Day Three (Music): Rubbed Elbows and Bad Audio

Sufjan Stevens

::	MUSIC DAY THREE: Rubbed Elbows and Bad Audio By Terry Sawyer

Last night seemed a conspiracy of the good fates, who usually flee at the mere sight of me. Despite the fact that there was still much to complain about in my evening, I managed to cobble together a few epiphanies about how to enjoy the clusterfuck and navigate the pitfalls of the sprawled commercial jungle that is SXSW.

Jolie Holland

Before I get to the pleasure, let me share my pain — something I’m far more adept at anyway. Bands that require intimacy in order to be absorbed may as well play at a mall fountains for all the genuine attention they’re going to get at many of the SXSW venues. Honestly, how can you spend all day and all night, at after parties and cocktail receptions, constantly immersed in live music without at some point simply tuning it all out? Given that my attention span is like a herd of frightened wild horses, I skipped much of the daytime and nighttime festivities so that I could give the bands an honest chance. When I saw Jolie Holland, for the first few songs the place was empty enough that I could dig into her sound. She has one of those voices that is a wonder of wounded ecstasy, the kind of old world blues voodoo where you get so lost listening that you feel like you’re tumbling into the performer. Try as I might, I couldn’t recover those first few moments of focus when I felt connected to the trance she spins, because the place gradually filled with the static of damnably loud chatter. It just wasn’t the right room, the recurrent crap shoot at this festival with discouraging odds for many of the lesser known performers.

What was horrible about Jolie Holland was absolutely unbearable during Sufjan Stevens, a songwriter whose work I greatly admire, but whose performance I didn’t hear a single word of. The crowd simply overpowered his delicate range, coupled with the blaring stoner rock from the bar below and the soundman’s apparent indifference to the inaudibility of the singer. It was one of the moments where I absolutely ached for the performer, wishing he could pull an AK from his underwear band and fire it into the air — letting everyone know that they could either listen for a few minutes or attend the next V.I.P. event in a body bag.

Old Crow Medicine Show

Part of what made me start enjoying SXSW this night was my first foray into networking, though only if networking is defined as finding someone cool to hang out with and not asking for anything in return. As I wandered around outside I bumped into A.J. Roach, this awesomely talented singer-songwriter from California that I’ve had the pleasure of seeing many of the times he tours through Texas. He convinced me to forego some “buzz” band I was going to check out in favor Old Crow Medicine Show, a band he described as “what would happen if Guns n’ Roses were an old timey country band.” That’s about right, especially in that it captures that kind of stadium energy where you feel like screaming your lungs out because the band just rocked your world and you’re about to salute them. Old Crow are a bunch of young gents who absolutely rip through their take on classic country with a pace as adrenaline pumped as a drag race. They’re madly talented, with plate-licking good looks, and definitely a band worth checking out even if the Americana vein isn’t your mainstay.

There are other pleasures to be had at SXSW, though they’re of a sketchy vintage. The festival is a reversal of the natural pecking order, a place where critics and music industry folks can fancy themselves to be the center of the artistic enterprise. Who doesn’t like a little red carpet treatment, the blushing rush that comes from scoring a party pass that someone else might not have been able to, or the thrill of getting to get led past the velvet rope while the masses are left waiting for you to throw them some cake on your way out? But these are all cancerous pleasures, best enjoyed in small doses and then showered off before they become permanent deformations of character.

As I made my way to The Moving Units, I bumped into my roller derby bombshell friend, Big Red, and she was talking on her cell phone outside the venue to one of my best friends in L.A. That seemed like synchronicity to me, a sign that my evening would end in as a consistent triumph over the dark organizational forces of the festival, be they the Illuminati or military-industrial complex or whoever (since its not the artists or venues) gets to roll naked in the mountains of money at end of the night.

The Moving Units

The Moving Units sound like L.A.’s gutter rock middle finger to The Strokes. The wildly jolting stage show and drummer dance antics had the entire crowd involuntarily twitching to their dancefloor rock shrapnel. Stupidly, I forgot my ear plugs and paid for it the next day when all I could hear was a feedback ring in my ears and the drum riff of “Between Us and Them”. Despite the hearing loss, it was the kind of loose, wrecking rock and roll that I love seeing live.

I think one of the crucial keys to enjoying SXSW is the buddy system — finding someone with their wits about them to troll for the good shows and wink at all the pomp and bullshit that go into pulling something like this together. Whether it was the editor of Devil in the Woods, Marc Hawthorne or singer, A.J. Roach, my best moments of the festival were those spent taking it in with cagey optimists, the kind of people who know exactly where in the shitpile to find the pearl.