“The Black Angels” Austin City Limits taping.

Waiting for The Black Angels to take the stage!

Earlier this week I was pleased that a ticket fell out of heaven for the Austin City Limits TV taping of The Black Angels. This is the second time this year that I’ve seen the band, as I was lucky enough to see them at Austin Psych Fest.
At the taping I ran into two older friends of mine, who are grown-up enough to have hippie friends from hippie times. I’ll call them V and W, in honor of the iconic bus of the hippie era.
V ran into an old friend at The Black Angels taping, an old friend who said “Acid?” as a greeting as V walked by.
“Are you buying or selling?” V asked.
“I wish!” said the old hippie.
“After half an hour of their music, you feel like you are on something. Even if you aren’t on anything!” W said later, after hearing about this exchange.

Your mileage may vary with this new-psychedelic band, but I’m awfully predisposed to like The Black Angels. When I was in high school, I wore some paisley, wore out at several crappy cassette tapes recorded from a friend’s parent’s original pressings of many of The Doors albums— and I once even pilgrimaged to the scene at Jim Morrison’s grave when I was going through Paris as an undergrad.

If you want to read a serious and more contextualizing recap of the show, head over the official ACL site.

If you missed the live stream of the show, you can catch up on your psychedelic music by watching Dirt Road to Psychedelia, an Austin-made film about the Austin psychedelic scene in the 60s. Or wait for The Black Angels ACL episode to air!

While I couldn’t take any pictures of The Black Angels at the ACL taping–because you can’t really do that at any of the ACL tapings these days– here are a few that I took of the band at Austin Psych Fest earlier this year: