I feel like I need some intravenous silence pumped into my veins, having overdosed on music at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference.
Binge-rocking isn't so much encouraged at South by Southwest as it's required: If your ears aren't bleeding profusely by the time the enormous five-day festival concludes on Sunday night, then you aren't doing your job. (It's dangerous, potentially fatal work, listening to all of those Velvet Underground, Wire and Gang of Four knockoffs, and there's no hazard pay. Isn't it about time for a congressional hearing on the matter?)
Despite the constant drumbeat of negativity that's enveloped the struggling music industry, there seem to be more people than ever trying to get their music heard. And they invaded Austin in staggering numbers this year. Music is dead, long live music, etc. -- for better or worse. At one point during the conference, the mope-rock godhead Morrissey pricked the bubble somewhat, saying, "I think there are maybe too many people making music."
Anyway, SXSW used to be manageable, even quaint. You and a few thousand of your closest music industry friends would come to town for a few days, see a bunch of shows, stuff yourselves silly, hang out with Alejandro Escovedo, maybe play a little softball on Sunday afternoon. Now, with the schedule having spun out of control at the 20-year-old event, everybody's comatose by Friday afternoon. By Sunday? You're ready for a gurney.
SXSW has in recent years spun off film and interactive media conferences, which precede SXSW Music. But the music confab, the largest of its kind in the United States, remains the top draw, and attendance spiked past the 10,000 mark for the first time this year. That led to longer-than-usual lines outside venues, many of which filled up early with your drunken zombies, your porn star mustaches, your indie thrift-shoppers, your liberal cowboys and cowgirls in their $500 ripped jeans. This made the natives and visitors restless, to the point that the Austin American-Statesman published a front-page headline Saturday that asked, "South by Southwest: IS IT TOO BIG?" (The short answer: Yep.)
Overwhelming
At the very least, it's overwhelming. Music assaults you constantly here, and at every turn: At the jampacked SXSW showcase venues, of which there were 62 this year (including a church, a hotel meeting room and a tented parking lot); at daytime and late-night parties thrown by media companies, record labels, foreign consulates; and in unsanctioned performances by all those struggling bands that failed to get past the festival's gatekeepers.
"We're in the range of 1,500 acts," said Brent Grulke, SXSW's creative director. "But that's just the official artists. . . . It's not like we said, 'You know, we should have more.' Because more isn't necessarily better. But we had to grow. Look at the number of applications we had this year."
More than 8,000 performers applied for SXSW showcasing slots; not even 20 percent were accepted. But hundreds of the rejects came anyway, hoping to get noticed by somebody who either knows somebody or who actually is somebody. (Which is to say that even though they probably sound like Franz Ferdinand or Spoon, they're more or less praying that they'll become the next Hanson, the Oklahoma pop trio that won the SXSW lottery a dozen years ago by crashing the conference without an invite and then leaving with a manager who ultimately took the siblings to the top of the charts.)
And the artists who were here officially, as listed in the 280-page guidebook, weren't slipping quietly in and out of town, either. The Minneapolis indie-rock band Tapes 'N Tapes, for instance, performed a SXSW showcase plus seven additional gigs on the periphery of the conference. The quartet, whose gorgeous, brittle songs seemed to split the difference between the Pixies and Pavement, was one of the best of the 85 bands I saw at SXSW. No surprise, then, that Tapes 'N Tapes came to Austin in search of a recording contract and left with a gaggle of salivating label execs in hot pursuit.
Other, more established artists also gigged constantly. Billy Bragg said he had 15 performances on his schedule here, from a benefit performance at a soup kitchen to a late-night hootenanny Saturday at the Central Presbyterian Church, where the British folk-punk artist appeared in various configurations with the likes of Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Joe Henry and Marty Stuart. It was a special, transcendent performance that clearly benefited from its unique setting and loose, collaborative format. Still, it would've been easy to miss, given the competition on the schedule. In fact, I could have easily gone through the week without hearing Bragg sing or strum a single note, what with so many other musicians performing across Austin.
One of the biggest problems with SXSW is that no matter what you're seeing, you're always certain that somebody, somewhere else, is witnessing something superior -- and possibly even having one of those elusive, transformative live moments for which music lovers live. Oh, the existential dread!
Not that Grulke feels sorry. Told that there's too much music this year, he laughs. "I must choose between quality artists. Boohoo!"
What. Ever.
It doesn't help that text messaging has become so pervasive. So while you might be seeing a relatively uneven greatest-hits set by, say, World Party, the Beatlesque band led by the hard-luck Brit Karl Wallinger, your phone might buzz with "Lips klld boho rhaps." At which point you kick yourself for not having gone to the secret Flaming Lips show that you'd heard about two hours earlier. Because if there's any band whose cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody" you know you'd enjoy, it's absolutely theirs.
At least you're not alone in your angst. "When I'm here, I get stressed out because there so much good stuff I want to see, and it's all at the same time," said Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore. The iconic indie-rock figure attended this year's festival as a non-performing fan, and he had a front-row spot during a superlative set of snarling punk by the Nashville teenagers in Be Your Own Pet. Led by a firecracker of a singer, Jemina Pearl, the coed quartet eschews big pop hooks and favors aggression and adolescent attitude above all else. At the conclusion of BYOP's set, one of the boys in the band blasted the music industry with an expletive -- a hilarious thing given that the various band members come from music business families. How so very punk rock.
Seconding the motion that the kids are alright, the Flairz also tore up Austin with an explosive set of ragged garage-rock songs about high school and such. But they're getting ahead of themselves: The average age of the coed Australian trio is 12, which no doubt added to their appeal. Still, the Flairz were among my favorite accidental finds at SXSW. (As it turns out, I'm somewhat late to the party, as Stevie Van Zandt has been playing the Flairz' "Rock and Roll Ain't Evil" on his satellite radio show.)
Going into the confab, the majority of names on the SXSW schedule were unfamiliar to me. There's an incredible urge to investigate many of those acts in the off chance that you might discover something great, a la the Flairz. More often than not, though, it's a dead-end option, which I confirmed by wasting precious time randomly sampling multiple bands that were average at best. I didn't know their names going in, and it's not worth repeating them coming out. (Note to upcoming bands: If you play a festival like SXSW, it's a good idea if you tell the crowd who you are -- early and often. Don't assume the audience knows your name simply by virtue of being in the room.)
Big names
But as always at SXSW, there were big names in town, too, as artists from Morrissey and the Beastie Boys to Rosanne Cash and Chamillionaire came to town to promote various projects to the international pop press that returns here every year in search of the Next Big Thing while drinking midafternoon margaritas. There were also plenty of buzz bands, with the Arctic Monkeys topping the list.
The Monkeys are the most hyped British band of the past decade, which is really saying something given the U.K. music press's penchant for hyperbole. As such, the group played to a ridiculously packed house that just dared the boys to impress. And for the most part they did, despite the presence of a few hecklers. Though the Monkeys are a young band playing stateside for the first time, they don't lack for confidence. At one point, as the crowd cheered its approval, singer Alex Turner wryly said, "Yeah, I know, we're good, aren't we?"
Standing out here isn't easy, so some artists resort to guerrilla tactics. Or gorilla tactics: One member of Facing New York, an indie-prog band from San Francisco, spent most of Friday night wearing a gorilla suit on Sixth Street, where most of the SXSW venues are. One of his band mates had on a cardboard robot outfit, and two others were decked out in bright-colored sandwich boards promoting their unofficial SXSW show the following night.
Omar Cuellar, the sandwich-board-wearing drummer, said the group initially planned to hand out fliers. "But then we went ape!" Ha. Ha.
"I don't know if it's going to get anybody out to our show, but it'll hopefully get people to at least remember our name," he said.
Alas, we couldn't make it to the Facing New York show. Too much competition on the schedule -- much to Jimmy Jam's delight.
The Grammy-winning songwriter and producer was attending his first SXSW and was thrilled by the sheer volume of artists in Austin.
"The vibe here is amazing," he said. "It proves that the music business is great. The record business may be a little shaky right now, but the music business is good. Music itself is a spiritual thing. We attach business to it, but music comes from the soul, the heart. And you can see here that the passion is still there."
Seymour Stein was looking for that very thing when I ran into him on Sixth Street. Stein is the co-founder of Sire Records, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a guy who knows a thing or two about greatness: His signings over the years have included everybody from the Ramones and Talking Heads to the Replacements and some woman named Madonna. He could be resting on his laurels and bank account. But he was rushing from one showcase to another.
"If you find just one great band here, do you know how lucky you are?" he said. "And if you find two or three, it's like breaking the bank in Las Vegas. Just don't drive yourself crazy worrying about missing anything. Because it'll kill you."
Don't I know it.
