Brian Rash

Alex Maples at one of his many haunts

​Alex Maples' ghost obsession began when his sisters were almost 10 and he was still in a crib. The whole family would frequently visit his Aunt Doris in Southern Illinois. Her house was old and drafty, built on many open acres of ranch land. On a country-quiet evening during one of those visits, as his sisters were trying to sleep on the second story of Aunt Doris' house right near the staircase, the sound of footsteps slowly walking up and down the stairs woke them.

The young girls thought nothing of it at first and tried to go back to sleep. It was probably mom or dad, or maybe Aunt Doris. But their annoyance grew as they kept hearing footsteps ascending the stairs. Finally, as they heard the footsteps approaching the top of the stairs for the umpteenth time, they opened the door.

To their shock, there was no one on the other side of the door, and this sent the girls racing to their parents' room, begging to sleep in their bed.

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There's not just one Austin roots band that knows how to produce a video that must be watched a bajillion times to be believed. While The Possum Posse's "Guy On a Buffalo" series has proved to be quite the Internet phenomenon, the video for the Whiskey Shivers' "Gimme All Your Lovin'" is perhaps as trippy as a rootsy bluegrass can get.

I've been obsessed with this video since catching the band live last weekend at the new-ish White Horse Inn on Austin's increasingly cool Eastside. On Saturday night, in a packed room twice the size of Adair's, the Austin hillbilly string collective, featuring stand-up bass, acoustic guitar, banjo and fiddle, didn't just happen to be the band on a small stage shoved into the corner of the room. They joyfully controlled the joint, regardless of whether they were meant to be mere background noise or not.

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​As I was standing in the photo pit of the Murder City Devils' stage the Friday evening of Fun Fun Fun Fest, a band started playing on the other side of the large, divided stage. I couldn't see them, as I was 40 yards to the band's right, literally with my elbows on the unused stage but, boy howdy, could I ever hear the act kicking things off.

Who was the band that blew me away? It was Chicago's Russian Circles. In the span of 40 minutes, their pulverizing, rhythmic and ravaging set was made all the more intense by the fact that I could only hear the raging riffs and the percussive propulsion. My view of the enraptured, fist-waving fans in front of the stage, backdropped by the always majestic Austin skyline, proved to be the perfect live-action visual accompaniment to the explosive tunes.

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