Around Austin during SXSW, this is considered something of an event -- "the real deal," insists one eager bizzer, standing in line because three out of five critics in the Austin American-Statesman recommended this show. But what The Biz calls The Buzz, most of us call Tuesday night at The Bone. I drove to Austin, spent five days there, and all I brought back was a lingering hangover of a blues jam complete with drum solo. Well, that, and a Byrds poster signed by Roger McGuinn, which I guess I could sell on eBay to cover expenses.
But that's my fault. On Saturday night/Sunday morning, I could have gone to see the Mekons, should have gone to see Tenacious D, and considered checking out Big Daddy Kane and Doug E. Fresh (oh, if only!) but skipped on the cross-town drive. Instead, I followed around a friend from New York and her two Los Angeles pals. They wanted something gritty, they explained -- something, to be specific, "in your face." The night had been horrific so far, a roll call of ironic and "clever" indie-rockers singing between parenthesis and quotation marks and a checklist of old men frittering away whatever goodwill they once accrued. By the time Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones lit into a mandolin solo in front of a thousand or so schmucks chattering away so loudly about Page and Plant's last record that you could hear nothing from the stage at La Zona Rosa, it was time to call it a night. A blind man should have seen it coming: The North Mississippi All Stars was going to be a very bad idea. But still, they insisted -- my friends, craving a little of the raw stuff.
But that's what South By Southwest does best: It creates a mirage where a desert once stood and will again. It gives hope to the hopeless, meaning to the meaningless. It underscores, exaggerates, accentuates -- all of New York and Los Angeles doing business over platters of Central Texas barbecue. For four days, give or take, small-time operators and dime-bag dreamers and, yes, certifiable legends sit around a table, share a stage, and talk about how the biz is dying, long live the biz. There's Chuck D badmouthing the industry, chastising all them greedy motherfuckers who done him wrong. "Five, six years ago, I had no answers, because lawyers and accounts created a quagmire in my brain," Chuck said on a Friday-afternoon artists' panel, perhaps explaining the last handful of Public Enemy albums.
And there's Roger McGuinn, touting his folk-song Web site and all those Byrds reissues being released by a certain multinational corporation. There's Neil Young, holding hallway press conferences about his new concert movie, filmed in Austin. And there's Steve Earle, cursing all of them in a keynote speech that should have sent the entirety of the room to the nearest pawnshop, where they could trade their instruments for loaded weapons to chew on.
For 14 years, South By Southwest has been where the Music Business goes to celebrate and condemn itself. It's a party for self-loathers -- a funeral and a wake. It's a place where bizzers go to terrorize one another and theorize about the State of the Industry. They come to praise the business while burying it behind its back.
"Smell that?" asks Bad Liver Mark Rubin, standing in the middle of the trade show that has now engulfed the Austin Convention Center (which, itself, has devoured all of downtown). He looks around, waving his painted arm at the dozens and dozens of dot-com booths all advertising a variation on a theme: the music you want, when you want it. "That's the smell of the music industry, dying." Rubin's face lights up. You can see it reflected in the dozens of $10,000, flat-screen, high-definition televisions strung up around the trade show.
When it was founded in the mid-1980s by the staff of the Austin Chronicle, SXSW's goals weren't terribly ambitious. At most, it was a showcase of Austin (and, to a lesser extent, Texas and Southwest) talent for the coastal crowds. Austin was in the middle of a rock-and-roll boom: Bands such as Zeitgeist, True Believers, Glass Eye, and Doctors Mob lent the city an aura, the likes of which had made such college towns as Chapel Hill and Athens havens for the Amerindie crowd. The Chronicle, which might as well be funded with a government grant and some Chamber of Commerce petty cash, seized the opportunity to exploit -- sorry, celebrate. Back then, it was a big deal to get Mojo Nixon on a bill. It was forever ago.
Last year's conference was a decided downer: The dark clouds of label mergers and layoffs hung in the air like stale smoke, and thousands gagged in unison. Now that the dust has settled, leaving one label in control of the universe ("Universusall," in the word of Chuck D), the music business is left to sort things out on the Internet. Next year, they need not even have this convention. Just hold it over the Web: RealPlayer (software available from every other booth and in your gimme bag) can stream the panels and showcases, and bands can upload their demos directly to MP3.com. With your new Rio player and a canvas tote bag, you can play SXSW: The Home Version, which comes complete with your own personalized badge, invites to the insider-only parties for magazines and Web sites you've never heard of, and all the flat beer you can stomach.
Ah, but it's hardly as miserable as all that. After all, SXSW, like college and sex, is what you choose to make of it. Hit it right, and you've won the lottery: Roger McGuinn and Jayhawks, perhaps, followed by some Jungle Brothers and a little Delta 72 (otherwise known as the Jon Spencer Blues Implosion) and Nashville Pussy, washed down with a little Guided By Voices and Kelly Hogan. Indeed, witness one Nashville Pussy set -- four near-naked female breasts, one hairy dwarf, and all the "songs" Motörhead left on the studio floor -- and you're almost home free for the entire year. But do it wrong -- three words: Legendary Stardust Cowboy -- and you might as well have stayed home watching the whole thing on Austin Access, which broadcast the Austin Music Awards Wednesday night. Really, nothing says "test pattern" like a Doug Sahm tribute featuring his son.
The music industry might be scared to death of its impending demise, but that doesn't stop bands from Sweden and France and Norway and London and Denton from making the annual trek to Austin. And it doesn't stop them from harboring that most old-fashioned of dreams: getting signed to a label, going out on the road, selling millions of discs, becoming stars, retiring young and pretty and rich. How else to explain a band like Stockholm's Backyard Babies. Made up of members who look as though they've been plucked at random from a traveling 1970s rock-and-roll exhibit -- one guy looks like he was in the Stranglers; another, the Scorpions -- the Backyard Babies are so anachronistic, you can't believe they haven't already been the subject of a VH1 Where Are They Now? They sound yesterday, look yesterday, act yesterday -- but are no less relevant today, if only because they strive to make their own brand of chaos in a bar-code world. Their Thursday-night set at the Red Eyed Fly no doubt rendered the rest of the weekend a letdown: How do you go up from such an indelible high?
Certainly not to a Patti Smith show. Last year, Tom Waits stopped by the Paramount Theater and laid down the rumble; no doubt, the goodwill and good press helped his Mule Variations sell in the hundreds, as opposed to the requisite dozens. This year, a giddy Patti Smith showed up on a damp, frigid Friday night to thrill the locals with a freebie show at Waterloo Park, where she offered up limp St. Patrick's Day jokes (you know, the one with the punch line "patio furniture") and a brand of behind-glass punk rock that's either still ahead of its time or so far behind it that she might well be the Bowery's Janis Joplin. That Smith was in town pitching her dreadful forthcoming disc Gung Ho didn't help -- three songs in, I couldn't tell the new shit from "Dancing Barefoot." For the next two days, everyone around the conference kept insisting she was "transcendent." Then again, they say the same thing about opening act Alejandro Escovedo. Some things in this life, you just don't...get.
Smith might have been the most high-profile old fart at SXSW -- and there were plenty of others, from John Cale to John Doe -- but she wasn't the most visible. McGuinn took that honor, showing up at a Sony Music invite-only party on Thursday at Stubb's, later that night with the Jayhawks at La Zona Rosa, the next night at the Cactus Café on the University of Texas campus, and on two panels. But it's easy to forgive such obnoxious ubiquity when the man remains among the most guileless performers ever to pick up a guitar, tell a story, and play a little song. In the end, after the rains have dried up and the echoes have faded, all you're left with all the little moments. Only a handful of hours later, I can barely remember my 14th South By Southwest, but listening to McGuinn perform "Turn, Turn, Turn" and "Lost My Drivin' Wheel" in front of 50 or so people at Stubb's is something I will own forever. When you stand that close to the well, you can't help but feel a little better about music and life. It's like watching God make a rainbow.
Before playing, he would introduce each song with a little story: "David Crosby said, 'I don't like it,'" McGuinn offered, before launching into "Mr. Tambourine Man." He reinvented "Eight Miles High," deconstructing its notorious intro until it became a hailstorm of notes. When the Jayhawks joined him for a couple of songs, you could almost see the wrinkles fade from his face. This is what it must have been like at the Troubadour in 1965, back before "country-rock" had a name, much less became a cliché. And bless him, McGuinn recently turned down an opportunity to reform the Byrds for a large chunk of change: "It would be a mistake to compete with it, to tamper with it," he said Friday afternoon. "The only people who want it to happen are a handful of fans and David Crosby, who is known to spread himself around."
If South By Southwest's organizers could be damned for anything, it's for putting McGuinn in the tiny confines of the Cactus Café on Friday night. Not even Peter Case, ex of the Plimsouls and next on the bill, could get in to see McGuinn. It was so packed, with no more than 150 people, even the air couldn't breathe.
But for some reason, SXSW honchos thought it would be a good idea to put the Legendary Stardust Cowboy on a Saturday-night showcase at the mammoth La Zona Rosa -- which is akin to putting on a flea circus in a big top. The man hasn't seen a note in 25 years, and it didn't help that he didn't even have a band in place till 15 minutes before his 10 p.m. start time. SXSW organizers were so desperate, they tried to get Joe Ely to play with him -- and he was across town at the Continental Club, trying to stay hidden. An hour later at La Zona Rosa, John Paul Jones took the stage -- and a fight broke out during "Going to California." A few minutes later, during "Black Dog," a nap broke out.
