Images by photographer Chris Jones from Sunday's Tracy Lawrence concert at the Mississippi Valley Fair. Click on any photo for a larger version.

Images by photographer Chris Jones from Thursday's Kenny Loggins concert at the Mississippi Valley Fair. Click on any photo for a larger version.

As we began a recent phone interview, Jim Heath was filing and dealing with music-publishing paperwork. You can be certain this is nothing that his alter ego, the Reverend Horton Heat, would ever do.

"The reason I joined a band is 'cause I wouldn't have to do this crap," he said. "I end up spending all day filing and talking to accountants."

That's the price of being a successful, long-running purveyor of lighthearted, Texas-scorched rockabilly, nearly impervious to the fickle trends of popular music. Appearing at RIBCO on August 22, the Reverend Horton Heat has a new album - the country-flavored Laughin' & Cryin' with the Reverend Horton Heat - due out September 1, and the band will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2010. Heath turned 50 this year, and bassist Jimbo Wallace has been with the group for 20 years.

But Heath would prefer that information not get out. "In the world or rock and roll," he said, "telling people that you've been around a long time isn't necessarily the best thing."

The Quad Cities psychobilly trio The Afterdarks wants to make an impression. The weapon of choice is a new 31-track CD - a collection of songs from the group's beginnings in 2003 to now, largely recorded by the current lineup.

There could have been even more. "Thirty-one's all we could fit," said guitarist/singer Jake Cowan, who gave a practical reason for the jam-packed recording: "Rather than take five albums and try to sell them individually, just re-record them, kind of fine-tune them, and put them on one album, and take one album on the road to sell."

The larger aim, said singer and bassist Joe Robertson, is to show record labels and music venues that the band is serious - that it can do more than lay down a handful of demos, that it knows how to pump out product.

Blood Sweat & Gears began as a typical 10- to 13-track full-length but evolved into a summary of the band's existence. The Afterdarks wanted to "draw a line in the sand and say, 'Here's everything up to this point. Now we can move forward,'" Robertson said. "I want to put us on the map. ... I want to actually have record labels take us seriously."