SXSW 2010 
5,707 Schmoozers, 750 Bands, 29 Musical Cars, and 250 Gallons of Cream Gravy
The 1997 South by Southwest Music and Media Conference was all that and more. No wonder Austin needs a year to recuperate.
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Schmooze You Can Use The Four Seasons is Austin’s finest hotel; as such, it is the place to be, the unofficial nerve center of the conference. While the peons spend their days at panel discussions and the journalists strut around with an air of importance because they aren’t paying for dinner, the real players are at the Four Seasons lobby bar, power-schmoozing and dealmaking as hopeful would-be music bizzers and hopeless unsigned musicians look on longingly. That being the case, the Four Seasons is booked solid with the biggest bigwigs. In a front-page Austin American-Statesman story trumpeting the exclusivity of the hotel, its general manager said that his staff routinely turns down bribes for reservations and that you can’t book a room for SXSW even a year in advance (because they’re parceled out by the conference, not the hotel). Anyway, since the place is in such demand, I thought that calling on the first night of SXSW to ask if there were any rooms available would go over about as well as “Is your refrigerator running?” But instead of laughter or a canned apology, I was connected to the front desk and told I could have a view of the city for two hundred bucks. SXSW’s dirty little secret: last-minute cancellations.
The Myth of the Deal Here is the dream: You start a band, play a few shows in your hometown, and send off a tape to a post office box in Austin, where five or ten people decide you’re the 632nd best thing they heard out of maybe five thousand submissions. You spend your last $300 fixing the engine in the van, which will also serve as your bed, and then you play a show at SXSW. It’s so great that the record label executive who accidentally caught the end of your set offers you a six-figure deal on the spot. That’s it: You’re set for life. Right?
Actually, your hell is just beginning—you’ll probably have a good couple of years, then buy a house that you won’t be able to pay for after you’ve been dropped by the label. But the real myth of SXSW is that anyone gets discovered at all. At best, the conference serves as a summit for bands and record companies, and it’s more fun than playing a showcase in New York or L.A. The connections between bands, managers, and labels are established well before SXSW, and so is the notion that a band is worth seeing. This year’s hot catch was Austin singer-songwriter Kacy Crowley, but the eventual winner, Atlantic Records, and most other interested labels knew about her before they’d ever gotten on a plane. Austin’s Sincola got a deal with Caroline Records at 1994’s SXSW, but the person who signed them had already heard the band’s debut record and lots of favorable word of mouth (and, sure enough, the band parted ways with the label after making only two albums). And Austin’s Spoon was signed by Matador Records president Gerard Cosloy after he caught the band’s set in 1994, but not at SXSW; Spoon was playing one of the unofficial anti-SXSW shows at a punk club called the Blue Flamingo.
Old Faithful After all the buzz bands and rock stars and next big things and aging legends and European novelties have had their moment, there are the artists who just show up, play a great set, and go about their business. The Instruments, for instance, have been around for too long to think that SXSW is going to be their big break. Known for most of their career as the Texas Instruments—until lawyers for the electronics goliath finally wore them down—the Austin band is said to be the only one to have played all eleven SXSWs. This year their show was at Trophy’s, a run-down South Austin sports bar that doesn’t ordinarily host original music. As one of those Strongest Man in the World contests unfolded on a crappy big-screen TV, T.I. (as they’re still called) reveled in the simple joy of playing together. Guitarist Clay Daniel did windmills, bassist Ron Marks seesawed his bass like a scythe, and singer/guitarist David Woody bounced on his heels as sweat and saliva poured off him like a spigot and dripped onto the microphone. They aren’t trendy or particularly popular, but their music is vibrant. As a band, T.I. espouses the values that SXSW embodied when it was just a two-bit conference featuring a handful of good bands, so it’s more than fitting that the group holds the conference’s endurance record.
Insert Punchline Here “Who Cares?” was the name of one of SXSW’s biggest panels, a discussion of politics and music.
Grandpa, Tell Us About Luckenbach Again A panel on Austin’s cosmic country heyday could have been the story of any music scene: We had joy, we had fun, we made really great sounds in the sun. Then money and drugs—in this case, cocaine—ruined everything. Nevertheless, the beatific reminiscences from the likes of Marcia Ball and Eddie Wilson (who owned the Armadillo World Headquarters during the seventies) underscored what makes a good SXSW panel: Forget about discussing “issues” or generating “dialogue” and just tell some stories and be entertaining. The panel did make one wonder what kind of Austin-centric nostalgia SXSW might offer up in future years. Some suggestions: “The Sky Is Still Crying: Stevie Ray’s Sidemen Remember” and “Still Slackers After All These Years.”
The Most Indelible Part of SXSW… … are the hand stamps you get at the doors of clubs. This year’s included “Yes,” “Top Secret,” “This Place Sucks,” “That Place Sucks,” “TABC,” and a picture of a lobster.
The SXSW Index. 250: Gallons of cream gravy served at both Threadgill’s locations during the five days of SXSW—25 percent more than normal. 1: Number of Austin American-Statesman music critics who rather awkwardly compared SXSW to the Holocaust. 54: Total number of housekeepers and managers on duty at Austin’s Hyatt Regency on the last day of SXSW—twice the usual staff. 7: According to one eyewitness, the number of police cars called to the scene of a fight at the aforementioned bar Trophy’s. 94: Number of exhibitors at this year’s trade show. Had you visited them all, you might have helped yourself to twelve CDs and cassettes, ten magazines and newsletters, one pair of earplugs, two Jolly Ranchers, one roll of Smarties, one free game of pinball, six stickers, one coffee mug, one Rolodex card, one Coozie, and one See Shell (an experimental CD case that folds up like a makeup compact). +23: Percentage change in customers at Austin’s Waterloo Records during SXSW versus a typical week. +66: Percentage change in sales at Waterloo.
Car Talk The inarguable highlight of SXSW was the Parking Lot Experiment, a rather unusual performance by Wayne Coyne of the Oklahoma rock band the Flaming Lips. Coyne assembled 29 cars and vans in an indoor parking garage, which quickly filled with a crowd that the Austin American-Statesman somewhat hyperbolically estimated at two thousand. After arranging the cars in an acoustically efficient manner, Coyne passed out 29 prerecorded tapes that when played together, made up a bizarre symphony of time, space, and sound, with echoes and stereo separation bouncing around the garage. The tapes were ornately marked with gold paint and, in big letters, “No! No! No!” on the side that wasn’t supposed to be played. During the second symphony (“Rotting Vegetables Marching Through Meatville”), a mélange of drums, bells, echo, and guitar, one of the cars blew a fuse. Unfortunately for Coyne, it was, to put things in classical terms, the “first chair.” In its absence, he described the piece as “the quietest music heard in this whole conference.”
Where’s David Helfgott When You Need Him? Austin’s favorite manic-depressive songwriting genius, Daniel Johnston, came to SXSW for what was just his fourth live performance in five years, a brief set that went on without incident—which is to say that he did not run away in search of pot or candy and that he made it back to his Houston-area home safely. The show itself was rather poignant: With hands shaking and his pig-squeal voice sounding downright mournful, Johnston made it through four quick songs before saying good-bye. “You’re a great audience,” he said. “You always were.”
You Can Call Him Al When Alejandro Escovedo and his orchestra take over La Zona Rosa on the final night of SXSW, it’s like the place falls into a vacuum—everything that can make the conference so frantic and trying is suddenly sucked from the room. No more schmoozing, no more dealmaking, no more keeping your eyes fixed at chest level (so you can read the badges of the people whose names you’ve forgotten). In short, no more outsiders. Sunday is for Austin, and for Escovedo’s performance, long SXSW’s traditional coda. The night involves more than a dozen performers and is alternately epic, beautiful, mournful, and savage, ranging from Escovedo’s dramatic, heart-swelling originals to his long-standing cover of Iggy Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The show is SXSW’s great catharsis, a perfect exhalation of perfectly lovely and resilient music after a week that is, finally, about that more than anything else.
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