Audio By Carbonatix
The storm blew in and rained down on Austin with a swift fury, for the second year in a row, on the second day of the South By Southwest musical dog-and-pony show. Perhaps it was a warning from above to the festival organizers for trying to shoehorn a record 960-plus artists into five days in a city where viable original local music clubs may be a more endangered species than such legally protected creatures as the Barton Springs Salamander and Golden Cheeked Warbler. Then again, maybe the related twister that touched down on the northernmost edge of Austin’s sprawl was the Texas Tornado, the late Doug Sahm, returning to his old stomping grounds to bitch one more time about the influx of “damn yuppies.” Or it could have been payback for my own arrogance of — as the spring sunshine emerged at about noon on Thursday — hopping onto my bicycle in a seemingly clever attempt to cruise the cluster-hump of afternoon free-food-and-swill parties, and then that evening’s showcases.
After 10 years living in Austin, I should know better. By late afternoon, I was looking for reliable petroleum-fueled transport home, enclosed from the elements, for myself and my bike as the rain came down. And then that night, early in Steve Earle’s set, the San Antonio native ground the old saw about “the great thing about the weather in Texas: if you don’t like it, wait a bit, and it’ll change.” Earlier in the evening his Philadelphia protégés Marah had played through a downpour in the open-air amphitheater at Stubb’s with aplomb, displaying, from underneath the stage covering, the championship-style, Rocky Balboa pluck and swagger of their South Philly roots. Then later, true to the metaphorical form of the day’s weather, after Earle declared himself “The Unrepentant,” the heavenly buckets poured again, ending what one of “his people” promised to be a two-hour set — basic fare for a concert marathoner like Earle — at merely an hour, yet one well spent.
By Saturday, the seductive Texas sunshine had returned, and then the festival actually began to feel festive, though most visibly so outside its official confines. A blooming South By South of Town Lake of unofficial and quasi-sanctioned events culminates on the weekend to ice the SXSW cake with those alluring old Austin vibes. And maybe that’s because, if there’s any higher presence wiring the weather patterns to local good karma, the returning sun shone on Danny Young, proprietor of The Texicalli Grille (an old-school music-scene lunch spot) and proverbial mayor of South Austin, the city’s more convivial quarter. The Cornell Hurd Band, in which Young plays rubboard, held court in the parking lot for a country-rock jamboree and danced with a passel of guest stars, the kind of thing even the out-of-towners can gather is an Austin musical throwdown of the best sort.
And it was there that the presence of Sahm, a regular in years past, was perhaps most vividly missed, even though he was saluted in a tribute show at Antone’s and at the Austin Music Awards, alongside the late Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground, an Austin resident for some of his post-VU days. Austin is a city that honors the dead, which means it will probably never have a shortage of country music rebels and white blues guitarists, no matter how many high-rises, condos, residence hotels, and shot bars replace the musical shrines of yore. The sun that shined on the Texicalli somehow felt like Sir Doug’s cosmic grace.
Last year, the rain washed out some shows on Thursday. But on this go-round it merely provided scheduling glitches and severe discomfort for a good part of the fest. Similarly, back in 1999, things looked a little off for the SXSW music conference, even as its allied film and interactive events burgeoned. In the wake of major record-label consolidations and subsequent staff and artist roster purges, attendance at SXSW ’99 was visibly down (SXSW claims annually that its registration numbers are up, but an insider confirms the large drop).
Yet a mere year later, the dot-com bull has at least scared off the bear, and SXSW felt like it was back on an upswing, vibrant as before, as hot a property as a Lake Austin home within jet-ski distance of Sandra Bullock’s spread. And it was Sandy’s squeeze, Austin funk-rock vet Bob Schneider, who took home the biggest armful of Austin Music Awards at the local scene’s annual junior prom, but more for the groundwork he’d done in the years before he met her, being one of the few people in Austin who knows the surefire currency of entertainment value and keeping the crowds dancing.
A little disclosure is called for here, conveniently providing context for what follows. I moved to Austin in 1989 to work for SXSW, selling its advertising and trade-show space for two years, and then for another four years assisting part-time in planning the conference panels after I had moved to its sister company, the Austin Chronicle newsweekly, to serve as an editor and staff writer. I was fairly paid and generously bonused by SXSW for work I enjoyed doing, yet since opting out of the event’s staging, my empathy with the undercurrent of local grumbles about the conference and festival has grown, though for somewhat selfish reasons all my own. I can’t rail on SXSW like the cab driver who ranted at an out-of-town friend all the way from the airport to the hotel, citing a laundry list of its evils. And being a recent arrival in an Austin that’s now thick with émigrés, I am far more a symptom of the influx problem than anyone with a legitimate bone to pick about Austin’s hurlyburly growth.
Nonetheless, I want the whole damn SXSW music deal out of my town. (Leave the film festival for a few years longer, though.) And I think that the notion might just be best for SXSW as well as Austin itself. Because what’s best about musical Austin is all that stuff that has a hard time coexisting with the shuck ‘n’ jive of the music business, for which SXSW provides a purchasable forum, ready to take the soft money of entertainment politics and fuel the system. Because even in these go-go Internet start-up days, when money-losing companies are worth millions, the music business is still a veteran at playing the margin. Remember: We are dealing with an industry of which 90 percent of its output never sees a profit. So even if Earle’s short-barreled salvo of a keynote address called the corporate music types the “snakes” they are, SXSW is still designed to appeal to the imagined mogul and/or tastemaker in us all.
As a New Yorker, I used to feel the same way about New Music Seminar, the 1980s Manhattan summer music conference and festival that SXSW emulated and eventually usurped as the business-card party for the record industry, thanks in part to NMS hoisting itself with its own petard. I eventually wanted that event out of my city, out of my face, and out of my music bars, so that I might be able to connect better with the music without the business obscuring what’s most valuable to a true music lover. And that is not the Spin magazine lighter/bottle opener in the canvas conference goody bag, nor the mountains of brisket served to freeloading journalists, nor the cachet or even the cash of being in the high-flying slipstream of some incipient musical success.
But even after the dot-com stocks go south, and this brave new world of online music marketing begins to resemble the once freewheeling record business that is now dominated by a handful of conglomerates, there will still be that voracious maw of hype looking for new victims to exploit and fickle tastes to serve and music media freebooters to ply with swag. And for better or for worse, SXSW has learned to serve that system reliably, if sometimes less than admirably. One can bitch about the duff band you see in a packed house (Lil Brian and the Zyedco Travelers) while a true talent an hour later at a club around the corner (expert New York songwriter Robert Burke Warren) winds up playing to a handful of friends. But having labored in the belly of the SXSW beast, I can safely say that for all the glitches and bitches, SXSW, organizationally at least, does about as well as such a behemoth can.
But this year the event almost felt redundant in Austin, with its plethora of roots-rock headliners competing for the attention of those whose tastes run to what old-school Austin still values. With Ray Price up against Steve Earle, Los Lobos and The Waco Brothers as competing headliners on one night alone, the Austin musical ethos appears hearty enough to survive this brave new century we’ve entered without the festival’s help, even if the Austin original music club scene is in crisis. The city’s now-thriving economy no longer needs its multimillion-dollar SXSW cash fix with such desperation as before.
So why not consider moving it, just for a while, and letting the rest of the cities in Texas enjoy the circus? Take the show on the road to Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio for a three-year tour, and after it circles back home, I’d probably welcome SXSW again with open arms. But after 10 years now, the extended exposure to the radiation emitted by music-business pandering just might be the last thing Austin needs to keep its own musical soul alive and healthy.
