Final SXSW blog
I'm feeling more than a bit like Hunter S. Thompson, with sleep deprivation and adrenaline substituting for the good doctor's preferred diet of drugs and alcohol. It's 6:08 am as I type this and I've been up since about 8 am Saturday morning.
It's not that I've been out partying all night, although there are enough after-hour parties here at SXSW to accommodate anyone who wanted to. See, an early getaway flight seemed like a good idea when I booked it a few months ago; but last night it dawned on me that to make an 8:10 am flight out of Austin, I'd have to be at the airport by 7, which means hailing a cab from my downtown hotel at around 6:30. I pulled in around 2 am after Saturday night's shows, spent close to another hour trading war stories with my hotel roomie Jim DeRogatis, and then, I just couldnt fall asleep knowing that my wake up call was coming in a few hours.
So here I sit, wracked with insomnia and indigestion (that blueberry muffin at 1 am seemed like a good idea at the time too), trying to remember yesterday.
The last night of SXSW is insane enough; doing it on St. Patrick's Day is just asking for trouble. You've already got a few thousand people in town from all over the world for the convention; throw in spring breakers, local kids out for a night on the town, and local music fans who flock to Austin like moths to a flame during SXSW and Saturday night is always a clusterfuck. Now add a small army of Texans, dressed in green and looking to get drunk; it was ugly out there, people. Ugly.
But my mind is wandering. Let's recount the day. It started off at the Convention Center. I attended a panel on covering music in the age of new media, at which people from Pitchfork.com and eMusic talked about how instantaneous music criticism has become. Add to that the discomfort of reading long articles on computer screens and most record reviews have shrunk to less than 200 words; most feature stories to 700 or less. Now throw in literally millions of music blogs and podcasts competing for attention and the landscape certainly has changed since the days when Rolling Stone was the only music magazine on the newstand and people like me could actually get noticed printing up 500 copies of a fanzine. Did you know Pitchfork.com has been around 11 years? That seems incredible.
After my annual pig out at Iron Works BBQ, I checked out the convention's trade show (not much to report this year, except that all those aggregator websites who had booths last year seemed to have disappeared in the wake of MySpace.com's hegemony.) I entered raffles to win Taylor and Fender guitars (nobody's called yet so I assume I didn't win one) and picked up a free copy of the new Spin. Other than that, it was slim pickings this year; I didn't even get any free guitar picks. Last year I got free samples of guitar polish, a handful of picks, and I bought a nifty leather carrying case for my iPod.
Around 2:30 pm I caught a local bus on Congress Ave. (Austin has excellent mass transit, tons of buses crisscrossing the city and only 50 cents a ride, plus free jitney buses on weekdays called Dillos that hit most of the major tourist and shopping areas) up to Guadalupe Avene. This is a busy commercial strip filled with cool shops and eateries that runs parallel to the UT campus. I arrived at Urban Outfitters just in time to see the band I wanted to check out -- Illinois, from Bucks County, PA. I fell in love with their CD (on NYC's Ace Fu) and missed their showcase (which was on Wednesday,) so I was glad to be able to catch them at this in-store. They did not disappoint; the sound was unexpectedly excellent and Illinois are a tough group to mic, since they feature several guitars, two different keyboards, banjo, harmonica, tambourine, and distorted vocals (sung through a telephone receiver) on different songs. As I was enjoying the band perform, the bassist started to look more and more familiar; so after their set, I introduced myself. Turns out the guy was in a high-school band called Trip 66 that I liked (and interviewed) back in 1996; small world!
Today's Plasma Center punk show was just a few blocks away so I walked over there, hoping to catch the Grabass Charlestons, Billy Reese Peters, or J Church. Turns out they were all playing much later in the day, and while the crowd was three times the size of Friday's show, nobody I knew from the day before was there. I watched a few minutes of O Pioneers and then caught another bus back downtown.
Dinner was at Manuel's, an excellent Mexican restaurant that's been around longer than SXSW itself, with Jersey Beater Lucy Rayberg from Atlanta; she had worked the convention as a volunteer in exchange for a free wristband that got her into shows. She was gushing with enthusiasm and talking about moving to Austin; and if you're into music, I have to admit that the city does have charms that Atlanta will never share. Of course it's also beastly hot all summer, and it isn't SXSW 52 weeks a year. Austin has a great music scene but it isn't all indie rock, all the time; there are an awful lot of frat boy bars, cowboy honky tonks, and cover-band discos the rest of the year.
By the time we finished dinner, the St. Patrick's Day insanity was well underway. Despite the waves of people flooding Sixth Street (many of them in silly green hats or t-shirts), the clubs didn't seem that crowded at first. The Alternative Tentacles showcase (at a Cajun restaurant masquerading as a rock club for SXSW) was almost empty for Fish Karma's entertaining set of folk/punk. Jello Biafra was there acting as emcee (and doing a spoken word performance later in the evening.) I really wanted to try and get him to record a bumber for the JB podcast, but so many people were bugging him for autographs and photos that I didn't feel right intruding.
Things weren’t much busier up the block at Bourbon Rocks, a more legitimate rock club, for the 9 pm set by Parlor Mob from Asbury Park. I hadn’t seen this band since they changed their name and had a brief flirtation with Capitol Records, but their Led Zep-cloned hard rock and bluesy high-pitched vocals clearly won over the crowd (very few badges, lots of locals into "Rock.") The Saint’s Scott Stamper was there tho, proudly watching his hometown boys rock the Austin crowd.
9:30 found me still on Sixth Street, now upstairs at a club called Uncle Flirty’s Loft for NYC’s Forms. They had a few drum difficulties but overall delivered a solid set of their driving post-punk. It was sad to see the room nearly empty though.
That didn’t last long; by the time Jersey City’s Black Hollies took the stage at 10:30, the crowd had swelled to capacity, and the jammed-in crowd grooved to the band’s retro-Sixties mod blues crunch. Even with a fill-in drummer, the Hollies delivered, with the three ladies of the Dansettes coming up on stage for the finale, a cover of “Hush” (which coincidentally is the A Side of the Black Hollies brand-new split 7-inch with, yes, the Dansettes.)
By 11 pm, the scene on Sixth Street was totally awash with drunken revelers in silly hats and green boas as well as the usual SXSW throng. I couldn’t get into see either Brooklyn’s Palomar (playing at the far end of Sixth Street at a backyard patio) or Scotland’s Hazey Janes on Maggie Mae’s rooftop stage; both clubs had max’d out and there were long lines of badgeholders waiting to get in. I found some space at a dive called Dirty Dog’s, where at midnight I saw Australia’s Beasts Of Bourbon, guys who looked to be at least in the fifties rockin’ out hard to Stonesy licks. The crowd seemed to like it but I found it a bit one-noteish and monotonous, but at least I finally got to hook up with Shawn Scallen, an old photographer friend from Canada who was shooting the fest for Now magazine. We’d been trading text messages for four days but had never managed to be in the same place at the same time until now.
I bugged out of the Dirty Dog and soaked in the insanity of Sixth Street for a bit, then headed over to a place called The Hideout on Congress Ave. to see my final band of the festival, Jersey City’s Flaming Fire. The Hideout is a snack bar but there’s a backroom that’s a bit like an Off Broadway theather, with riser’d seats for the audience and a stage for the bands. Flaming Fire turned out to be perfect for the place, an archly theatrical eight-piece combo in fire-red costumes who combined elements of the B 52’s, 60’s political cabaret, John Waters movies, and their own wacky vibe. What a discovery! And a perfect end of my 19th SXSW.
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