Paying her debt

This incident seems typical of the bad karma that plagued this year's SXSW. Writers were running around saying, "There are no good bands." Labels were running around saying, "We don't have money to sign or feed you." Artists were plagued by bad weather and bad prospects. In all, it seemed as though there was an unspoken sense of Are we still having fun here? hovering on everyone's lips. There were Band for sale signs hanging from the stages of a lot of acts with significantly higher profiles than Kathy McCarty. Perhaps because she didn't have to drive all the way to Austin from Kentucky or California, McCarty took the Grand Royal fiasco somewhat philosophically.

"If they sign me," she said the next day, "I'll have a record deal, and I'll have my life. If they don't, then I'll only have my life."

Although she could only laugh about the situation, she was also a bit disconsolate. "All I ever wanted from music," she added, "was the ability to be free to live my life being an artist, without having to work at a restaurant. So part of me thinks, 'Wow, I'm 38. Maybe it's time to get out of the Youth Culture Racket and have a fucking life.' But the truth is, I am an artist, and I'll always be one. I just think it might be time to pour more energy into making a living--by which I mean, not by art, as I had always hoped, but at least in some way better than restaurant work."

The day after SXSW, Kathy and I took a long walk around Town Lake, finally settling down on a hot rock near the bridge by Guadalupe Street. And as we trailed our fingers in the green water and watched the turtles floating by, McCarty told me that after 13 years in the music business, she was thinking about giving it up. Saying uncle. Moving to Wyoming and maybe going back to school, training for something else.

"But it's not so much giving up on music," she amended, "or writing songs, but the whole winning-the-lottery-ticket mentality of getting a big fat record contract. I've really devoted myself to that for 15 years, and my particular lottery ticket hasn't won yet. And all of I sudden, I'm thinking maybe it never will."

For a second, I think maybe she's right. Rock is in bad shape right now, and jeez, we all have to live. Sure, I think McCarty's a great artist, but this business is a cruel one, and it doesn't enjoy hearing from a 38-year-old woman with a brain, however deserving she is of being heard.

But almost the exact second I thought that, I realized I was wrong. McCarty should keep on keeping on, not for herself and her dreams, but for me, for you. Maybe it's selfishness on my part, maybe not; the artist initially makes music for himself or herself, but it is ultimately for us. And what McCarty does is so wonderful, I can't bear to think of it disappearing into thin air, never to be heard or appreciated again.

Besides, to be able to get a showcase at a moment's notice at South by Southwest, to win a place in the Austin Music Hall of Fame, to have made records your peers love, to even be considered by Grand Royal--these things are not nothing. Many artists would be happy to have done any of them, much less to have lived the life we did back in the 1980s--a life that was the rock-and-roll equivalent of Paris in the '20s, driving around in a beat-up van and making meaningful relationships and really great music. To give up now may be understandable, but it's also kind of unthinkable. And if she does quit now, she won't be the loser.