This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual conference and festival ...
© Chicago Sun-Times SXSW 2013 opens with names big and small By Thomas Conner on March 13, 2013 9:00 AM AUSTIN, Texas — "It's like Comic Con, but without anything cool." That early review of South by Southwest came from one of the multitude of hipsters strutting through the Austin Convention Center on Tuesday — the final day of SXSW Interactive and the first day of SXSW Music. This annual conference and festival in the Texas capital has grown into a 10-day event encompassing rollouts of films, digital ventures and new music. The movies and online jibber-jabber started March 8; the music blares on through March 17. The relative coolness of what lies ahead remains to be seen, but it's already shaping up to be a typical mix of fresh-faced new bands — the showcasing of which was SXSW's original mission when it began in 1987 — and big-name celebs. In the latter category, Depeche Mode, Green Day and Dave Grohl's Sound City Players (an assembly of Stevie Nicks, John Fogerty, Rick Springfield, Rick Nielsen, Corey Taylor and many more) have booked big performances this week. Other formidable names — Iggy & the Stooges, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds — also are among the thousands of artists vying for attention from journalists, record labels and digital media. The rumor mill, though, is buzzing about two other megastars: Prince and Justin Timberlake. Both taut pop-R&B legends have been floated as possible surprise showcases during SXSW. The Prince gig is just a rumor, with an unnamed source suggesting that His Purpleness will perform with a 22-piece band Saturday night at the cavernous La Zona Rosa club. Timberlake — whose new album, "The 20/20 Experience," is out Tuesday (read my review) — is scheduled all week on TV's "Lat Night With Jimmy Fallon," but the Austinist site has pieced together clues toward JT's own possible Saturday night show. Watch this blog for my own reports. My docket includes the big and the small, from seeing how Green Day emerges from their personal crisis to checking out up-and-comers like Foxygen and Lianne La Havas. I'll also be sniffing out the home-cooking that always pervades SXSW, from Chicago's Wild Belle and Chief Keef to the premiere of the blues documentary "Born in Chicago." Stay tuned! SXSW: Long live Shoes, long live Camper Van Beethoven By Thomas Conner on March 13, 2013 6:32 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Janice Greenberg actually teared up a bit at the Camper Van Beethoven show. The 46-year-old mother of two from Sonoma County, Calif., stumbled into the Jr. club Wednesday afternoon, squinting from the bright-to-black transition and her jaw hanging down. The band was running through its well-known 1980s indie-rock standard, "Take the Skinheads Bowling" — but it was, Greenberg discovered to her considerable dismay, their last song. "I had no idea that they ... are they even ... I didn't know they were here!" she said, close to a wail. "I love Camper!" Camper eased onto the stage Wednesday afternoon and played a 10-song, career-spanning set that was plenty to justify their status as indie-rock grandfathers. What was extraordinary, though — and somehow I always forget this till I'm faced with it — was the skill of the five players. CVB's music can get complicated, not in a convoluted art-rock sense but in a self-taught virtuoso sense. While singer David Lowery wheezes and whines his weird, grumpy-ol'-stoner tales, you've got Jonathan Segel (elegant on violin, especially during "Sad Lover's Waltz," but also adding swooping third guitar to the new "Too High for the Love-In") and Greg Lisher (braiding melodies and countermelodies throughout like a pro). New songs like "Northern California Girls" — from the recently released new album, "La Costa Perdida" — were refreshing live, while old surprises like "Seven Languages" still packed a punch. The best part, though, was when Greenberg got the good news: Camper's playing again two hours later, at 7 p.m. right next door at El Sol y La Luna, 600 E 6th St. I'd quote her reaction, but she was off like a shot to secure her spot. Trusty ol' Shoes Another legacy act inaugurated SXSW 2013 Wednesday afternoon with a show that was, at least historically, slightly more momentous. Beloved power-pop band Shoes — the lions of Zion, Ill. — played their first concert outside the Chicago area in 18 years. Shoes, an occasional underground delight since appearing in 1975, reunited last year to record "Ignition," their first new album since 1994. Early Wednesday afternoon, at an annual showcase organized by Chicago native publicist Cary Baker (who shepherded the dB's into their comeback at the same place last year), singer-guitarists Jeff Murphy and Gary Klebe, brother John Murphy on bass and drummer John Richardson blasted through their own career-spanning set. Shoes is one of those bands with a consistency that's more than a little frightening. I was bobbing my head through most of "Say It Like You Mean It" before I remembered it was one of the new ones. No one at SXSW has just one gig anymore: Shoes' play again (their official showcase) at 11 p.m. Friday at Maggie Mae's Gibson Room, 512 Trinity St. SXSW: 'Born in Chicago' explores '60s blues hand-off By Thomas Conner on March 14, 2013 1:33 AM AUSTIN, Texas — A day after it was announced as a featured documentary at next month's annual Chicago International Movies & Music Festival, "Born in Chicago" had its world premiere here at SXSW on Wednesday afternoon. The film, directed by John Anderson, chronicles the history and tall tales from the generation of young, affluent white kids who gathered in Chicago during the 1950s and '60s, learning to play the blues from the men who had honed the music on their own. Narration by Marshall Chess (son and nephew of the Chess Records founders) mixes into interviews with Elvin Bishop, Charlie Musselwhite, Nick Gravenites, Barry Goldberg (who co-produced the film) and excellent footage of the late Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield. On the other side are snatches of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, plus interviews with Sam Lay and the great Hubert Sumlin. "Born in Chicago" makes Bloomfield, a wealthy Jewish guitar virtuoso (a fact he presents in a funny bit of old footage), appear something of a valiant crusader for crossing the mid-century racial divide, bearing his instrument. Goldberg relates a templated tale of him and Bloomfield venturing into the South Side one night to sit in with Howlin' Wolf — and the hush that came over the club when two white boys walked in. All that's missing is the record-scratching clip from the Dexter Lake Club in "Animal House." The film's problematic thesis, though, seems to be that this particular appropriation wasn't like all the other black cultural exploitations by white musicians — because Muddy and Wolf and the gang were apparently so thrilled to be noticed, appreciated and revered by these upper-middle class dilettantes. Chess himself drives the point home about "these white kids treating 'em like stars," and Goldberg assures us that "people recognized the respect we had for their music." Musselwhite — himself the subject of a current generational rediscovery thanks to his recent collaboration with Ben Harper — insists, "These guys ... were so flattered we knew who they were." Just because the original bluesmen welcomed their exploiters, however, does not mean they weren't exploited. Even Jack White mentions what a "shame" it is that it takes white people to "legitimize" something like this, apparently never stopping to consider that the music previously had been perfectly legitimate for black people. So only when white people — a bunch of Brits, no less, once the Stones showed up at Chess — stamp their approval does a music become 2 legit 2 quit? Same song, umpteenth verse. Steve Miller probably sums up the reality of the situation better than anyone in the film: "Everybody talks about it like, oh, these white kids. We were competing with Howlin' Wolf for gigs. ... It was business." Catch "Born in Chicago" at the CIMM fest in Chicago, April 18-21. Four-day passes are on sale now. SXSW: Chicago's Wild Belle ready for summer By Thomas Conner on March 14, 2013 8:15 AM AUSTIN, Texas — SXSW originally was created to showcase music that was new, fresh, creative. Wild Belle returned to the festival Wednesday night boasting all three. The Chicago-area, brother-sister duo of Elliot and Natalie Bergman kicked off the Wednesday showcases with a packed house at the roomy upstairs Haven club, with lines of eager badge-holders and fans stretching in two directions down the block. Leaning heavily on their new album, "Isles" — released Tuesday on major label Columbia — the Bergmans and their band bounced effortlessly through their reggae-driven pop. It was music for the Austin weather: warm, breezy and revitalizing. That they performed a song about being "bundled up like chickadees" in Chicago seemed almost to taunt the folks back home. Natalie is a Kittenish creature — capitalized because, while her vocals certainly purr, she sings with a throaty, Eartha Kitt allure. She performs with a sultry confidence belying the fact that "Isles" is the band's debut. Elliot, though, is crucial to the band's unique sound. Puttering about among keyboards, a baritone saxophone and various gizmos, like a thumb piano with an electric pickup attached, he looks like Lazlo Hollyfield and underpins the music with a similarly silent mad genius. Wild Belle's sound is relaxed, summery and always keeps just left of what one might expect them to go. One of those moments where you wish this wasn't a mere 40-minute SXSW showcase. SXSW: The return of Dixie Chick Natalie Maines By Thomas Conner on March 14, 2013 8:39 AM AUSTIN, Texas — Really, no hoots and cheers when Natalie Maines, covering Pink Floyd's "Mother," sang the song's line about running for president? Maines, the singer for country's Dixie Chicks, returned to the spotlight in a Wednesday night showcase at the Austin City Limits Live theater during SXSW. Once the flashpoint for debate after disparaging President George W. Bush (telling a London audience in 2003, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas"), the Lubbock native was back in Austin a decade later to unveil the new Natalie. Performing the entirety of her new album, "Mother" — her solo debut since the Dixie Chicks went on hiatus in 2007 — Maines appeared stolid and confident. In fact, in the beginning the set lacked much energy at all, plodding through midtempo numbers without much fanfare or enthusiasm. The Pink Floyd cover — a dark choice, but played capably and arranged for arenas — is part of the reason this is being touted as a "rock" record, and eventually more of her trademark feistiness backed up that perspective. Politics are still foregrounded: "I put this on the album because it reminds me of the West Memphis Three," she said by way of introducing Dan Wilson's "Free Life." But then — backed as she was Ben Harper and his Innocent Criminals band (Harper co-produced Maines' new album) — she put down her own guitar and launched into Patty Griffin's "Silver Bell," unleashing a pent-up Belinda Carlisle kind of frenzy while rooted at the mike. Suddenly the near faux-hawk hairdo was making sense. "Mother" is due May 7. Incidentally, as Maines pointed out, Patty Griffin also has a new album out the same day. SXSW: Dave Grohl talks Chicago, inspires the aspiring By Thomas Conner on March 14, 2013 2:08 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Dave Grohl stepped to the podium Thursday morning to deliver the keynote address at SXSW 2013, rolled up his sleeves, tucked his hair behind his ears — and put on reading glasses. The move spoke not only to rock's AARP eligibility but to the paternal tone of his address. Largely an autobiography of a lifetime spent pursuing some measure of independence in his music, Grohl's speech aimed not at the media and industry crowding the Austin Convention Center ballroom but at any indie-rock kids who might hear him. "There is no right or wrong, there is only your voice," he dispensed. "It's your voice. Cherish it, respect it, challenge it ... Everyone's blessed with at least that." In Austin to hype his new documentary, "Sound City: Real to Reel," Grohl barely mentioned it, largely trying to inspire with his speech rather than merely shill for his flick. The Foo Fighters leader and former Nirvana drummer began his hourlong talk with the moment of his birth, but wrapped it up by stating hope that his own two daughters will find their own way in the world. His remarks retraced that wayfinding, beginning with a K-tel record. His sister bought it in 1975, and it contained Edgar Winter's instrumental "Frankenstein," which he proceeded to scat for the audience. Hearing the tune was a life-changing moment, he said, adding, "It was the riff. I gave it all up for a f---in' riff." Much of his tale he has told before, including the other pivotal musical moments he experienced during summer family visits in the Chicago area. He described (somehow) getting into the Cubby Bear to hear local punk legends Naked Raygun ("The most ferocious noise! Bodies were flying everywhere ... piss and puke. I was in heaven!") and making the pilgrimage to Wax Trax! Records to begin stocking up on the requisite punk catalog. Grohl demonstrated the crude multitracking technique he came up with as a teen. With one tape machine, he recorded a few bars of a guitar riff. He placed that tape into another player and played it back, while recording some drum beats on the body of his guitar. Voila — the new recording contained both sounds! Grohl's rewind was full of life-changing moments — a political punk show in Washington, D.C., a single question ("Have you heard of Nirvana?"), the death of Kurt Cobain. "When Kurt died, I was lost. I was numb. The music that I had devoted my life to had now betrayed me. I had no voice. I put away my drums. I turned off the radio. I couldn't bear to hear someone else singing about their own pain or happiness." He re-emerged with a self-made album, which he labeled the Foo Fighters, which became — as once described by Pitchfork, a media outlet he disparaged midway through his speech — "his generation's answer to Tom Petty — a consistent hit machine pumping out working-class rock." Grohl's talk about Grohl was a bit thin after recent SXSW keynotes — Bruce Springsteen's rousing music history lesson last year, Bob Geldof's still-poignant pleas for rock's social conscience in 2011 — but it contained nuggets of self-awareness and inspiration for aspiring contemporary musicians. Repeating a mantra about finding one's individual voice, he confessed, "F--- guilty pleasure! How about just pleasure? ... I can truthfully say out loud that 'Gangnam Style' is one of my favorite f---ing songs of the past year." Dave Grohl's Sound City Players is a temporary supergroup featuring Grohl, Stevie Nicks, John Fogerty, Rick Nielsen and many more. They perform an anticipated showcase later tonight. SXSW shows off Chicago hip-hop By Thomas Conner March 15, 2013 9:26 AM AUSTIN, Texas — Late Thursday night, an official showcase of more Chicago rappers — including King Louie, Lil Durk, Lil Mouse, GLC, Katie Got Bandz — stocked the upstairs Club 119 in the shadow of the Texas capitol. MCs and DJs ringed the club's small stage, waiting to be tagged in like pro wrestlers. Vic Spencer worked the crowd, followed by the dynamic and engaging YP, who boasted of his East Side roots and led the crowd chanting the title of "Insane" (alas, no Rockie Fresh cameo). Chance the Rapper was here, too, working his own forceful rhythms despite the tempo of his soothing, soulful tracks. Chance dances like a boxer on stage, and his rhymes (even when not talking about "tabs of acid" in "Brain Cells") get pretty wild and surreal. And lest you've fallen prey to the notion that all Chicago hip-hop is bleak and violent, Chance shouted with notable ferocity: "Make some noise if you love your mama!" SXSW: Dave Grohl's Sound City Players rock long By Thomas Conner on March 15, 2013 10:08 AM AUSTIN, Texas — "It's gonna be a long f---in' night," Dave Grohl promised at the start of his Thursday set with his live musical collage, the Sound City Players. Then the supergroup — Grohl on bass with his Foo Fighters, led by omnipresent hard-rock maestro Alain Johannes — kicked off a song that found Johannes pleading, "I hope it won't be long." Dave Grohl's Sound City Players are a hodge-podge of recognizable names spanning three generations, a promotional ploy for Grohl's new documentary ("Sound City: Real To Reel," about the legendary Los Angeles recording studio) and its accompanying soundtrack. The group features Grohl and his band with Stevie Nicks, John Fogerty, Rick Springfield, Lee Ving (Fear), Rick Nielsen (Cheap Trick), Brad Wilk (Rage Against the Machine), Corey Taylor (Slipknot, Stone Sour), Chris Goss (Masters of Reality), Johannes (Eleven, Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures) and bassist Krist Novoselic (Nirvana). They've performed a handful of shows since early January in New York, Los Angeles and London. Grohl said at the beginning of Thursday's SXSW concert outdoors at Stubb's BBQ that this one would "probably" be their last. "So we're gonna make it extra long, extra special." Long we got — close to three-and-a-half hours — and special, too. The result was a rollicking rock and roll revue. Springfield came on for "I've Done Everything for You" and, of course, "Jessie's Girl." Taylor and Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins sang Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me" and "Surrender," with Grohl on drums and Nielsen on guitar. Fogerty closed the show with Creedence Clearwater Revival hits, including "Proud Mary," "Bad Moon Rising" and trading verses with Grohl on "Fortunate Son." Through it all, Grohl stayed on stage playing with everyone's mini-set (switching between guitar, bass and drums), beaming with obvious glee at having assembled this temporary clubhouse. Grohl's first guest, however, was the most transformative. After half a dozen songs bashed out with Johannes, Nicks stepped to the mic and proved to be more than up to the task of leading a bashing hard rock band. She and Grohl pointed at each other as they sang the chorus of "Stop Dragging My Heart Around" (see, Grohl is his generation's Tom Petty!), and Nicks performed Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" with the band and "Landslide" with Grohl alone on guitar. She sang excellent new song from the "Sound City" soundtrack, "You Can't Fix This" -- graceful and tuneful, with a leaning, weaving riff more akin to Waddy Wachtel than Lindsey Buckingham. Swinging her ribboned tambourine and wearing shades, Nicks was in great voice and moving with an ease I've not seen on stage in a long time, particularly when the band began a surreal, clanging opening séance to "Gold Dust Woman," as Nicks waved her scarf with her back to the audience and conjured her old witchy self. With the Foo Fighters cranked to 11, Nicks wailed and howled and raised the dead, holding her own with the muscled band all the way through the cacophonous conclusion. Forget Grohl's "Sirvana" work with Paul McCartney -- let's have some Fleetwood Fighters! (Since a couple of people have asked: According to Pee Wee Herman himself via Twitter, the photo on the bass drum head was of Pee Wee, David Lee Roth and Rodney Dangerfield.) SXSW: Flaming Lips bring 'Yoshimi,' 'The Terror' By Thomas Conner on March 15, 2013 11:23 AM AUSTIN, Texas — "The new record is probably going to freak some people out," said Wayne Coyne. "It is, on purpose, not a hopeful record." He's talking about "The Terror," the Flaming Lips' new nine-track album due in late April, and as he does it's easy for him to get a little heavy. "There are things we have to face as human beings, truths we must explore," Coyne says. "'The Terror' is a certain kind of terror, an uncanny sort of break in nature or your own life. It's not an insane, monster terror. It's the terror of realizing that love isn't the magic bullet. We all wake up with dread of the unknown. It's not about fear of dying, but about the fact that we just don't know what's going to happen anywhere, anytime." We were sitting in a makeshift green room, a tent in a parking garage behind the venue where the Flaming Lips would perform later Thursday night. Not that parking garage. During SXSW '97 nearly 2,000 people crammed into the second level of a downtown garage to hear Coyne's Car Radio Orchestra, an experiment involving 28 vehicles. Coyne gave each driver a pre-mixed cassette and instructed them to press play and blare the music on cue. Soon, soothing synthesizer parts were swelling from various auto systems, with surreal samples and female orgasm sounds. It was an experiment; one car blew a fuse. "The cops nearly shut us down," Coyne recalled. Thursday night the Flaming Lips played a more intimate showcase — no confetti, no costumes, thankfully no big plastic ball — performing the whole of their 2002 album "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots." The show was packed — so much so there was still a line down the block when it was over. Friday night, though, they'll be unveiling the new music in a free show at the Auditorium Shores amphitheater here. "We keep saying this is the most depressing but life-affirming music we've ever done," Coyne said. Coyne is also in town this week to promote a film, "A Year in the Life of Wayne's Phone," which had its world premiere Wednesday night at SXSW. The film is a collage of clips Coyne shot with his iPhone. "I didn't do this on purpose," Coyne said. "I take so many videos, and my computer guy is always having to empty them off my computer to make room. One day he said, 'We should a movie of these.'" Since Coyne shot nearly all the videos in vertical portrait mode rather than the usual horizontal scale, the film features three clips lined up, each running simultaneously. The clips range from interviews, shots of friends (look for Yoko Ono and Rivers Cuomo!), cute animals, the USB skull and Coyne crowdsurfing. The viewer's attention is directed by bringing up the audio on a certain clip, but it's still a disorienting challenge to take it all in. SXSW: Green Day roars back to life By Thomas Conner March 16, 2013 11:31 am AUSTIN, Texas — In the middle of “Stay the Night,” Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong paused at the microphone, stared at the crowd for a moment and sighed, “Ah, welcome back!” A turnabout of words. No doubt he was happy to see us — a crowd not even close to capacity at the Austin City Limits Live theater, but certainly a welcoming one. This was Green Day’s return to action after Armstrong’s profane meltdown last September at a festival in Las Vegas, complete with tantrum and smashed guitar. Days later, the band announced Armstrong was seeking treatment for substance abuse and a slate of arena dates was postponed. Friday night at SXSW, though, Armstrong couldn’t have looked more refreshed, reinvigorated and grateful. After the welcoming comment, he let the crowd sing for moment while he sat on the edge of the drum riser, first gazing back at us with some measure of incredulity, then sitting for a spell with his head in his hands. There’s a lot of that in a Green Day show nowadays — the poor band vamping, sometimes for quite a long time, while Armstrong wrangles the crowd. He’s a professional motivator, certainly, and obsessed with airborne limbs (“Get your hands up! This ain’t no caf, motherf—ers!”). Thankfully, the band — Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt, drummer Tr Cool and their criminally unsung “fourth member,” guitarist Jason White — was plenty exciting without the constant demands for shouts, singalongs and waving arms. In 24 songs over two hours, Green Day ripped through its catalog, reaching back to the early ’90s and slotting in some requisite newbies from this winter’s album trilogy (“Uno!,” “Dos!” and “Tr!”). The hit parade marched along — “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “Jesus of Suburbia,” the excellent “Know Your Enemy” — including some songs that now wear an extra patina of irony, given Armstrong’s recent troubles, such as “Burnout” and “Basket Case.” Only once did Armstrong allude to his recent woes. During “Stop When the Red Lights Flash,” he had directed the band and the audience into a quiet moment and crouched into the microphone to kick off a climactic explosion — but just before he could whisper to a scream, a roadie darted over and replaced the wireless mic right in front of Armstrong’s mouth. The singer barely missed a beat but couldn’t help chuckle a bit. “And I wasn’t even on drugs,” he quipped. But while the on-stage comeback was encouraging, SXSW finds Green Day at a possibly crucial juncture. The band also debuted not one but two new documentaries during this festival: “Broadway Idiot,” about the transformation of the 2004 “American Idiot” album into a hit musical, and “Cuatro!” chronicling the making of the recent trilogy. Each album in that trilogy is, with remarkable consistency, terrible. (I reviewed “Uno!” but couldn’t find the heart to kvetch further about the other two.) So here they are with projects that look backward and forward. If the way forward is merely “Cinco!” then even though the band played the ACL theater like an arena, it may want to prepare itself for such smaller venues. The stoked fire in their bellies on display Friday night either will spark their previously impressive creativity within such a rigid genre, or it simply will warm their evenings as a very entertaining legacy act at the casinos and cruises of the future. Green Day reboots its postponed tour starting March 28 at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont. SXSW: The rebirth of Detroit punk trio Death By Thomas Conner on March 16, 2013 12:21 PM Black musicians did a lot of great things in Detroit in the '60s and '70s. Rock and roll — much less anything that would later be called punk — wasn't always one of them. At SXSW this year, though, a band was on display that defies that notion: Death, a fraternal trio and a rare group that can justly support the claim "best band you've never heard." Death was born in the east Detroit home of the Hackney family. Brothers Dannis, Bobby and David, like so many boomer-era musicians, started playing in the early 1970s as the Rock Fire Funk Express. But after witnessing concerts by the Who and fellow Detroiter Alice Cooper, the brothers threw their lot with their city's other musical heroes, punk-rock icons like the MC5 and Iggy Pop. The Hackney brothers then began writing taut, propulsive rock 'n' roll — truly great stuff — which, until a slightly miraculous rediscovery a few years ago, was heard by practically no one. The story of the band's derailed promise and eventual obscurity is told ably in a documentary screening at SXSW, "A Band Called Death." Blessed with a rich tale, director-producer Jeff Howlett basically leans back and lets the golden plot points unfold one after another. Opening with gushing praise from the likes of Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra and — was that Elijah Wood?! — "A Band Called Death" charts the emergence of this family band and the, for the times, unusual shift from R&B to rock and roll. "Then the Who came to town," Dannis Hackney says, pausing to emphasize some unspoken gravitas of that moment, "and when I saw Alice Cooper, all bets were off. I said, 'If we ain't playing this, then we ain't gonna be having no fun.'" Singer David Hackney, however, sought to express through the band's new music his own complex cosmology, which included some positive notions about the rebirth and transformation potential in death. Thus, he insisted on the name. That made Death pretty much dead on arrival. The band's first producer in Detroit, former Stax musician Don Davis, recalls in the film telling the band: "Have you lost your mind? Nobody is going to buy a song from a group called D-E-A-T-H," spelling out what apparently was still an uncomfortable moniker. The trio's music caught the ear of hitmaker Clive Davis, who was ready to sign the band to Arista — as long as they changed the name. David refused to budge, insisting (with definitely punkish integrity) that the sacrifice would be a slippery slope. Bobby Hackney, in an earlier interview, recalled, "He said, 'If they make us change our name, then every little thing they see in us they're gonna wanna change — the music, the style, the concept. Once we change that name, we belong to them. Once we give in to that, Death is, well, dead.'" Credibility intact, Death still died. They did, however, manage to secure the master recordings of what was to be the debut Death album. Attempts to release songs independently failed, and the brothers relocated to Vermont and formed a reggae band. David Hackney died in 2000, after insisting that his brothers hold on to those masters, saying, "One day the world's gonna come looking for this." Amazingly, that's exactly what happened. Biafra, a rabid record collector, bought a box of singles several years ago: Death's lone indie 45, "Politicians in My Eyes." He mentioned it in an interview. The writer posted the single online as an mp3. Word began spreading of its awesomeness. Then the rediscovery came full circle. Bobby Hackney Jr. — clearly still dazed and amazed by this as he relates the story in the film — hears the song, likes it, and has no idea it's his dad until he goes as far as to Google some background. He calls home: "Dad, why didn't you tell me??!!" This is 2008, and the following year momentum has built enough that Chicago-based label Drag City assists the Hackney brothers in restoring those old masters and finally releasing the debut Death album, titled "...For All the World to See." Another compilation of early demos followed. This week at SXSW, in addition to the documentary screenings, two bands played showcases: Death, featuring surviving brothers Dannis and Bobby with two extra players, and Rough Francis, a deadly new generation featuring Bobby Hackney Jr., Julian Hackney and Urian Hackney. Even better: Death will live again on a new record, titled "Relief," in the works now. SXSW: Justin Timberlake, Prince, Smashing Pumpkins By Thomas Conner March 17, 2013 9:06 am The final night of SXSW featured two big legacy acts. OK, from a Chicago perspective it was three. Justin Timberlake, making good on rumors, blew into town after a week on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” to play an intimate club gig. Here’s a star who will fill Chicago’s Soldier Field this summer, but here in Austin he played the 800-capacity Coppertank Events Center. (Mind you, this show was only partly about music. Timberlake, now a beer spokesman, was here to promote the newly renovated MySpace web site, of which he’s a major investor, in a concert sponsored by Chevrolet.) Timberlake, backed by a 16-piece band, played for an hour. This writer did not gain admission — I just reviewed his record, and we’ll have plenty of chances to discuss JT further all year long — but there are good reviews here, here and here. Across town, Prince played the larger club La Zona Rosa, leading a 22-piece band and performing more covers than his own songs. The nearly three-hour show — in which Prince never played guitar (fail) — did bring something to SXSW that is often hard to find: lots of R&B and funk. "They called our people and said they wanted some funk in Austin,” said Prince, before belting out the last bars of a gentle rendition of “Purple Rain.” At least this show sounds like it was better than his previous Chicago fiascoes. You won’t see a lot of photos from the Prince show online today, however. Notoriously prickly about photos at his shows, Prince banned all cameras. Even simply using a cell phone got some fans tossed — a biting irony, given that the concert was thrown by Samsung Galaxy and promoters worked the crowd beforehand offering customers fresh phone batteries or device test-drives. But intrepid Chicago photographer Michael Jackson (yup, his real name), shooting for the Sun-Times, landed the image above. In other news: Today is Billy Corgan’s birthday — happy 46th! — an occasion the Chicago rocker rang in at midnight on stage at SXSW. The Smashing Pumpkins, still busy and ahead of a new world tour, played a set mixed with hits (“Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” “Tonight, Tonight”) and newer songs from the excellent “Oceania” album, even a cover of Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Review here, or see the detailed run-down on the Twitter feed from Hipsters United. SXSW: Wanderings, discoveries, random notes By Thomas Conner on March 17, 2013 12:00 PM AUSTIN, Texas — If it's Sunday, that means my notes are full of jottings about a dozen other bands I saw and haven't written about yet in the mad rush that is SXSW. Deep breath, here's a wrap-up of the other tunes worth mentioning ... Best brand-spanking-new band CHVRCHES, barely a year old, impressed with a strong batch of electronic pop at several showcases, including a Friday day stage. The Scottish trio's debut album isn't due until September, but singer-synth players Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty bear all the hallmarks of a forceful, creative unit with a single mind — perhaps the meaning of the beautiful current single, "The Mother We Share." Their newness is evident in the fact that they still have a ways to go before making their knob-twiddling something to watch on stage, but the songs are there. I haven't heard synth-driven pop this tight and tuneful since Robyn showed up. Most hopeful feeling at end of showcase No one really seems to have demanded this reunion of Chicago's Fall Out Boy, but the band's Friday night showcase — back at SXSW after eight years — at least showed off enough energy and chutzpah to suggest that the comeback is genuinely inspired. Their fans certainly remain adoring, singing along with practically every word that fell from singer Patrick Stump's lips, maybe even his stage banter. The 45-minute slot kept to singles old ("Sugar, We're Going Down," "Dance, Dance") and new ("My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark [Light 'Em Up]"). Stump flexed his own R&B muscles in a recent solo outing, and the new FOB is highlighting that strength. Even the cover of "Beat It" sounded more sincere and natural than one might expect. Definitely whetted the appetite for the new record. Best stumbled-upon showcase Field Report, a band led by Christopher Porterfield. Two bits of trivia: First, Field Report is an anagram of Porterfield. Second, Porterfield started out a decade ago in DeYarmond Edison, the band Justin Vernon fronted before creating Bon Iver. On his own, Porterfield is much warmer and far rootsier. At a Saturday SXSW showcase, his six-man band — plenty of plaid shirts and trucker hats, neither of which seemed to be worn with much hipster irony — delivers supple, textural Americana that fit right in with the venue's sponsorship by a home-improvement cable channel (as if his music was in itself an answer to the advertising banners hung around the bar, asking, "What does home mean to you?"). Singing well-written songs about New Mexico and a "bible school choir," Porterfield guided the band up and down various crescendos to achieve maximum emotional impact, all the while maintaining an appropriately pensive expression. "Is everyone drinking enough water?" he asked between songs. Bassist Travis Whitty chided him: "Concerned dad up here." Aw shucks. Best return on investment in buzz New York quartet Parquet Courts entered the festival with considerable, though understandably hesitant, buzz. The band's proper debut album, "Light Up Gold," out in January, is a complex chart of steady rhythms, snaking words and clean but often jarring guitars. It's not an album that immediately broadcasts "great stage show!" On stage Saturday night, the band lazed into action, blurring the line between hasty SXSW sound check and actual opening song. Driven by the rhythm section — featuring bassist Sean Yeaton, who spends the show contributing occasional backing vocals with hilariously distended tongue, like a punk Loudon Wainwright III — guitarists Andrew Savage and Austin Brown were free to work at their own pace and inspiration, pulsing their instruments to propel the song or torturing them a bit. The momentum of the Strokes, the late-night "Stoned and Starving" haze of the Dandy Warhols, plus occasional Sonic Youth squall. Adds up to a good time. Best personal thrill with very little note-taking A longtime Robyn Hitchcock fan, I wasn't going to miss perennial SXSW performer Robyn Hitchcock's early Saturday show, particularly since it was celebrating his 60th birthday (complete with tarantula-topped cake and red wine, which Hitchcock referred to as "lady petrol"). The British legend was supported by a number of pals — Ken Stringfellow (Posies), Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows, Minus 5), Bill Rieflin (R.E.M., Ministry, tons), Linda Pitmon (Steve Wynn) — and for a moment, with Kelly Hogan on stage and Jon Langford in the wings, it seemed the band might turn into Robyn Hitchcock & the Chicagoans. Langford never materialized on stage with Hitchcock, though. Nor did R.E.M.'s Mike Mills (grinning, looking more content than I've seen him in years), who was at the bar and had played bass behind Stringfellow as the opening act. Nonetheless, Hitchcock told his usual bizarre stories and sang an impressively wide variety of songs — newish ones (the beautiful "Dismal City"), old ones ("Queen Elvis," "Ole Tarantula," "Alright, Yeah") and covers ("Tangled Up in Blue," "Don't Let Me Down") — as well as rapping a bit about the new pope. Best delayed reaction Lord Huron was highly recommended to me by friends at last year's SXSW, but I missed their showcase at a cramped little club. Fast forward one year and on Wednesday night they were filling the spacious ACL Live theater, ahead of Natalie Maines' comeback set, with some enchanting folksy harmonies and rhythms. Those harmonies have earned them far too many Fleet Foxes comparisons — and they're sometimes a bit thinner and wispier than that — but when those rhythms crank up they come alive. "Time to Run" does just that, and every band member is armed with some percussion instrument — a shaker, maracas, singer and bandleader Ben Schneider with a small snare. Good tunes when they get up and go. Best hangover showcase Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell played NPR's Radio Day Stage inside the Austin Convention Center. It was Friday morning, and the soft-spoken angel that is Emmylou strolled out in her boots — cue the Janis Ian song — and quipped that everyone here deserved a merit badge just for navigating through the festival. She meant the confusion and enormity of SXSW, but when she and Crowell played Kris Kristopherson's "Chase the Feeling" ("And you got loaded again / Ain't you handsome when you're high") many vacant-eyed attendees were nodding with understanding, not rhythm. Worst showcase logistics Foxygen was due to play a half hour set Wednesday night at the Hype Hotel, which they started a half hour late. (Out of all the shows I saw this week, two started on time. That's my main complaint about SXSW's rampant growth. They're starting to lose control of their production.) Foxygen is a great, brassy band that sounds superb on their latest record, "We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic," but that interesting sound was completely swallowed up in the ramshackle venue that was the Hype Hotel, an empty commercial cavern hemmed in with sound-eating drywall that appeared to have been nailed up this month. Bummer. This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual conference and festival ...
© Chicago Sun-Times This SXSW post is not brought to you by an Austin homeless person By Thomas Conner on March 13, 2012 6:09 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Perhaps you've heard that the zeitgeist at the annual South by Southwest culturefest is now located in the Interactive segment, rather than the conference's original Music portion. Must be true — the first real controversy of SXSW 2012 occurred before many music critics had landed in the Texas capital. SXSW is now a 10-day event encompassing rollouts of films, digital ventures and new music. The movies and online jibber-jabber started March 9; the music blares on through March 18. But it's a crowded event, with celebrities, journalists and industry types jamming the Austin Convention Center and venues throughout downtown. Last year, nearly 20,000 registrants attended the Interactive portion — which wraps up today, just as the Music showcases begin tonight. As you might imagine, mobile bandwidth comes at a premium. So BBH Labs, the techie division of the marketing agency BBH, tried a little experiment. They gathered 13 people from a local homeless shelter, gave them mobile 4G Wi-Fi devices and sent them into the throng. Each volunteer wore a T-shirt saying, "I'm [Homeless Person's Name], a 4G Hotspot." Many have found the campaign insensitive. Wired.com wrote that it "sounds like something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia." Technology blog ReadWriteWeb called it a "blunt display of unselfconscious gall." In an online op-ed, The Washington Post wondered "Have we lost our humanity?" The company paid the homeless workers $20 up front and a minimum of $50 a day for about six hours work, said Emma Cookson, chairwoman of BBH New York. They also were able to keep whatever customers donated in exchange for the wireless service. When you log on to one of the Homeless Hot Spots sites, customers are introduced to the person providing the connection and are invited to make a donation. A statement on the page reads: "Homeless Hotspots is a charitable innovation initiative by BBH New York. It attempts to modernize the Street Newspaper model employed to support homeless populations." Saneel Radia, the BBH Labs director who oversaw the project, told the New York Times the company was not taking advantage of the homeless volunteers. Other might want to get in on the action, though. My cab driver from the airport said, "Hell, they can load up my cab and I'll drive around with a hundred hotspots, long as I can keep the meter running." Contributing: AP SXSW dials down the digital, cranks up the music By Thomas Conner on March 14, 2012 9:00 AM AUSTIN, Texas — Let the music begin. For days here in the Texas capital, tastemakers from digital ventures and the film industry have been unveiling their wares at the South by Southwest culture conference. Tuesday night, however, the programming shifted back to what built SXSW a quarter century ago: music. More than 2,000 bands will roll their gear into Austin during the next few days, performing on more than 90 official stages. Last year, more than 16,000 registrants attended the music portion of the festival, including artists, publicists, industry scouts and a lot of media. Music is a hot topic among digital pioneers, of course, so concert stages were under way earlier in the week. Hip-hop titan Jay-Z performed Monday night for an invitation crowd. Tuesday night, as the Interactive sessions died down, the music showcases revved up. Last year was the first time music showcases started backing into the Tuesday of SXSW week, and there were more this year. Chief among them was the return of Philly singer-rapper Santigold, acclaimed upon her 2008 debut and not heard from much since. Now she's out hyping her upcoming sophomore set, "Master of My Make-Believe," due May 1. This being Austin, there was also a crowded fete for the loveable and quirky Daniel Johnston, a beloved area singer-songwriter. The music programming starts in earnest today and continues through the weekend, with Bruce Springsteen giving the keynote address midday Thursday and performing later that night with the E Street Band, which launches its next tour this weekend. Got a SiriusXM radio or a friend who does? The SiriusXMU channel is airing SXSW broadcasts all week, including the Friday night outdoor concert by the Shins. SXSW: Alabama Shakes deserves the hype By Thomas Conner on March 14, 2012 5:06 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Buzz bands at the annual South by Southwest music conference have a lot in common with those who win best new artist at the Grammys. You tend to not hear much from them afterward. (Last year, conference attendees and wristband fans clawed over each other to get into showcases by London fuzz-rock band Yuck. Who? Exactly.) Possibly the buzziest of the buzz bands at this year's SXSW (so far) is Alabama Shakes — but this is a band you're going to hear much more from. Fresh out of the piney woods just an hour downriver from the legendary soul studios at Muscle Shoals — and with only a couple of EPs to their credit thus far — Alabama Shakes is a fiery quintet of youngsters playing country-soul that both Skynyrd and Otis could love. The anticipation generated one of the largest crowds ever for a daytime showcase at the Austin Convention Center, with several hundred filling a ballroom for the group's Wednesday afternoon performance. The band just played a sold-out gig last weekend at Chicago's Lincoln Hall. For the most part, the hype is deserved. Lead singer Brittany Howard is a cool storm, one of those young singers exuding confidence beyond her years and presence possibly beyond this earthly realm. She pulls her accent back, often singing through rounded cheeks that add an extra dimension to her growls and wails. Her voice isn't a wide-ranging beast (her high notes are thin), but it's a beast nonetheless, purring like Macy Gray or exploding in very occasional fits of Janis Joplin. The band supports her with remarkably restrained backing, controlling the dynamics of every song — slowing down when it wants to get fast, and vice versa — like making great love. Each player keeps things tuneful but spare — leaving huge spaces for Howard to snake through, then unleashing rare bursts of carefully timed fury. In that respect, they could use a songwriting mentor; at least half the set features rocking soul numbers that develop the same way, always ending with the band grinding hard while Howard wails something appropriately animalistic and urgent over and over ("Feels good!" or "Yes, he did!!" or "Well, all right!!!"). The band's ninth and final song, the dramatic groove of "You Ain't Alone," followed that template and resulted in their second standing ovation of the set. SXSW: Little Steven on TV, Broadway, Springsteen tour By Thomas Conner on March 14, 2012 8:00 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Little Steven Van Zandt had a good chuckle about an alleged rumor reported this week during South by Southwest. A writer at Magnet music magazine claimed he'd heard that, for their anticipated Thursday night performance during the annual music festival, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band would be performing a version of the Broadway musical "The Music Man." (The writer later confessed, not surprisingly, "I made it up.") "You never know, though," Van Zandt said during a chat Wednesday with the Sun-Times, laughing heartily at the idea. "[Springsteen] might have some Broadway up his sleeve." Van Zandt is in Austin this week for a couple of reasons. In addition to the Thursday night show, he's also promoting something SXSW hardly deals with it all: a TV show. Following his turn as a gangster in the HBO series "The Sopranos," Van Zandt is again playing a mobster -- this time in a series produced for Norwegian television, "Lilyhammer." The show was recently picked up by Netflix as the streaming service's first original programming. "I was in Norway producing one of my bands there, the Cocktail Slippers [an all-girl rock band from Oslo]," Van Zandt said, "and these writers came and pitched this to me. I wasn't planning on playing a mobster again, but it's such a great idea. ... The Norwegians have gone crazy for it because they love America and rock and roll. They love the spirit of individualism, which is a bit of a contradiction for them and their community-based government. My character is someone who doesn't follow the rules, and they're very used to following the rules. Someone like me being a little naughty is exotic to them." After the SXSW show, the E Street Band kicks off its tour this weekend. The band performed last Friday at New York's Apollo Theater, debuting the five-man horn section that replaces late saxophone legend Clarence Clemons on tour. "We'll be featuring our soul music roots more on this tour," Van Zandt said. "And, you know, this year is a celebration of Woody Guthrie [the centennial of his birth]. Quite a bit of Bruce's music is a tribute to Woody Guthrie. ... It just never ceases to amaze me how Bruce continues to write in a way that is vital and very much of the moment. It always keeps us from even thinking about becoming a nostalgia band, because every tour is a whole new everything." Springsteen is delivering the SXSW keynote address Thursday at noon. His latest solo album, "Wrecking Ball," was just released, and it debuted at No. 1 this week. SXSW: John Fullbright comes of age By Thomas Conner on March 14, 2012 11:48 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Let me tell you my quick John Fullbright story before I go on about how mesmerizing and moving his Wednesday evening South by Southwest showcase was. When I was writing about music in Oklahoma, I covered the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival each July in Guthrie's hometown of Okemah. Okemah has one motel, which is taken over by the artists and production crews during the festival. Folk singers, in my experience, don't sleep much, and every night after the shows wrapped up in town most of them would drag chairs into the motel parking lot and swap songs till dawn. Every now and then, wide-eyed young buskers would stroll up and try to measure up. Few did — until, several years ago, a teenaged Johnny Fullbright strode into to the circle with a banjo over his shoulder. Tipping his cap, the Okemah native offered to play a couple of his own songs. Soon, Arlo Guthrie's eyebrows raised and he sat forward in his lawn chair, and we all knew we were hearing something special. Since then, Fullbright has shared stages with Joe Ely and fellow Okie songwriter Jimmy Webb, among others, and he recorded a live album. "From the Ground Up," though, will be his studio debut, due May 8 (Blue Dirt/Thirty Tigers). Fullbright's SXSW showcase — the first of eight gigs he has here this week — was as perfect as if it were a Jonathan Demme concert film. Taking the stage at St. David's Episcopal Church in downtown Austin, the unassuming young singer stepped to the mike with his guitar and harmonica rack. He appears meek and milquetoast in his flesh-colored collared shirt and flat, parted hair, but — sorta like Kelly Joe Phelps — the square look is deceiving. He started plucking and blowing and wailing a first-person account of God setting up humans for their inevitable fall, and suddenly another crowd knew it was going to hear something special. Fullbright synthesizes the best songcraft from his home state — Webb, Leon Russell and, by default, Merle Haggard. Just in his 20s, he mournfully considers how "all my life I've tested truth / but truth's not always sound." I'll give him credit for the double entendre in that last line, because the caliber of the rest of his songwriting is so good. He's got a tune called "Forgotten Flower," a thoughtful country lament, that Tom Waits and Randy Newman could fight over. Possibly unintentionally, Fullbright filled his set on that church chancel with familiar subjects. He opened with "God Above," a searing blues. He sang, "Glory, glory, hallelujah," then played "Satan and St. Paul" and "Jericho." The last three songs were plunked out on an upright piano, swinging from his own slow ballad "Nowhere to Be Found" to the dancing blues of "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do." The versatility was natural, authentic, untrained. Webb's oft-repeated endorsement predicts "that in a very short time John Fullbright will be a household name in American music." It may not be hyperbole. SXSW: Ezra Furman, Sharon Van Etten, Mr. Muthaf---in' eXquire, the great R. Stevie Moore By Thomas Conner on March 15, 2012 9:33 AM AUSTIN, Texas — "Is that a dude in his underwear, just playing?" asked a guy who wandered into The Jr bar just off Sixth Street on Wednesday night. Why, yes, yes it is. Ezra Furman, the mad Evanstonian who recently relocated to the Bay Area, stepped onto the bare stage for his SXSW 2012 showcase nearly bare-assed, wearing only socks and boxer briefs. The rest of him was just the same — wild eyes, spasmodic poses, a spitting earnestness so unnerving you pray he doesn't make eye contact. Hurling a mixture of songs from his new solo album, "The Year of No Returning," and gems from "Mysterious Power" and his Chicago tenure with the Harpoons, the skinny folk-punk wunderkind bared his soul, as well, in songs alternating between naked desperation ("Bloodsucking Whore") and mournful reverie (a cover of Tom Waits' "Bottom of the World"). In a new song, "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde," he summed up his SXSW moment, singing, "I was hideous and handsome." "I was supposed to be a wide-eyed sort of singer-songwriter, but I don't feel like that anymore," he said from the stage. "Too bad, marketing team." • • • Acclaimed singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten played a demure set Wednesday night at Stubb's. Getting off to a late start, Van Etten plodded through several songs from her attention-getting 2010 debut, "Epic," and her new follow-up, "Tramp." I still don't quite get the slobbering reverence for her work. No doubt, it's encouraging to hear someone with a voice this lovely treading the well-worn road of dissonant strumming and oblique, soul-bearing poetry blazed by fellow New Jersey-raised Patti Smith. Most of the songs merely wear that path down deeper, though, warbling over organ and cymbal-shy drums until they reach big crescendos that stumble to clumsy halts. They're awfully passionate dirges for someone who seems so chipper and cheery during her brief stage banter. • • • Mr. Muthaf---in' eXquire and his red-hot New York rap crew continued their SXSW gigs Wednesday night at MI Annex on Sixth Street, and the crowd didn't want them to leave. "eXquire! eXquire!" they chanted, begging for one more freestyle, to no avail. MMeX is a weird, Wu-Tang-like mob of half a dozen rappers, and the group's namesake is a hulking, slurring nutjob with percolating flow. Wednesday night, he was spewing syllables so fast and without stopping that he began to slouch and collapse. At the climactic moment, he shot up as his mates punctuated the verse, shouting, "Breathe!" Huzzah! • • • Since the early 1970s, "singer"-songwriter R. Stevie Moore has been producing song after song after song — countless hours of tape — documenting the weird and wonderful corners of his mind. As the Trouser Press record guides have stated for years, "'Unsung hero' only touches on the injustice of obscurity for this wry, heartfelt artist whose limber genius." But he meandered into the SXSW spotlight this week for a few showcases, including a typically bewildering set of songs Wednesday afternoon in the middle of the SXSW trade show. "Why would anyone come to South by Southwest to see Lionel Richie?" Moore sang in a seemingly off-the-cuff ditty about the preponderance of big-name bookings at this year's festival, which was born in the late '80s as a haven for spotlighting up-and-coming talent. "If I had to choose between Lionel Richie and Sufjan Stevens, it would be a dead heat." A large fella, in shades and with a wild Santa Claus-white beard and hair fluttering every which way, Moore plunked out his crafty lyrics and bent tunes on acoustic guitar. From his bottomless repository of material, he plucked a remarkable cache of quirky love songs, such as "Traded My Heart for Your Parts" and, uh, "I Wanna Hit You" (which he punctuated with, "Pow! To the moon, Alice!"). Looking at him, a deranged Wilford Brimley gargling his notes and strumming herky-jerky chords, the song "Goodbye Piano" took on new resonance: "You're so out of tune / I assume you're dead." SXSW keynote: Bruce Springsteen gives musical history lesson, celebrates Woody Guthrie centennial By Thomas Conner on March 15, 2012 3:22 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Marveling at the breadth of contemporary pop music, Bruce Springsteen name-checked his own lengthy list of milestone influences during a funny and enlightening keynote address Thursday at the South by Southwest music conference. The king of this particular musical Mardi Gras, Springsteen hit town Wednesday night and showed up to jam with Joe Ely and Alejandro Escovedo at the Austin Music Awards. In addition to his keynote speech, the Springsteen blitz continues tonight in concert with the E Street Band, a preview of the tour kicking off this weekend. His latest album, "Wrecking Ball," was released last week and debuted at No. 1 in 14 countries. "No one hardly agrees on anything in pop anymore," Springsteen said in his opening remarks. He expressed awe at the number of bands booked at SXSW. "There are so many subgenres and factions," he continued — and then amused the standing-room crowd by listing as many as he could name, dozens of hyphenated musical classifications and creations, from melodic death metal and sadcore to rap-rock and Nintendocore. He ended the list with a slight slump, saying, "And folk music." "This is all going on in this town right now," he said. Citing rock critic Lester Bangs' assertion that Elvis Presley was the last thing Americans would agree on, Springsteen said each of the thousands of bands booked during SXSW "has the belief to turn Bangs' prophecy around. "The one thing that's been consistent over the years is the genesis and the power of creativity. It's all about how you're putting what you do together. The elements you're using don't matter. It's not confined to guitars, tubes, turntables or microchips. There's no right way, no pure way of doing it — there's just doing it." Springsteen then took the rapt audience on a tour through his own musical upbringing, noting each notable inspiration that molded him — from Presley's appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1956 through poetic descriptions of the power he felt coming from doo-wop, Roy Obison, Phil Spector, British Invasion bands, the Beatles, country, soul, Stax, Motown and Dylan. He spent extra time on the Animals. "For me, the Animals were a revelation," he said. "That was the first full-blown class-consciousness I'd ever heard." He sang and strummed most of "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," a song the Animals made famous, and declared, "That's every song I've ever written! That's all of them, I'm not kidding. That's 'Born to Run,' 'Born in the U.S.A.,' even the new ones." He played the riff from "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," then the riff from his own "Badlands": "Same f---ing riff, man." Acknowledging that this is the centennial year of Woody Guthrie's birth, Springsteen concluded with how he's been inspired by the American folk legend to keep his own lyrical focus on the issues of working people. He was also honest about their differences. "I knew I was never going to be Woody Guthrie. I liked the pink Cadillac too much. I liked the luxuries and comforts of being a star. I'd already gone a long way down a pretty different road," Springsteen said. In the end, Springsteen tried to bring it back to music's colorful mass, the overwhelming amount of it, the dizzying scope of its styles as evidenced in SXSW itself. The thread fans and artists must needle out of the experience, he said, has always been the same no matter how many subgenres there are. "Here we are in this town celebrating a sense of freedom that was Woody's legacy," Springsteen said. "We live in a post-authentic world. Authenticity today is just a house of mirrors. It's all about what you're bringing when the lights go down. At the end of the day, it's power and purpose that matters." • • • The Woody Guthrie connection bookended Springsteen's keynote. Immediately before the speech on the same stage, American singer-songwriters Jimmy LaFave and Eliza Gilkyson strummed Guthrie songs, such as "Oklahoma Hills," "I Ain't Got No Home in This World" and "Deportee." Colombia's Juanes played a couple of his own songs, spirited tunes in Spanish he said were inspired by Guthrie. All three lead the sleepy SXSW crowd in a singalong of "This Land Is Your Land." A panel session followed the keynote, titled "Woody at 100." Moderated by Bob Santelli, executive director at the Grammy Museum and a Guthrie scholar himself, the panel featured journalist Dave Marsh, scholar Doug Brinkley, songwriters LaFave and Joel Rafael, and two of Guthrie's children: singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie and head of the Woody Guthrie Foundation & Archives, Nora Guthrie. Nora discussed the pending move of her father's archives — thousands of original lyrics, poems, notebooks, journals, artwork and more — from its current New York home to a new facility in Tulsa, Okla. She also highlighted a theme from Springsteen's keynote about music's many styles, noting that Woody wrote all kinds of music, including love songs and Jewish music. Arlo made some important distinctions about his dad's legacy amid all the discussion of it in this centennial year. "There are a lot of different Woodys," he said. "Even having known him along with my sister, I don't know that anybody has the capacity to have fully understand anyone. ... He really had the ability to distill all of us and put it into a way so that we recognize our own voice coming back to us. He said, 'Let me be known as a man who told you something you already knew.' ... Everybody in this room has a little voice they count on that they recognize as being them. My father recognized that voice in him and reflected it back on you so you recognize something that rings true to you. I don't think we're actually celebrating Woody — we're celebrating us. That's the genius of the man." For a complete list of the numerous Guthrie centennial events around the country, see woody100.com. Power pop @ SXSW: Big Star tribute, dB's reunion By Thomas Conner on March 16, 2012 10:32 AM AUSTIN, Texas — At the 2010 South by Southwest music conference, critics and fans were eager for a scheduled celebration of the '70s band Big Star. The influential pop-rock band was at the height of a popular resurgence, fueled in part by a stellar box set ("Keep an Eye on the Sky") released the previous year. A panel session was planned, a hotly anticipated concert, too. But on the first day of the festival, bandleader and power-pop icon Alex Chilton died. The pieces of those plans were reassembled in earnest Thursday night at SXSW 2012. In a star-studded concert — featuring a pantheon of alt-rock greats including R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, Wilco's Pat Sansone, Tommy Stinson, Peter Case, Chris Stamey, Ken Stringfellow, Jon Auer, M. Ward and many more, plus Big Star's lone survivor, drummer Jody Stephens — musicians inspired by the band, complete with a 12-piece orchestra, performed the whole of Big Star's "Third," their emotionally tangled and rightly acclaimed album recorded in 1974 and released by 1978. Stamey — also appearing several times at SXSW this week with the reunited dB's (see below) — has made these "Third" gigs into something of a pet project, performing them a few times ahead of the festival. But Thursday's gig, back in something of an emotional center for the band and its fans, resonated with obvious love from the musicians, especially a smiling Stamey, who never sang but acted as bandleader. Mixing up the album's various sequences, the show opened with M. Ward on piano meandering through Eden Ahbez's "Nature Boy," an outtake from "Third." Players and singers then started cycling behind the microphone. British pub band the Dunwells delivered "Take Care" with Irish balladry and an accordion. The Mayflies' Matt McMichaels lead a steady "Jesus Christ." Auer, who had joined a revived lineup of Big Star, drove slowly through "Black Car," fueled by the string quartet. Standouts included Stinson, formerly of the Replacements, redeeming himself with a solid version of "Nightime." Watching him in his skinny plaid suit and hipster hat, one could almost forget he now slums in the reconstituted Guns N' Roses. Peter Case, once a svelte New Wave rocker in the Plimsouls, appeared shaggy and bearded and did his best Van Morrison impression through "Stroke It Noel" (Stamey's smile was a thousand watts through that one). Sansone's "You Can't Have Me" was powerful even without the wailing saxophone and the two drum solos from Stephens. Stephens himself stepped out from behind the kit to sang a couple of songs, including a string-laden "Blue Moon" beautifully arranged with a Pachelbel's Canon sway. R.E.M.'s Mike Mills originally was scheduled to be on stage for the show, but he canceled due to illness. The former band's guitarist, Buck, appeared instead. He merely lurked in the background for two songs, the cover of the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale" and "You Can't Have Me." The show closed with "Thank You Friends," featuring most of the cast back on stage, like a traditional "This Land Is Your Land" folk finale. The Big Star concert followed a screening of a documentary, still in progress, called "Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me" from director Drew DeNicola. • • • Stamey's a busy boy at SXSW 2012. In addition to corralling that large cast of players for the Big Star tribute, he's got his own showcase on Saturday, plus he and the reunited dB's are scheduled six times here this week. Wednesday afternoon was their first showcase, on the Dogwood patio on West Sixth Street. Featuring originals Stamey, singer-guitarist Peter Holsapple and drummer Will Rigby, plus acclaimed Southern producer and artist Mitch Easter on bass, this latest revival of the beloved '80s power-pop group is hawking a new album, "Falling Off the Sky," due in June. They utilized their showcase to show off many of the new tracks — as jangly and tuneful as ever. Holsapple insists the new album is "a great summertime record," and as he sang the new "World to Cry," a wind-blown tree in the courtyard approved by showering the tightly packed audience with new buds. It's not all sunshine and tanlines. Another new song jangled over a martial rhythm and lyrics of lament and paralysis. Stamey remarked, "On my tombstone, I want, 'He wrote one great riff.'" Then he added, "Plus a lot of depressing songs." He then ripped a scary, dissonant solo from the heart of "Happenstance," which the band balanced with the gentle waves of melody in "Love Is for Lovers." Their official showcase is tonight. • • • Fast forward to the 21st century: Power-pop rocker Brendan Benson was back on stage as a solo act Thursday night. Jack White's partner in the Raconteurs, Benson funnels most of his melodic talents into his solo albums. He has yet to make a bad one, and his next, "What Kind of World," is due in April on his new independent label Readymade. His Thursday showcase wasn't as flawless as his records. Stringy-haired and a little adrift, Benson charged gamely through some new songs, though one had to be abandoned after the first verse; he tried to restart it, but flubbed something again and moved on into a duo of the Raconteurs' "Hands" and his own "Cold Hands (Warm Heart)" (in which he laments, "Why does it always happen...?"). SXSW: Fiona Apple's splendid case of nerves By Thomas Conner on March 16, 2012 12:05 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Alabama Shakes might be one of the buzziest new bands at this year's South by Southwest music conference, but Fiona Apple is the one of the hottest returning-act tickets. After not having been seen outside of Los Angeles in years, and with her last record of emotionally taut pop-cabaret released in 2005, two lines for her second showcase Thursday night snaked around the block in different directions. Performing in a Presbyterian church, Apple strode purposefully onto a candlelit stage with a four-piece band and launched into "Fast as You Can." Still a frenetic ball of anxiety, when Apple stands at a microphone without a piano to occupy her hands her nervous energy nearly flings her limbs apart. Thursday night she wore a white shawl over her shoulders, which she immediately took to flipping and waving about like a manic Stevie Nicks. Banging fists against her body, flailing her arms, pounding the piano — one senses that without the music to focus her energy she'd go utterly mad. Then again, she can rein herself and become the perfect picture of Marlene Dietrich smolder, as she did during "Paper Bag." Apple's voice is not a smooth or delicate instrument. It's guttural and trembling and sounds ravaged by a prior hour of sobbing; midway through her Thursday concert, she made a brief show of spraying some salve into the back of her throat. The songs fit the sound — lyric after lyric of man after man who doesn't understand her (the dolt who won't even kiss her in the right place in the new "Anything We Want") and heaps of self-doubt ("I'm gonna f--- it up" from "Mistake"). "Not that I go to church or anything," Apple said, gazing up at the shadowy altar, "but I'd like to apologize to the building itself for my cursing." The band supports the crackling tension with herky-jerky soul-jazz phrases, as if Elvis Costello's "Spike" is drowning his sorrows at L.A.'s Largo club (home of the acclaimed residencies curated by Apple producer and compatriot Jon Brion). Prone to lengthy vamps and calliope-like refrains, the music's drunken gentility was often pierced by tinny, edgy solos from her guitarist. Every song was a suspense thriller, and as Woody Allen said, "I hope it lasts." Briefly, anyway — her SXSW showcases kick off a tiny tour, just a few dates including two sold-out shows Sunday and Monday at Chicago's Lincoln Hall. Apple's new album returns to her penchant for lengthy titles — (inhale) it's "The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do" — is scheduled for a June release. SXSW hip-hop fusion: K. Flay, Idle Warship, Robert Glasper By Thomas Conner on March 16, 2012 5:51 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Kristine Flaherty grew up in Wilmette. She went to Stanford. She's also a helluva rapper. With frenetic flow and live-wire, chicken-dance moves, K. Flay barreled through a Friday showcase at Austin's Red Eyed Fly, crumpling labels and defying genres. Backed by an excellent live drummer, Nicholas Suhr, she crafted loops and samples with real finesse, utilizing grinding guitar sounds and squawky electronic noises for melody and music more than mere beats and punctuation. "We're going to go to a fun place in our minds," she said by way of introducing one song. It was less invitation than advisory — she picked up drumsticks and attacked her own percussion pad, and she and Suhr lost themselves momentarily in a rhythmic freakout of ecstatic proportions. K. Flay's sharpest weapon, though, is her fast-talking tongue. Her words-per-minute reached the red line almost every time. One song began with a slow, easygoing beat (no drummer), as she started rapping along. The beat kept modulating, faster and faster, and for three or four minutes she kept slinging syllables without a single flub or nonsense gibberish. Who knows what she wound up saying? But given the rest of her wisecracking, hard-hearted material -- all that's out thus far is an EP, "Eyes Shut," available free on her web site -- it's worth hearing at any speed. • • • Idle Warship — a new collaboration between acclaimed rapper Talib Kweli and Philly soul singer Res — released an album last fall that was mostly great, a fizzy mix of hip-hop, R&B and rock with just the right balance between all three. The group's SXSW showcases were highly anticipated — but, alas, their Friday afternoon show was ho-hum. Backed by a live quartet, Kweli and Res ping-ponged their vocal duties and spent an inordinate amount of time asking the crowd for cheers instead of earning them. Kweli turned the word "soul" in one song into a falsetto, drawn-out "Soul Train" nod, but the music, which is buoyant and bouncy on record, lurched and lagged live. Even the synth underpinning of Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" in the song "Steady," which eventually morphed into the whole band singing the Eurhythmics' "Sweet Dreams," failed to brighten the desperate energy on stage. The term "rap-rock" has certain negative connotations; this isn't really rap-rock, but it's close. A 21st-century Digable Planets, unfortunately, they ain't. • • • In one sense, I'd like to thank the sound engineers who had difficulty getting things in gear for the Robert Glasper Experiment showcase late Thursday night at the Elephant Room. Without their delay, some room in the tiny, dank club might not have opened up and I'd have missed the whole show standing on queue. The sound was substandard even when the show got under way, but those who made it in heard enough to justify the hype that brought us there. Glasper is a hip-hop wunderkind. Glasper is a jazz juggernaut. A pianist, a Texas native, he seems to be knitting a new kind of fusion. A set that opens with Coltrane (sax player Casey Benjamin is pretty wicked, see video below) and nearly winds up with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" might only turn the head of zeitgeist interpreters like Brad Mehldau, but Glasper's quartet followed their open-minded explorations through the jazz tones, hip-hop beats and raucous rock with more ferocity than irony. His latest album, "Black Radio" (Blue Note), does the same thing and features guests like Mos Def and Chicago's Lupe Fiasco. Occupy SXSW: Tom Morello carries Woody Guthrie torch through protest showcase, street party By Thomas Conner on March 17, 2012 10:20 AM AUSTIN, Texas — During his keynote speech at this year's South by Southwest music conference, Bruce Springsteen referred to folksinger Woody Guthrie as "a ghost in the machine." In the centennial year of his birth, Guthrie has certainly haunted SXSW 2012. Springsteen and many others have sung his songs. "Woody at 100," a panel session featuring his children, Nora and Arlo Guthrie, considered his legacy. Then Friday night, Chicago-area native Tom Morello capped off his showcase in the middle of the street, leading a throng of Occupy Austin demonstrators in a sing-along of "This Land Is Your Land." "I am the Nightwatchman and this is a one man revolution!" said Morello (who performs solo under the moniker The Nightwatchman) at the beginning of his SXSW showcase, scheduled inside the Swan Dive bar near Sixth Street and Red River in downtown Austin. But days earlier, Morello began reorganizing what the festival had programmed for him. His showcase, he declared, would become Occupy SXSW — all 99 percenters welcome. "SXSW has a lot of specialty shows — record companies, vodka companies, promoters and things like that," he told Rolling Stone on Tuesday. "I thought it was important that at a music gathering of that size, to have a place where the rebels, revolutionaries, rockers, rappers and the 99 percent could gather and have a mighty SXSW throw down." Via social media and online networks, Occupy Austin spread the word and gathered Friday at the state capitol three hours before Morello's midnight showcase. The group of nearly 100 began marching toward the downtown streets already crowded with SXSW registrants and hopeful music fans. How do you get a mob to move through a mob? By dancing. The benevolent Occupiers rolled a sound system with them, blaring mostly disco and dance tunes but also raising a ruckus with "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine, Morello's former hard rock band. About every block, they'd stop and dance, as well as wave some signs and hand out fliers. At Sixth and Brazos, the assembly inadvertently blocked traffic, which laid on the horns. The honking, however, simply raised more cheers and whoops. Slowly, the demonstrators made their way down Sixth Street toward Morello's venue. One large banner reading "F--- the Police" was its own crowd control issue, because gawking passers-by insisted the bearers stop -- so they could take their picture with it. Irony of ironies: Midway down the street the group had to detour slightly after being blocked by a drum circle. Morello started his official showcase about half an hour late, playing a few songs by himself before bringing on his latest band, the Freedom Fighter Orchestra — and, later, special guest Wayne Kramer from Detroit punk legend the MC5 — to tear through typically fiery Nightwatchman songs, including "Save the Hammer for the Man" and "Union Town," as well as Rage's "Bulls on Parade." The previous night, Morello had joined Springsteen on stage during his SXSW concert; Friday, Morello played Springsteen's "The Ghost of Tom Joad," dedicating it to "the only Boss worth listening to." As his official timeslot ended, Morello told the crowd — primarily SXSW badge-holders inside — to follow him outside. There, the largely uncredentialed Occupy crowd had been watching the showcase on a video projected on the wall. Morello proceeded to start a second showcase in the middle of the street, which he called "the people's venue" — carrying his acoustic guitar, which has "Whatever It Takes" scrawled on it (Guthrie's guitar famously sported the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists") — and leading the crowd in a rollicking sing-along of "This Land." Lack of a PA didn't stop him — not when you have the "human microphone." "Mic check!" Morello called, and the crowd began repeating him. In a very Obama-like delivery, he went on: "They can turn off the PA, but they can't shut this party down!" He told a tale about guitar factory workers in South Korea who were fired because they formed a union. Using the human mic, he taught the crowd the chorus to his "World Wide Rebel Songs" and lead another sing-along. He then ended the event with yet another Guthrie quip: "Take it easy," he shouted, "but take it!" Catch Morello when he leads a Woody Guthrie tribute concert May 19 at Chicago's Metro, featuring Holly Near, the Klezmatics, Jon Langford, Bucky Halker and more. SXSW: Hospitality, Ava Luna, Joe Pug By Thomas Conner on March 17, 2012 11:55 AM AUSTIN, Texas — There's buzz, and there's buzz. When people insist you see a band at South by Southwest, it's usually dicey. When people recommend a band like this — "Aw, Hospitality. They're really good. I'd like to see them again" — that you take a little more seriously. The buzzy Brooklyn band's Friday night showcase at Frank was definitely worth the recommendations, and then some. Unassuming and sometimes unobtrusive, Hospitality segued from sound check to set without any fanfare or introduction; the snugly packed crowd in the small bar simply enjoyed the revelation that, hey, that beautiful music is the room's centerpiece now. Hospitality, like its namesake, creeps up like that, anyway. Creating a sound way bigger than the sum of its basic quartet lineup, this is indie-pop with bright colors, effervescent arrangements and, most importantly, real swing. Underneath the big, fat, chiming guitar chords and singer-guitarist Amber Papini's conversational patter is usually a firm beat, certainly a supple groove thanks to left-handed bassist Brian Betancourt. They could probably go toe-to-toe with most dance-rockers from the first wave (Franz Ferdinand, etc.), but they'd also have a calming effect on them. "The Right Profession," from this year's self-titled debut, certainly moves, and "Friends of Friends" enjoys a groovy dance break, but other songs sometimes noodle, sometimes vamp, sometimes slip into a positively Pink Floyd reverie. • • • If Steely Dan worked to sound like the actual future, rather than Donald Fagen's nostalgic 1950s Worlds Fair perspective on it, they might sound something like Brooklyn's Ava Luna. A thrilling, lurching, bewildering, surprising frenzy of genre-splicing, this sextet's Friday night return to SXSW at the Iron Bear club rocked and grooved and glitched. Driven by rhythms that stutter and fray, Ava Luna's 21st-century rock 'n' soul is humanized by no-nonsense vocals. Becca Kauffman and Felicia Douglass bring seriousness and sass, when called for, but it's singer-guitarist Carlos Hernandez that embodies the band's schizophrenic joy. Playing with an ADD tic justifying lyrics like, "If I could focus," Hernandez sings like a less-somnambulant James Blake — all heady methol and melancholy. It's headbanging dubstep, it's postmodern soul, full of sound and fury, and when some feedback began ebbing and flowing between songs — hey, some of us thought it was just part of the band's space-age sound. • • • Chicago's Joe Pug sounds like a native down here in Texas. Biting his lip, chewing his accent, flashing his winsome smile or sometimes wincing with emotion, Pug is the picture of down-home earnestness. Squeezing in just five songs for the Folk Alliance showcase on Saturday at Threadgill's, Pug played a handful of thoughtful country-folk tunes from his second album, "The Great Despiser," due next month. That's after he broke a guitar string — on the first strum of the first chord in the first song -- which was surprising given how tender and delicate most of the material is, augmented here with only an occasional electric guitarist and a stand-up bassist. But the new album features guests such as the Hold Steady's Craig Finn, so it's gonna roll. To close, Pug was joined by Austin music legend Harvey Thomas Young for his song, previously covered by Pug, "Start Again." SXSW: Don Cornelius, 'Soul Train' celebrated By Thomas Conner on March 17, 2012 4:54 PM AUSTIN, Texas — "Soul Train" creator and host Don Cornelius was left out of the Grammys' "in memorium" slide show last month, barely two weeks after the Chicago television pioneer was found dead of an apparent suicide, but he was celebrated Saturday at the annual South by Southwest music conference in the Texas capital. At an event called "'Soul Train' Tribute to Don Cornelius," NPR's Dan Charnas conducted an amiable onstage chat with Don's son Tony Cornelius about the TV music show's history and legacy. "If he'd come back here and see the love from those who miss him so much, I wonder, would he decide to stay?" Tony Cornelius asked during the session. "He had so much love to live for. It hurts me that he's not here." "Soul Train" was one of TV's longest-running syndicated shows, airing for 36 years. Launched at Chicago's WCIU in 1970, the music performance and dance program went national the following year and was crucial in showcasing black soul and R&B artists to a wider audience, including Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Gladys Knight, Aretha Franklin and Michael Jackson. "Dad talked about that quite often," Cornelius said. "He found a need, and he served it. There was a need to allow not only the music of black Americans but kids an opportunity to express themselves." Charnas showed numerous video clips -- "Soul Train" performances, dancers, pivotal moments, Afro Sheen commercials (the sponsorship of Chicago-based Johnson Products was important to the show's early survival) -- and Cornelius commented. "When I watch these clips, what comes to mind that people don't understand is these performances were about relationships. It wasn't, 'I want to do "Soul Train,"' it was friendships that developed over time," Cornelius said. Many of those relationships began early in Chicago, where Don Cornelius negotiated complete ownership of "Soul Train" at WCIU because "no one believed" in the show, Tony Cornelius said. Tony Cornelius was around age 12 when "Soul Train" premiered. He worked as a runner, cable mover, lighting operator and more throughout the years, eventually becoming an executive producer. From the start, he recalled, "Soul Train" was a family affair. "My most vivid memory is my mother writing out cards of all the kids who wanted to dance on the show from high schools around the area," he said. "The groundswell in Chicago was so exciting that [Don] decided Los Angeles would be the place to take it. That's where the stars were, where the acts were." He took one thing with him, though: the Scramble Board. Members of the audience were often selected for the Scramble Board, where they would reorder a jumbled set of letters to spell the name of a prominent black American. Don Cornelius later admitted that the gimmick was always fixed. "It's funny, but it's true," Tony Cornelius said. "It's something he felt extremely strong about. We were speaking to the world, not just the dancers, and informing anyone who didn't know Stevie Wonder's name or Thurgood Marshall's name how to spell it and who they were." Cornelius said years later he suggested to his father that they update the Scramble Board to something digital or more contemporary. Don refused, saying he wanted to maintain that set piece — the one piece of the Chicago set that traveled to L.A. In honor of his father, Cornelius said the family has created the Don Cornelius Foundation to raise awareness, prevention and support for those contemplating suicide and aid for its survivors. SXSW global: K-pop, Juanes, Bensh, Noa Margalit By Thomas Conner on March 18, 2012 12:14 AM AUSTIN, Texas — This year's South by Southwest features music acts from every continent except Antarctica (those penguins aren't as musical as you've been lead to believe). Here's some of the international flavor I sampled this week: • • • The panel session at SXSW 2012 was titled with a question — "Do Music Moguls Know a Secret About K-Pop?" — but the non-insider query is simpler: Do you know what K-pop is? It's a genre of hyper-produced, often sugary sweet pop music mostly out of South Korea. It's got its own Billboard chart, and in December launched its own festival (K-Pop World, Dec. 7 in Seoul). According to the moderator of this industry panel, it's "a huge thing across Asia and other parts of the world," and it's about to invade the states. Earlier in the year, I suggested 2012 might have a more worldly sound, including more K-pop. Already in the United States, South Korean idol Kim Hyun-a has attracted media attention, and when K-pop acts tour this country it's not just their music that turns American heads. "People often are stopping because of how many people show up" to these concerts, said Flowsion Shekar, founder of Koreaboo, a Korean news blog. David Zedeck, a booking agent at Creative Artists Agency, said he's selling out 1,700 to 2,500-capacity venues with K-pop, even in interior cities like Atlanta, Kansas City and Denver. The group Girls Generation announced via Twitter that they would premiering a new video at a New York Best Buy. "We had 1,500 kids show up on a school day — from a tweet," he marveled. "This is bigger than anyone thinks it is." Other prominent K-pop acts include Bigbang, JYP, the Wonder Girls and SMTown. "Even though it comes from Korea, it's not of or for Korea anymore," said Jeff Yang, the Tao Jones columnist for the Wall Street Journal ("It wasn't my idea," he said sheepishly of his column's name). "It's become a world music. There are more people who don't understand Korean listening to K-pop than in Korea." Yang predicted K-pop could develop in America one of two ways: It could become like Latin music, a cultural identifier for Asian-American communities, or it could establish itself as a platform like hip-hop, inviting collaboration and eventual evolution into something larger. Some of the latter already is happening. Kanye West previously worked with the trio JYJ (rapping on the single "Ayyy Girl") and has said he plans to do more with the group. Snoop Dogg recently appeared on a track by Girls Generation, and DJ Swizz Beatz says he's hoping to help bring K-pop acts like Bigbang (currently atop the K-pop charts, No. 1 and 2) to America. • • • In addition to performing his own and Woody Guthrie's song immediately before Bruce Springsteen's keynote address at SXSW 2012 — one of his first English-language performances — Colombian singer Juanes has been making multiple appearances at the festival all week. He discussed his upcoming May album, "Juanes MTV Unplugged," during a Friday panel session, then performed during the Latin rock showcase later that night. In an AP interview, he celebrated the cultural smorgasbord that is SXSW: "It's such a great opportunity to interact together and exchange culture. I just feel the world now and the world is absolutely sick, you know, so I just see music and culture and art in general as a great idea to change at least our own environment and just connect people to the music. You can just go and walk around the street and you can see bands from I don't know, wherever, and they can sing in Chinese if you want. You just have the opportunity to connect with somebody else you didn't know, and that's good." • • • The sheer volume of music at SXSW makes random discoveries possible, probable and the payoff is often good. Thursday night I stopped for stir-fry at one of Austin's better food trucks downtown near Fifth and Brazos. On the corner a trio of Austrian vagabonds was playing to anyone who'd stop and listen. They're called Bensh, and they don't sound like a sidewalk band. Good-spirited pop with flourishes of electronics and gypsy bounce, Bensh's fluid, well-crafted pop caused me to scribble a seemingly bizarre list of comparisons in my notebook: Luka Bloom, Deathray, Syd Barrett, Animal Collective, the Monochrome Set. Much spunkier live than on record, Bensh still made a great impulse download that was perfectly dreamy in the earbuds during a pedicab ride home. • • • A showcase of musicians from Israel, sponsored by the Israeli Consul, ran all day Friday in a downtown park. I caught an acoustic set by Noa Margalit, from the rock band the Car Sitters. Listening to her stoic personal songs, you'd never guess how energetic the Car Sitters usually are. Tel Aviv's Margalit — breathy, barefoot, bar-chording the heck out of her guitar — played things close to the vest, at least sonically. Lyrically, she was raging about politics and quality of life, lamenting (or marveling?) that "it doesn't take much to survive." Later, J. Viewz, aka Grammy-nominated and Brooklyn-based producer Jonathan Dagan, let loose some throbbing beats with a soulful vocalist and great live drums. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times AUSTIN, Texas — Hanson returned this year to the festival that made them famous — and then they got all Bob Geldof on us. The three Oklahoma brothers first came to SXSW 17 years ago, strolling the streets as under-age hopefuls, singing for anyone who would listen (and getting kicked out of the Four Seasons lobby for doing so). One guy did, and the rest is "MMMBop" history. Now grown up, married, each with kids, they look around Austin and Zac, 25, sighs and says, "South-by definitely put a mark on us." This year, the Hanson guys returned to SXSW to play a showcase — only their second time to do so — in support of last year's spot-on pop-soul record, "Shout It Out," their eighth. But then something else happened. Maybe it was the presence of Geldof, but Hanson decided to whip together, in the span of about two days, a telethon to raise money for the recovery efforts in Japan following the massive earthquake there and subsequent nuclear power threats. "When we got to South by Southwest, we expected to see more of a unified effort," Zac said Friday afternoon from a makeshift base camp in an office building on North Congress Ave. "It was like, all we've got going is four tables at the convention center? That's not great. ... All these important people are here, from IFC to CNN, arts and culture people who should be talking about this, and no one really was. So yesterday we decided to throw this thing together, and started calling everyone we know to participate." "And everyone we don't know," added Isaac Hanson. The result, they hope, is a 12-hour live stream from noon to midnight Saturday, viewed at sxsw4japan.com (a different address from sxsw4japan.org, but related), featuring live and pre-recorded performances and messages from a variety of musicians. It was still early when I spoke with them, but on board a day ahead were Widespread Panic, the Boxer Rebellion, Ben Folds and the Courtyard Hounds. "Even if we raise $12, we just felt something had to be done — by someone, and if we could step up and be those people, OK," Zac said. "We don't want to be so jaded and say, 'Well, we helped out with Haiti, and that was pretty recent ...' I've heard people say, 'Well, it's Japan, they've got money.' It didn't seem right." Money raised through this awareness project will be via text messaging and go directly to the Red Cross. Hanson will oversee the stream and appear several times. When it's over at midnight, they head to Antone's for an all-ages showcase at 12:30 a.m. "Live Aid was put together in two weeks," Isaac said. "We can do this in two days." He looked at Zac. A beat. "Right?" This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual conference and festival ...
Rolling into town for SXSW, so is Jack White's Rolling Record Store By Thomas Conner on March 16, 2011 4:58 PM AUSTIN, Texas — When I first attended South by Southwest, the annual pop music conference and festival in Austin, Texas (the music industry's spring break), it was 1996, just shy of the event's 10th anniversary — and everyone was already complaining about how big it had gotten. Too many bands, too much press, too much traffic. The film fest had barely started. This year is the 25th anniversary of SXSW's music showcases, which are now preceded by SXSW Interactive and the SXSW film festival. The whole things stretches on for 10 days, with a lot of entertainment, a lot of media and a ton of traffic — and now most of the complaints about size and impact have shifted to Interactive. But we're all down here because SXSW still has a rep of previewing the films, music and online experiences that we'll be geeking out about for the rest of the year. It starts the moment you get off the plane, where a brave singer-songwriter strummed her guitar on a makeshift stage at the airport bar next to the baggage claim escalators. For the next four nights, the Texas capital will echo with more than a thousand musicians hoping to turn the heads of writers, talent agents, music supervisors, film directors, label execs and more. Jack White was first into the fray this afternoon ... White's in town to unveil his latest venture after his recent confirmation that the White Stripes are no more. White is on a mission to salvage the experience of record buying for a generation of iTunes downloaders. He's put together the Third Man Rolling Record Store — basically a food truck that peddles vinyl LPs, T-shirts and such, plus a sound system. Wednesday afternoon, White worked that system, playing a set in front of the Rolling Record Store, which had set up outside Frank's Diner. He played a handful of songs solo, including a Buddy Holly cover, plus the White Stripes' "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground." The mobile shop rolled here from Nashville for SXSW. White says he plans to travel the country with it, hitting the summer festivals. SXSW Wednesday: Colourmusic, Wolf Gang, the Kickback, Admiral Fallow, Pete Wentz's Black Cards By Thomas Conner on March 17, 2011 2:56 AM AUSTIN, Texas — SXSW is basically a musical March madness. Here's one man's brackets at the end of Wednesday night's series of showcases: BRONCHO: When in doubt, follow Martin Atkins. The famed drummer for Public Image Ltd. and Pigface led a spirited panel Wednesday afternoon advising newbies to the music business, then started his evening at the Oklahoma showcase, seeing BRONCHO. Funny about that name: it's in all caps, for some reason, and it's pronounced so it rhymes with honcho. Tulsa's BRONCHO is the latest project from Ryan Lindsey, who manages to meld his experience in the alt-country band Cheyenne and early indie-rock hopefuls the Starlight Mints into a sweaty mix of loping cowpunk and Stiff Records guitar aggression. Atkins was bobbing his head, anyway. Colourmusic: Another Okie quartet, Colourmusic, hoisted the freak flags over Austin's Sixth Avenue early, unleashing a squall of early Flaming Lips feedback, general high-pitched shrieking and, surprisingly, some meaty funk grooves. This is some serious evolution for a band that started as a more folk-driven, Britpop act (see their more accessible debut, the cumbersomely titled "F, Monday, Orange, February, Venus, Lunatic, 1 or 13") — and then they met the Lips' Wayne Coyne. Underneath the Brainiac-like furor, though, are some solid, funky rhythms. One fan was moved enough to tear off his shirt, jump on stage and dance ecstatically for all to see. The Kickback: Guitarist-singer Billy Yost quipped between songs, "If you work in the entertainment industry and would like a hot record to put out, boy would we like to talk to you!" Here's hoping they had their chat. Chicago's the Kickback is a fierce power trio within a quintet — Yost, his brother Danny Yost on drums and bassist Zach Verdoorn. Tighter than a flea's undies, these three plow through every dynamic, from sweetly tuneful to apoplectic fury, buttressed by Billy Yost's apparent natural edginess (his stage banter was taut, nervous, like he was spoiling for a dust-up) and a vein in his neck that bulged whenever things got really good and really loud. It was almost like seeing David Garza at SXSW all those years ago. Admiral Fallow: Here's the next Scottish band to watch. In the tradition of Belle & Sebastian, but with a more rock edge and a significantly grandiose songwriting perspective, Admiral Fallow is fertile with song styles and instrumentation. Opening their set late with a quiet tune, a lyric buoyed by rhythm guitars just for atmospherics, not melody, this six-piece played pastoral pop for those who've also been turned on to Mumford & Sons or their own countrymen, Frightened Rabbit. I heard the urgency and persistent rhythm of Dogs Die in Hot Cars (a fabulous but, with that silly name, defunct Scottish band), as well as a lyrical landscape of losers and big spaces that reminded me of American Music Club. With their flutes, clarinets and big drums in addition to the guitars, they could be Scotland Music Club, and they should start opening for the National immediately. Black Cards: A small crowd waited for Pete Wentz to shag it from the mtvU Woodie Awards across downtown and finally debut his new band. He jumped on stage early Thursday morning with a crazy fur hat on and cranked up a fairly dime-a-dozen set of dance-rock. Black Cards is led by Bebe Rexha, a personable newcomer who comes off vixenish without being too affected. She's got a great voice, but Black Cards are still waiting for a full house. The groove-based music is deftly led by Wentz's bass, much the way John Taylor's bass was at the forefront of Duran Duran early on, but in the end it was sub-Garbage, especially when the songs took on a reggae flavor, which suited neither Wentz's nor Rexha's strengths. Clutching his Miller Lite, Wentz mubled some stage patter about how "weird it is when you do something different and people are like, 'That's lame.'" In that sense, yeah, this was weird. Wandering Sixth Street: In addition to the smorgasbord of music down here, Chicagoans, it's also in the 70s. Strolling the main music row thus makes for easy shopping, with a band neatly framed in the open windows of most clubs. Practically next door to the Colourmusic show was another band with British spelling: Chicago's own Secret Colours, which turned in a set diametrically opposite of Colourmusic's brave frenzy; Secret Colours plays a tender swirl of '60s autumnal folk and '90s shoegaze. Down the way, Ha Ha Tonka smartly showed its Ozark roots in some ripping country-rock, featuring a mandolin player with a harmony voice as high as his instrument and a rhythm section with a driving backbeat. These Missouri boys had the crowd clapping along — and this was the SXChi showcase, sponsored by Chicago's JBTV and Threadless. Around the corner at Latitude, the unofficial British embassy for the duration of SXSW, Lonndon's Wolf Gang drew a crowd. Here's a band that looks like an anachronism — Spandau Ballet's wardrobe, Adam Ant's earring — but sounds timeless, luring a dancing mob on the street with rich melodies and crisp playing. A fellow next to me was lured away from another showcase by the sound. "American music is so muddled," he said. "This is so British — so clean and clear and, I don't know, some kind of tune to take away with you." SXSW keynote: Bob Geldof pleads for rock's continuing social conscience — 'Say something to me!' By Thomas Conner on March 17, 2011 2:25 PM AUSTIN, Texas — A fine new biography of Queen by Mark Blake, Is This the Real Life?, was recently published. The first chapter details the band's performance at Live Aid in 1985, as fine a piece of stadium showmanship as you'll ever see. It inspired me to drop the cash on a used set of Live Aid DVDs, the four-disc set that was finally compiled a few years ago. Watching the whole spectacle over a long weekend while the spouse was away, I finally came to terms with the fact that, sure, Dylan was there, but so were Spandau Ballet and the Style Council (themselves the picture-perfect illustration of style trumping substance in the mid-'80s). It happened when Elvis Costello came onto the stage. He had one song. He didn't pick one of his own, he didn't push the hit, he instead sang "All You Need Is Love." Live Aid is peppered with such moments, when the music itself reminds us of why we're here — much moreso and certainly more effectively than the marathon concert's occasional news reels about the African famine — and what we should be talking about. This is exactly the kind of thing Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof says is lacking in current music — or, if it's there, at least the democratization of the Internet has prevented him from finding it. Surprising and inspiring, more optimist than doomsayer, Geldof began Thursday's keynote address at SXSW 2011 with a pleasant ramble but focused his remarks on pop music's history of affecting social change, however indirectly, and the future of that crucial power. "I don't think the American revolution is over," said the activist-musician. He didn't mean 1776. "The music of the American revolution was not fife and drum. It was rock 'n' roll. It is entirely understandable to anyone in the world. That's why Live Aid worked." Geldof recalled his youth in "cold, damp, gray" Ireland and the personal (which, once he took action by joining a band, inevitably later became social) revolution that occurred when he first heard rock music. His realization, he says, was, "I can use this thing." He saw the music as a tool to change his own circumstances, and then to have a voice in the world. But it's the nature of that voice that Geldof focused on. What kind of voice, and through what medium will it come? The Internet isn't enough, he said. "We can talk these things through, which is the limitation of the web," he said, salting his impassioned speech in several places with his distaste for blogs and for the ability of anyone to shout their views unmanaged into cyberspace. An increase in the quantity of voices has drowned out those with quality — "Everybody's got the means to say anything they want, but nobody has anything to say," Geldof said. No, blog screeds and even Woody Guthrie-esque didacticism are not going to keep the American cultural revolution alive and growing. For music to have any impact, he said, "it must suggest, not state ... It has to be about society. The revisiting of context is crucial. When rock becomes about the height of the platform boots and the size of one's country manor, it's meaningless." He called rock music a "vivid, livid argument with the constituency," adding, "This thing we call content now is about the conversation society has with itself." The power of shaping ideas still lies in the music, he said, though finding it and experiencing it has grown more difficult without clear arbiters and filters online. "Where are the Ramones of today, the Sex Pistols?" he asked. "They're out there, but will they be found? That's the point." To the musicians at SXSW, Geldof pleaded: "Say something to me!" He also encouraged them not to be taken in by the illusion of community offered by the Internet and to realize that "a fan club is more powerful than 6,000 [Facebook] friends." Then he started to get angry, exactly in the way he wanted musicians to be. "I don't hear it! I don't hear that rage! I don't hear the disgust in music" -- and this after a laundry list of injustices, including the Wall Street scandals and the new McCarthyism of Rep. Peter King (whose hypocritical former ties to the IRA brought real color to Geldof's cheeks) -- "and I need to! It doesn't have to be literal. Ideas are shaped in music. That's why music is dangerous, and always has been. Rock 'n' roll is the siren cry of individualism acting together." Individualism acting together. Nice. Sounds like America to me. And the voice of that collective individualism is still desperately needed throughout the world, Geldof said without even citing the examples of current uprisings through Africa and the Middle East. "We still need you. Still the voice of the American revolution must pound on." Amusing postscript: In the Q&A that followed, one questioner brought up contemporary outspoken punk bands and focused on Chicago's Rise Against, who Geldof seemed familiar with. But their name is too literal, he complained. "I really don't think pop should be that literal," he said. "I suggest that they ... move to transliterating what they're feeling." That said, it should be interesting to compare the directness of lyrics on Rise Against's new album, "Endgame" when we finally hear Geldof's new album, "How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell," this spring. SXSW Thursday: The Strokes fill an amphitheater on autopilot, plus Abigail Washburn, Yelawolf and more By Thomas Conner on March 18, 2011 12:43 AM AUSTIN, Texas — Ringing in the second full night of music at SXSW, as they rang in the 21st century, New York City's venerated Strokes plodded into a set cherry-picked from their retro-hipster catalog. In the early stages of a tour that appears to be dreadfully duty-bound, supporting the band's first new record in five years, "Angles," these once refreshing rock revivalists played a free concert for a capacity crowd at Austin's Auditorium Shores outdoor amphitheater. (Capacity of the outdoor venue is listed at 20,000; by mid-show, the entrances were closed to incoming fans, some of whom then knocked down the fences to get in.) While the evening was temperate and breezy, the music wasn't quite the same. Opening the show with a wink-wink choice for this "comeback," singer Julian Casablancas slumped onto his microphone and wheezed, "I want to be forgotten / and I don't want to be reminded / You say, 'Please don't make this harder' / No, I won't yet." But it's not easy listening to a band that sounds so talented and proficient — and so bored. The Strokes' Thursday night set clearly thrilled the mob of fans, but it sounded like "Angels" does — labored, merely capable, not completely forced but close. Bob Geldof in his keynote Thursday morning said, "America, you look exhausted." Case in point: Julian & Co., not exactly a festival band (see last summer's Lollapalooza) playing-by-numbers and trying to determine what cultural contrast existed that made them sound genuinely fresh and exciting a decade ago. In the new single, "Under Cover of Darkness," Casablancas sings, "Everybody's singing the same song for 10 years." I bolted and hit the west side of downtown to explore some unknowns — the founding purpose of SXSW — before closing the night with some other known quantities ... Curiosity led me into the ACL Live at the Moody Theater, a new venue attached to the W Hotel and reflective of its clean lines and modern personality. It's a great, three-decked theater, and the band on stage was, I'll say it, smokin'. The New Mastersounds is a quartet with a formidable keyboardist, Joe Tatton, dancing up and down the ivories of a Hammond organ and a Fender Rhodes. The rhythm section is pure New Orleans backline, and singer Eddie Roberts calmly played an intense guitar solo at the end of the set — smiling to himself when he was done because he knew he'd nailed it. Hot funk, and you'd never believe where they're from while you're standing there doing the chicken dance like you're at Mardi Gras. They're from freaking Leeds. Abigail Washburn, a k a Mrs. Bela Fleck, struggled against the room at Antone's, kicking off a strong night sponsored by the Americana Music Association also featuring Emmylou Harris and the Old 97s. Washburn, an Evanston native, is a crafty clawhammer banjo player, and she leads a very adult and understated Americana quintet that includes upright bass and pedal steel. Washburn's voice is cool and salty, and her songs are supple and slow-building, like little Appalachian operettas — not the best fit for a big beer hall. But she easily steered several songs into brief breakdowns that caused couples to dance and Washburn to try out her clogging while crying, "Eeee-yeah!" The Austin Music Hall was smoky with a fiery hip-hop bill. Trae the Truth, a Houston collective built around Trae (born Frazier Thompson III), had manic mouths and big beats, rapping about "the South Side" and getting a lot of crowd participation with exchanges like this: Trae: "You ain't sh-- if you ain't ever been..." Crowd: "...screwed up!" Brooklyn's Yelawolf hit the stage with several times that energy, jumping from side to side in his grungy plaid shirt and ridiculous pom-pommed stocking cap. He juiced the crowd while spewing redneck raps that change gears suddenly between regular time, double time and triple time. Born Michael Wayne Atha in Alabama, Yelawolf is signed to Eminem's Shady Records; he sounds like a Southern Shady, but with much less to say. Yelawolf just wants to par-tay. After Trae joined him on stage for some more call-and-response with the crowd — the youngest and across-the-board most diverse I've seen here yet — Yelawolf got introspective for the briefest moment, stalking the stage and talking about a girl who left him "for some Abercrombie motherf---er." Then he started singing, soft and fluttery, "Love is not enough" — before shrieking, "F--- that bitch! I just wanna party!" More SXSW Thursday: S.O.S. for B.o.B., Wiz Khalifa and Janelle Monae By Thomas Conner on March 18, 2011 12:43 PM The first SXSW S.O.S. went out Thursday morning, after Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco — a buzzed favorite on the schedule especially since his controversial "Lasers" album just went No. 1 — canceled his show, as did Cee Lo Green after him, both for undisclosed reasons. They were scheduled headliners at the Atlantic Records showcase at La Zona Rosa, but Atlantic has plenty of hot commodities to choose from right now. The new lineup became: B.o.B., Wiz Khalifa and Janelle Monae. B.o.B. impressed me playing the very first set at Lollpalooza last summer in the brutal morning sun, mostly because this 22-year-old from North Carolina is a triple threat: a rapper with flow, a capable singer and a pretty hot guitarist. All three talents we on stage Thursday night, but showing some wear. Two of his biggest singles from last year's "The Adventures of Bobby Ray" are collaborations, and since Rivers Cuomo and Bruno Mars can't follow B.o.B. on tour to sing their melodious parts of "Magic" and "Nothin' on You," respectively, B.o.B. simply plays their tracks and dances while their voices dominate the chorus. He's got a half dozen guys on stage with him; one of them can't fill in for the live concert? When he straps on that guitar, thou, he's hot, as he did to rip through "Don't Let Me Fall" and "Electric." Wiz Khalifa, whose "Rolling Papers" CD, due March 29, is one of the year's most anticipated, moseyed on stage and filled the interim with a hazy set. Hardly polished, this sub-Snoop Dogg rambled about the stage, looking like a deer in the headlights but raising the temperature of the place with his carefree party raps, mostly along these lines: "If you don't smoke, I don't know why." Surrounded by members of the Taylor Gang, Khalifa ping-pongee back and forth, laughing to himself and transmitting a generally slap-happy vibe, which the crowd picked up on and rolled with. Before closing with his hit "Black and Yellow" (go, Steelers!), he freestyles a tribute to the late Nate Dogg. Janelle Monae has announced a spring tour with Bruno Mars (May 27 at the Aragon), and just this week announced some dates opening for Katy Perry. But if the public finally latches onto her in a bigger way, she's already prepared to handle her own headline. A tiny thing (the pompadour adds at least half a foot), she proved Thursday night she can command the stage. Backed by a tight eight-piece band, Monae hit the stage in a flowing cape while three dancers in monk robes knelt around her. She quickly went into her thesis, "Dance or Die," moving the crowd with the tight-tight-tight funk (sometimes that rhythm section was even a little overpowering) and prodding their minds with the sci-fi concepts from her fascinating debut album, "The ArchAndroid." Midway through, she cooled things down with a rendition of Judy Garland's "Smile," then brought the show to a close with the hit, "Tightrope," expanded into a Vegas-jazz marathon with about seven endings. Didn't bother those of us who didn't want it to end. Let's put on a show! Hanson throws together online telethon for Japan earthquake relief at SXSW By Thomas Conner on March 18, 2011 5:01 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Hanson returned this year to the festival that made them famous — and then they got all Bob Geldof on us. The three Oklahoma brothers first came to SXSW 17 years ago, strolling the streets as under-age hopefuls, singing for anyone who would listen (and getting kicked out of the Four Seasons lobby for doing so). One guy did, and the rest is "MMMBop" history. Now grown up, married, each with kids, they look around Austin and Zac, 25, sighs and says, "South-by definitely put a mark on us." This year, the Hanson guys returned to SXSW to play a showcase — only their second time to do so — in support of last year's spot-on pop-soul record, "Shout It Out," their eighth. But then something else happened. Maybe it was the presence of Geldof, but Hanson decided to whip together, in the span of about two days, a telethon to raise money for the recovery efforts in Japan following the massive earthquake there and subsequent nuclear power threats. "When we got to South by Southwest, we expected to see more of a unified effort," Zac said Friday afternoon from a makeshift base camp in an office building on North Congress Ave. "It was like, all we've got going is four tables at the convention center? That's not great. ... All these important people are here, from IFC to CNN, arts and culture people who should be talking about this, and no one really was. So yesterday we decided to throw this thing together, and started calling everyone we know to participate." "And everyone we don't know," added Isaac Hanson. The result, they hope, is a 12-hour live stream from noon to midnight Saturday, viewed at sxsw4japan.com (a different address from sxsw4japan.org, but related), featuring live and pre-recorded performances and messages from a variety of musicians. It was still early when I spoke with them, but on board a day ahead were Widespread Panic, the Boxer Rebellion, Ben Folds and the Courtyard Hounds. "Even if we raise $12, we just felt something had to be done -- by someone, and if we could step up and be those people, OK," Zac said. "We don't want to be so jaded and say, 'Well, we helped out with Haiti, and that was pretty recent ...' I've heard people say, 'Well, it's Japan, they've got money.' It didn't seem right." Money raised through this awareness project will be via text messaging and go directly to the Red Cross. Hanson will oversee the stream and appear several times. When it's over at midnight, they head to Antone's for an all-ages showcase at 12:30 a.m. "Live Aid was put together in two weeks," Isaac said. "We can do this in two days." He looked at Zac. A beat. "Right?" SXSW Friday: Cool Kids, Mac Miller, Yuck, Wild Flag, A Lull By Thomas Conner on March 19, 2011 11:45 AM AUSTIN, Texas — Chicago's Cool Kids, Chuck Inglish and Mikey Rocks, show the folks gathered for SXSW just how much the music business has changed. Since popping up in 2007, the talented rap duo has yet to record a proper album. Instead, they've built a sturdy career on blog-loved singles, EPs, mixtapes and remarkably solid performances like their stand Friday night at Austin's La Zona Rosa. They're doing well enough that Mikey Rocks can strut the stage in a red Neiman Marcus tank top and rhyme about his "new pair of shoes," his "ATM credits," how he swaggers around "with a little bit of gold and a pager" and, finally, snorts derisively: "You shop at the mall!" Still there's talk of an album being recorded, but who cares? The crowd was singing and shouting and dancing wildly. Chuck and Mikey brim with confidence, pacing the stage while calmly but firmly delivering their lines — not too wacked-out, but none of that rapid-fire stuff — over rocking beats and minimal electronic sounds. But it's not all about the coin. "They say if you ain't got no money take yo broke ass home," Chuck said in "Basement Party," the closer. "I say if you got you two dollars, then come through to my party." Next up was a rapper to watch: Mac Miller. Backed by a DJ scratching actual vinyl, this 19-year-old white rapper from Pittsburgh stumbled into his SXSW debut in a grubby sweatshirt and backwards cap looking and acting every bit the stoner guy from "Clueless." "Anyone drunk or f---ed up?" Miller asked the crowd, which roared the affirmative. "Man, there's so much sh-- backstage," he chuckled, smacking his cheek in amazement. Whatever his state of mind, Miller warmed into an engaging and occasionally goofy set of quick rhymes (he tends to rap on the same note for long stretches). He's got flow, but his set doesn't. He stopped after every song to stumble around some more and yammer on about partying and generally being a good-natured doofus. ("I love to party," he said, then added his thesis: "You gotta goof around a little bit." Someone in the audience said no, you don't. He responded, "Well, I do.") Expect to see him on college campuses all year long — or, with his feisty "Nikes on My Feet" ("Lace 'em up, lace 'em up, lace 'em up, lace 'em / Blue suede shoes stay crispy like bacon"), on a shoe commercial soon. Earlier in the week, I saw Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, hosts of public radio's "Sound Opinions" show. The subject of Yuck came up — possibly the buzziest of buzz bands at this year's SXSW — and the two instantly broke into their Siskel & Ebert dynamic, with DeRo claiming Yuck was just retreaded shoegaze rock and Kot disagreeing, saying he hears a lot of Pavement. They're each right, depending on the song. Sometimes, as on "Holing Out," the guitars from Yuck's Daniel Blumberg and Max Bloom are wonderfully lush and streamlined (kinda shoegazey). Sometimes, as on "Get Away," the melodies take sharp turns and the bass line gets up and runs around the room (kinda Pavementy). In all, it's a pleasant sound that washes over you without leaving behind much sediment. Yuck, a quartet from London, has played here, there and everywhere this week; Friday's showcase at the Kiss & Fly lounge had a line a block long waiting to get in. It's not really worth all that, but it should make for a harmless summer '90s revival. Those fans should have been in line for Wild Flag. Amazingly, there was no line for the most exciting revival of the night — from Carrie Brownstein, formerly of Sleater-Kinney and currently a co-writer and actor on the buzz-worthy IFC sketch comedy show "Portlandia." Her new supergroup — featuring singer-guitarist Mary Timony (ex-Helium), keyboardist Rebecca Cole (ex-Minders) and Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss — played a rollicking set Friday night, with Brownstein ping-ponging around the stage in a red dress. This is not Sleater-Kinney — it's much more fun. Pop hooks rule, with spirited vocals from the whole band (including a lot of girl-group ooh's and ahh's in the back), and only occasionally (but thankfully) does a darker S-K undertone show up, particularly in Brownstein's guitar breaks, which thrash about in the pop pool making welcome waves. Cole is the band's secret weapon, though, laying down determined organ lines that give Brownstein and Timony a steady something to cling to. A debut disc is due later this year on Merge. I capped the night next door with Chicago's A Lull, which crammed onto the closet-sized stage at the Bat Bar with four members playing drums. Digging into the most primal corners of rock, A Lull (Nigel Evan Dennis, Todd Miller, Ashwin Deepankar, Aaron Vinceland and Mike Brown) has released recordings that utilize any available sound they think hits hardest, including hitting drums with microphones and beating things against a wall. Friday's showcase was less destructive physically, but pretty pummeling otherwise. With two drummers, a bassist also occasionally hitting drums and a bongo, a guitarist with drums and a xylophone, and a singer lurching over repeating keyboard whims, A Lull was hardly a pause in anything. But the pounding compositions possess shape and texture and bode well for their full-length album, "Confetti," due April 12. 'American Idol's Crystal Bowersox plays lively SXSW showcase with John Popper By Thomas Conner on March 19, 2011 1:07 PM AUSTIN, Texas — The way "American Idol" runner-up Crystal Bowersox and Blues Traveler frontman John Popper were getting along on stage at SXSW, you'd think they'd been BFFs for a long time. But they met just 30 minutes before the show. Bowersox explained that she had contacted Popper online via a mutual friend (see below for geeked-out backstory) and asked the harmonica virtuoso to play during one song at her showcase Friday night in the Victorian Ballroom of Austin's Driskill Hotel. Popper wound up playing the whole set with Bowersox and her country-rock band. The two played off each other nicely — Bowersox's acoustic strumming and strong, soulful voice balanced by Popper's high-pitched harp solos. Sometimes Popper (in town with his own band, John Popper & the Duskray Troubadours) went a bit too far, egged on by the applause, and threatened to overshadow Bowersox's first SXSW spotlight. As great a player as he is, he's never one for playing few notes or leaving the slightest space between them. But he added to a rich performance, seeming to enliven mandolin player Charlie King, bassist Frankie May and, for "Mason," Bowersox's husband Brian Walker. Bowersox, who lives in Chicago, sang and played like a veteran, clearly in command of the band. Each player watched her for cues and chords, as she fearlessly played a set that included carefully constructed folk-pop like "Mine All Mine" and revved-up soul-rockers like "On the Run" and "Kiss Ya." All original, too, thank heavens. Her "Idol" experience is well on the way to becoming a footnote in her bio. "You might know me from a certain television show," she said early in the set. "... 'Extreme Makeover.'" The show turned into as much a comedy set as a musical one, with Bowersox and Popper veering into a bizarre, slap-happy run of poop jokes. It began when Walker joined her on stage for "Mason," their wedding song, wearing a white shirt and jeans. Bowersox wore the same combo, and she quipped, "Even our poop is starting to smell the same." The scatological humor kept on throughout the set. Backstage afterward, Popper said, "I've never met another singer with such soul and fecal humor." When will Bowersox finally play a full gig in Chicago again? She didn't know. She and Walker live on the North Side. Walker, however, plays April 7 at the Bottom Lounge, and she'll be backing him up. ** How Crystal met John: If you watch "American Idol" closely, you might have heard Bowersox say something odd during a post-performance interview during the finals in May 2010. She said, "Meow is the time." It was a bet, she said, between her and a friend, Steve Lemme, an actor who was in the 2001 comedy "Super Troopers." In that movie, Lemme's character, State Trooper MacIntyre Womack, is wagered by his buddy to say the word "meow" 10 times during a traffic stop. "Meow is the time" counted as one. Lemme also knows Popper. Bowersox made the original connection online via Lemme. When she hit Austin on Friday, she texted Popper and he came right to the venue. It's a small festival, after all. Kanye West, Jay-Z, John Legend and more party late into the night for SXSW diversion By Thomas Conner on March 20, 2011 12:28 PM AUSTIN, Texas — A rare, full "super moon" shone over the Texas capital Saturday night, but only one music star was big enough to eclipse not only that but nearly all of the annual South by Southwest music conference and festival: Kanye West. Announced via a cryptic online video weeks before SXSW (with the audience enticed via a Twitter/texting RSVP, which the sponsoring company admitted failed terribly, with hundreds turned away) West hogged the spotlight on the festival's final night and set up shop in an unusual venue, a decommissioned downtown power plant. By early Saturday morning, fans were already lined up for the midnight show; at showtime, a mob of ticketless fans mashed the barricades outside, hoping to get in. The venue's capacity is just over 2,000; the event guest list received more than 10,000 requests in its first hour. From 1 to 4 a.m., West trotted much of the roster of his G.O.O.D. record label across the stage, including Mos Def (who was surprisingly basic and dull), Pusha T (his "Fear of God" mixtape is due Monday) and Kid Cudi (a crowd favorite and a snappy dancer). Most blended in, one after the next, except the arresting Cyhi Da Prince (whose crazy-fast rhymes were paired with the masked Mad Violinist for "Sideways") and the aberrant Mr. Hudson (a bleach-blond white singer who sounds like Midge Ure and covered Alphaville's "Forever Young"). The concert was filmed for an online broadcast scheduled for April 22 — Good Friday. West himself slipped on stage without pomp and launched a set that swung between brilliant and boring. Fiery as he is — and certainly was in hot flashes during "Gorgeous" and "Hell of a Life" — the concert benefited most when he added extra theater, such as the cymbal-flipping marching band that joined him (a la "Tusk") during "All of the Lights," John Legend leavening the mood with elegant piano playing (first during "Christian Dior Denim Flow" and "Blame Game," then for his own "Ordinary People") and the big-guns set of the night — Jay-Z showing up for six of the set's 19 songs. When Jay-Z is on stage, Kanye actually looks humbled, standing there with not much to do while Hova roared through "Big Pimpin'." Alas, no announcement of a release date for or even the status of the pair's teased collaboration album, "Watch the Throne." Ultimately, though, this concert merely crashed the party. Assembled and promoted by an online video service, not the festival itself, West's parade of salesmanship only managed to draw a crowd away from aspiring bands that came to SXSW, one of the few opportunities they have to possibly be heard without the ruckus of Kanye-sized competition. Kanye & Co.'s set list Sunday morning: "Dark Fantasy," "Gorgeous," "Hell of a Life," "Can't Tell Me Nothing," "Christian Dior Denim Flow" (with John Legend), "Blame Game" (with John Legend), "Ordinary People" (John Legend), "Power," "Say You Will," "Runaway," "All of the Lights" (with marching band), "H.A.M." (with Jay-Z), "Monster" (with Jay-Z), "Swagga Like Us"(with Jay-Z, but cut short when Kanye laughed and confessed, "I forgot that thing"), "PSA" (Jay-Z), "So Appalled"(with Jay-Z), "Big Pimpin'" (Jay-Z), "Lost in the World" (with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon), "Good Life" (with the G.O.O.D. crew). Violence and crowd control problems cause SXSW to consider limiting events By Thomas Conner on March 21, 2011 1:01 PM AUSTIN, Texas — Injuries and incidents of violence pockmarked this year's SXSW music festival in the Texas capital, causing organizers to consider scaling some things back for 2012. At a 1 a.m. Saturday show by '80s pop band OMD, a camera boom broke and fell into the crowd. Four people were taken to the hospital with moderate injuries. SXSW director Roland Swenson called the accident "disheartening" and added, "This is our 25th year, and we've never had anyone permanently injured." On Friday night, Chicago pop-punk band Screeching Weasel's show in east Austin was cut short when singer Ben Weasel (Ben Foster), after lengthy diatribes between songs and some taunting of the audience, ended up in a brawl after someone threw an ice cube that hit him in the eye. Crowd control was a problem at several concerts. Late Saturday night, a throng of fans unable to get inside pressed against an alley fence at the venue where reunited Canadian noise-rock band Death From Above 1979 was playing. Eventually, the fence was pushed down, "inciting a mini riot" according to the venue. "Some kid came over the top [of the fence], as soon as he came over the top the fence kind of went and everybody started coming in," the bar owner said. Police on horseback intervened and cleared the alley, allowing the show to continue. Thursday evening, the Strokes filled the downtown Auditorium Shores amphitheater to its 20,000-person capacity. When the gates were closed to any new concertgoers, several climbed the fence and jumped off the tops of portable toilets to get in. Minor injuries were reported. Late Saturday night, crowds mobbed an unusual downtown venue, a decommissioned power plant, where Kanye West had scheduled a midnight show. This concert was not an official SXSW event, and it was free — to anyone who saw a tweeted promotion and RSVP'd via text message to the concert's organizer, the online video service Vevo. The company reports receiving 15,000 texts within the first two minutes after announcing the show. Capacity at the venue was 2,500. Things soured when several thousand people who had received text messages saying they would be admitted to the show then received a second message apologizing and adding that they did not have a ticket, after all. Vevo issued a public apology, admitting "we missed this up" and saying they were "asked by the Austin Police Department" to limit the size of the crowd. (Kanye himself was uninvited to a fashion show earlier in the week.) Despite that — and the fact that entry would be granted only to those with a confirmed RSVP or other VIP access — fans began lining up outside the venue early Saturday morning. Crowd control, I can tell you, was poorly planned and managed, with hundreds of hopeful and some angry fans pressing against a barricade demanding entry and shouting at police and security personnel. MTV reports a spokesperson for SXSW says the festival will reexamine its approach to free events, "which appear to have reached critical mass," plus Austin city officials plan to limit permits next year for free shows. In the video below from Austin's KXAN, Swenson attributed the restive attitude at some events this year on too many free events, which "attract an element of people who are troublemakers." This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual conference and festival ...
© Tulsa World Tulsa band Fanzine gets a chance to shine at SXSW showcase By Thomas Conner 03/19/2000 AUSTIN, Texas — The sound man at Opal Divine's Firehouse was filling the pre-show dead time with his own selection of classic-rock greatest hits: a couple of cuts from the Eagles' "Long Run" album, a smattering of Zeppelin, a lot of Journey. A few minutes before showtime, he played Cheap Trick's live cover of "Ain't That a Shame," and Fanzine drummer Don Jameson started air-drumming. "Oh, yes!" he said, tapping into the song's lengthy introductory groove. "This is what it's about, right here. It's not, 'Won't you step back from that ledge, my friend' " — making a face, making fun of the Third Eye Blind hit "Jumper" — "It's about the shaking of the booty. It's about being larger than life . . . There isn't an arena big enough to hold us." This weekend it wasn't arenas, just a small club patio on the edge of Austin's hottest nightclub scene and in the middle of its yearly music-industry lottery. On Wednesday night, Jameson and his Tulsa-based rock band, Fanzine, kicked off the South by Southwest music festival, an annual congregation of music-business talent scouts and international media all searching for the Next Big Thing. Nearly 1,000 bands — a record — from around the world were scheduled to play hourlong sets in clubs throughout Austin this weekend, and Fanzine had the daunting task of playing in the first showcase slot on the first night of the festival. In just a few hours, and certainly over the four days of the festival, these four players would learn what, indeed, it was all about. It's all about the gig South by Southwest is basically a live-music mall. "Buyers" from record labels, management companies and music magazines stroll up and down Austin's nightclub-lined Sixth Street and shop for the hottest new fashions in pop music. So when your band is fortunate enough to land a showcase here, you want everything to be perfect. For Fanzine, it very nearly was. "How lucky are we to be playing right before the Mayflies?" Jameson asked when the band finished sound check. The Mayflies, an up-and-coming pop band from Chapel Hill, N.C., were listed by many SXSW forecasters as one of the most interesting acts to see this year. They would thus be drawing a crowd of scouts and record company reps, and many of them would come early — and hear Fanzine. "We're blessed tonight. This feels good," Fanzine singer Adam said before the show. The band arrived in Austin on Tuesday and immediately went to work with staple guns and smiles, tacking up posters advertising the Wednesday night gig and thrusting handbills into the palms of any passers-by. "We came all this way, I just want someone to see us," Jameson said. "Tonight's all about being seen — eyes on us." And, of course, ears. It's not about the gig Still, Jameson and the other Fanzine players weren't expecting miracles. Their set coincided with the Austin Music Awards — a ceremony honoring the best of local talent, much like Tulsa's Spotniks — the big event of Wednesday night. The band's 24 hours in town wasn't a lot of time to spread the word about its showcase. Most music reps and media don't arrive until late Wednesday or Thursday, anyway. "I really expect very little tonight," Jameson said. "It's the first night, and this club's off the beaten path, but this sure is great to put (in the press kit). It means we've been chosen among some kind of selected upper crust." The World Wide Web was certainly an aid in advance promotion. Word of the showcase spread quickly on, oddly enough, Web sites and newsgroups for fans of the Toadies. Plus, Tulsa radio music directors e-mailed their record company contacts en masse, advising them of the Fanzine show. One of them, KMYZ 104.5-FM music director Ray Seggern, attended Wednesday's show. Seggern is an Austin native, having worked with the city's popular modern rock station for several years. He knows people, and he dragged as many as he could with him to see the Tulsa band. But even Seggern was realistic. "It's not about the gig," he said. "The gig is the least important part. (What's important) is the networking, the experience, the mindset. Just being here and wearing a badge is important." Case in point: Hanson. The young Tulsa trio spent several days at SXSW early in the '90s. Too young to even play in the local bars, they strolled the streets and softball-park bleachers, singing for anyone who would listen. An astute music manager did, and the rest is history. It's about support For Fanzine's show, though, Opal Divine's was packed. Most importantly, the crowd stayed and stared. Many SXSW showcase audiences often are indifferent groups of jaded music-industry mavens concentrating on wheeling and dealing with other industry folk rather than listening to the bands. Fanzine's crowd, though, stopped, looked and listened. The band was on point, too. Tighter than they've been in many months — and fueled by more adreneline, no doubt — they tore through 40 minutes of their groove-stuffed, flashy and unrelenting rock 'n' roll. Adam threw off his bright orange jacket ("You like me mack?") by the third song and was soon shaking his tambourine all over the club's outdoor wooden deck and dancing with Beatle Bob, an eccentric music-industry analyst who came to the show and danced his trademark swingin' dance. Many in Wednesday night's crowd were Tulsans, checking out their hometown band on Austin's turf. Tim Kassen, a Williams Company agent who also books bands for Tulsa's Bourbon Street Cafe on 15th Street, was in town and said he made a beeline to Fanzine's show. "Nobody performs like Adam, with all that energy," he said. "Heck, if I had the money, I'd sign them." Also looking on were T.J. Green and Angie Devore, the husband-and-wife team at the helm of new Tulsa band Ultrafix. They weren't scheduled to play in Austin this weekend; they came down just to attend the conference and meet music-business folks and other musicians. They had planned to arrive in Austin on Thursday but came a day early to be present for the Fanzine show. "It's all about support, man," Green said. By George, we got us a rock show By Thomas Conner 03/19/2000 AUSTIN, Texas — When South by Southwest occurs each March, the Texas capital is literally overrun by music businesspeople and musicians. How invasive is the conference? Just ask presidential hopeful George W. Bush. When the Texas governor realized he was going to sweep Tuesday's second big round of Republican presidential primaries, his campaign staff decided to book a local ballroom to host the celebration and inevitable victory speech. But they couldn't find one. Every ballroom, theater and public venue in town was booked up with SXSW events. Bush and his supporters wound up in far northwest Austin, patting themselves on the back in a gymnasium at the Dell Jewish Community Campus. Talk about rocking the vote. Rangers in command Storms raked the Texas hill country late Thursday afternoon. The Ray Price show in the park surely was doomed, so we headed for indoor shelter. The fact that it had tortillas, margaritas and the Red Dirt Rangers made it downright heaven. The Oklahoma roots-music band played the first of its five SXSW-week gigs ("Six," Ranger John Cooper said later — "We actually got one that pays!") at Jovita's, an authentic Mexican restaurant south of downtown Austin. And I mean authentic. The walls were arrayed with rich, colorful murals, mostly depicting masked rebels in olive drab, including a giant portrait of Che Guevera. The tables were so sticky we had to paper them over with copies from a stack of someone's Spanish-English poem entitled "Crossroads." Our waitress had two breathtaking parrots tattooed on her shoulder blades. As the storm pelted Jovita's corrugated skylight, the Rangers blasted through their typically invigorating set of Okie rock 'n' soul, opening the show with two Woody Guthrie covers, "Rangers' Command" (the title track to the Rangers' latest CD, recorded in Austin) and "California Stars" (one of the Woody lyrics put to music by Billy Bragg and Wilco) — a nod to Woody's younger sister, Mary Jo Edgmon, sitting in the audience. Also watching the Rangers was fellow Stillwater native, now Austin-based songwriter Jimmy Lafave. The Rangers also played his song "Red Dirt Roads," rocking it more than Lafave probably ever envisioned and using it as a sparring match between electric guitarist Ben Han and new steel guitarist Roger Ray, also of Stillwater's Jason Boland and the Stranglers. Whoops and yelps all around. This ... is Wanda Conversation overheard on the sidewalk outside the Continental Club, Thursday night in the freezing cold, waiting in vain to get inside and hear Oklahoma City rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson: She: "We'll never get in." He: "They're full? At eight o'clock? Who is this woman?" She: "I don't know. She looks like Loretta Lynn." He: "Loretta Lynn never had a stand-up bass player like that." She: "Can you see her hair?" He: "That's all I can see. I could be back at the hotel and still see that hair." She: "It's not that big." He: "What?" She: "Nothing. I was wrong." Talking 'bout Tulsa Tulsans protested the derogatory mention of the city in a recent Best Western ad campaign, but our hometown creeps into the world's consciousness in strange and mysterious ways. Take, for example, a song by Astrid, a spunky and tuneful guitar band from Scotland. Near the end of the band's hard-hitting showcase, they played a song called "Cybersex," which the singer was good enough to point out "is about cybersex." The refrain, from the point of view of the narrative's libidinous web surfer: "It's 3 p.m. in Idlewild / Kansas, Tulsa, Arkansas." Minty sweet Norman band Starlight Mints were lucky enough to land a SXSW showcase this year, but it was nearly ruined by equipment problems that delayed them 20 minutes — nearly half of their allotted playing time. (And SXSW showcases begin and end on time, or else.) Still, the embryonic rock band impressed a capacity crowd at the intimate Copper Tank North club with its herky-jerky melodies and noises. My notes include this absurd but revealing description of the band's music: "Gordon Gano (Violent Femmes) singing, Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) on guitar, chick from the Rentals (Maya Rudolph) on keys, all aboard a carousel at Wayne Coyne's (Flaming Lips) fun park." For the record While SXSW takes over Austin with live music, another of the country's biggest musical events occurs here at the same time. This one involves recorded music: the annual Austin Record Convention, the largest new-and-used record sale in the country. Hundreds of record dealers from all over the country huddle over tables in the Palmer Municipal Auditorium and hawk more than a million CDs, LPs, 45s and even 78s. With the world's music business leaders in town, these dealers have to face a particular and knowledgeable clientele. "This is the reissue, though. See, it's dated '92. You don't have the '84 original with the six extra versions?" That's pretty standard discussion fare at the convention. One dealer from Minnesota boasted a pristine, still-wrapped copy of former Tulsan Leon Russell's "The Wedding Album." Asking price: $100. A C-note? Has he heard it? "No, but my books tell me that's a steal." A rose by any other name ... Part of the fun of perusing the SXSW schedule is the humor and daring of some of the band names. The chucklers on this year's list: Alabama Thunder Pussy, ... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, Betty Blowtorch, Camaro Hair, Del the Funky Homosapien, the Dino Martinis, Fatal Flying Guilloteens, I Am the World Trade Center, Man Scouts of America, Maximum Coherence During Flying, the Psychedelic Kinky Fellows, Roar! Lion, Sci-Fi Uterus and the Tremolo Beer Gut. Food for the soul If you want music media to come see your band, set up a free buffet. A table of sumptuous Texas barbecue and an absence of cash registers filled La Zona Rosa with SXSW registrants Thursday afternoon to see the Nixons open for Texas guitar hero Ian Moore. Greasy hands clapped for the Nixons' timeless (as in, stuck in 1993) grunge rock. The band sported a new record label (the showcase sponsor, Koch Records), new songs ("P.O.V." and the wildly cheery "Blackout") and, well, a new band. Singer Zac Malloy is the only original Norman-native member left, having jettisoned the rest of the crew for a new batch of Dallas-based throw-backs. The Nixons started in Norman as a cover band, scored a modern rock hit early in the '90s with "Sister" and now are based in Dallas. A new album is due April 11. 'What about the amps?' Austin is full of colorful, sometimes downright eccentric, characters, so when we noticed the guy talking to himself on Fourth Street, it was no big shock. He stood in the hot afternoon sun, pacing in circles, gesturing wildly and talking, talking, talking — by himself. "What about the amps?" he kept asking. "Where are the amps?" We skirted him just off the curb, thinking to ourselves, "So young, and already so nuts." Then we noticed it. The earpiece, the hidden microphone — a hands-free cell phone. SXSW snapshots: The high, mighty and downright loony go wild in Austin By Thomas Conner 03/22/2000 AUSTIN, Texas — More than 30 years after his death, musicians — and, indeed, Americans — are just now figuring out what Woody Guthrie was about. Greg Johnson, owner of Oklahoma City's revered Blue Door nightclub, summed it up ably during a South by Southwest panel discussion entitled "Made for You and Me: Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Legacy." "Woody was about freedom and community," Johnson said. "He was about propping people up. Bruce Springsteen used to say it this way: 'Woody was about the next guy in line.' " Veteran music journalist Dave Marsh led the panel, which also included Austin-based songwriters Jimmy Lafave and Michael Fracasso. The star of the panel, though, was Guthrie's youngest sister, Mary Jo Edgmon, who regaled the crowd with homespun tales of her proud father, her misunderstood mother and her iconic older brother. "I was reared on music all the way up to here," Edgmon said, pointing over her head. "Woody taught me chords on the guitar. I got really good at that C chord, I guess it was." Edgmon spoke proudly of the "1,000 percent turnaround" in America's perception of Woody, particularly in his Green Country hometown of Okemah. She said she's thrilled to see the misunderstandings about Woody's political and spiritual beliefs clearing up. "I want the world to understand that the Guthrie family was not trash, that Woody was as good a man as there is," she said. Lafave and Fracasso both punctuated the panel session with performances. Fracasso sang Guthrie's "1913 Massacre" and one of his own songs directly inspired by Woody's songwriting (Fracasso's chorus: "From the mountains to the valleys / from the prairies to the sea / If you ain't got love, you ain't got a nickel"). Lafave sang a song about Woody called "Woody's Road," written by acclaimed Oklahoma songwriter Bob Childers, and then closed the afternoon event with a rendition of Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills," joined by members of the Red Dirt Rangers and Edgmon herself. Paint the town Redd Austin's Top of the Marc is a clean, classy place — not your usual SXSW mosh pit. The clientele shows the proper amount of cuff, and the bar has drambuie. Festival organizers couldn't just stick another all-girl Japanese punk band in here. They needed class. So they called upon Charlie Redd and his boys. Decked out and dynamic, the Full Flava Kings brought Redd back home in style. "Bring it on home, y'all!" Redd would shout in a song's closing jam, though it was unclear which home he was referring to — his native Austin or his new Tulsa HQ. Either way, his Austin friends and fans saw a new Redd on Saturday night: more groovy, more gravy and drizzling a more honeyed baritone over the band's dense rhythm-and-funk. In addition to charter Kings Dave Kelly on guitar, Brian Lee on keyboards and Stanley Fary beating the drums mercilessly, the Full Flava Kings debuted new guitarist and veteran Tulsa funkmeister Travis Fite (Phat Thumb) to the Austin crowd. Their response? Ask the female stranger who tried to start The Bump with me during the show. Here come the brides Tyson Meade, the colorful leader of the Norman-reared Chainsaw Kittens, used to wear dresses on stage as a rule. After his Friday night SXSW showcase, he took the fixation to a bold new level by getting married to another man in full white-gown fabulousness. Before the next band (the bizarro but like-minded Frogs) took the tent stage outside the Gallery Lombardi Lounge, Meade reappeared in a wedding processional that parted the crowd. The wedding party included several maids, matrons and misters of honor in various degrees of Mardi Gras-esque garb, all of whom surrounded the officiating Hindu priest for the brief ceremony. In a flurry of toasts and funny-but-heartfelt vows, Meade and Skip Handleman Werner — who was always preceded by the mysterious title "international pop star" — were pronounced unlawfully married. They smooched, and the wedding party bunny-hopped from the venue as "Y.M.C.A." blared. Reports of this high camp should not overshadow news of the Kittens' triumphant return. Still without a record deal after the sad demise of the Smashing Pumpkins' Scratchie Records, the Kittens blasted back into action Friday night with an explosive set of old and new glam-punk songs. Meade, juiced by pre-wedding jitters, took the stage in a royal blue feathery jacket and furiously belted and screamed his way through the serrated set of Kitty classics reaching all the way back to the band's debut album, "Violent Religion." I can't chaaange Billy Joe Winghead's lead singer, John Manson, took out his personal angst about Meade's marriage (he was distraught over not getting to, um, kiss the bride) through BJW's two sets of roadhouse rock. The OKC-Tulsa band blew into Austin late Saturday and played back-to-back shows at the Hole in the Wall, a University of Texas hangout, and Cheapo Discs. Shoppers at the latter venue were typically unfazed by the blaring band over in the corner — until they played "Free Bird." A cliche request that normally turns off young rock audiences always turns heads when its coming from the five-piece Billy Joe Winghead. Tulsa bassist Steve Jones sings over the guitar grind while Manson waves out the melody on his green theremin. Amid the band's repertoire of songs about rest-stop sex, doomed B-filmstars and car salesman lingo, "Free Bird" is practically the crown jewel and always a crowd pleaser. Hit me with your best shot Readers of the Austin Chronicle voted David Garza the city's second-best musician of the '90s. (Ask a blues fan who was first.) It's not simply because he writes well-rounded pop songs and executes them gracefully on record with his band; it's that he really doesn't need his band at all. On the Waterloo Park stage late Saturday afternoon, Garza held his own with only his pretty red Gibson guitar to keep him company. Songs that on record seem pieced together by clever arrangements of drum machines, acoustic guitar and Garza's versatile voice — like "Discoball World" -- evened out in frenetic and energetic solo jams. Near the end, he took requests, cheerfully tearing his fingernails off by barreling through "Take Another Shot." Thank you, sir, may I have another? The good, the bad, and the ugly Rumor of the week: That Neil Young was the mysterious "special guest" billed immediately before Steve Earle's Friday night set at Stubb's. Young was in Austin for South by Southwest, but not the music part. His latest concert film, "Silver and Gold," was premiering. The special guest was Whiskeytown singer Ryan Adams. Patron saint of the festival: Doug Sahm. The drive-train for the Sir Douglas Quartet may be dead but he hasn't left Austin. From two star-studded tributes to him — one at Wednesday night's Austin Music Awards (featuring Shawn and Shandon Sahm), another Friday at the legendary Antone's blues club (featuring former bandmate Augie Meyers and, straight from the where-is-he-now bins, Joe "King" Carassco) -- to posters in Mexican restaurants advertising prints of his portrait for sale, Sahm has edged out Townes Van Zandt as the bandwagon who bought the farm. Best TV footage no one could use: Steve Earle's Thursday morning keynote address. Earle delivered his words of wisdom wearing a T-shirt that read, "I'm from f—-ing outer space." Comeback of the week: Former Byrds icon Roger McGuinn, whose Friday night performance brought overplayed standards back down to earth with grace and style. Best T-shirt: "My lawyer can kick your lawyer's ass." Most shameless self-promotion: Dallas rap-rockers Pimpadelic not only drove around downtown blocks in its giant tour bus with the band's name emblazoned along the sides, the band also spent its free time walking around Austin with dancers it hired from the Yellow Rose strip club, all of whom, of course, sported tightly cropped T-shirts bearing the band's name. Watch for the band's debut on Tommy Boy Records. Most prominent foreign country: The Netherlands, buoyed by waning interest in the annual Japan Night and extensive lobbying by the Dutch Rock and Pop Institute. Best non-SXSW show: Austin's ear-splitting Hotwheels Jr. on Friday afternoon in a tiny CD shop way out in north Austin. They spell it r-a-w-k. Favorite new discovery: Scotland's newest guitar pop band Astrid, with a debut album, "Strange Weather Lately," out now on Fantastic Plastic Records. Best diversion on the way to another gig: The strolling horn band Crawdaddy-O, which braved the frigid cold Thursday night livening people's steps with funky Dixieland jams, including — at Adam of Fanzine's request — some sizzling James Brown. This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual conference and festival ...
© Tulsa World Musical Mardi Gras Spotlights Oklahoma's 'Red Dirt' Singing Poets By Thomas Conner 03/21/1998 AUSTIN, Texas — South by Southwest is a musical Mardi Gras, of sorts, but Chris Maxwell spent Thursday afternoon immersed in actual Mardi Gras beads. To draw some attention to his label, Binky Records, and its artists, Maxwell passed out Mardi Gras beads in the South by Southwest trade show. One artist, in particular, concerned Maxwell the most. In fact, it's an Oklahoman, and it's the whole reason Maxwell launched Binky Records. “I started this label a while ago after I met Tom Skinner and wondered why in the world this man didn't have records out all over the country,'' Maxwell said. Skinner is a popular performer in Tulsa and Stillwater, and he's at the apex of the group of songwriters that forge the “red dirt'' sound — Oklahoma's unique brand of singer-songwriter music with that good ol' boy touch. He and a few other immensely talented songwriters -- Muskogee's Greg Jacobs and Stillwater's Bob Childers — are featured on the Binky Records sampler that Maxwell handed out to every journalist and music industry mole that walked through the South by Southwest trade show. In addition, Skinner, Jacobs and Childers performed an unofficial showcase concert Thursday night at Austin's Waterloo Ice House. The bill also featured Green Country native Jimmy Lafave and area favorite Ray Wylie Hubbard. The Big Names: To seed the festival with exciting attractions, South by Southwest books a couple of unofficial headliners each year. This year's biggie: Sonic Youth. The announcement came just a couple of weeks before the festival, but word spread quickly because the lines to get into the show at Austin's La Zona Rosa wound around the block. Why the hoopla? Sonic Youth is a veteran New York quartet that — I realized upon hearing them again live -- created the entire sonic landscape that allowed grunge to exist. The carefully reined dissonance, the thudding guitar rhythms, the squelched noises and walls of distortion — it all opened the doors for modern rock's anger and angst. The band is still hot, too. During their long set Thursday night, they played mostly songs from the forthcoming new album on Geffen Records, “A Thousand Leaves.'' Actually, these experiences weren't just songs; they're compositions, sonic landscapes, carefully crafted noise. Hearing it live is breathtaking. Guitarist Thurston Moore closes his eyes and meditates on the music's off-kilter drone; then suddenly comes the inevitable change, a jerk in the song that turns Moore's guitar into a live transformer. He snaps the strings, scrapes them, even rubs them with a bow. Amazing. Another oldie act played Thursday night: Soul Asylum. The passe bunch of bores played songs from their new album, “Candy From a Stranger,'' due in May. Festival Highlight: Imperial Teen's Thursday night show was an appropriate follow-up to the Sonic Youth show. Here was a scrappy band from San Francisco taking the sonic expanse and reverence of dissonance that Sonic Youth pioneered on the other side of the continent and containing it all within head-bobbing pop songs. The same occasional guitar torture is there, and they learned their droning rhythmic lessons from Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon, but instead of crafting rock suites, Imperial Teen presses the same sonics into the mold of an accessible pop song. The results are exhilarating and smart. As the Austin Chronicle's Raoul Hernandez said, Imperial Teen is the Talking Heads as Nirvana was the Sex Pistols. It's the same shtick running backwards on the same rock 'n' roll road, and it's exciting. MMMSXSW: The Sheridans, a Pretenders-like Austin band, ran an ad in the SXSW program book that read, “In celebration of their third annual rejection from SXSW, the Sheridans are taking it to the street. Hey, it worked for Hanson!'' Indeed, Tulsa's own hit trio was discovered via SXSW in 1994. The brothers three didn't have a showcase; instead, they wandered among spectators at a music-business softball game, harmonizing for anyone who would listen. “You know, people were smiling at them cutely and laughing when they walked away. I don't think anybody really listened to their singing,'' Christopher Sabec told the Austin American-Statesman. Sabec was the one person who listened and realized the Hansons had hit potential. He rushed to talk to their parents about managing the boys, and the rest is history. Year of the Woman: Women dominated the annual Austin Music Awards this year, held on the first night of the SXSW music festival. One woman, in particular, Austin native Abra Moore swept the top awards, winning Musician of the Year, best album (“Strangest Places,'' Arista), best song (“Four-Leaf Clover'') and best pop artist. Shawn Colvin came in second behind Moore in each of those categories, but Colvin won for best songwriter and best single (both for “Sunny Came Home''). Other awards of note: best electric guitarist, Ian Moore; best female vocals, Toni Price; best male vocals, Malford Millgan of Storyville; best country artist, Don Walser; best alternative band, El Flaco (Sixteen Deluxe came in second); and the Hall of Fame inductees were Shawn Colvin, Doyle Bramhall, Daniel Johnston, Keith Ferguson and Jason McMaster. Respite From Rock: Thursday night's Daemon Records showcase provided the ultimate break from the rigors of other rock. Daemon is the Atlanta-based indie label started by Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, and the star performer in the line-up was one Ray watched with intensity. Her name is Terry Binion, and her debut release, “Leavin' This Town,'' already has been reviewed by publications as diverse as People and No Depression. She's a lone singer-guitarist who warbles in that range-jumping singing style Nanci Griffith once dubbed “folkabilly.'' During her Thursday show, she played a song called “Dear Richard,'' which she explained was her ode to a night in the life of fellow Americana performer Richard Buckner. It was the perfect tribute, her reedy voice lurching between roars and coos much like Buckner himself. “Are these the songs that you write out on the prairie / with the moon over your genius head brightly shining,'' she sang. Band to Watch: The band of the festival that simply screamed “Next Big Hit'' hails from just up the turnpike from Tulsa in Stockton, Mo. It's Flick, a quartet of very green but hardy teen-agers with style and panache oozing from between their power chords. Oh, they've got their share of teen-age angst, but they radiate such spirit and energy that tames the whiny beast. Imagine the Smashing Pumpkins covering ballads by the Raspberries. Led by the Thornton brothers — Oran, 18, and Trevor, 14 -- Flick has a freshly scrubbed look and fuzzy rock sound that is destined to shoot them too high too fast. They're already writing songs for the radio; Flick closed its Thursday night set before a huge, responsive crowd with Oran singing, “This is my song for the radio / want the world to know.'' Flick's debut disc should be out in June from Columbia Records. Eyes of Texas: Every March, Austin experiences its own brand of madness By Thomas Conner 03/22/1998 AUSTIN, Texas — A shower would have ruined the whole experience. Straight from eight hours on the road — grubby, bleary-eyed, irritable and scatter-brained — we stumble into, of all places, the Bates Motel. It's Wednesday night in Austin, the first night of the South by Southwest music festival, a veritable flea market of new, young bands with a lot to prove (Flick, Sixteen Deluxe) and old, old bands begging for continued respect (Tommy Tutone, Soul Asylum). One such relatively new band with a lot to prove is Billy Joe Winghead, a quartet comprising slightly askew residents of Tulsa and Oklahoma City. At their official SXSW showcase tonight, they have to prove that they can draw a crowd and keep it — even people as bedraggled as I am, longing for fresh sheets and hot water rather than the club's stale cigarette haze and lukewarm beer. However, Billy Joe Winghead's lead singer, John Manson, is going into the gig with a different plan. “We like to have the opposite effect. We want to clear the room. Faster than pepper gas, if we can,'' he says, his maniacal grin stretching horrifically underneath his Uncle Fester bald head. With that objective in mind, he's not going to have much to work with. As the band takes the small, harshly lit stage, they look out over a paltry crowd of about a dozen disinterested faces. Again, it's the first night of the festival. All the industry people are across town at the Austin Music Awards, and the townies still have to go to work in the morning. But eventually, Manson's plan to evacuate the club will backfire. Of course, if anyone could clear a room, Billy Joe Winghead is the band to do it. Their kind of rock 'n' roll used to reverberate from behind a chain-link safety screen. They named their debut disc after a truck stop, and the distorted guitar chords don't crunch as much as they stomp. They sing songs about drug-induced car accidents, aging sex queens, crooked cops and tractor pulls. And they do it very, very loudly. But these are the desensitized '90s. Such topics don't frighten the gentlefolk anymore. Instead of clearing out the dingy little Bates Motel, Billy Joe Winghead fills it up. They start playing five minutes before their scheduled starting time (“We will now be the first band to play this year's South by Southwest,'' Manson declares as he starts “C'mon I Wanna Lay Ya''), and throughout the band's 40-minute set, people stream through the door. “Who is this?'' asks a smartly dressed Kate Winslet look-alike. I do my best to explain over the roar of the song “Peckerbelly.'' She looks and listens another moment longer and says, “They're so creepy. I love it.'' Indeed, this is the kind of sleaze you wind up wallowing in. My own whiny pangs for a respite from road weariness were satiated not by the meager comforts of hotel room isolation but by the bone-rattling thwacks of Tulsan Steve Jones' bass and Manson's glitter-green theremin (an eerie contraption that does as much to fascinate an audience as the band's own bawdiness). The music's tawdriness, boldness and spookiness fill a club with vibrations that relax the most exhausted road warrior, whether he be a truck drivin' man or a pop critic on the dole. Shower? Who needs it? We must revel in our revulsion. Whether tonight's exposure will reap the band any rewards remains to be seen. The band cleared the bar only when they stopped playing. The crowd included at least one booking agent and some industry types towed by Ray Seggern, music director at Tulsa's KMYZ, 104.5 FM, himself an Austin native. Manson is keeping a cool head. “I've been through this South by Southwest hoop before, and I'm not expecting miracles. The fact that we had time to set up and got to play right in the middle of the action is enough reward for me,'' he said. The band kicked around the rest of the week and was scheduled to play a wedding on Saturday. Yikes. A Tulsa Sampler By Thomas Conner 03/22/1998 AUSTIN, Texas — The bright yellow sign outside Maggie Mae's said, “Come hear the Tulsa Sound!'' It enticed the throngs of music lovers off the sidewalks of Sixth Street -- Austin's main drag and the heart of the South by Southwest music festival — and into the club featuring the first of several bills packed with Tulsans. Dave Percefull and Bud Barnes organized the festival line-up through Percefull's Tulsa-based music company, Yellow Dog Productions. The bill featured bluesy rockers Steve Pryor, Brad Absher and Brandon Jenkins, as well as a sister pop duo called Eden. For five hours late Wednesday night and late Thursday afternoon, the four acts rotated across the stage in the rooftop loft of Maggie Mae's club. The Tulsa Sound it was — Absher's smooth, loosened-tie blues; Pryor's hard-livin', cleansing blues of a true axman, and Jenkins' muddy wheatfield country blues. During Jenkins' first set Wednesday night, Pryor sashayed around the sparse room playing air guitar. He later commented, “Ever notice how the guys who can play the hell out of a guitar never get the record deals?'' It was a question intended to compliment Jenkins, but it spoke volumes toward the plight of these three players, each incredibly tight and accomplished musicians who have been slogging through the Tulsa club scene for years without any greater reward outside the city limits. But that's what these two showcases were for, Percefull said. “I can't think of anyone in Tulsa who deserves to have fingers pointed at them in front of record industry people quite like these guys,'' Percefull said. Percefull and Barnes landed the choice timeslots and location when another record company pulled its showcases out of the festival at the last minute. Percefull, who plays guitar with Jenkins' band and has been trying to grab a stage at the festival for several years, heard about the cancellation, contacted the organizers and gave a loud, “Ahem!'' That led to not just one night featuring four acts, but two nights in a row. “We lucked out, big time,'' Percefull said. Rounding out the Tulsa Sound was Eden, a haunting pop group made of sisters Sharla and Angie Pember. Sharla backs her sister's vocals with alternating piano and acoustic guitar, and the two blend their voices into evocative harmonies. Together, they sound like Sarah McLachlan's multi-track studio recordings, but they're creating the dreamy mood live with two voices. The Yellow Dog showcase got the most out of its location, too. Maggie Mae's loft opens onto a popular rooftop loft made even more popular by this week's warm weather in Austin. Plus, the bathrooms for the large club were upstairs, so eventually everyone at Maggie Mae's walked by the Tulsa players. Hey, they come down to here to be seen and heard, right? They'll take the exposure any way it comes. Prefab? Another Lennon Goes Into the Rock Wilderness By Thomas Conner 03/27/1998 AUSTIN, Texas — Saturday, at the South by Southwest music festival, was a hard day's night. After pundits debated the remaining relevance of Paul McCartney, Sean Lennon wowed a star-struck crowd with his meandering and pretty un-Beatlesque tunes. The young Lennon seems more interested in his parents' Beach Boys records than the records of his parents. Oh, there are flashes of “Revolver''-era John here and there, but Sean has carved out his own sound right from the start. It has more to do with jazz than John and it's more Pat Metheny than Paul McCartney. Unfortunately, like Metheny, it's not exactly captivating to a large audience. The club, Austin's Cain's-sized Liberty Lunch, was packed with eager fans at the beginning of Sean's Saturday night set, but many left halfway through. Sean and his backing band, the unusually subdued Cibo Matto, clumsily wound through some complicated material — a few breezy pop tunes (as breezy as the heavy bass and Sean's low-end guitar could get), a little post-Beatles electric R&B and a lot of roomy rock-jazz. When he played guitar, he sounded like the son of Santana, and when he sang he sounded like Red House Painters' Mark Kozelek -- soft, overly breathy and slightly out of his range. All in all, intriguing stuff that will demand careful listening (read: a sizeable cult following). John would be proud, surely, but John is dead. We know this for certain. McCartney we're not so sure about. Thus the Saturday afternoon panel discussion titled “So IS Paul Dead?'' which attempted to assess the relative worth of McCartney's checkered post-Beatles solo career. The panel, which included a spectrum of resumes from songwriters Tommy Keene and Vic Chesnutt to journalists Jim DeRogatis and Michael Azerrad, not surprisingly was evenly divided and came to few conclusions. DeRogatis, rock critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, led the charge by insisting that McCartney is “to 16-year-olds today, the one who put that damned 'Yesterday' song in the elevator.'' “To many kids, he's Sinatra. He's the target of rebellion. You play rock now to not be like him,'' he said. No matter how much support was voiced for McCartney's latest album, “Flaming Pie'' (and its one stunning song, the George Martin-touched “Calico Skies''), the discussion always came back around to “Ebony and Ivory,'' his sappy 1982 phoned-in duet with Stevie Wonder that he will never live down. It was uncomfortable watching this heated debate rage basically behind McCartney's back, but the very existence of the panel and the sparking of the debate did more to answer the question on the panel's title than any carefully crafted barb. The reports of his death, it seems, have been greatly exaggerated. Austin City Limits: A South by Southwest Diary By Thomas Conner 03/27/1998 AUSTIN, Texas — Four days, about 850 shows to see. Somehow this year, the crowds at the annual South by Southwest music festival were smaller and the shows were better, which probably goes hand-in-hand. Also, there weren't as many must-see bands on the schedule. That allowed for more wandering and exploring, which is the best thing the festival can offer. I tried to see as many cool new acts and veterans as I could, and I've got the aching calves to prove it. Here's a round-up of my subjective, serendipitous stumbles through the South by Southwest showcases: Sonic Serenade: With no bandwagons to jump onto this year, like last year's electronica buzz, the most interesting stuff being plied was experimental pop. The last-minute scheduling of Sonic Youth provided the perfect balance to trippy pop explorers like Imperial Teen, Apples in Stereo and the fascinating but doomed-to-obscurity Olivia Tremor Control. Even Sean Lennon veers away from his dad's succinctness and essays jazzier, more expansive sonic experimentation. Of course, his backing band is Cibo Matto, so he couldn't remain exactly accessible. Break on Through: 14-year-old Trevor Thornton simply drips rock stardom, from the tattered-but-swank floor-length fur coat he wore to the Friday night showcases to the completely green and vulnerable look on his face as he sings. He fronts the band Flick with his guitarist older brother, Oran. Together with their made-for-MTV looks and their immense sense of style, this Stockton, Mo.-based band is destined for at least 15 proverbial minutes. The quartet's Thursday night showcase was dogged by sound problems, but no one cared; they simply put on too enthralling a Big Rock Show. Imagine the Pooh Sticks with Smashing Pumpkins production levels. Get ready. Route 66 is nowhere near: Sporting an Australian ranger hat and a quite rugged red-plaid pullover, English folksinger Billy Bragg spent Friday pitching his latest project — an album of lost Woody Guthrie songs recorded with Wilco, due in June and titled “Mermaid Avenue.'' At his Waterloo Records in-store gig, he was introduced by Robyn Hitchcock, and he sang a tear-jerking politics-made-personal lyric that Guthrie had scribbled into the margins of a notebook, “She Comes Along to Me'' (“It never could have happened if the women hadn't entered into the deal / like she came along to me''). He still promises a Tulsa date on the fall tour in support of the Guthrie album. Save your pennies and pay whatever he asks. OK, Maybe It Does: Once the oldies licks being passed off as country finally oozes out of Nashville, the industry will discover that the roots of American country music have been kept alive in Oklahoma. Two nights of showcases at the Waterloo Ice House gave a sneak peak at the bands that are archiving these down-home sentiments. Red-dirt pioneers Tom Skinner, Greg Jacobs and Bob Childers spun their tales with more precision than usual. Michael Fracasso, the plains' answer to Chris Isaak, made up for his overly simple lyrics with astonishing subtlety and suppleness. Austin-based Okie Jimmy Lafave played a few of his bluesy-boogie classics. Finally, the Red Dirt Rangers capped off the fiesta with a typically satisfying set despite technical problems with multi-instrumentalist Benny Craig's steel guitar. And what a Texas following all these Okies have; the club stayed packed till nearly 4 a.m. each night. Also, Stillwater's Great Divide played an official showcase Thursday night at the hub for country music, the Continental Club. Look for the band's debut soon on Atlantic Records. Deluxe treatment: Their twisted, gnarled My Bloody Valentine kind of pop is sometimes difficult to digest, but the Saturday night show by Sixteen Deluxe was the most amazing spectacle. An intrepid projectionist ran four 16mm film projectors onto the band and the sheet behind them, providing smartly choreographed eye candy (explosions, shimmering water, sun flares, kaleidoscopic mouths) during the full-bore set. Near the end of the set, Robyn Hitchcock joined the band for a driving rendition of Lou Reed's “Vicious.'' Soon, lead singer and guitarist Carrie Clark was jabbing out her last guitar solo while crowd-surfing. Much mania and mayhem. They'll be here in April. Don't miss them. Visible Hitchcock: Oddball Brit Robyn Hitchcock was everywhere during this year's fest, from introducing Billy Bragg's in-store show to guesting with Sixteen Deluxe. His own shows are always fascinating. At Waterloo Records on Saturday, he played a delightfully trippy acoustic set with violinist Deni Bonet, including such standards as “Madonna of the Wasps'' and “Arms of Love'' plus two hilarious new ones: about Gene Hackman (“and when he smiles / it means trouble somewhere'') and “Viva Seattle-Tacoma'' (“they've got the best computers and coffee and smack''). A fan gave him a plastic tomato. “It doesn't say Texas on the bottom,'' Hitchcock said, examining the vegetable. “It says, 'Signs Point to No.' '' Get it? His new disc is due in September. He's Alright, and So Are the Kids: The Wainwright family was in town for the festival — and that's not a new sitcom bunch. Loudon Wainwright III was hyping his latest and most fully realized album to date, “Little Ship.'' His showcase before a packed university ballroom was witty as ever, focusing on the subject of families and kids and thus comprising a veritable Cosby-esque “Loudon Wainwright: Himself.'' Most of the topical material came from the new record (“Bein' a Dad,'' the moving “Four Mirrors''), but he took a couple of appropriate requests (“Hitting You,'' “Baby in the House''). He remains astonishingly underappreciated. Son Rufus Wainwright in the tradition of Ben Folds Five. And then there were ...: The windows of Maggie Mae's on Thursday night were coated with dripping, freshly hacked lung secretions. A ferocious punk band, Human Alert from Amsterdam, tore through a set of fierce noise and bravado, spitting on everything and everyone. One of the three lead singers wore a beaten leather jacket with the self-contradictory slogan “Master of Anarchy'' painted across the back. ... Fastball's “The Way'' already has conquered modern rock radio, but this Austin band has plenty more hit songs to come. They played many of them at an acoustic in-store show Saturday afternoon and their capacity show that night at La Zona Rosa. They also have going for them what Third Eye Blind somehow (and unfairly) missed: critical respect. ... Jonathan Fire*Eater is the best garage-club band in the country. Lead singer Stewart Lupton stumbled through his band's raucous set like a drunk Stanley Laurel, and he sang with such exciting desperation, as if singing was the only thing keeping him remotely lucid. Hot stuff. ... The theme nights this year were a bust. The only time eyes were smiling Thursday at Maggie Mae's Irish Night was during the Frank and Walters spunky power pop set. Japan Night, Friday at the Tropical Isle, was a dud compared to last year's mania. Also, Rock en Espanol at Maggie Mae's West was wholly indistinct. Each band was just another forgettable modern rock band who happened to sing in Spanish, like Miami's Volumen Cero. Bummer, compadre. Pop's Tops Flock to South by Southwest By Thomas Conner 03/28/1998 Depending on who you ask, South by Southwest is either the most important event in the music industry or the most embarrassing evidence of said industry's laziness and greed run amok. Both viewpoints are pretty much on the money. Being part of that evil liberal media to which the festival caters ever so kindly, you won't be surprised to hear that I vote the former. This annual bridal fair of pop music's best and burgeoning is still the only time each year when the bulk of the music industry and its press are gathered together to actually ask, “What's new?'' Deals are still made at this behemoth, and stars rise out of Austin every year. Here's a bit of call-and-response answering some of the questions and criticisms of the best time an expense account can buy: What the heck is this thing, anyway, and why does the Tulsa World pay it any mind? South by Southwest is, as Alternative Press editor Jason Pettigrew so wisely stated it this year, the spring break of the music industry. Journalists and music biz types go down to Austin for four or five days, spending someone else's money, talk a lot of crap and wear badges that grace them with a rarely bestowed V.I.P. status. And don't forget the endless buckets of free barbecue and beer. We wear out our trendy black shoes striding between downtown clubs every hour on the hour trying to see the latest buzz band or the most interesting confection. Hopefully, we see something worthwhile and we do what we do in our respective professions to help make some noise about it. It's all about making noise, from the actual music to this ink. Plus, if Tulsa bands are part of the fiesta, by God, I'll be there. No one actually gets signed or in any way propelled forward as a result of SXSW. In a word: Hanson. Tulsa's own mega-star trio proved that just being near the festival can be the first step toward taking over the planet. In 1994, the brothers three wandered among the crowd at an industry-only softball game, singing for anyone that looked remotely interested. This impromptu performance grabbed the attention of Christopher Sabec, who rushed to talk to the Hanson parents behind the bleachers. You know the rest of the story. If it can happen to three smooth-faced doo-woppers, it can happen to punk bands and performance artists. Need more proof? Here are some acts that were discovered — at least by the music press — at SXSW: Green Day ('93), the Toadies ('92), the Gin Blossoms ('89), Big Head Todd and the Monsters ('90), Lisa Loeb ('93), Ani DiFranco ('92) and Veruca Salt ('94). Each showcase is about 40 minutes long, and there are too many going all at once. How can any artist hope to discovered out of that? First, the actual showcase is not what helps your band. That's purely entertainment for the club-crawlers. South by Southwest is not about actually seeing music as it is talking about it. The deals go down in the convention center trade show, at the record company parties, at the chance meetings here and there. The priority is to meet people and — dare I say the word? — network. Learn from the Hanson experience. Just being there and being brave enough to stand out, that's what puts contracts on your tabletop. It's only for signed bands. Unsigned bands can't ever get in. Indeed, if you ain't from Austin, cowpoke, and you ain't got a record deal, chances are you ain't getting an official showcase. Unsigned bands are a rarity, but they're there (case in point: Tulsa and Oklahoma City's Billy Joe Winghead this year), and the bulk of bands are on indie labels, which still means no one likely has heard of them. Frustrated applicants should keep in mind, though, that South by Southwest aims for a level of professionalism a notch or two above your basic talent show. Also, if Tulsa bands want more clout in this kind of arena, someone's got to get off their keister and launch a credible indie label here. We've got to walk it like we talk it. How can they call it a new-music festival when they bring in such huge acts? If you booked a festival of 845 Billy Joe Wingheads, do you think it would attract more than 6,000 industry types and another 6,000 journalists? The harsh reality is that you've got to seed the thing with some known names or no one will come and chance upon the undiscovered gem. Gotta get used to riding those coattails. It's just an excuse for critics to get together and feel important on someone else's tab. And the problem with this is ... ? This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual conference and festival ...
© Tulsa World Go SOUTH-West Young Man By Thomas Conner 03/23/1997 AUSTIN, Texas — Shortly after I checked into the Lazy Oak Inn in Austin, I met Flash Gordon. This should have clued me into just how far out this weekend would be. Flash sings and plays flute in a basic Florida bar band called the Pundits. They didn't make the cut for one of the nearly 750 showcases at this year's South by Southwest music conference, but Flash and his wife, Jo, came anyway. When your band gets rejected from SXSW, the conference offers you registration at half price, which we determined was reason enough to apply each year. We sat on the porch, soaking in a warm Austin evening and watching Molly, the inn's resident pooch, chase imaginary squirrels around the inn's massive namesake tree. Everyone had their SXSW booklets out and was making notes, circling band names, highlighting times in the schedule. You have to plan your attack carefully. At the top of each hour, about 40 musicians and spoken word artists will begin a new set in clubs all over town. Just as any sage would advise, you first must accept that you will not be able to see it all. Then you plan your route, lace up a comfortable pair of walking shoes, and hit the bricks. It's all highly subjective. Wednesday, 7:55 p.m. The music part of the conference (film and multimedia kick off the week) always begins with the Austin Music Awards on Wednesday night. Storyville, the rootsy band that's been through Tulsa (and will be back April 4), dominates the awards, winning Band of the Year, Song of the Year (“Good Day for the Blues''), Best Rock Band, and so on. Ian Moore lands Musician of the Year. Junior Brown, of course, wins Best Country Artist. And everyone is obsessing about the January death of local hero Townes Van Zandt, who is inducted into the Austin hall of fame. Wednesday, 10:15 p.m. Always on the cutting edge of cowpunk/twang-core/alt-country/whatever it's called now, Jason Ringenberg of Jason and the Scorchers tears up Liberty Lunch in a flurry of fringe and wins the Michael Stipe lookalike contest with a freshly shaven head. Warner Hodges remains one of rock's most overlooked and electrifying guitar masters. Wednesday, 11:45 p.m. Decked out in shiny silver space suits and flailing around far more than keyboard players should indeed flail, Roger Manning and one of his partners from the Moog Cookbook dazzle a slovenly audience of media registrants at the Iron Cactus restaurant. It's the first performance of the all-Moog “band'' outside of L.A. or Japan. Thursday, 12:10 a.m. As Tito and Tarantula start their set at Steamboat, film directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarrantino are refused admittance to see the bunch that played the vampire bar band their film, “From Dusk Till Dawn.'' The fire marshals had been ticketing club owners for overcrowding their establishments, and the film moguls had to get over it like everyone else. Thursday, 10:30 a.m. Carl Perkins delivers the conference keynote address in the Austin Convention Center. Certainly one of the most surreal experiences of the week, Perkins noodled on the guitar while speaking, mostly about Jesus but he did demonstrate the difference between Bill Monroe's version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky'' and that of Elvis Presley. Thursday, 3:15 p.m. Tanned, rested and ready, Tony Bennett sits down for a Q&A and talks about his “comeback'' and his irrepressible love of singing. When talking about getting booted from Columbia in the '70s, he told the story of Duke Ellington's similar fate years earlier: “They called him into the office at Columbia and said, "We're going to drop you from the label.' Duke said, "Why? What's wrong?' and they said, "You're not selling records.' Duke said, "Oh, I thought I was supposed to make the records and you were supposed to sell them.''' Thursday, 5 p.m. Tulsa modern rock band Epperley takes the stage at the Voodoo Lounge for a “pirate'' show — one not officially part of the SXSW showcase. Perhaps that officialdom has its advanatages because the quartet plays its heart out for an audience of about 12 listless club rats. In whatever setting, though, Matt Nader is a thoroughly entertaining live guitarist. Thursday, 9 p.m. Fulflej plays a subdued but affecting set at Liberty Lunch, including a cover of Sinead O'Connor's “Nothing Compares 2 U.'' Guitarist and singer MC No Joke G uses the lingo (he actually said “homies'') like he's the hippest dude around, but the music is more deeply rooted in arena rock and power pop to allow his thick, dark curls to become dreads anytime soon. Thursday, 10:30 p.m. Now that his original power pop band 20/20 has resurfaced, Tulsa native Ron Flynt tried out his solo chops in the tiny space of Bob Popular's Headliner's Room Upstairs. With fellow 20/20 member and Tulsa native Steve Allen adding lead guitar flourishes to Flynt's acoustic strum, the two rolled easily through a warm set of 20/20 classics and new Flynt originals. Flynt's soft, childlike voice is better suited to this folkie setting, but Flynt is still concerned with his primary (and unabashedly pop) lyrical topic: the love and loss of chicks. Thursday, 11 p.m. Dwight Twilley takes the first step in his, what, fourth comeback? Safely rooted in Tulsa once again, Twilley and his new band lean into the set of power pop gems they'd been trying out on small crowds at Caz's last fall. The large patio of Austin's Waterloo Brewing Company is nearly SRO for this gig, and Twilley looks as young and sounds as fresh as he did in 1975. He plays a classic like “I'm on Fire'' right next to something brand new, and no one knows the difference. He isn't slumming for the nostalgia addicts; he's just doing what Twilley does — rocking with more melody than the radio has played in 10 years. Susan Cowsill, a former Twilley sweetheart, backs him up at the mike for three songs. The set is flawless and exciting. Friday, 12 a.m. 20/20 follows up Twilley at the Waterloo with more stripped-down and direct rock 'n' roll. Fresh from his solo gig, Ron Flynt now wears shades and Allen's finesse on the electric guitar proves that's his real forte. Opening with the classic “Remember the Lightning,'' they charge into last year's “Song of the Universe,'' a driving melody that gets better every time I hear it. The crowd cheers every solo from drummer Bill Belknap. Flynt introduces “The Night I Heard Her Scream'' as “a song from our second album, or is it third? We've got four or five. I don't know.'' Someone from the audience shouts, “I bought one!'' Flynt looks relieved and says, “Thank you.'' Friday, 1 a.m. Justly introduced as “one of the great songwriters of the universe,'' Okie-born songwriter Jimmy Webb slides behind a grand piano in the Driskill Hotel Ballroom and pounds out several of his touching, smartly arranged songs. He sings with much more power than he gives himself credit for (“These songs were made famous by others who can actually sing''). Sure, Barbara Streisand wrapped her silky voice around Webb's “Didn't We,'' but when Webb sings it, the nuances of each original emotion are wrenchingly vivid. He pounds the piano with a confidence that's built up for 30 years, but his voice still caresses the yearning for that 21-year-old woman on a Galveston beach. There is indeed magic in the Webb of it. Friday, 2 a.m. La Zona Rosa is offering “breakfast shows,'' featuring non-SXSW acts whooping it up next to a spicy buffet line. Tonight it's Oklahoma City's Red Dirt Rangers. Someone always dances at a Red Dirt Rangers show, and one woman was so eager to get to the dancefloor that she beaned me in the head with the Miller longneck in her grip as she ran by. No problem, though, the slow laments like “Blue Diamond'' and the male bonding of “Dog on a Chain'' had already knocked me out. Multi-instrumentalist Benny Gene Craig absolutely wails on the steel guitar. Friday, 4:10 p.m. Thomas Anderson, a spaced-out folkie (a native of Miami, Okla., now based in Austin), finally goes on at ABCD's and once again proves the strength of his songwriting skills. Anderson, exactly like Elliott Murphy, writes intricate and intriguing character sketches — songs that are too big for his timid, thin vocal chops. In trademark shades, doo-rag and blazer, he sings of Bill Haley's tragic death in Mexico and a freaked-out killer named Nash the Slash. Even with subjects that could easily have been far too precious — the admiration of Deadheads in “Jerry's Kids'' and the touching “White Sands'' — Anderson boasts a tenderness that's usually hard to find in songs of this intellectual caliber. Friday, 5 p.m. This time, Epperley drums up a teeming crowd at a skate shop called Blondie's. They sound better, too, playing mostly new songs — “She's Like a Marine,'' “Jenks, America'' and “You're So 1988.'' The crowd whoops it up and cheers without the prodding of the band's rep from Triple X Records. Friday, 6:20 p.m. Just as every public establishment in New Orleans has a cocktail lounge, every place in Austin books live music, especially this weekend. As we savor the Mexican food at El Sol y La Luna, one of those South American bands with the drums and pan flutes fills the place with tropical ambiance. Greg Brown, the guitarist for Cake, is at the bar. “I see guys like this everywhere I go now,'' he says with a hint of boredom. “Better not go to Tulsa's Mayfest,'' I advise. Friday, 9:10 p.m. On that note, there's even a band scheduled to play at the inn where I'm staying. Scheduled at 8 p.m., Seattle's urban-folk progenitor Caz Murphy arrives late. His excuse? He was taken to the hospital after being bitten by a bat on the Town Lake bridge. I love this town. Friday, 10:05 p.m. I could bypass the lengthy line and get into Stubb's with my snooty press badge, but I opt to watch from outside the fence with the cheapskates; the sardined crowd on the Stubb's lawn is wallowing in mud from the previous week's rains. Supergrass plays a solid set of very British Invasion rock 'n' roll, looking a great deal more mature than the superb but spastic debut album that spawned what fans feared would be the band's wondrous one hit, “Alright.'' New songs from the album due this May included “Cheap Skate,'' “Richard III'' and the Who-ish “Silence the Sun.'' Friday, 11:20 p.m. It's Japanese Night at the Tropical Isle, and I wander into the adorable screech of Lolita No. 18. Fliers on the tables declare that the band “captive (sic) the heart of both punk rock fan and cartoon fan immediately.'' True enough — the all-girl thrashers are, to our Western sensibilities, cute as cartoons, and any punk fan would enjoy their racket. Singer G. Ena squawks with a smile over the band's quirky time signature shifts. Suddenly I recognize one of the choruses — my God, it's “Hang on Sloopy.'' Saturday, 12:30 a.m. After an interminable delay, Spring Heel Jack finally begins their set, only you can't really tell. They remain in the dark on Bob Popular's inadequate stage, and the ambient techno the London duo begins punching out of a huge bank of machines is not discernable in quality or style from the tape that was filling time between showcases. Techno of any kind is simply unsuitable for environments outside a dancefloor. Saturday, 1:05 a.m. The Mysterious John pleads for quiet through a bullhorn at the start of the Asylum Street Spankers' show, declaring that “we make music the way God intended — without the use of de-e-e-mon electricity!'' When some patrons continue talking, the elder ukulele player jumps out of his chair and shouts, “Don't make me cut a switch!'' The bawdy songs — played with clarinet, ukuleles, guitars, banjos, kazoos, washboards and a little soft shoe -- highlight the roaring part of the '20s (“Roll Me One of Those Funny Cigarettes''). As homespun and rollicking as bathtub gin. Saturday, 1 p.m. Art Alexakis, leader of Everclear, is the first hungover musician to take the Daytime Stage for a string of sets benefitting Artists for a Hate-Free America, which Alexakis helped to found. With just an acoustic guitar (he obviously writes with an electric — listen to those strings buzz!), the songs about trying to kick yourself out of the gutter are somehow more ostensible. I must have been hungover, too, because I swear he introduces one song as being “about my dog.'' The lyrics make sense: “You know I'm never home / I call but you don't talk on the phone.'' Later I'm told he said “daughter.'' Saturday, 2 p.m. Back to the Daytime Stage for my hero, Mark Eitzel, former frontman for American Music Club and a patron saint to all who drink for reasons other than escape. He knocks out five of his gems, getting lost in every song, flailing his body awkwardly and with abandon (so much so that during “Firefly'' he hits the mike with his head). He finishes a new song, with a chorus of “Why can't you leave my sister alone,'' this way: “That song's about my sister. She's a pro-rights kind of person. Her brother-in-law banned her from seeing the kids because he said she was from Satan. My sister is not from Satan.'' Despite that conviction, Eitzel momentarily retreats into an unusually potent moment of pessimism: “They told me to say lots of nice things about a hate-free America. Is there such a thing? No. This country is finished.'' Someone in the crowd asks, “Then where are we going?'' “We're going to hell, man,'' Eitzel replies. Saturday, 4 p.m. About 2,000 people cram into the second level of a downtown parking garage to hear the Car Radio Orchestra, an experiment led by Wayne Coyne of Oklahoma City's Flaming Lips. Lips manager Scott Booker says they had expected about a fifth of this crowd. “I'm just trying to keep people from destroying my car,'' he said. “I wish I'd used a rental.'' (Though, in a Dallas Morning News note about the event, Coyne had advised that most rental cars “won't have adequate sound systems for the experiment.'') After an hour of positioning 28 vehicles and running two tests, the real music begins. Coyne gives each driver a pre-mixed cassette and instructs them to press play and blare it on cue. Soon, soothing synthesizer parts are swelling from various auto systems, and then the sound of a gasping, moaning woman begins building from Coyne's car in the center of the fray. The sounds build to a, well, climax, whereupon the ecsatic female cries are sped up, manipulated and squelched and begin rapid-firing from every car. The piece is called “Altruism,'' subtitled “That's the Crotch Calling the Devil Black.'' The second piece uses more looping drum sounds, but the ending fizzles because the principle sound was on tape no. 16 -- and that car had blown a fuse. Saturday, 10 p.m. My one and only personal indulgence — Paul K. and the Weathermen play at the Atomic Cafe. Even though he wears a turtleneck tonight, the darkness of his tales of a criminal past are not blunted. The fiddle player is superfluous, and the rhythm section only adds spine to the brooding, mythical post-punk-blues Paul pulls from his surprisingly powerful acoustic guitar. “30 Coins of Gold'' tells the spooky story of a beggar who posed as Judas for da Vinci's rendering of “The Last Supper.'' Saturday, 10:45 p.m. A Ryder truck is parked on the edge of Red River Avenue, and there's a big film screen in the back door showing a director's reel of film and video clips produced by L.A.'s Underground Media, which has provided videos for everyone from Marilyn Manson to David Bowie. This reel is dominated by videos for Cottonmouth, Texas — a group from Dallas featuring musicians from the New Bohemians providing a backdrop for the clever spoken musings of an ex-junkie. The work is more accessible than that sounds. Watch for the Virgin Records debut this summer. Saturday, 11:20 p.m. Who knew Fred Sanford had given up the salvage business and launched a hip-hop career? Endlessly toying with his voice effects, Mike Ladd slops through some captivating rants. The crowd was paltry but enthused, and Ladd will probably get used to that because his raps are about topics that matter, not sex and guns. When he gets furious, as he does in his lambaste of Richard Herrnstein's race-and-education theories in “The Bell Curve,'' he sounds like he's about to clutch his chest and have “the big one.'' Sunday, 12:05 a.m. Deborah Harry may not be aging gracefully, but her vocal chops are juicy in her latest project, the Jazz Passengers, a sharp jazz outfit that sidesteps the latest retro-lounge fad in favor of stream-of-consciousness, almost avant garde compositions led by sax and trombone. Harry's role as singer is well-suited to her dynamic voice, purring one moment and roaring like a tiger the next. Sunday, 1 a.m. Figures. The best punk show I've seen in years is by the three nellie queens in San Francisco's gay punk pioneers, Pansy Division. Venting about kinky boyfriends (“James Bondage''), the men north of the border (“Manada'') and right time alternatives to night time (“Horny in the Morning''), this trio puts out the most entertaining and energetic set of the week. Bassist Chris Freeman is in a skirt and flaming out all over the stage while guitarist Jon Ginoli (wearing a T-shirt that reads, “I Dream of Weenie'') this time plays it a bit more, uh, straight, offering an unexpected moment of seriousness in his solo tale of “Denny.'' What Is South by Southwest? By Thomas Conner 03/23/1997 The South by Southwest Music and Media Conference takes place each March in the remarkably hospitable city of Austin, Texas. It could take place in no other city, really — Austin is, per capita, the live music capital of the world. Conference organizers book about 750 acts (solo musicians, singers and bands) to perform one-hour showcases during five nights in 36 clubs around the city, mostly concentrated on Sixth Street downtown. (Every other club in town, though, books “pirate'' shows.) The purpose is to provide one-stop shopping for music industry talent scouts and journalists (and, oh yeah, fans) looking for the Next Big Thing. Among the scores of up-and-coming bands are scheduled shows by well-established artists — it helps draw the crowds. The event calls itself a “conference'' because it also includes panel discussions of music industry issues and a trade show, all of which helps to justify a week of listening to rock 'n' roll in bars. This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual conference and festival ...
© Tulsa World Tulsa Musicians Featured at South by Southwest Festival By Thomas Conner 03/17/1996 AUSTIN, Texas — Most people spend the first day of the South by Southwest music festival just getting their bearings. On Thursday, Tulsa band Epperley was just trying to get its equipment. The quartet drove to the Austin festival, and the trusty van broke down more than 20 miles outside of town. “At least we got that far,'' said guitarist Matt Nader. “We could be fishing on the Red River, you know.'' Epperley was scheduled to play Friday night at the Driskill Bar in the Driskill Hotel on Austin's club-lined Sixth Street. The van was towed to an Austin garage, and the band spent Friday extracting from it instruments and amplifiers and loading them into a rented U-Haul trailer. For Tulsa singer-songwriter Bob Collum, Thursday was a day of rubbing shoulders with heroes. Before his show Thursday night, Collum was jacked up by several chance meetings with admired musicians. “I bumped into Robyn Hitchcock right there at the trade show,'' Collum said. “He just turned and looked at me like this,'' whereupon Collum cocked his head and widened his eyes into a very droll, Hitchcockian expression. He also showed off an autograph from Mark Eitzel, former lead singer of American Music Club, who was scheduled to perform Saturday night on Sixth Street. Collum's name-dropping wasn't all blowing smoke, though. Before he began playing his set at the Coffee Plantation, Peter Holsapple came in and shook Collum's hand. Holsapple was in the '80s pop band the dB's and was in Austin to perform at the State Theater with his wife, Susan Cowsill of the Cowsills. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd come by,'' Holsapple said. Collum beamed. “You don't understand,'' he said later. “He's my biggest hero.'' That's clear when Collum plays his earnest, clever brand of acoustic pop. He took to the Coffee Plantation stage Thursday with his guitar and harmonica rack and proudly announced where he was from. “I'm here to report to you that the corn is still as high as an elephant's eye,'' he said and immediately launched into “Little Johnny Shotgun.'' He played eight songs in his allotted 30 minutes, including the four songs from his latest EP: “The Long Way Out,'' “Theoretical Girlfriend,'' “Prozac Yodel No. 9'' and “Writing on the Wall.'' He's a fierce performer. Other acts that followed him Thursday night were a couple of timid souls who looked a bit vulnerable on the stage with just an acoustic guitar between them and the audience. Collum, however, holds the stage with a startling confidence — one you don't expect after talking to the sheepish, caffienated hero-worshipper offstage. He stands at the microphone like Green Day's Billie Joe, a little too far back so that he leans into it with a pigeon-toed stance and neck muscles straining -- along with his conviction. The coffee house audience included about 20 folks seated when Collum began, and maybe 30 when his set wrapped up. The members of Epperley came to support him. Holsapple left early to get to his own gig, but tipped an imaginary hat to Collum as he left. Collum wasn't thrilled with his performance, but you get the impression that he never is. It's not a false modesty, just a charming insecurity. The set was brief, sure, but Collum said he was glad he made the trip. “Sure, it's worth it to come down here, whether you get to play or not,'' he said. “I've gotten to talk to a guy with a New York label, plus I've handed out a bunch of tapes.'' It's all about exposure here. Every little bit counts. Collum, like everyone, had a lengthy list of performers he wanted to see that night, but he said he'd eventually wind up in a bowling alley. “There's this bowling alley next to my hotel,'' he said. “They serve breakfast anytime for, like, $2. That's where I'll be all the time, probably. Just watching old people bowl.'' Another band with a Tulsa connection also landed a gig at the festival. Acoustic Junction played Thursday night at the White Rabbit on Sixth Street. The band is based out of Boulder, Colo., and bassist Curtis Thompson is from Tulsa. The band came together two years ago when Thompson moved to Boulder. They have two independent releases, which together have sold about 40,000 copies. However, the band has yet to play in Tulsa. 20/20, a revived new wave band made up of Tulsa natives, spent Thursday warming up for their Friday night show. 20/20 was a fairly influential band in Los Angeles during the early 1980s, and two original members started writing and recording again last year with Bill Belknap, owner of Tulsa's Longbranch Studios. Friday's show would be the new 20/20's second gig since releasing its fourth record last year, “Four Day Tornado.'' They played at the Poptopia festival in Los Angeles last fall. “We've all got careers and families now, so it's not real feasible for us to get out and tour now,'' Belknap said, though the band may try some traveling this summer. Thursday, they were set up in member Ron Flynt's garage. “It's just like we're in high school again or something,'' said member Steve Allen, with a little excitement and a little amazement. 20/20 was on an attractive bill with the Posies and fellow early '80s new wavers the Plimsouls at Austin's Waterloo Brewing Co. Tulsa-Based Groups Wow Austin Crowds By Thomas Conner 03/19/1996 AUSTIN, Texas — Joan Osborne just wouldn't shut up. The Grammy-snubbed singer was featured at the South by Southwest music festival Friday night on the Outdoor Stage, which was poorly placed in the middle of the intersection at Sixth and Brazos streets in downtown Austin. She held her ground up there about half an hour longer than she was supposed to. Her laziness paid off for one Tulsa band, though. Epperley was scheduled to play at 9 p.m. in the Driskill Bar in the Driskill Hotel, which is right on that corner. Thousands choked the streets to see Osborne play her astonishingly boring set. As 9 p.m. approached, and Osborne was still going, Epperley went ahead and started their show despite a meager crowd of their parents, a couple of execs from their record label and a few bar flies. As they churned out songs, their driving rock attracted quite a crowd — people from the streets who found Epperley's hooks much more interesting than Osborne's aural barbiturates. The Driskill is not a huge place and is not arranged to be conducive to gathering around the makeshift stage, but about 60 people tried during the band's hour-long set. When the band finished “Nice Guy Eddie,'' two guys with justified beer guts whooped, “Now that's good stuff right there!'' They continued dancing throughout the show, to the added amusement of the rest of the crowd and to guitarist Matt Nader. Nader had been discussing the band's music the night before after watching another Tulsan, Bob Collum, perform at a Sixth Street coffee house. The festival was choked with a lot of bands that had listened to too much Nirvana, Nader had said, and he once worried that his band's original album, a self-titled release when the band's name was Bug, suffered from that same ugly comparison. He had made it a point, he said, to try and lighten things up a bit. That's obvious in the new songs written for Epperley's first album on Triple X Records — which is finally released this week after some delays — and is especially obvious when the band plays live. The music sometimes may grind a bit harshly and lead singer David Terry sometimes may whine a bit too piercingly, but the overall vibe is fairly light and someday may even be fun. Terry sings nonsense just as often as he tells an ex how low she is. Osborne finally sang “One of Us,'' left the stage and was escorted through the bar and into the hotel, whereupon Nader said, “Hi Joan!'' in the middle of a song. Then the bar really filled up, and from what I could gather, most were attracted by the music and not waiting for the next band, the Dragmules. Rumor had it that Tommy Stinson, bassist for the defunct Replacements, was there, but I've no idea what he looks like. Terry's mom, Linda, was there, sporting an Epperley T-shirt and beaming with pride. “It's so much bigger than a piano recital when he's 6-years-old, you know,'' she said. Dean Naleway, a representative from Triple X Records, was there. He talked afterwards about the label's plans for Epperley. “These are memorable times, and this is step one,'' he said. “We've got 'em out here and people are listening to them. Now we've got to get the record in the stores and the Best Buys and the listening booths so people can start figuring it out. Pretty soon a lot more people will have heard of these guys.'' Naleway said a thorough tour is not very feasible at this point, but Nader said the band is itching to get on the road. “The only thing we were really looking for (in Austin) was maybe a booking agent, someone who could get us a lot of shows and get us a tour,'' Nader said. “We want to get out and start playing.'' As Epperley played, a true Tulsa mainstay, N.O.T.A., impressed a crowd of maybe 600 at the Back Room, a club a safe distance from the downtown mob. N.O.T.A. has been playing punk off and on in Tulsa since punk was an actual phenomenon at the turn of the '80s. N.O.T.A. member Jeff Klein said the show went as well as they expected. The crowd that showed up at least included some die-hard fans. “People were shouting out song titles from 10 and 12 years ago,'' Klein said, “so I guess we weren't completely forgotten.'' In all the years, N.O.T.A. had never played during South by Southwest, but the band is no stranger to Austin. They played there several times and were on an Austin label in the mid-'80s. While not label-shopping now, Klein said the show was really just to spread the word again that the band was around and to have a little fun. N.O.T.A. opened a bill that included Stiffs Inc. (another punk legend that Klein said “were pathetic'' and “dressed up like Gary Numan''), the Hickoids and the notorious Meatmen. Later that night, a band of erstwhile Tulsans resurrected themselves for a showcase at the Waterloo Brewing Co. in Austin's warehouse district. 20/20 was formed in 1979 when Tulsans Ron Flynt and Steve Allen moved to Los Angeles. The band had moderate success there and a lasting enough effect to pack the outdoor venue Friday night with fans eager to see the revived 20/20 — Flynt, Allen and Bill Belknap, owner of Tulsa's Longbranch Studios. The stage at Waterloo was outside the restaurant under a huge tent. L.A.'s the Delphines played before 20/20, and the huge crowd stuck around. The guys started with a song from their new album, “Four Day Tornado,'' then launched into oldies like “Remember the Lightning.'' Guitarist Allen sang lead on the first, and bassist Flynt sang lead on the second. Flynt's stage voice takes you by surprise — a fairly high and effected rock star vocal coming from such a subdued guy with a low, booming offstage voice. Allen's lead guitar was sharp and the solos peeled straight out of the '80s. “Stone Cold Message of Love'' from the new record was a delicious throwback to the days when arena rock and new wave were clashing — the backbeats pounded through the last chorus and a big, sustained finish with rolling drums and the whole sling-the-guitar-down crash at the end. The crowd bounced up and down and ate it up. SXSW Panel Beats Boredom by Exploring Dead Topic By Thomas Conner 03/21/1996 AUSTIN, Texas — In order to call itself a music “conference,'' South by Southwest organizes several panel sessions and workshops for musicians, press and the like. It adds an air of legitimacy to the three days of listening to rock 'n' roll in bars. Most of the panels sessions could sedate an elephant. “Covering Your Local Scene'' was a pointless exchange of egos between snotty reporters from Los Angeles and frustrated reporters from Texas towns of 6,000 people. “Why You Should Sign a Publishing Deal'' was a cavern of audible Valium — agents and publishing representatives droning on about the virtues of publishing your songs and the legal benefits therein. Zzzzzzzz. The only truly entertaining session came Friday afternoon. It was called “Were the Grateful Dead Really Any Good?'' The goal of the discussion was to determine whether the music of the Grateful Dead was really much beyond the average hippie garage groove or whether it was the sheer genius its fanatical followers claim it to be. As expected, it was a lively debate and reached about as many conclusions as your average episode of “The Jerry Springer Show.'' The panelists were these: Bill Wyman, rock critic of the Chicago Reader; Jim DeRogatis, senior editor at Rolling Stone; Ben Hunter, music editor at Swing Magazine; Michael Krugman, a freelance writer from Brooklyn; John Morthland, a freelance writer from Austin; and Paul Williams with Crawdaddy in Encinitas, Calif. When I entered the room, Williams was discussing his rediscovery of the band in 1978. He said that the Dead, because they toured and played so often, were not always great, but that one out of three shows was guaranteed to “blow your mind.'' “That's not good consumer value,'' DeRogatis quipped. “They've always been a (bad) rock 'n' roll band. They might be a good jug band.'' “But one of those nights will blow your mind,'' Krugman said. “And if they are a jug band, that's cool because you don't get to see jug bands in an arena.'' The fact that the Dead did not always have great shows was a continual hot spot. One man in the audience said he finally went to see the Dead at the urging of many friends, and he thought they were horrible. “Then (my friends) said, 'Well, you have to be in the right frame of mind,' and they said I had to take drugs to really get it, and that got really irritating.'' Another audience member addressed the same issue. “The first 17 times I saw them, I was on acid, and it was fun. The 18th time I was not an acid, and it was a great show. They rocked out a little more, and I enjoyed it more because I wasn't so spaced out that I couldn't enjoy the show, or even pay attention to what was really going on.'' This led to the issue that never seemed to be resolved: Were the Grateful Dead more important for their cultural experience than their music? The drug factor came up repeatedly — people discussing how integral LSD and various drugs were to the enjoyment and understanding of the Dead's music. But that begged this question: How good is music if you have to alter your consciousness to find it interesting? “When you stop taking acid, you realize how boring they are,'' one woman in the audience said. Few denied the unique community that the band inspired among its dedicated followers. “The Dead were able to engender a great feeling among a lot of different people,'' Hunter said. “Some magical experiences came out of seeing the Dead, for whatever reasons. You can make fun of the scene all you want, but there is definitely something there that's not at your basic Better Than Ezra or Rancid show, and likely never will be.'' But there might have been other sides to that huge and infectious community, some said. One woman in the audience didn't think the mere fact that the band was so hugely popular was necessarily a plus. “America's Funniest Home Videos'' is also hugely popular, and that hopefully doesn't constitute artistic merit, she said. DeRogatis saw the huge community more as a marketing target for the band, a captive audience and insurance policy that the members didn't set out to create but didn't shun, either. “They were marketing community as commodity,'' he said. “It was just like Camelot. Camelot never really existed. It was like the Disneyland notion of '60s-Land.'' Here he began reading from a catalog selling Grateful Dead licensed clothing. “A great new line of Steal Your Face active wear,'' he read. “They just wanted to sell more ties!'' he cried. Krugman defended the merchandising. “Everyone sells T-shirts,'' he said. “Some of 'em even like to wear them.'' Another virtue was raised by an audience member: the Dead were not pawns of the record industry. In the last two decades, they made very few records and subsisted almost chiefly on touring -- consistently running the highest-grossing tours each year. “The great thing about the Dead was that they managed to piss off the record industry,'' one audience member said. “Their touring dwarfed their record sales, and the record companies couldn't get a hold on that. They weren't getting any money from it.'' Williams agreed. “No one in the whole indie movement did more to say you can screw the record business than the Grateful Dead. They showed us there is such a thing as going out and making a living playing music, no matter where you are on the Billboard chart.'' A music teacher in the audience found the only real, tangible advantage of the Grateful Dead's music. “The kids that I've taken to Dead shows learned more about world music than they would have otherwise. They were the first experimental music with mass appeal, and they turned a lot of people onto different styles of expression.'' Wouldn't you love to sign up for her class? |
Thomas Conner
These online "clips" reproduce a self-selection of my journalism (music etc) during the last 20+ years. It's a lotta stuff, but it only scratches the surface. I do not currently possess the time or resources to digitize the whole body of work. These posts are simply a bunch of pretty great days at the office. Archives
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