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SXSW: Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Guitar
by Lowell Bartholomee
The women at the registration desk are remarkably calm and polite.
“Who are you with?” one asks.
“Being There.”
“Being There?”
“It’s an online magazine.”
“Ah.” And, try as she might, she can’t prevent her voice from containing a hint of “Oh, yeah, sure, nice try, buddy”. And I don’t blame her at all. I can only imagine how many complete strangers have walked up to her all day and said they were writing about the festival for an “online magazine” only to discover that they have a blog hosted by Diaryland.com and were hoping that would translate into a free pass to The Show. Nevertheless, to be nice, she checks the registry.
“Who’s he with?” the other asks.
“Being There.”
“Being There?”
“It’s online.”
“Ah.”
“Hey, whattaya know? They’re on the list.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
And with that I’m issued my wristband. They can’t help looking a little amazed that this very not-music-writer-looking fellow actually represents an actual publication that is actually on the actual list. I look at my pleasingly deep-blue wristband and ask, “Is there anything that shows that I’m with the press on here?”
They blink at me. “No, just the wristband.”
“Can I use this to get into the Elvis Costello interview?”
“No, you’d need a press pass for that.”
“Can I get a press pass?”
“No, just the wristband. You’re only marked down for a wristband.”
“Is there any way I can cover the Elvis Costello or Brian Wilson interview with just the wristband?”
“If you had a press pass, yes.”
“But since I don’t. . .”
“No.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
I almost step away, but remember to ask, “Can I take pictures at the events?”
“Only if you have a press pass.”
“Which means. . .”
“. . .that you can’t.”
“Okay. Thank you so much. You’ve been very calm and polite.”
And, in case that reads as sarcasm, I mean and say it sincerely. As I will learn throughout the course of the ensuing festival, the staff (to the most part) is incredibly helpful and steady under pressure. And if you’re saying to yourself, “How hard is it to be steady under pressure when all you’re doing is manning the door at a music festival?”, I want you to take the next possible opportunity to stand between a venue and one hundred drunk, riled-up music fans whose goal in life at that precise moment is to somehow get past you at any cost and see how well you hold up. Right from the start, the doorkeepers have my respect.
However, since the music doesn’t start for several hours and the only events between now and then require a pass, I’m left on the surprisingly cold Austin street outside the Convention Center with time to kill. Fortunately, unlike the vast majority of those attending, I live here so I have no trouble killing time. Besides, I need to plan my travels for the next few days and with a handy-dandy festival schedule and several cups of Progress Coffee (independent, Austin-based, and wonderful), I prepare myself for a weekend of what has, year-by-year, become one of the most anticipated musical events in the country. Right in my own backyard.
Cue the brief biographical interlude.
An Austin native’s attitude toward SXSW fluctuates depending on several variables. If you’re a member of The Austin Chronicle and festival staff (and especially if you’re Editor-in-Chief Louis Black), SXSW is your Chinese New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and Times Square Ball Drop wrapped all in one. You approach the event with a mixture of awe, pride, and terror and it defines the preceding and proceeding 12 months.. If you’re in a local band or have an indie film under your arm (which, according to the last census figures, accounts for approximately 98% of the Austin population), you either love SXSW because you’ll have a showcase this year or you say it sucks because they neglected to invite you this year so they could feature some loser who isn’t half as good as you and probably isn’t even from around here. If you’re anyone else, you look forward to it like anything else and have singular memories of festivals past. If you’re stuck in traffic downtown that week or were hoping to slip into Casino El Camino for a fat burger and wings and were greeted with what appeared to be the entire population of Springfield, Missouri crammed into an alarmingly small space you wish those particular four letters had never been introduced to one another. There are small subsets and combinations of these variables, but it more or less breaks down like that. It is the week out of every year when your hometown stops being your hometown and turns into this crowded burg full of groups of jeans-clad guys who might as well have “Yes, We’re in a Band” on their foreheads and parking becomes a sentimental anachronism. And Sixth Street fills with the combined barrage of sound blaring out of every conceivable crevice.
Personally, I count myself a member of the third group when it comes to the music festival. I’ve never wanted to be Bob Dylan, so I don’t bear much resentment towards the stage portion of the week, which I guess makes me a good candidate to write about the music festival with an objective eye. I would love to be Tarantino, however, so I’m glad that this assignment is directing my creative frustrations (Why can’t they have a film festival that spotlights people who have great ideas for movies? If you answered that question, you gave it more thought than it deserved.) into alternate avenues this year. These are some of the thoughts I have while sitting in a coffee shop planning my weekend attack.
Like I said, I had time to kill.
End of brief biographical interlude.
I decide to kick things off with Robyn Hitchcock, who will play somewhere around 1,000 showcases throughout the weekend. So, it’s off to Emo’s.
Emo’s is hosting an unrivaled number of acts this weekend due to the fact that it has three venues: Emo’s Main Room, Emo’s Jr., and Emo’s Annex. None of which are identified that way to the inexperienced patron. (I would probably go to Emo’s more often if I enjoyed being asked, “What are you doing here?” I may be a lot of things, but I’m not someone who looks in-place among a crowd of young, white-belted Suicide Girls devotees.) I go to the door I always assumed was the entrance and get in line and after a cursory wristband-and-ID check, in we all go.
The room is surprisingly empty for a show that is set to begin in 15 minutes. I’m a bit shocked. About fifty people roam around, buying beer, and waiting for the show to begin. Everyone cranes their necks looking for the featured performer. Small talk ensues.
At 8 PM sharp a guy gets on stage and says, “Hi, I’m from San Diego, California. Thanks for coming out to the show.” He starts to play. At which point about fifty people suddenly look up like they just realized they left their keys in the car and scramble madly for the back door. Maybe we would have had time to feel bad for abandoning a guy with a guitar who had just thanked us for coming to his show if we weren’t so consumed with figuring out where the hell Robyn was hiding.
It turns out he wasn’t hiding. He was taking the stage next door in what turned out to be the Main Room where an enormous crowd of people much better informed and probably a lot smarter than us have already gathered. The rest of us slink in through the back door and the show begins.
Hitchcock delivers a very soothing, rather sweet acoustic set with a minimum of between-song banter. In fact, his banter never sounds like banter. It’s just the kind of off-the-cuff words he might speak if you were sitting in his living room listening to him play. Some of it pleasantly nonsensical. “We all know that life is all about shopping. And that love is the meaning of life. Which is why this song is called ‘Ole Tarantula’.”
As I lean against the back wall next to the car seats that serve as back-row seating, I realize something new has taken place since last I frequented live music performances: the camera phone is giving the cigarette lighter a run for its money. Dotting the sea of heads throughout the darkened cavern of the room are countless camera phones held aloft and lighting the room with that eerie color-LED light. It makes me think two things: a) Technology is creepy and b) I guess you don’t need a press pass to take pictures after all. (In response, my cheap-ass cell phone with the sad black-and-white, dot-matrix LED screen stares back at me impotently.)
This break in communication between singer and myself causes me to realize something else: No one seems to be listening to the performance. The back of the club is a sea of chatter and plan-making and- oddly enough- comments about how the show they’re not watching is going. Certainly this isn’t the case all the way throughout the club because if it were it seems that Robyn would start hurling things at us. I can’t tell for sure (though I can see several people lower their camera phones and start punching buttons so they can send the hot-off-the-ether pictures to people outside the club.) The chatter continues uninterrupted song after song and intensifies when Robyn drinks from his water bottle and says, “This is what a cult figger looks like having water. It’s different than when a living legend has water, so when you watch Elvis tonight or Brian Wilson tomorrow, take note of their. . .” and that’s all I heard because a wave of voices consumes his in a flurry of excited fervor. It calms down when almost by consensus everyone realizes that Robyn has misspoken and that Brian Wilson isn’t going to be here until Friday. Whew, that was close. Just had to clear that up. Go ahead and play, Robyn.
But Robyn is done. It’s a very short set. He leaves the stage reminding us that he’ll be playing “approximately 4,000 times this weekend”, so I was off a bit in my estimate.
The night is now open in anticipation of the Holy Grail of the weekend: The Elvis Costello Show at Midnight. Which, due to the short set, is a mere three and a half hours away. But there’s so much going on that it should be easy to use that up. I walk up and down Sixth Street listening for something to draw me inside. I don’t hear anything particularly notable or anything that’s begging to be heard. I head up past the clubs on Red River. Same thing, though I notice that people have started camping out for the Billy Idol appearance, which is also at midnight. I make this circuit several times, hearing lots of bands that sound like a lot of other bands before deciding it’s time to decamp to La Zona Rosa and lay in wait for Elvis.
That turns out to be the most unoriginal idea of the day because by the time I get there the club is packed tight and two lines stream out from the enormous sign over the door that reads: “SXSW/Badges/Wristbands/Cash”. The two lines are for the Badges and Wristbands queues, and I notice one single hopeful gentleman standing in the Cash line.
As I get in the back of the middle line a guy comes out and (very politely) says, “We’re at capacity already, so it’s one-out, one-in. We have to let the badge line in first, so keep that in mind.” In other words, this is a hopeless endeavor. But, even with Billy Idol as the back-up plan, I’ll stick it through.
And when you’re waiting for the unknown that may turn into the impossible, the wait feels like forever. But conversations are struck up, people want to know where everyone’s from (and always seem unimpressed when you say you’re from Austin), and the minutes tick by, interrupted briefly when a gaggle of non-badge-or-wristband-wearing muckity-mucks (including Mr. Hitchcock) slip into the club past the doorkeepers. Little by little, everyone around me loses hope.
Midnight strikes and the head doorkeeper announces that only forty more people can be allowed in. This happens and the first strains of the concert can be heard banging out of the open doors of the club. The remaining line immediately drops to only a handful of the foolhardy. I figure I could cut my losses and find some other fun show, but at the same time I can hear the show right here in the dwindling line. So, I stay.
About four songs into the show, the doorkeeper returns and announces that there were some exits so they can now let in 150 people. 150! It kind of boggles my mind that 150 people fought tooth and claw to get in and then bolted after a few songs, but that’s the case and within seconds I’m standing in the darkened La Zona Rosa with Elvis Costello and the Imposters only a few yards away.
It is now 12:30 AM and I assume that he’ll probably play for another thirty or forty minutes and that will be great. The night would turn out to be ripe with surprises.
Elvis and the band are tight and they fire off one song after another. Despite his assertion at today’s interview that he didn’t want to turn into “an oldies act”, they don’t shy away from the hits. In fact, they deliver a very nice mix of classics and cuts from The Delivery Man with a bare modicum of talk. And everything sounds fresh. “Chelsea” has a nicely funkified vibe to it. “High Fidelity” sounds as raucous as ever and “Pump It Up” has more energy to it than I’ve ever heard before. Elvis is clearly enjoying himself. He’s smiling even. He interrupts “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” to lead the audience in a round of “You Really Got a Hold of Me”, goading them to take on the back-up lyrics. All of the upbeat numbers are torqued and pounded out with incredible energy for a man who looks like he should be slowing down. But he refuses to do so, trading guitars between songs and launching one after another, taking a newfound pride in his playing skills and even taking the time to show them off a bit. The pure driving blitz plays in terrific contrast to the newer, slower, countrified numbers that shine with simple beauty. The joy keeps coming in such ever-increasing jolts that it barely registers that he has been playing for over an hour and a half by the time he reaches his final number, “The Scarlet Tide”.
It is during this song that The Moment occurs.
A little set-up here: This is without a doubt one of the most anticipated performances of the festival. This is the one to be at tonight and everyone knows that going in. And, yet, even during this performance the majority of the audience is more interested in what’s happening on the floor than what’s happening on stage. The ubiquitous camera phones illuminate conversations that show no deference to the performers throwing it down on stage. It surprises me. I felt lucky to be there and still people seem more impressed with commenting on the show than watching it and soaking it up. Every song is delivered to us over a constant sea of escalating talk.
I have a tendency to be a curmudgeon. So, I don’t like to put too much stock into my reactions to things. I assume that this is how shows like this are meant to be. Maybe I’m just out of it.
That’s when it happens.
As Elvis heads into the last verse of “Scarlet” he wanders away from the microphone and stands in the half-light on the side of the stage. He plays into the verse and just when you expect him to head back to the microphone and sing the rest of the song, his unamplified voice floats out from where he stands.
And the room goes silent.
The slow, beautiful final verse of the song is given to us straight from his mouth to our ears and everyone stands stock still and strains to hear every little fluctuation and note.
It is a moment that for me upended everything I assumed about live performance. In this small space of time, the fleeting moments it takes for these few lines to be sung
Man goes beyond his own decision
Gets caught up in the mechanism
Of swindlers who act like kings
And brokers who break everything
The dark of night was swiftly fading
Close to the dawn of the day
Why would I want him
Just to lose him again
we realize that the microphone is a tool for communicating to larger numbers of people at once, but it is also a barrier between us and the performer. We have grown accustomed to the ease of hearing music and vocals through the speaker. So, comfortable that it allows us to carry on with what we were doing and allow the music to become a part of the air around us. But in this small moment, that mindset is shattered. We are back to where live performance began. A singer and a group of people hanging on every syllable.
It’s hard to describe this moment without slipping into hyperbole and, the truth is, the impact of the moment isn’t truly felt until Elvis returns to the microphone to sing the final chorus. But as soon as he does, the wave runs through the crowd and we know we have witnessed the simplest of magic. We have been given a wonderful, brief gift from a man who could quite easily coast out the rest of his time in the spotlight. And, whether he meant to do it or not, Elvis has asked us in the most lovely way imaginable to let ourselves go a little more and to give a little more of ourselves to the performance. It is the most delicate of rebukes to an audience that wasn’t paying enough attention. It was a beautiful consolation for wanting to experience the performance just a little more deeply.
And with that the show is over and the lights come on and everyone exits into the even more surprisingly colder Austin night. Everyone is talking excitedly about this experience. One college guy complains that he didn’t sing “Allison” and his friends threaten to beat him. This opening night of the festival has ended on an incredible moment of pure performance that will not be forgotten. Not a bad start to the weekend, I think.
I would later find out that Billy Idol gave an incredible concert that left its audience devastated. So, there truly was some magic floating around Central Texas on the night of March 16th.
Thursday called for something different.
“The kid’s like an idiot savant. Seriously. You can name any of the six hundred something songs out of the catalog and he can play it perfectly on guitar.”
In line for the Guided by Voices Hoot Night at Emo’s. In line after trying to go in through the door I went through last night only to be told that the door is never used to enter but only to exit. Rules change, but signs never have to if you post no signs.
Tonight is the night for the super geeks. And they come in all shapes and sizes, but their devotion to Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices is palpable and, ultimately, sweet-natured. There’s often a side of geekdom that contains darkness and a seething contempt for the figures that are nominally the object of the geek’s affection. From what I can see this is not the case with the Cult of Bob. These super-fans will defend their band to the end. It may get violent, but never impolite.
It turns out to be an interesting evening. Things start slowly. The kid referenced above starts things off and while his guitar prowess may be the thing of legend, his singing style does not warm the crowd. It takes a while for the crowd to build to considerable numbers and for the bands to impress the crowd. I see at least a dozen folks in the crowd who carefully keep note of which band plays and what they play. No doubt, to share with the fan message boards later. It’s rather adorable in the slightly creepy way.
Two hours in the buzz goes through the crowd: “Bob’s here. I saw him. He’s really here. I saw Bob!” And Bob Pollard is indeed there, as are other members of the recently disbanded band. The word on the street is that the “Special Guests” listed on the schedule that are set to play at 1 AM will be the band itself. That word on the street became codified earlier in the day in the pages of the Chron which flat out stated, “At 1 AM Bob and the boys take the stage”.
As the evening progresses, the bands get better and better. A discernable turning point in the quality of the performances is marked by a performance by Calexico. This is the first I’d heard of them and their short set (Well, everyone’s set is short. No one plays more than two songs and GBV’s catalogue is famous for its shortness of play time.). but they set the tone for the rest of the evening and I make a note to check their showcase out on Friday night.
Then, all of a sudden, Bob is on stage. A band whose name escapes me (and everyone else I asked) has asked him to deliver “I Am a Scientist” and anything else he wishes. And the crowd goes nuts. A tangible electric kind of nuts that completely transforms the energy for the rest of the night. Once Bob finishes his second song and steps off, the crowd is out of its mind and some of us are feeling bad for whatever band has to follow that.
Everyone is getting ramped up for 1 AM. “You guys playing at 1 AM, Bob?” “Oh, I’ll probably too fucked up by then to play anything.” And everyone laughs. That Bob.
Bob later slips in another appearance just to get the crowd even more riled up. The room seems to know without a doubt that come one in the morning, this place is going to explode.
At midnight, I need a break from the GBV juggernaut (and what may turn out to be the fifth version of “Game of Pricks” performed that night) and I slip out and across the street to Emo’s Annex to catch a bit of The Dan Band. They’re a novelty act from Los Angeles that has popped up in a couple of movies here and there and they basically perform cheesy pop songs with a bad-boy attitude. And it works very well. In small doses. So, after about ten minutes (and a very lively performance of “Waterloo” and “Nasty Boys”) I head back to the now very large and very excited GBV crowd.
The magic hour approaches and as each band takes the stage the anticipation grows. No one has seen Bob in a while so he must be getting ready. Prescott Curlywolf does a very nice set that should have won a few fans to their cause and then former GBV member Doug Gillard steps up for a solo set. And he takes a while to get started because he doesn’t like the way the monitors at Emo’s are working. At long last he begins to play, then stops, then plays again and makes his way through a song as if he were being forced to do so at gunpoint. He leaves the stage very unhappy to cries of “Thank you, Doug!” from the crowd.
“He should not be unhappy. That man. A man who was in band like that. He should be happy. On a night like this. There’s no excuse for that,” says one fan.
Fivehead, the Austin band that organized this event, hits the stage and they truly kick ass. They are tight, solid, and full and should find a larger and larger audience relatively soon if there’s any justice. They play right up to 1 AM.
And the fervor in the room is so intense you can scrape it off the walls. Beers are finished and reserve beers are bought. People crowd to the front of the stage (including a hatchet-faced woman who makes quite an ass of herself by running backwards through the crowd). The moment has arrived.
Beaty from Fivehead steps up the microphone and the crowd is ready to pop. But Beaty looks like his dog just died (and if it had, I don’t mean any offense).
“Thanks for coming out tonight. This was a lot of fun. See you all soon.”
And all at once this entire room crammed with crazed GBV fans just sort of deflates. Nothing is thrown. No sudden bursts of rage. Just a sort of group slump.
“Thank you, Beaty!”
And as hairy men storm the stage to screw around with the monitors, the crowd exits into the streets. People who were there all night tell the ones who just arrived about how great Bob was, but they tell them in this saddened, apologetic way. But the general mood is melancholy and acceptance. In the Cult of Bob, anger is a poison and life will deliver another chance to hear Bob or Tobin or any number of former members one day and buy them one of any number of beers. (Though I suggest you do this early in the evening.)
Friday night at the Austin Music Hall, one of the largest venues of the festival. The crowd is fairly large and rather subdued. The GBV night has induced an alarming strain of laziness into my system. Spending a whole night in one spot without having to fight my way into a club in the hopes of catching a whole show has made me value sticking where you’ve already been stuck.
Fortunately, when the Blind Boys of Alabama take their places on stage they make you want to be nowhere else but where you are. These three men with entire history books etched on their faces fill the room with rapturous gospel music and beautiful harmonies that would make even the most dedicated atheist give at least part of his soul to Jesus.
This is definitely one of those situations where the music is accentuated by the force of history behind the performers. You realize that these men are well into their sixth decade of making music together and the power and conviction they bring to their music is enough to knock you off of your feet. Whether they are putting their own mark on a chestnut like “Amazing Grace” (which in their hands sound more like “House of the Rising Sun” and sends shivers up and down your spine and soul) or the title cut from their newest album Atom Bomb (with lyrics like “Jesus gonna hit you like an atom bomb” which makes you laugh and hope that George W. never hears it), the Blind Boys did what they set out to do that night: they brought joy and hope to a crowd of people, whether they believed in the same god or not. By the time Jimmy Carter (the Blind Boy, not the President) jumped off stage (with his faithful seeing-eye stagehand) and made his way through the crowd wailing, “You feel it? I feel it! You feel it? I feel it!” I found myself with tears in my eyes and knowing that I had lost all sense of place and time. Their set is too short and they would have been more than welcomed to have stayed for the rest of the night.
But if they had done that we would have been denied the evening’s next treat- Mavis Staples. How many times do you get to stand a few yards away from someone who was both on the stage during Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and also appeared in a Scorsese film (The Last Waltz)? And how many times do you get to share oxygen with a woman whose very face expresses such outright joy that you have no choice but to go wherever she wants to take you.
Unfortunately, Mavis was having some nasty vocal problems that Friday night. Her voice was noticeably scratchy and she often took breaks to cough delicately while the band played on. But it didn’t diminish the performance. Granting us the opportunity to hear Staples’ classics like “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There” along with some surprisingly strong covers (The Band’s “The Weight”), you feel more than grateful you chose to enter this space on this particular night.
You also feel fortunate that her magnetism draws you ever closer to the stage because as you do, you leave behind the noisier portion of the audience and enter the realm of the true believers. It is a place of peace and inspiration and you are sad because, even though her vocal issues couldn’t dampen her performance, they do cut it short. Then again, when you’ve been given a little bit of amazing, it’s pretty petty to ask for more.
I take off from the Music Hall and head on over to Antone’s where (eventually) I’m able to get in and catch the last portion of Calexico’s showcase. Their appearance at the GBV show proves to be merely a small taste of their true ability and if nothing else happened this weekend, the festival has honored its founding principle for me in that I’ve discovered something I didn’t know about before and now can’t live without.
Saturday is always a strange night for the festival. It definitely feels like the end of the festivities even though there is officially one more night to go. But Sunday night is only a few venues with acts that they weren’t willing to put in better slots, so Saturday really feels like the end. And with that it has a very strange vibe. Maybe that’s just me. But I can never help feeling a little sad on that Saturday. It always feels like everyone is trying to act happy even though they know real life is coming to get them very shortly.
It’s on Saturday that I decide to do something different. It’s a bit of a risk and perhaps I endanger my journalistic cred by doing it, but it seems like the thing to do. I decide not to enter a venue.
Not that there was much choice. By the time I get to Stubb’s it is packed beyond packed. My wristband promises only that it will get me into the second longest line outside but nothing more. And the thunderstorm that rolled in that afternoon has left everything just a little muggy. I stand on line for an hour before we are told that it doesn’t look good for the rest of us. I figure I could stick it out like I did for Elvis and get in, but something occurs to me.
Each night has had its own particular flavor that no amount of planning could have created or foreseen. I’ve seen some wonderful and not-so-wonderful things and I’ve stood among the intensely devoted and the not-at-all-interested. And I want a different experience. And if it doesn’t look good for me getting in, then I’ll just have to make my own entertainment.
Stubb’s stage is outdoors. A creek runs next to it and on the far bank of that creek, in the shadow of a bland parking lot, there is a small grassy area. And one of the great attributes of sound is that it has a tendency to travel.
So, I spend Saturday evening on the grass, separated from the stage by a creek and a wall. But the music makes it over the other side. For me and for a handful of other people dotted along the grass. We hear Aimee Mann roll through her set rather listlessly (and rather antagonistically towards Austin- making sure we all know that she hasn’t been in town long, but already can’t stand the place). She plays the known songs and some new ones and never really marks any of them with anything special to take them home. It is a show. It lasts a set amount of time and has music through most of it, but the overall impact is unremarkable.
The same cannot be said for the following act, The Wallflowers. Part of me dreaded this set because you stand a good chance of getting something sad. Maybe a few known songs and then some lame attempts at current relevancy. But that wasn’t the case. Jakob and the band delivered a seamlessly crafted set that combined new stuff that sounded great with unapologetic renditions of the big hits. And in a marked contrast to Ms. Mann, without any of the attitude. Jakob seemed to be happy to play for us and therefore it made us happy to listen. As a refreshing breeze blew across our unofficial press box during the final number, I looked around and saw nothing but contentment on the faces of our little renegade audience.
The mood of Saturday was perfectly captured by the voice of the final act that night, Son Volt. When you are feeling a little sad, Jay Farrar’s voice is there to make you a lot sad. This was a new line-up for the band after Jay split with the original members not long ago. (Why can’t this guy just get along with people?) The transition has clearly been smooth performance-wise as they sounded just as good as ever (or as lousy as ever if you’re a dedicated Jeff Tweedy fan and you went to his side after the divorce). For me, this was the way for the night to end. A peculiar band with a most peculiar front-man who has refused to compromise. It was enough to make the threatening rain clouds beautiful.
On the way back to the truck, knowing that the festival was all but over, I felt a little down. All that was going to be left were the memories, but did I gather enough of them? Did I try hard enough to seek out unfamiliar things? Probably not. Did I have a good time? Undoubtedly. Was the festival becoming less about breaking new sounds and more about bringing in the big names and showing off the town for a few days? Let’s face it, yes, but that’s not in and of itself a bad thing. SXSW doesn’t just have a party atmosphere. It is a party. And the party is everywhere: from the official showcases to the unaffiliated shows in other clubs to the live music that suddenly sprouts up in coffee shops, empty storefronts, and alleyways during the week. The beer flows freely and even when people give you the stink-eye because you don’t look anywhere near hip enough to be here (one guy handing out invites to a day party said, “You’ll find a band that even you’d like.”) they’re just there to have fun. It would be great if a lot of them were also there to actually listen to the music, but I can’t blame that on the festival so much as this bizarre TV society we live in. So, yes, I was a little sad that this was all about to slip into the past.
Then I passed the Vanilla Ice show and was reminded that all good things must come to an end and everything else just should.
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