Don't Mess with Texas

Notes from SXSW

Words: Jesse Ashlock

Photo: Jesse Ashlock

Every Yankee visiting Austin for the eighteenth annual South by Southwest music conference probably trotted out a few tired Texas clich?s during their stay, but only because they turned out to be so apt. The hospitality is truly Southern, people do speak at 10 words a second with gusts to 50 and the portions are most definitely Texas-sized. So is SXSW, and come Sunday, the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport was teeming with spent, haggard hipsters who'd been humbled by the whole thing and now wanted nothing more than to drink a Bloody Mary on the plane, then go home to sleep the sleep of the dead.

Within two hours of arriving in Austin on Wednesday, I was provided with an anecdote tailor-made for filling awkward silences with new acquaintances. My hotel, the utilitarian and decidedly unglamorous (and just far enough from 6th Street, the central artery of the festival, to be annoying) Doubletree Club turned out to have a Denny's literally in the parking lot. Having caught less than two hours of sleep before my 5:45 AM flight out of LaGuardia, this seemed like a great idea. After suffering through a Grand Slam breakfast and watching my dining companion gnaw on a T-bone steak that looked like a piece of old tire (what was he thinking?), I realized it was not a great idea. Denny's only works if you're on a road trip or on drugs.

But then Little Richard walked in with his entourage, which made it all worthwhile. You could almost hear a sucking sound as everyone's attention was drawn to the center of the restaurant, where the group of seven or eight black men of varying ages sat down. Little Richard, in town to deliver the SXSW keynote address, didn't seem able to walk very well. He looked old and of course incredibly made up, but he's still definitely got some of the Lawd's fire in him. After a beefy bodyguard stared down a couple of would-be photographers, an elephantine waitress informed LR that her son, whom she was serving, had just shipped home from Iraq. "Je-sus sent him home!" LR proclaimed. "Je-sus loves him!"

After registration, the first full set I saw was by an Austin group called I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. "Great name," people inevitably remark when you describe the band. Imagine them sharing a marquee with And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (also from Austin...something in the water?). They turned out to be friends of friends (as everyone seems to be), which was good, 'cause I liked 'em. The Texas sunlight filtered benignly through dust motes and cigarette clouds in the backyard annex of Emo's, which didn't really jibe with the band's crepuscular, stylishly ominous rock attack, but they still sounded great. They kind of reminded me of Echo & the Bunnymen, stretched out, abstracted, and guitared up a bit more, with a fair measure of that spidery Slint brooding.

So began the first long afternoon/evening of self-bludgeoning via beer and rock. By midnight I was fleeing down 6th St., drink in hand, dodging clusters of black-haired dudes in Converse and torn band shirts and gaggles of conspicuously large-breasted local hoochies checking out the first day of indie rock summer camp. I wanted something different, something refined, erudite, cosmopolitan, a little yin to balance all the rock yang, maybe an elegant chanteuse who could provide an antidote to all the scruffy boys with guitars. I walked into Elysium, where the American-born transplanted Londoner Dani Siciliano was performing with a full band that included her husband, acclaimed electronic producer Matthew Herbert (better known by his surname alone) on piano. There's no way I can say it was a great set -- Siciliano stopped the show for 10 minutes shortly after I came in, complaining of "tragic stuff" going on with the sound -- but once they really got going, I was entranced. Siciliano was a kinetic presence up front at the mike (and effects box) with a full-bodied, sensuous voice, while her band laid down warm, complex, engrossing rhythms behind her. The vibe was one of intelligent, jazz-tinged lounge-pop, but with sampled beats and other sonic elements that kept things highly unpredictable. It was, to say the least, a pleasurable change of pace.

Big Star #1 Panel

On Thursday, still flushed with ambition, I went to my first and only SXSW panel, the Big Star #1 Panel, whose speakers included a number of key figures in the story of the legendary Memphis power-pop band, though not singer Alex Chilton, who according to the moderator, "doesn't do this kind of thing." There I picked up another choice anecdote for cocktail conversation. Big Star's other great songwriter Chris Bell (who died in a car accident in 1978; check out his one great demos collection, I Am the Cosmos) had a dark and obsessive-compulsive side. Deeply dissatisfied with Big Star's #1 Record, he decided to steal the masters and destroy them. Engineer (and uncredited musician) Terry Manning caught wind of this and replaced the tapes with blanks just before Bell arrived at the studio, thus saving one of the greatest pop albums ever recorded from annihilation.

A pleasant surprise came at the Touch and Go/Merge showcase, where I caught the folky, minimalist, electronics-abetted sister act Coco Rosie. I'd already listened to their debut album Le Maison de Mon R?ve without really hearing it, but was slightly turned off by a press quote that compared them to "field mice singing gospel" and by friends' virulently negative reactions to their record and live show. Lies -- all lies! The sisters Casady were lovely and mesmerizing creatures onstage with astonishing, remarkably complementary voices. Their vocal parts, informed by folk and the blues, Lady Day and chamber music, circled and soared around each other with equal parts weary sensuality and desperate romanticism, above a bed of plucked guitar, toy instruments, metronomic found sounds and light percussion. People I talked to said you need to see them to understand their album. That was certainly the case for me, as La Maison de Mon R?ve has remained in steady rotation since I returned from Texas.

Aesop Rock Incites the Emo's Crowd

The Caucus Patio then grew oppressively crowded for TV on the Radio, who sounded more exciting than ever, even though I couldn't see them. Soon after I was indoctrinated into the cult of Texas BBQ at the famous Stubb's, which I found deeply satisfying, especially considering it was past 6 PM and I'd drunk a great deal already without eating a thing. Then I wandered through those lost twilight hours which separate the day shows from the night, bumping into friends from sundry bands, text messaging frantically and wishing I could shower, until finding myself at the Biz3/Vice/Def Jux throwdown, where the racy Jean Grae reminded her lily white audience, "This is a hip hop show, y'all," receiving many, many hands in the air in response to her acerbic full-throttle raps. The Def Jux boys then followed, with Mr. Lif, El-P and especially Aesop Rock impressing with their lyrical acuity and dazzling breath control while RJD2 did his DJ thing behind the wheels of steel.

High on Fire Is Tougher Than You Are

Then, talk about changes of pace, I checked out a fey duo on Drag City called Faun Fables whose musical touchpoints seemed to be Fairport Convention, Narnia and the Renaissance Faire. I kinda got a kick out of them, but left to go see my friends The Court and Spark, who play a wonderfully dreamy, elegiac, atmospheric brand of cosmic American music. They rarely tour outside the West Coast and I hadn't seen them in three years, so it was a treat. Then onto a little raga-like acoustic psych (Six Organs of Admittance), some hilariously over-the-top doom metal (High on Fire) and one of the hipster post-punk-influenced Canadian bands that were in such abundance at SXSW (The Stills). South by Southwest is all about taste tests.

After combing downtown Austin early Friday afternoon trying in vain to find some socks (I'd neglected to pack any), I settled down with a pint or four at the File 13 showcase and listened to the ferociously loud and mathematically complex Atombombpocketknife (more friends) and the enjoyably spastic new wave garage-rockers We Ragazzi. Then on to Insound's party, where I'd hoped to see another of the above-mentioned hip Canadian bands, The Unicorns, but they'd apparently been detained at the border. So instead a Chicago band called The Ponys played garage rock with some Television undertones and were fine but sort of uninspiring. In the evening, I checked out Film School (more friends), whose swirling space rock had gotten really good since the last time I saw them a few years ago. At the Sub Pop showcase, All Night Radio, featuring members of Beachwood Sparks, took that band's winsome desert folk-psych and tripped it out with effects, blips and static.

James and Scott from the Court and Spark Babysitting My Camera

Then over at Club de Ville I saw a band called the Starlite Desperation, which I hadn't seen since a show in 1998 at the Berkeley collective Punks with Presses. Since then singer Dante White moved from the Bay Area to Detroit, started Lost Kids, then returned to San Francisco, resurrecting Starlite as the second coming of the Gun Club. The new lineup of the band played truly ferocious, raw, live-wire rock and roll with energy and passion that better-known bands of the moment would be happy just to be able to fake. They have an EP called Violate a Sundae coming out in May -- do yourself a favor and buy it.

Sufjan Stevens is Sad. And Quiet

The riotous NYC band The Fever played next and were almost as good, their charismatic frontman Gaspar Jeremy clearly having a blast as the band ripped through the super catchy "Bridge and Tunnel," from last year's Pink on Pink EP. But near the end of their set, I split over to the Secretly Canadian showcase, to be greeted by the sight of Brother Danielson from the Danielson Famile, performing dressed up as a tree with a full head of fruit. I found Mike from the Court and Spark, who asked me, "Do you like this? Because I think it's crap," then confessed to having taken a bunch of mushrooms earlier. Sufjan Stevens, who'd been accompanying Brother D, then took over the stage, and though I liked the banjo and trumpet and the fragile little compositions about Michigan and melancholy, he utterly failed to engage his audience and was inaudible from the bar, much less the back of the room. Consequently we all lost interest and left to see the recently reformed American Music Club. They played four great songs before I ventured across the street to Exodus, braving an extremely full house to see Calexico, who played a bunch of my favorites, including their terrific cover of Love's "Alone Again Or," the wistful "Not Even Stevie Nicks" from their last album Feast of Wire, and their triumphant "The Crystal Frontier." South by Southwest seems pretty cool when you can check out Mark Eitzel and then run across the street for Calexico.

Saturday brought with it my first real hangover and it was a doozy. I watched some of the sun-baked bands from Eagle Rock, CA's Ship Collective, including the sublimely wistful Radar Bros and the increasingly terrific Earlimart, whose Fresno fuzz kept blowing the circuits. I really wanted to eat the free barbeque but my stomach was reeling from the fajitas and prickly pear margarita I'd had for... breakfast? -- so I stuck to Gatorade and water. Then I found another party where the Unicorns, having finally made it into the country, mounted an unscheduled performance that involved a lot of quirky loud-soft post-punky dynamics, Atari-like synthesizers, scary masks and pull-ups from the crossbeam of the tent they played beneath.

Dykehouse: "I guess you could say she was a sex fiend"

After dinner, I began drinking as quickly as possible. It was the only way I was going to make it through the evening. Ghostly International held a showcase at an odd, awkward venue called Zero Degrees, where I caught a sloppy but fun set from unabashed neo-shoegazer Dykehouse. Midwest Product followed with an hour of their stylish, funky electro-rock fusion capped by a return to the stage by Mike Dykehouse to do his patented rendition of Prince's "Darling Nikki." Then I saw San Francisco's Comets on Fire do wanky self-indulgent stoner rock, which suited me fine because I'd smoked a bowl with someone somewhere along the way. Finally I caught the Scottish indie pop band the Delgados, who launched their plaintive epic "American Trilogy" just as I walked through the door feeling bad for the badge-less suckers in line who couldn't get in. The Delgados sounded good but I couldn't see and I was exhausted. The guys from the Radar Bros were standing next to me, hopelessly smashed and flailing around. Everyone was in pretty bad shape.

But my friend of the moment and I had to go to the Vice/Kemado party to officially close down the weekend. Austin cabbies generally seem to point the car somewhere and hope it's the right way, and this one took us in the exact opposite direction of the party, which was in a raw space on the other side of the freeway from downtown. It was a strange experience to be directing a cabdriver in a city I'd just come to for the first time. "It looks dirty," he said when we finally got there. "Why would you want to go here?" We didn't really know, but people were beating down the door to get in. There were bands playing inside, but who really wanted to see any more bands? There were interesting new people to talk to but I'd had enough interesting new people to last me a month. We cut in line, squeezed our way in waving our magic laminates and circulated for awhile, but it was kind of a relief when around 3:30 people started trying to scale the barbed wire fence and the police shut down the party. All I wanted to do was go back to New York and sleep in my own bed. But I get to come back next year, right?