At the end of the beginning, “Little Danny” Lanois got it right. After all his beat-down poetry, after his self- congratulatory accolades, after a welcoming speech in which he kept referring to himself in the third person, the producer of U2 and Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan hit it square in the grinning face. “There’s a lot of optimism in the air,” Lanois said at the end of the keynote address that opened up the seventeenth South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, which ran March 7-16. Some of us smelled something different — apprehension, fear, or maybe just the musician sitting in front of us — but Lanois, who lives in higher and more rarefied altitudes than the rest of us, has a different perspective. You can afford to be optimistic when expensive people hire you to make expensive records.
That SXSW’s organizers chose Lanois as their keynote speaker was of no surprise; they like the Big Name, the Superstar Draw, to bless their event, and Lanois did just that in the sort of rambling and indulgent fashion that befits a man who makes guitar wallpaper for himself when not producing men richer than everyone in the Austin Convention Center combined. He said nothing and said it for 45 minutes, insisting at one point he was going to “beeline” it out of the auditorium lest anyone give him a tape and ask him for help. Lanois did provide one of the fest’s musical high points, when Richie Havens joined him at the Austin Music Hall Thursday night for a furious performance of the Woodstock Generation anthem “Freedom,” but it was hardly an apologia for kissing his own ass repeatedly that very morning. (Everything old is older again, when you get down to it.)
Lanois’ remarks gave SXSW perfect context: It was a conference in denial, which is easily done when five-hundred-plus bands — from across the country and around the world — crank up in one place and drown out the bad news and ill tidings. The usual litany of ailments that threaten to decimate the entire body — from piracy and declining sales to media consolidation and government inquiries — were spoken of in small whispers. You could hardly hear them on Sixth Street and just beyond, where bands started to play early in the morning (8 a.m. in the Four Seasons bar) and wrapped up, on some nights, in the wee hours before the sun came up. (As Thursday night became Friday and then some, the Sugar Hill Gang was a-hip-a-hoppin’ at an East Austin after-hours shindig thrown by the owners of Stubb’s Barbecue; it was early morning of the living dead.)
There was no unifying theme this year, no single strand that looked more like a rope from which the music business could hang itself. This year, there was no Hilary Rosen to kick around; she’s now the former president of the Recording Industry Association of America, and someone else will have to blame everyone but the labels for the industry’s plentiful woes. There was no Courtney Love to pick apart; there’s no one left with whom she can feud. And there was no Norah Jones to suck up to, though crits and bizzers were chasing down the Next New Thing night after night, insisting always they’d just heard the greatest thing since … well, Norah Jones.
The outrage and disgust and suspense of 2002 had given way to the ennui and exhaustion and hangover of 2003; the torrent of anger unleashed last March had dissipated into a fine mist of anxiety. Even the panels meant to generate heat — say, the Activism and Protest circle jerk — were cool to the touch. It didn’t help that this year, the label- and media-sponsored parties seemed to begin earlier than ever before. You could get your free drunk on well before noon, meaning you could go to SXSW and have legit reason never to step inside the convention center. Fuck it, right? Might as well party like it’s 1991. As Chicago Tribune music critic and Activism and Protest panel moderator Greg Kot said late Saturday afternoon, standing in a convention center that looked like a ghost town, “There might not even be a music industry next year.”
Save for the Saturday afternoon antiwar protest that began on the Capitol steps and proceeded south on Congress Avenue, there was little talk about what’s likely to come in days; hell, half the people marching Saturday were just SXSW attendees trying to get from one party to the next. Ted Leo, the Billy Bragg (or Joe Jackson?) of New Jersey, had “No War” on his guitar in shiny duct tape, but it was unreadable from twenty feet away. Then again, you ain’t gonna find many pro-war folks at a music festival where former Dallas Cowboys and current NORML honcho Mark Stepnoski is scheduled to be the guest of honor at the High Times party. You dropped a bong on me, baby.
What makes SXSW special, all these years later, is that for a few days in March, you can be around people who speak the same secret language. They’re excited when they see Steve Wynn, ex-Dream Syndicate, standing in a club; not only that, but they’ll start debating his band work and solo stuff, trying to decide if it’s better to be “important” or “good.” And not only that, but they’ll have a story about Wynn, like the time a friend loaned him a guitar before a gig and a place to crash after. It’s a place where every other band sounds like the end of a Neil Young song. It’s a place people get excited about Liz Phair, the Meg Ryan of rock who still manages to make old songs sound like demos. It’s a place where the Trachtenburg Family Slide Show Players, with its little-girl drummer keeping the beat in someone else’s back pocket, generate buzz. It’s a place where power-pop bands get the Knack and keep it. It’s a place where 50-year-old men dress like 34-year-old men dress like 17-year-olds in vintage shirts just off the rack from Urban Outfitters. It’s a place where Billy Bob Thornton, the Lenny Nimoy of his generation, can’t bullshit the audience, which walked out on him quicker than the Jews from Egypt. And it’s a place where comebacks are possible, if not always likely. Ask the Jungle Brothers or Concrete Blonde or Presidents of the United States of America or the Yardbirds, all of whom generated as much interest as a checking account.
Still, the oldies delivered: Blur, playing to a packed house at La Zona Rosa Thursday night, are now in their Sandinista! phase; Damon Albarn even introduced one song as a Clash homage, and he wasn’t starting a “White Riot.” (As evidenced by the awkward movement of the crowd, it’s dance music for people who don’t go dancing — or leave the house — too often.) And the band has moved so far past its past that “Girls and Boys” now sounds like it was recorded in 1984, not ’94. Mark Gardner, touring in support of a new Ride best-of, played the trade show at the convention center, and even acoustic he never once gazed at his shoes. It was an impossible place to perform — smack in the middle of the Blender magazine booth and the Miller Lite kiosk staffed by two chicks in half-tees — and it had the vibe of a talent-show tryout; still, Gardner passed the audition.
Joe Jackson, who pretty much closed out the fest Saturday night at the Music Hall, proved how fine the line is between oldies act and upstart newcomer. Backed by old mates who ditched after the band went beat crazy in 1980, Jackson played the standards (“Is She Really Going Out with Him,” “Fools in Love,” etc.), but more fulfilling were the new songs off the just-released Volume 4; Jackson’s been reborn in middle age playing alongside men he’s known since he was a kid. (Too bad the cavernous joint was damned near empty; seems the rocknoscenti were at smokin’ up Supergrass at Stubb’s.) The same goes for Camper Van Beethoven, who sound better now than the first go-round — reunited ’cause it sounds so good.
The best SXSW moments are the surprises, the unknown commodities who’ve sold themselves by the weekend’s end: KaitO, fronted by two chicks made out of Elastica and a guitarist who looks like a young Richard Thompson and plays like a young Jimmy Page; the Shazam, Tennessee titans of power pop who sound like Cheap Trick and the Who and know it; Petty Booka, two women from Japan who play ukulele and cover Gomez; and the Venue, Swedes who think they’re all Ray Davies and it’s still 1964. Don’t see a Norah Jones busting out of this year’s fest, but if there was one band there worth making the Big Leap it’s England’s Grand Drive, who’ve been together since 1997, have released three critically adored albums and three EPs in the United Kingdom, have gotten considerable airplay at home on the BBC and XFM, and are only now getting any kind of US distribution on a BMG subsidiary. (Private Music will release a best-of compilation next month.) “We’re considered UK Americana, whatever that means,” says singer-guitarist Danny Wilson, whose brother Julian plays keys in a band that sounds like Fred Neil Finn (and only five of you will get that, sorry). Oughta cross over like Kevin Garnett, but just try finding the radio station that plays beautiful pop with an EastEnder’s Western twang.
SXSW has become a place where labels launch new bands and shill new product, but still the hopefuls come seeking elusive deals; there was Jack Lee, once a legendary Nerve and a Paul Young hitmaker, passing out two-song samplers in front of the convention center, grinning at the grunt work. But no one came from further looking for more than Abbos Kosimov, who brought from Uzbekistan a small version of his eponymous big band in search of US representation and, yeah, even a recording contract.
Abbos’ band, which comes with two guys blowing Louis Armstrong notes out of a karnay (a copper horn that looks like a tall lamp), wasn’t on the SXSW schedule because it never turned in its registration paperwork; there had been a visa problem even after the Uzbekistan Ministry of Culture had requested the band’s appearance. When it showed up, organizers were stunned and scrambled to find showcases. By week’s end, Abbos had done three, including one at an after-hours party, where pretty young girls moved and grooved to the sound of the JB Horns fronted by Lester Chambers on a Middle Eastern kick. (Hear them at www.uzonline.com/abbos)
Kosimov looks like a café au lait Larry Fishburne, and dressed in white and golden robes and a skull cap, he was more the Rock Star than anyone else at SXSW. (Most bands look like they’re fronted by guys who sold pot in high school or the girls who used to date them.) He was the sudden hit of SXSW, doing interviews for CNN on the convention center rooftop and beating the hell out of four doiras (tambourine-like instruments) with his bandaged fingertips anytime someone asked. At 2 a.m. Sunday, as the band finished its gig in the black-box theater at the Hideout on 6th Street and Congress, the audience of one hundred cheered, stomped its feet against the wooden floor, and stood for minutes that seemed like hours. Though he speaks no English outside of a “thank you” or “jazz music,” Kosimov needed no translator to understand what that meant.
