South By Southwest has kicked off. Too many bands, too much music... Or is it just the posturing that seems overwhelming? At the quarter century mark, Austin, Texas' roots/alt/whatever music conference has grown from a couple small hotels and a handful of bars to an event that dominates the city...
The Foo Fighters, Lucinda Williams, the Strokes, Jack White & his mobile music store, the Civil Wars, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Emmylou Harris are among the cred names that will be here. But for people like Hayes Carll, Kevin & Dustin Welch, Jimmy Lafave, Dave Olney and more, it's about building believers, a sense of community and remembering how powerful music can be.
Here are two postcards from the edge. More to come. But if you can't get down to the 5-1-2, come here. there will be updates for the next four days!
South BySouthwest
Missive One
It’s so easy to hate on South By Southwest… Too big, too corporate, too much, too too too… And it’s true, kind of. But not really…
The energy in the streets of Austin is palpable. Music everywhere. Aging hipsters not nearly as hip as they used to be tragically dressed & not necessarily checking the mirror to realize the sartorial joke’s on them as they cling to some sense of “still cool”
That desperation extends to the young and hungry, the blurry mass of bands yearning to make their mark… Even the midlevelers, who have their people clamoring to bask in the we’re-so-cool-here-we-ARE of being somewhere where someone knows their name.
Yeah, whatever. It’s pretty obvious.
But in the obvious, there’s a lot of what you miss: the brightness of the people here to enjoy the moment… the shining charm of people making music… the pop and country and screamo sounds wafting through the not too hot (yet) air.
You can hear it down Congress… escaping the exhibition hall at the Convention Center… creating an almost nervous cacophony all over Austin’s storied 6th Street.
There are the VVIP events, where you have to know somebody to get in, those spaces fairly clogged like arteries with the hipnocracy clamoring to bask in their sangfroidliciousness, the undead of cool affecting a disaffecting sense of ennui. Which is fine if you don’t miss missing the thrill of it all.
But that’s not how I – a professed cynic -- choosse to roll. You can’t game me, because I’ve seen it all… a buncha times. But knowing all that, I still choose to embrace the arc of live performance, the heart of a song that reaches a little further into the emotional core of being human, a band that’s not afraid to explode or a singer to tear the flesh off their most vulnerable places.
Down on Red River Road , American Songwriter has joined forces with progressive Americana/prep designer Billy Reid have set up shop in an industrial/faded luxe outpost called Swan Dive. It’s about vast potential of what songwriting can mean – and cold beer. And whether you’ve come to experience the magic, or just hang out on the fringe of what’s happening… the music is being played, and it’s alive with possibility.
Heck, the Civil Wars, an unlikely duo who plays an organic, atmospheric set of songs that butterfly net the range of desire, decay of same and devastation, are everything AMERICAN SONGWRITER stands for. Smart songwriting, true performances. The little DIY pair managed to debut at #1 on BILLBOARD’s Top 200 Albums chart, proving the potency of this away-from-the-mainstream, emphasis on taltent and execution approach.
So it is with the magazine devoted to where the songs come from. So it is at South By Southwest if you get beyond the obvious. Look around, especially at Swan Dive and the artists assembled, and see the collected yearning to be good.
Jessica Lee Mayfield is here, and Caitlin Rose – both neo-queens of the alt-roots, near-rock realities, who write songs that peel back the cuticle and let it bleed. Jason Isbell working the reigning superstar for the oeuvre tip. Apache Relay drums thumping like hearts aflame with the overwhelming force of lust first encountered.
Mike Grimey, purveyor of Nashville’s killer indie/used record store and underground venue The Basement is standing in the back, watching artists he’s been booking and selling local product on for over a decade. He’s smiling, recognizing that it may not be the elephant dollars of the great big music business, “but we’re making enough to get by… and we’re doing music that hits me”
Grimey knows of what he speaks. A journeyman musician, a coloe outside the lines businessmen, he’s harnessed his passions and let it fuel an almost holy war against the machine. And he’s not a jihadist, but more a live and let liver… give him room to breathe and he won’t tread on you.
Over the years, baby acts like the Black Keys and the Civil Wars set up shop at his room when no one knew who they were – and they come back now that they’re topping the sales charts and playing meaningful dates. The Civil Wars – for what it’s worth – will be closing this show for AMERICAN SONGWRITER.
“I just wanted to have a record store that was a continual party,” he says in his quiet downplay way. “Somewhere people could come and the music was happening.”
Happening enough that when Metallica headlined Bonnaroo, they set up shop to do an unannounced micro-club gig at the Basement. Happening enough that the sonically pulverizing Hall of Famers opted to turn the game tapes into Live from the Basement, an unadorned article of faith that demonstrated just why James Hetfield & Co. are the heaviest band in the land.
Hayes Carll, all lanky slouch in fleece-lined demin, haunts the back of the room, taking in the music. It’s his fourth stop in a day that included the breakfast cast KGSR fields, a long interview with THE PHILADELPHIA ENQUIRER’s Dan DeLuca, a lunchtime show at an advertising agency – and now being one of AMERICAN SONGWRITER’s big acts.
He smiles that cockeyed smile, tilts at little about the ambitiousness of it all, but shrugs it off at the same time. He’s a craftsman, someone dedicated to the notion of quality of songwriting and forging a path that’s his own. It’s why he’s more kin to Ray Wylie Hubbard – a sometime songwriter – than a huckster pitching horse shoe hooks at the glistening fame machine.
Another songwriter – who shall remain nameless – casts a sideways look. We’re talking about the continuum of Agge Frat country, an off-roading kind of frat boy country that’s good for hooking in bumper crops of ball-cap-backwards boys who lean towards husky and the pretty young things who show up to hurl their hormones at these bards of their way of life.
“It’s about teenage girls,” sneers the songwriter who shall remain nameless. “It’s about piles and piles of teenage girls – and the guys who chase’em. Hook when when they’re young, let a beer company use you to brand loyal them… and there you go. It’s the ‘Jersey Shore’ of Texas.”
If I were drinking I’d’ve spit my beer out. Thankfully, I’m just dry and leaning in to hear in the dun of small talk bouncing off concrete floors and brick floors.
If you’re into how important you are, a place like this could be a drag. If you’re looking for the life force of music made to matter – and musicians who’re striving to have a little quality conrol, albeit in an unfiltered form, this is a good place to be.
South By Southwest
Missive Two
The G&S Lounge is not a pretty place. Not even close, Ceilings too low and in the pre-happy hours, they don’t even engage the myriad neon signs to extract that buzzing crayola light to deaden the pressboard ceiling and beat-up alternating black and white industrial tile floor. This ain’t anywhere a poseur’s gonna go, but it’s about as real as it gets, a bar that time and poseurs forgot.
Onstage with a modified pompadour and a high notched blazer is Michael Fracasso, a man with a voice that’s true in spite of the years he’s spent [unching it out in going nowhere bar gigs. It’s a voice that cuts through almost as clear as the bass, drums and two electric guitars churning out a lean kind of rock shot through with country rural and a bit of straight up Stevie Ray Vaughan blues.
These aren’t kids hoping, but men born to play. They ain’t promping or fromping, but churning out no-nonsense music without flourish. That’s the way it is beyond the fringe of South by Southwest where real men come to prove what it means to take the stage just for the sake of playing.
He mentions a new CD called Saint Monday, then decides to go ahead and play the song that gave the collection it’s name. It is a dialed in song that’s about the way time gets suspended in bars, nowhere to go, nowhere to be – just the passage of time, the place where one drifts and the way we make our way as time gets the better of us.
It’s a song that is as much a cautionary tale. About pretty girls fading. The way looking down the barrel of more of the same can be too much to bare. It’s tender, concerned, compassionate. It stands in stark contrast to what you might expect from a bar like that – or else in perfect symmetry. For this is where the dreams of the unseen come to succumb to the poison of no hope, to slowly die without much fan fare.
Not one to wallow, Fracasso kicks up the tempo. Introduces the band, leans into a raver called “Eloise.” Slightly Buddy Holly-esque, certainly innocent and wildly ardent, it is the sort of song that reminds us how fresh desire can be when it’s new and we’re still willing to believe in the potential of love.
Outside on the sun-scorched parking lot, there’s a second stage. Local legend Jimmy Lafave is talking to a couple girls along the edge. Cars pull up and unceremoniously unload gear. This is what people do, how they live.
Onstage Terri Hendrix has her most constant companion: an acoustic guitar and a fistful of her sometimes wry, always insightful songs. She’s joking about needing to get her guitar in tune – because it’s a song about spirituality, and “if you’re going to sing a song about spirituality, you need to be in tune.”
“Spiritual Kind” tackles all faiths. Kinda like her. Even has an album by the same name.
Terri Hendrix is a classic Texas texture: tough enough to never fold, strong enough to cut her own path, woman enough to smile in the face of fate and keep going. She’s been doing it her way for over a decade, and she don’t look back. She just writes her songs, makes her records and stays with her program.
You don’t tell a girl like Terri Hendrix what to do. And that’s what makes her so engaging. People stand there, listening, nodding, knowing that she knows how they lives, too. It doesn’t need to be said, it’s a given.
Heck, her new record is called Cry Until You Laugh.
If that ain’t life as we know it, what is?
Jimmy LaFave is equally beyond expectations. Not really tough, tender without being wimpy. He can embrace Butch Hancock’s “(If I Were A) Bluebird,” whisper Dylan’s “Only A Woman” and inhabit his own “One Angel” in a way that makes nuance seem like the most manly commodity in the world.
He doesn’t have to flex or shout, he just has to exhale those filigreed lyrics. The sighing is inherent. The beauty he evokes complete.
Austin, Texas is its own kind of deal – and it supports this sort of rank individuality. There are girls with neon hair and torn tights, skateboard boys, women on traditional bicycles with cow skulls entwined with flowers, men in roper boots with long necks nestled in their hands.
They come to hear the sparkling piano notes, chords rising and falling – and Lafave’s voice a corn husky witness that’s steadfast and willing. Show up, be, stand, rise, embrace. It’s a kind of romance that’s beyond romantic.. and that’s what makes it so compelling.
It’s the ones you think are gonna last that are the ones you wanna keep. And if these Texas writer/artists aren’t filling stadiums, you can bet they’re gonna be here in 15 years – writing songs, playing bars like this one to people who don’t just remember, but want to be connected to the things they sing about.
That’s the gift of this kind of beyond of country roots music. It’s built to last, not break like cheap Chinese plastic toys. People who truly love music know the difference, and thar’s why they parking lot is full before 5 o’clock.
The G&S Lounge is almost (Not) South by Southwest. Though plenty of people are no doubt from other places, not wearing their badges, but soaking up the quality of the music. Again, knowing the difference creates a whole other set of what one values.
Kevin Welch is an Okie. He talks about how far the horizon line can be. He writes songs that have a linear romanticism, but its shot through with details of desire that are grounded in coffee cups, summer rain, women not gone wild – but gone. He could’ve been a big time hillbilly heart-throb, maybe even a thinking woman’s sex symbol.
He decided better of it. Walked away from the machine.
Now he’s standing under a pitched tin roof with his son Dustin, trying to get the guitars and banjo to sound right through the monitor. While in some ways, Kevin Welch is all about the words, what he conjures onstage is very much a product of the playing – and those notes are each precious.
Dustin is an artist in his own right. He writes darker songs, fraught with echoes of Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. If the father has an easy smile that draws you close, the son has a brooding countenance that is mystery and knowledge all his own.
They open with “Come A-Rain,” a name check of juxtaposition – citing cultural icons, then evoking truths that seem oxymoronic to the essential reality of the named. “Fellini was a scientist/ Dante was a thug/ Buddha was a cowboy/ and Amelia, Amelia was a stud…”
Dustin whipstitches electric slide against his father’s chop-chop tribal acoustic guitar, the echoed chorus almost trancelike. Not quite dervish whirlingness, there’s a trancelike reality at work, a song that topples totemics in a way that confronts and perhaps undermines all the things we hold true about the famous.
Welch talks about the trouble in the world – meltdowns nuclear and working class, the revolutions in Egpyt and Wisconsin, tsunamis and earthquakes – without being specific. He sings “Trouble Out There” and “The Great Emancipation” and “Widows Prayer,” and injects some sort of balm into the starkness, comfort on the trembling earth and torn reality.
Apples don’t fall far from the tree. Dustin does a nimble job expanding and embroidering his father’s melodies. Hints of hiss, lines that burn, the National guitar takes the songs to more surging places, adding dimension and urgency.
But even more kinetic is his take on “Whiskey Priest,” a stark, tense blues that stabs and starts under the younger Welch’s charcoal dusted voice, all crunchy and throaty insurrection. It is a natural thing – what comes spewing from his throat, as disconcerting as his father is comforting, a challenge that explodes as the two men taunt their guitars with almost metronomic fervor.