|
|
AUSTIN, TEXAS — I never wanted to see Mojo Nixon’s pale, puffy ass. But that’s exactly what I was reluctantly looking at — and not so reluctantly laughing at — as I stood near the stage in the Continental Club in South Austin late Saturday afternoon, March 16, the last day of the South By Southwest (SXSW) Music Conference and Festival.
Nixon and his band, the Toad Liquors, were competing against Louisiana’s Dash Rip Rock for the love of the crowd during Nixon’s third annual, all-day, hot-rod show and concert festival, a non-SXSW event. The two bands took turns trying to musically one-up each other in this friendly competition that followed six hours of other, mostly local bands.
Nixon, ever merciless, went for the knock out with his big hit, “Elvis is Everywhere,” which he updated in part by saying he didn’t care if Michael J. Fox has “some kind of shaking, debilitating disease” he’s still got no Elvis in him.
Dash counter-punched with their almost-1996 hit, “Let’s Go (Smoke Some Pot)” sung to the tune of the similar-named Beach Boys’ song.
Without fanfare, Rip Rock’s singer/guitarist Bill Davis began the journey to the gutter in the middle of the show. In between songs he picked up a couple of beer bottles and shot cups near the stage and finished them off, backwash and all. Only a few people noticed it, but the showmanship of it impressed them, and word spread quickly through the packed house.
It all ended with Mojo going toe-to-toe — or really butt-to-butt — against Rip Rock’s drummer, who dropped his drawers and received a refreshing spray of Miller Lite right in the kiester, and at least pretended to enjoy it.
The crowd howled with laughter.
That prompted Nixon to say, “All right, we give.” Then Mojo quickly realized what he had just witnessed and added jokingly, “Motherfuckers — get the fuck away from me.”
It could have been worse. The last time I saw Nixon, around 1996 at Stache’s in Columbus, he blew snot-rockets on the stage.
I could have taken a picture of either of the asses. I had the digital camera, the memory, and I was standing less than 10 feet from both of them. But I just couldn’t pull the trigger. Hell, I couldn’t even put the camera up to my eye.
It was the Cincinnati in me. I hope you understand.
All butts aside (didn’t you see that one coming?), Nixon is onto something. Spontaneity, originality and humor are all-too-rare in music these days, even at a festival designed to connect people to new audiences. Mojo’s hot-rod show stood out during four days of music for that same reason.
The main challenge at the SXSW — besides parking — is picking which bands to see. There are 48 official venues, each hosting an average of five bands nightly for four nights. It’s almost 900 acts, enough to induce brain lock.
Good luck trying to separate yourself from the crowd if you’re in a generic Country, Pop or AltRock band. Or even if you’re Japanese, who seem to have taken a liking to American-style AltRock, judging by their SXSW contingent. You’d better be damn good or damn funny — or better yet, both. Virtually all the bands only have one 30-minute set to make cases for themselves. Some would have been more entertaining if they just mooned their audiences.
However, have you ever seen a Japanese female ukulele duo? What about a six-piece retro group straight out of a 78 RPM record? Do you know any hot acts from Portugal? Would your eyes and ears perk up for a 25-piece symphonic Pop band, including a 12-member choir?
I have, I do, and mine would, so follow me.
If you’ve never been to Austin, you probably don’t realize how many musicians play here in non-SXSW times. There are literally dozens of venues that regularly host live performances, from the biggies at the Austin Music Hall to the tinies such as the Red Room, capacity 50 (according to local fire marshals). Even some local greasy spoons section off a corner for the occasional band.
Toss in SXSW, and this phenomenon blows up to ridiculous proportions. Bands play in parking lots, in backyards, even in Taco Express, a local dive restaurant. I half-expected to hear about a traffic tie-up on Interstate 35 involving an accident between a Blues singer, a Punk Rock band and a couple of singer/songwriters who all wandered into traffic to play gigs.
Austin, fueled by Dell Computers, warm weather, the University of Texas, and music, grew to 650,000 people in 2000 — a 30 percent increase since 1990. The boom caught the town with its pants down and drove up housing prices, fattened the city for miles with poorly-planned, traffic-inducing sprawl, and alarmed folks more used to an older, funkier Austin. One local writer recently summed up how some people feel about growth and SXSW by saying, “Welcome to Austin. Don’t move here.”
Although SXSW keeps putting Austin on the map for its wealth of music, there is an undercurrent of resentment among some locals toward the festival and the people who attend. At the end of Mojo’s afternoon show, everyone had to leave the Continental Club an integral part of the local music scene for decades — because SXSW was taking it over for the final evening of music.
Most of the crowd booed at the announcement. Loudly. Once again, people with badges hanging from their necks — the press, music industry types, and other insiders — would take over the venue, not to mention the rest of Austin. Locals can buy SXSW wristbands in advance for as little as $85 and still see all the same shows, but wristband holders take a back seat to badge holders, who often get into shows first or more quickly.
Earlier in the show Nixon led a chant of “I’m not in the music business” in the middle of a rant against strangers who feel the need to talk to him about their recording contracts and musical influences, like REM. It was enough to inspire a sudden wave of guilt and make me hide my badge inside my shirt.
That said, the main reason I came here was to find something new. Four bands in particular met the profile. Like Mojo, they offered performances I won’t soon forget. The Japanese female ukulele duo, Petty Booka, enjoyed one of the warmest audiences in this year’s festival. They packed Elysium as part of the second Japan Nite, which mostly featured Japanese bands who wanted to rock, not twang.
The duo, backed by an Japanese acoustic guitar player and two gaijin on slide guitar and stand-up bass, covered traditional Hawaiian music, their own songs, including “Ukulele Lady,” plus covers such as Pasty Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” and Blondie’s “The Tide is High” — all successfully.
Yes, they both really do play ukuleles, mostly with straight faces. Although it’s difficult to imagine many people buying a CD of theirs and repeatedly listening to it, Petty Booka provided a stage show so cute and sweet that diabetics had to leave the room. The crowd, perhaps hypnotized by their leis and smiles, loved everything they said.
“We love Ow-stin,” Petty and Booka took turns saying, which elicited loud whoops of appreciation from the audience.
If you could digitally clean up a 78 RPM record from the 1920s, extract the band, and put them on stage in somewhat retro clothes, they might look and sound like Shorty Long. This Austin-based six-piece is as odd-sounding as they look, with a bald, long-goateed stand-up bassist and a very tall and skinny ukulele player strumming away and punctuating the songs with his happy-go-lucky facial expressions.
Members take turns lead-vocaling in songs with catchy lyrics, including “Knock it back, have another one/Drinking and driving is so much fun” and a song about “a flaming ukulele in the sky.” Yes, there’s a danger of a sophomore backlash, a la the Squirrel Nut Zippers, but for now give Shorty Long the benefit of the doubt.
The Gift, from Portugal, was the only band to have their own booth at the daytime SXSW music conference in the Austin Convention Center. Among booths occupied by CD makers, The Village Voice, Jim Beam and others, the Gift showed videos of their performances and offered glossy color flyers hyping their Saturday night event at Element, a huge dance club.
Maybe our national aversion to marketing made people uncomfortable with their tactics, but The Gift might have only kept half of a capacity crowd at Element who had just see Irish rockers, Ash.
This was unfortunate as The Gift’s record label, La Folie Records, is owned by four of the band’s members. And more importantly, the band offered a rich, nuanced set with a three-piece horn section and lots of synthesized layers of sound. As their flyer accurately observed, they have the experimental sounds of Radiohead, the kindness of Bjork, the energy of Beck and the musical textures of Air — sort of.
“The Gift are not as good,” it continues candidly, “but listen (to) them carefully.”
They were also one of the most professional bands in the festival. Even though the previous acts finished at nearly midnight — The Gift’s starting time The Gift set up their tangle of wires, stacks of keyboards, and other equipment and finished their set early enough to give the last band time to play. Axl Rose, are you listening?
The Polyphonic Spree, the Dallas-based, 25-member “pop symphony,” provided what might have been THE show at this year’s SXSW on March 15 at Stubb’s, a barbecue joint turned into a large outdoor concert venue. Imagine if the Flaming Lips picked up another 20 members, put on white robes trimmed at the bottom with various-colored satin, and assembled half of them into a choir. Put Tim Delaughter, formerly of Tripping Daisy, in front and include two keyboardists, two guitarists, a trombonist, flutist, French horn player and even a triangle. After all, what’s a pop symphony without a triangle?
Their songs were appropriately grandiose; part Broadway musical, part Beatle-Pop, part spiritual revival. Delaughter conducted the affair and couldn’t stop smiling in between verses. A packed crowd of about 1,000 ate it up. I was hoping Delaughter would end the show by leading the audience down the street in a Krishna-style dance toward musical enlightenment. As one impressed middle-aged man said early in the show, “I want to follow him.”
Maybe next time. I’m already preparing my robe, Tim.
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2002.
