of Super Happy Fun Land's SXSW Overflow Fest, two weeks of performers stopping by the East End art space/music venue/sock-monkey emporium on their way to and from Austin. Read more about it in this week's SXSW-related feature package.

This year Overflow Fest is bringing almost 100 artists through town, from as far off as Spain, China and Arkansas, very few of whom Rocks Off - or even SHFL owner Brian Arthur - has ever heard of. But at $8 a night or a measly $25 for a two-week pass, Overflow Fest is well worth taking a chance on.

To help you get acquainted, Rocks Off picked through the MySpace pages of some of the Overflow Fest artists playing over the next few days. We've got something special planned for Blowfly a little later on this week, and we'll do this again next week, but here's a little of what's in store at SHFL this coming weekend.

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The members of Hey Monday look more like they walked off the set of Laguna Beach than like five kids who grew up and cut their teeth in West Palm. But that's exactly where vocalist Cassadee Pope, lead guitarist Mike Gentile, guitarist Alex Lipshaw, and bassist Jersey Moriarty, and drummer Elliot James hail from.

And with those pretty-rocker-posing-for-Abercrombie good looks and a Hills-friendly sound, it wasn't long before a major label like Columbia Records snatched them up through Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz's Decaydance Records. Call their material power pop, call it pop-punk, or call it what you want, but in all cases, Hey Monday's sound is upbeat, exuberant, and effervescent to the point of contagion.
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Bayou Beat: Because sometimes Houston is too big for just one Mixtape.

Aaron Farley/ myspace.com/indianjewelry

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• Attention Houston bands, rappers, folksingers, etc.: If you are playing in Austin next week - anywhere in Austin, not just an official SXSW event - please email chris.gray@houstonpress.com ASAP. Rocks Off has some questions we'd like to ask you.

• Indian Jewelry (above), who plays a non-SXSW show Saturday, March 20 at Austin's Ms. Bea's (wherever that is), will release Totaled, the follow-up to 2008's Free Gold, April 11 on We Are Free Records. The psych-noise insurgents are about to put some serious miles on their van, zig-zagging from NX35 in Denton Friday to SXSW to the MtyMX All Ages Festival of Art and Music in Monterrey, Mex., March 21 to Norman Fest in Norman, Okla., April 24.

• KTRU announced the lineup for its annual Spring Outdoor Fest Wednesday: San Diego indietechques Rafter, who also have several SXSW dates, headline over Houston's Fat Tony, Space City Gamelan, Ghost Mountain, Wasp and Pear, children's entertainer Rachel Buchman and Rice battle of the bands winner Office Party. The festival runs noon to dark on the Rice campus (follow your nose) and is totally free.

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