SXSW Friday On My Mind

Breakfast at the hotel with my buddy Jim DeRogatis was southern comfort food, biscuits with country gravy and several big mugs of black coffee. Armed with carbs and caffeine, we ventured over to the Austin Convention, where DeRo and Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune would be co-interviewing Booker T. These celebrity interviews have pretty much taken the place of the traditional keynote speech at SXSW. So instead of having one celeb make a boring 45 speech about his life and achievements (Robbie Robertson of the Band comes to mind as a particularly annoying windbag,) several different celebrities are interviewed on stage, sometimes by music journalists and sometimes by semi-celebrities. This year's crop of interviewees included Pete Townshend, Rickie Lee Miller, Gilberto Gil, Emmy Lou Harris, and Iggy Pop. I only made it to the Booker T Jones event, and that was only because two friends were doing the interviewing. Booker was articulate, well-spoken, and charming...but also a man of few words. DeRo and Kot had to pepper a half-dozen very specific questions just to find out that the Monterey Pop Festival was, indeed, a day he will always remember.

I killed a little more time around the Convention Center, checking out the trade show and occasionally chatting some with old friend or acquaintance, until early afternoon when I got a cab up to the University district on Guadalupe. I had a quick lunch at a barbecue placed called Rubys (brisket and sausage on a bum, sauce on the side, yum) and then went next door to a place called The Plasma Center.

I guess it was a plasma center, once, but now it was just an empty abandoned commercial building, concrete floors, stained plasterboard and wiring ripped out of the walls... In other words, the perfect place with a DIY punk/hc show. Local comic artist Ben Snakepit (whose boss leased the empty bldg.) put on the show. What a great surprise when the first band, Party Garbage, featured my old buddy Lew Houston on vocals. The crowd hovered around 20 people all afternoon but the day included much loud trashy thrashy garage-punk, a lot of underage drinking, a goodly amount of crazy dancing, and the usual merch fest, with 7 inches, t-shirts, and buttons being begged, bartered, and sold. The lineup included Lew's Party Garbage, the Chinese Telephones from the Northwest, the Trashies, an amazing male/female, guitar/drums duo called Shellshag (like the White Stripes on steroids and crack,) and two high-energy bands who literally bounced off the walls and had me fondly remembering my own punk/hardcore days at ABC No Rio -- the Conniption Fitts and Triclops. I hung out, made a few friends, bought some merch, had my ears pummeled relentlessly, and killed an entire day of SXSW about as far removed from the "music industry" as possible. In other words, a pretty good day.

I had hoped to hook up with my old Canadian friend Shawn Scallen, whose party was off hobnobbing a various industry parties, but we never quite made a connection so I wound up blowing off dinner and catching a local bus (Austin buses are only 50 cents) back downtown to Emo's IV Lounge, the fourth club in the Emo's empire at 6th Street and Red River for my Chicago buddies, Bible of the Devil. These guys crank out the metal with exagerrated metalness - insane technical solos up the wazoo, anthemic choruses, screeching vocals... in other words, a lot of fun. They started out as much more of a caricature; now, after several years of touring the circuit, I think they're getting comfortable with just being an awesome metal band, not playing one in some mock/ironic/indie way.

I caught a little of Dirty On Purpose, who were very Sonic Youthy and not nearly as interested as I'd hoped they would be, and headed crosstown to Antone's (a lengendary Austin blues club) to see the Black Angels. I was early and had to sit through another band (My Brightest Diamond, a female-fronted post-punk trio who turned out to be My Biggest Nightmare, tuneless screeching histrionics masquerading as jazz fusion.) Ah, but the Black Angels... surely Austin's finest homegrown and as-yet unknown combo (three guitars, synths, monster drums,) the Black Angels summon up the voodoo gods of the Velvet Underground's primal psychedelic drone infused with Neil Youngish vocals. DeRogatis showed up for this set, as did NY Times critic Jon Pareles (you can check out their competing blogs for each's review). Even with my professional earplugs, I left this set with my head ringing and those walloping beats pounding in my brain. Good stuff!

DeRo and I started walking crosstown back to the main drag but somewhere I lost him and proceeded along back to Sixth Street, which I saw a few minutes of Genghis Tron, a Philly noiseband I'd heard on Jon Solomon's excellent Philly podcast, Local Support. Unfortunately five minutes of screamo is about three minutes more than I could handle at that point, so I was back on Sixth Street, wolfing down something greasy from one of the local street peddlers. I wanted to catch a little of Youth Brigade and say hello to the Stern Brothers (who not only run BYO Records but also play host each year to the Punk Rock Bowling Tournament in Vegas,) but there was a monster line outside Emo's and it didn't look like I'd get in. So I caught a few minutes of the Red Walls (a young mod/garage quartet from Chicago who were recently dropped from Capitol in the post-Virgin merger purge) and then headed back to my hotel room, where I promptly collapsed into a deep sleep (and dreamed of heavy metal bands all night.)