“At South by Southwest, everyone’s a rock star,” my friend Hollis said in a moment of clarity, after seeing a small but rowdy show featuring a Brooklyn punk duo called Japanther.
It seems true. The number of rappers, indie-rockers, and solo crooners that showed up from across the country (and the world) to peddle their homemade CDs and grab a gig at one venue or another was obvious as I got molested with swag, walking down Sixth Street on Friday night, the main drag in downtown Austin.
In less than five minutes, I was loaded down with demo CDs, stickers, and gig flyers: Input from Cleveland; Army of Me from Washington DC: Britt Warner and Luke Costa from Austin: Tballa from Lees Summit, Missouri; and Female Demand from Houston.
At SXSW, word spreads fast about how good (or bad) certain bands are. Bands that gathered heavy buzz (like H.E.A.L.T.H., a noisy awesome rock band from L.A.) started the weekend with a small show at a club off Sixth and ended with an impromptu press interview in the middle of the street after the show.
Click Clack Boom, a band from Harrisburg, PA I met while waiting in line for pizza, were still looking for their own buzz. Members Billy Newman and Will Markley were shambling the streets drunk, handing out stickers, and trying to convince the crowds on Sixth to see them at a nearby bar at noon tomorrow, at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q two blocks away on Red River Street. The girl waiting with them in the pizza line, though, seemed excited about another band. “We just hung out with Tori Amos at the Spin party!” she exclaimed. “She’s totally starstruck,” said Billy.
The real rock stars weren’t doing anything much different. I ran into Dinosaur Jr. frontman J. Mascis roaming around downtown minutes before he joined a band called Earthless for a lumbering 30-minute brontosaurus jam outside a bar called Habana on 6th, in front of me and a crowd of grungy headbangers slamming cans of cheap beer.
Hours later, near the end of the evening I stood outside Stubb’s with a large crowd to catch a glimpse of Metallica, who were performing a surprise show. A woman next to me was waiting with her teenage daughter. “Honey, if this was AC/DC, you don’t wanna know what I’d do.”
The band, by far the biggest to play at SXSW during the festival, got off their bus one by one and went into the show (exclusively for badge holders) and the gawkers on the street totally flipped.
You could say it’s a sign SXSW, which currently tops about 12,000 festival-goers and continues to draw more music fans from outside the industry, is growing beyond its indie heritage. But mostly, it was just a band of forty-something rock idols trying to recapture the DIY energy of the wannabe-be rock idols who were now lined up to shake their forty-something hands and see them play.
