SXSW DAY 2: A DAY, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

In contrast to my first 24 hours here at the SXSW
festival, last night's activities proved genuinely
debaucherous and entirely amusing. Whereas Thursday
night found me wandering the closed down streets in
somewhat of a daze, Friday brought a different
attitude with it.



I ended up in downtown by around 11am, free to roam
for a good 7 hours before the My Brightest Diamond
load in. Shara had an interview near the convention
center and James had to pick up our drummer at the
airport, so I was on my own. My first order of
business was a short walk, placing me in the middle of
a party thrown by the Australian Music Council. For
some reason, walking into a location filled with
Aussies makes me a bit uncomfortable. It's not really
the accent, or the attitude, but something about
Australians in the US seems offputting to me; like
they're spies for some secret subversive organization.
Plus, there was a lot of leather jacket action
happening, and I'm suspicious of anyone wearing
leather on the middle of a relatively hot day in the
middle of Texas. At this party, the booze was free as
was the food, but I found myself short of appetite on
accounts of the blaring guitars and the gratuitous
leather.



I walked in just as a band was finishing, and helped
myself to a free beer. It's funny walking into a party
and not knowing a single person there. I'd even go so
far as to call it liberating. I stood solitary behind
a long-bearded fellow with blue-blocker sunglasses and
a Wolfmother hat (of course) and watched the band
finish. After the set I sat down for a bit and took
mental notes on the scene. The next band to play was
called "Children Collide." Now, I haven't enjoyed a
punk show in years; in NYC bad punk music is about as
common as pidgeon poo. But this trio had something
special. It was a combination of Sonic Youth, Fugazi,
and Nirvana - a blend which proved both fun to watch
and appealing to my ear. I helped myself to another
beer and departed, somewhat satisfied with my taste
into what Aussie rock has to offer.



Around 1, our drummer, Brian Wolfe, arrived somewhat
exhausted from a mildly disasterous commute. He had
missed his connecting flight from Dallas to Austin
because of a delay suffered at the hands of Friday's
freakish March snow storm. We chatted for awhile and
caught up on Diamond matters and on the dionysian
nature of this whole mad scene.



My next destination proved to be a great surprise and
a perfect picture of why this festival is like nothing
I've experienced in music before. I took a cab to a
tiny little brewery in a warehouse district 15 minutes
south of downtown to see "Dirty Projectors" again. The
cabby, Benjamin, kept on asking me as we circled the
warehouses, "are you sure there is music here?" I
replied with medium confidence that there would be. We
turned a corner to see a handful of hippie-looking
types, to which Benjamin exclaimed, "ooop, there they
are." Indeed.



The Independence brewery was modest in stature, with a
make-shift bar in the front serving three difference
kinds of Independence Ales (I'm partial to the dark),
and 6 huge silver vats in the back. The stage was
essentially a three-foot drum riser; the rest of the
bands shared the same footspace as the tiny audience
of about fifteen. The first band was a prog/noise band
from LA called "Health". Because of all the concrete
and the cube-shape of the room, this was an
overpoweringly loud performance. But it was exciting
to watch, to say the least. They started with a chant
which reminded me Native American hymns, and burst
into a furious blast-beat filled freak out. And when I
say freak out, I mean F R E A K O U T. I took a roll
of film and was captivated by these guys, even when
the bass player's rig went on the fritz. To my great
surprise, I looked to my left to see a woman cradling
her newborn baby to her chest as the little one slept
like a rock (no pun intended). I chalked this up to
being one of nature's little miracles.



The next band was called The Apes. I didn't really
like the stuff too much, but seeing it in this
environment somehow redeemed them as I realized that
my usually hyper-critical music snob ear had been
rendered mute. Before her set, Angel D from the
Projectors hung out and cracked jokes with me about
the hippies and how this was an extremely odd place to
find a woman with her infant. As they started their
set, I struck a conversation with a dreadlocked,
bearded fellow named Nugget. Unfortunately, the free
beer and obliteratingly loud music had temporarily
fogged my conception of time, so I checked my watch
and called Benjamin the cabby in one quick motion.

I returned to the downtown around 6pm, and the
evening's debauchery officially began. After our load
in at Antone's, I walked down the block to meet up
with my friends Michael and Adam at Exodus on 6th
street. They, too, had just completed loading out for
their show with The High Class Elite. We had some
drinks around the way before heading back to Exodus
for their show at 9. I am the usual bass player for
The Elite, but seeing as my bass responsibilities with
My Brightest Diamond have been in demand, my
substitute, Robby, handled the low end business. I had
never met him before, and he's a HUGE guy. It totally
shocked me to meet him. Having never seen this band
except for from the on-stage perspective, I had a
great time watching my friends on stage. And for his
part, Robby did a great job on bass. Seeing as my show
with My Brightest Diamond was only an hour after the
start of the High Class Elite set, I had to depart
after only 4 songs. Even so, I thought it was kickass,
to use a juvenille expression.

I got to Antone's right around 9:30, and swiftly put
on my game face. The crowd at Antone's was extremely
thick, and the energy in the place was enough to give
me a case of the butterflies. Also, we hadn't played
since our last show on our European tour, so there was
a certain palpable sense excitement on all of our
faces. Modesty aside, we rocked. Everything was tight,
everything in the dynamics was right, and we had a
great time. Shara almost took my head off with an epic
axe-chop guitar move at one point, but my stage radar
helped me execute some successful evasive manuevers.

After the set I headed back to Exodus to meet up with
my boys from the H.C.E to do some heavy drinking.
That's easy to do when the drinks are free, and by
midnight I was jolly drunk. Stumbling, bumbling, we
made our way to a party at Habana Calle where a band
called the Deers were playing. They were great. For
some reason they introduced themselves as "Broken
Sexual Chocolate", and I was the only one in company
who bought it. Hook, line, sinker. I believe my
response was, "That's a funny band name." My friends
turned and laughed at me. We also met up with my buddy
Gabriel and his fellow bandmates from a band called
the Unmentionables. We had some laughs, some booze,
some conversation.



Now the evening began to get foggy. We met up with
friends from the band Locksley at Stubbs, caught the
last of the last set of the night, and continued our
perambulation. After passing by a couple of vomitous
casualties of the evening, we ended up wandering for
an hour to get to the Blender party on Congress st.
This was a scene, and held our attention until about 5
am. As we walked back to homebase, the streets of
Austin were empty, and I found myself applauding the
stamina of my companions and me. We really did it up.
After a trip to Jack-in-the-box (or J in the B, as we
call it), we bedded down at around 6am. All in all,
this was an epic evening, and a perfect end to a
stellar day.

SXSW: MUCH BETTER THAN BEING IN IRAQ.

Three days before flying out from NY to Austin for the
South by Southwest music conference, I had a rather
ominous dream. It was the sort of dream you wake up
from panicked and not quite sure of your surroundings,
perhaps in a cold sweat and a bit disheveled. I dreamt
that when I arrived at the festival, the location had
been switched from Austin, Texas, to Iraq. Yes, Iraq -
that little blip on the radar screen of world affairs.
I asked my colleagues sheepishly, "This is South by
Southwest, right? But I thought it was in
Texas....this looks more like....IRAQ? Or am I just in
the wrong place?" Around me were roadblocks, bombed
out buildings and skeletons of charred cars, and
hundreds of hipsters walking the streets as if
everything was completely normal.



I arrived here in Austin yesterday to find that my
dream was not really that far off. Of course, I'm yet
to see a car bomb go off; there has been no sign of an
AK-47 or a rocket-propelled grenade (even though I
have seen my fair share of NRA bumper stickers). And
as far as I know, Austin is free from any pesky
insurgency standing in the way of normalcy and order.
But this place is undoubtedly what I would call the
Mecca (excuse the Islamic imagery) of hipsterdom. The
streets have been closed to traffic, allowing throngs
of punks, indie chicks, metal dudes, and
acoustic-guitar toting troubadours to run free and
unmolested through this beautiful city.



Standing in line for security at LaGuardia, the
passengers flying to Austin for this orgiastic feast
of music might as well have been wearing space
helmets. Even the usual security mantras seemed
altered to accomodate: "Please remove all shoes,
jackets, facial piercings and spikey arm bands before
stepping through." Luckily, my friend Adam, who plays
guitar in two of the other projects I play in, The
Kiss-Off and The High Class Elite, was on my flight.
We chatted about our expectations of the weekend for a
while before boarding our flight, which was totally
packed. There was even a high school soccer team on
the flight, a sight that immediately made me think of
the
movie "Alive." I shook off my fears and fell asleep
for an hour, only to be awakened by a rather
disturbing announcement from the cockpit. In his
monotone voice, the pilot made a request for a doctor
to please volunteer and report to seat 17B. Upon
hearing this, every passenger perked up with a morbid
curiosity. Apparently some woman had passed out and
could not be revived.



This is a scenario I've heard about, but never
witnessed firsthand. Instead of an M.D. proper, a
dentist and a nurse came to check on the woman, who
had a pulse and was still breathing but had peed
herself. Adam was one seat behind her, so he reported
these details to me later. Luckily, we landed without
incident in Dallas and made our connecting flight to
Austin.



This was a rough commute, to say the least. Once I was
settled in around 5pm, I surveyed the territory with a
somewhat scientific eye. It's a very different world
down here. It's as if someone airlifted a 2 square
mile section of Williamsburg from Bedford ave to
Graham ave and dropped it in the middle of Austin,
providing booze, music, and questionable street
cuisine.



The first show I saw was "Dirty Projectors" at a venue
called Mohawk, featuring my good friend Angel, who
plays with me in the band INLETS. Dirty Projectors is
one of pitchfork's top-ten SXSW choices, and they
flat-out blew me away. Their singer belts like a more
manic and exuberant version of the caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland, supported by frenetic drums and
driving, odd-beat rhythms. Angel played bass and sang
backups along with guitar player Amber, providing a
beautifully contrasting melodic backdrop behind the
other-wordly lead voice.



After the show we ate some dinner and I parted company
to check out the band Vietnam at Bourbon Rocks. Here,
I met with a couple of buds from the Brooklyn-based
band Takka Takka, and continued my determined survey
of this mad mad world. Vietnam was good, but not
altogether amazing. After this, I made my last stop to
see my boss in My Brightest Diamond, Shara Worden. She
played a haunting solo set at the Asthmatic Kitty
Records showcase, and as per usual, was amazing.



All in all, this was an exhausting first day here.
Luckily, I paced myself and didn't get too piss-drunk
to remember most of it. Tonight, My Brightest Diamond
will play at 10pm at Antone's, and I am looking
forward to it greatly. If all goes as planned, I will
survive this weekend and return home and awaken from
this whacky, all-too-hip dream. It's WAY better than
being in Iraq.