Jim DeRogatis at SXSW

March 14-18, 2007

BY JIM DeROGATIS POP MUSIC CRITIC

For 21 years, South by Southwest has been the music world's version of the Sundance and Cannes film festivals combined, with equal measures of spring break and the sort of glorious anything-goes bacchanal that hasn't been witnessed since the heyday Roman Empire.

I've made the trek from Chicago to the Texas capital every March for the last 15 years — all in the course of journalistic/critical duty, of course — and every year, I've reported that this year's festival has been the biggest yet. SXSW XXI is no exception.

Conventional record sales may already be down 15 percent this year, and the major labels, giant retailers and mainstream radio chains continue to consolidate and downsize more aggressively than the Detroit automakers. But sales of music via the Internet is increasing more than proportionally to offset those losses, and the number of artists eager to make themselves heard is growing just as quickly.

All of this leads to some staggering numbers: 1,400 bands from around the world performing at more than 55 venues over the next four nights for more than 10,000 registered conference-goers. (That's not counting the estimated 30,000 more representing people who come only to hear the music, hang out and crash the parties sponsored by some 150 mostly independent labels and small publications or blogs.)

In other words, this is one massive undertaking, with independent music essentially invading and occupying one small corner of Texas for one long, loud, freaky and fun weekend. And I saw evidence of that even before I got on the plane.

Sitting at O'Hare at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m., I can't help noticing that with the exception of one very sitcom-normal-looking Midwestern family, everyone around me is clearly a SXSW-bound rock 'n' roller.

There's the punk-rock grrrl dressed in calf-high combat boots, a black-and-white leopard-print skirt and a black hoodie and lost in the pages of Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader (bless her heart).

There are the two obvious record-company employees, one from New York and the other from Chicago, who meet at the gate and greet each other with, “Hey, it's not to early to talk business, right?”

And there are the concert promoter and the booking agent who hold an in-depth discussion about the difficult decision of whether indie-rock superstars the Arcade Fire should play two shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York and one at the smaller, cooler United Palace Theater, or two at the United Palace and one at Radio City.

(The problem, it seems, is that the New York unions charge an arm and a leg just to load the equipment in and out: $8,500, according to these insiders. With tickets priced at $35, the band makes much less of a profit playing one show instead of two, given the expenses. For the record, the Arcade Fire is playing three shows at the Chicago Theatre, May 18 to 20.)

Ah yes, even at this very un-rock 'n' roll time, the mania has begun, and the madmen have taken over — all except for that one very Midwestern family. But it turns out they were waiting for the flight to Louisville.

AT THE AUSTIN CONVENTION CENTER

The conference-launching keynote address by a venerated musician used to be the one conventional part of this most unconventional convention.

The artist would take the stage; make a nervous joke about how he or she was used to making music, not speaking to such a large crowd, and then regale those in attendance with fascinating tales of dirty deeds behind the scenes in the music industry and inspirational talk about how the act of creating made enduring all the crap worth enduring. Sometimes, they’d even punctuate their chat with some poignant snippets of song.

Two of my previous SXSW favorites: Johnny Cash and Lucinda Williams.

Unfortunately, for the last few years, festival organizers have had a celebrity pseudo-journalist interview the keynoter rather than letting him or her speak for themselves. The results have been dreadful, since even the most free-form expression of whatever’s on a great artist’s mind is preferable to listening to somebody "guide" them through their career while imitating James Lipton on "Inside the Actors Studio."

This is a long-winded introduction to saying that this year’s keynote by Pete Townshend was a big let-down, partly because Bill Flanagan (rock journalist turned VH1 executive and author of one of the hands-down worst rock bios ever, U2: At the End of the World) blew the opportunity to dig deep into the psyche of the Who’s legendary auteur.

An example: Townshend casually mentioned that the recent Who reunion tour came about "because of money problems" -- as in he needed some. What? How can that be true? And even if it is, doesn’t that raise the question of whether that’s an awfully cynical reason to make art -- especially from an artist who professed, during the talk, to disdain cynicism?

Alas, Flanagan never asked that follow-up question; he was too happy with the long-winded queries he’d scripted. Nor did he touch on Townshend’s controversial brush with the law in 2003, when the 62-year-old musician was arrested by Scotland Yard for allegedly possessing child pornography. The investigation was dropped three months later, and no charges were filed.

I don’t mean to say that, given an incredible 40-year career, that should have been the first question. But Townshend devoted most of his talk to a glowing homage to the Internet (more on that in a moment), speaking as if it was bringing only joy, light and previously unimagined possibilities into our lives. He never touched on the fact that there can be a downside, such as the instantaneous spreading of scandalous and ultimately false rumors that could permanently tarnish a person’s reputation by lingering in limbo on the Web forever. Again, this was a natural question a journalist would have asked. Flanagan didn’t.

As noted, Townshend essentially used his keynote as a platform to hype his new project -- everybody at SXSW is hyping something -- a Web site called the Method set to launch in late April. He claimed that the site will use sophisticated software to create a "musical portrait" of a person -- physical looks as well as personality -- as the subject "poses" at their computer. In the end, they’ll own one third of the copyright of a new, original song. (The first example of any of this can apparently be heard at the start of "Fragments," the opening track on the Who’s last album, "Endless Wire.")

Yes, it sounded as weird, fantastical and unrealistic to me when he talked about it as it no doubt seems to you while reading these words. We can’t the bugs out of Windows after all these years, but we can pull that off?

"You enter data about yourself, you share some stuff about how you feel, and you get back a piece of music," Townshend insisted. "There was no computer in 1971 big enough or powerful enough to do what I wanted it to do, and of course, there was no Internet."

At times like this, when talking about the Net, Townshend sounded like Al Gore, who was unjustly accused of claiming he invented it. But ol’ Pete believes that the possibilities of online communications were predicted and sketched out in his rock opera "Lifehouse," the aborted follow-up to "Tommy," way back in 1970.

Here are some choice quotes from Townshend’s talk.

•         "The gathering that the Internet offers is meditation. You lose yourself when you’re listening to good music."

•         "What do we do with [live music broadcasts on] the Internet? We delay them! You can have it later, when it fits into your work day. F---k it -- I want it live! [Live music] is the moment we make that contract between the artist and the fan. We need more of that."

•         "I think the Who are an anomaly, like the Stones. Bands today shouldn’t even go there. It takes time to build something like that, but now record companies just ask, ‘Where’s the hit?’"

•         "The chemistry [that the Who has] today is completely different but just as effective [as the version of the band with John Entwistle and Keith Moon]."

•         "Before I came to Austin, I spoke in New York to a big record company CEO, and he said, ‘Rome is burning.’ "

•         On a recent performance with Lou Reed at Joe’s Pub in New York, (part of his Internet-televised "In the Attic" series with girlfriend Rachel Fuller: "It was fantastic. At one point, Lou asked me if he could sit down, and I said sure. You don’t know how f---ing huge it was to Lou Reed that he could sit down and play. He’s a couple of years older than me!"

•         On the state of rock today: "I now realize that these big, noisy violent acts, I don’t think they’re appropriate anymore. If it’s going to be political, let’s make it f---ing political. Part of the reason [I didn’t do that with the Who] was that I didn’t understand politics at the time, although I’m not sure if I do now, either."

•         On why he ultimately prefers "Quadrophenia" to "Who’s Next," the album that came out of the derailed "Lifehouse" project: "It’s purer. It’s full of energy. It’s also simply a story of a kid who has a bad day. It rains and he goes and sits on a rock and he contemplates the future and the present. He decides to do something he’s never done before: He prays. That’s the end of the story."

•         And, completely contradicting everything else he said: "Music is about congregation, gathering and sharing. F--- the Internet -- I want it live!"

2:15 A.M. THURSDAY, MARCH 15

EXHAUSTED AND BACK AT THE HOTEL

The first night of musical showcases started slowly, at least for me, but I’m not complaining: It wasn’t all that long ago that the non-stop sounds didn’t even kick off in earnest until Thursday night.

My first big revelation of SXSW XXI: Wolf & Cub, a quartet from Adelaide, Australia, consisting of two drummers, a guitarist and a bassist, making a mix of old-school trippy psychedelia and modern, rhythmically jagged dance-rock a la TV on the Radio. Signed to England’s prestigious 4AD Records, their debut album "Vessel" was just released in the U.S. on March 6, but I hadn’t heard it before I stumbled upon the group’s fiery set at Austin’s coolest punk club, Emo’s.

I also caught partial sets by Future of the Left from Cardiff, Wales (unimpressive New Wave of New Wave, but they dressed neatly in matching white shirts and black ties) and Seattle’s Tiny Vipers (more familiar-sounding emo). Then I arrived at a club called Habana Calle 6 just in time for the end of a performance by Manchester, England’s Bone Box, whose recent album "Death of a Prize Fighter" is an example of moody, ethereal but wonderfully melodic Southern Gothic rock, with strong hints of Nick Cave. (Bloodshot Records’ Nan Warshaw was there and raving about the group.)

That vibe continued in part with the next band, the Minneapolis quartet the Deaths, who added a big dose of British Invasion pop, heavy on the Zombies, to their own Nick Cave-inspired sturm und drang, making for an unexpectedly effective combination. (They have a strong album, too, called "Choir Invisible.")

Finally, though I generally try to avoid seeing Chicago bands at SXSW since I can catch them at home any time, I stayed for the showcase by the ork-pop group the 1900s, which is building a well-deserved buzz in anticipation of its first full album, the follow-up to last year’s "Plume Delivery" EP. The big band came to Texas hoping to find a label to release the new disc, and it played to a full room of enthusiastic listeners, even if many of them seemed to be Windy City homeys.

The group’s intricate, violin- and harmony-enhanced folk-pop suffered from a poor sound mix set, as many SXSW showcases do. But the songs were strong enough to win the day, and the 1900s had the distinction of boasting the most amusing stage patter of the night, as singer Jeanine O’Toole tried to fill time while the sound was tweaked.

"I went to see some Chicago band today that was really great -- I saw a couple of Chicago bands, actually -- and I realized that I slept with the bass player," O’Toole said. "Then I realized that I slept with a lot of Chicago bass players. Now, I’m starting with Texas!"

You go, girl. SXSW can be a heck of a lot of fun, but as with everything, you have to pace yourself.

AT THE AUSTIN CONVENTION CENTER

Much of the conversation during the daytime panels here at the convention center focused in one way or another on the massive changes being wrought on the music industry by the Internet.

In a witty multi-media presentation entitled “Record Companies: Who Needs Them?,” David Byrne — one of rock’s most incisive thinkers, even if he can be a halting and difficult speaker — eventually came to the conclusion that artists still do, even if the Net is dramatically changing the relationship, because musicians can’t or don’t want to do the marketing and publicity work that a record company does.

“I’m negotiating a record contract now with Nonesuch Records,” Byrne confessed. “I’ve been negotiating for a year. That is what we call making music.”

At the same time, Byrne’s talk made clear that the music industry as it has existed for the last century will never be the same. For one thing, there won’t be any physical product, or the ensuing costs of manufacturing.

“Within five years, no CDs will be sold anymore,” Byrne predicted, envisioning an all-digital future. “Or maybe CDs will be sold, but only the way vinyl is sold now.”

The former leader of the Talking Heads went on to compare digital rights management to prohibition. DRM is the software encoded on downloadable music files which prohibits buyers from playing songs they purchased on any kind of player they might own hardware. He agreed with Apple visionary Steve Jobs, who recently released a controversial statement declaring that DRM is bad for music, and Byrne predicted that it will be extinct soon, too.

Contradictions were inherent in even the most optimistic talk about music on the Net, however. In a rare public appearance, Tom Anderson, the 31-year-old president and co-founder of MySpace, made some dubious comments while presenting the typically cliched picture of a computer-geek/slacker turned multi-millionaire entrepreneur, complete with the goofy baseball cap.

Among Anderson’s sillier pronouncements: calling MySpace “a force for great good in the world,” as if trolling the Net for members of the opposite sex will lead to curing AIDS or ending global warming, and declaring that Rupert Murdoch, who recently bought MySpace, “is really a pretty cool guy.” (You know, for a 78-year-old ruthless right-wing media baron.)

Anderson did make sense when he scoffed at the way record companies are viewing his absurdly popular networking site, which boasts 90 million members worldwide. “Friend count does not translate to sales at all, and I see all kinds of record company A&R people [talent scouts] making that mistake all the time,” he said. “You can see a great band with 5,000 friends, and a terrible band with 10,000 friends. The difference is just how they promote themselves.”

In other words, artists and their support systems still need to do the lion’s share of the work in order for their music to be recognized on the Net or anywhere else. This was the key point uniting the diverse participants on a panel called “Idiots Unite!,” with the idiots in question being people who still work at and believe in independent record labels.

Now a senior citizen, Seymour Stein — the man who started Sire Records and signed the Ramones, the Talking Heads and Madonna — brought some perspective to things: The music business is only 125 years old, and it has weathered crises spurred by technology in the past, he said. In the 1920s, the record labels worried that radio would kill the sale of recorded music, just like they worry about the Internet today. “There will always be a music business,” Stein said. “Music is something a lot of people in the world just can’t live without. What we just have to do is figure out how to survive.” The panelists all agreed that every artist now has the tools, thanks to the Net, to act as his or her own record company. “There will be 100,000 tiny indie labels,” artist manager Jeff Castelaz said. But only a few of those will succeed in the end. One of the visionary computer programmers who developed Lotus 1-2-3, Yobie Benjamin is now working on a program that will help all these small new indie labels distribute their music, but that won’t be enough to level the playing field between, say, a Joe’s Record Company and a Sire. “Everybody can’t be a businessman,” Benjamin said. “The most difficult part of the music business is the business, and only people who are good at that will succeed.”

1:30 A.M. FRIDAY, MARCH 16 -- EXHAUSTED AND BACK AT THE HOTEL

Another night with mixed results in the clubs, though I'm certainly not despairing: Midway through the festival, there are still 48 hours and 700 bands to go.

My musical explorations started with a band from the indie-rock hotbed of Montreal, the Besnard Lakes, who play dark, spiraling, ambient folk-rock with hints of Southern Gothic. (Hmmm, I seem to be typing those words as a prevalent influence a lot this year.)

The group is winning a devoted fan base for its debut album, "The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse," but I thought the music was too fragile, drawn-out, sleepy and uninspiring onstage to sustain a 40-minute set, especially given that the sextet only played five songs during that time.

With my interest piqued strictly by the goofy/provocative name, I didn't exactly bring high expectations to the Columbus, Ohio, trio Psychedelic Horses---. But even those weren't met: This pointlessly noisy, gleefully talent-less combo would be more aptly named Unlistenable Bulls---.

It's a 1,250-mile, 19-hour drive from Columbus to Austin, and this was the sort of set that left you scratching your head and wondering why the band bothered.

Speaking of edgily named bands, Dead Child is the new quintet featuring former Slint and Zwan guitarist David Pajo, along with members of For Carnation and Lords. Punishingly loud, the group aims to resurrect the golden age of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal - Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Motorhead - combined with Voivod and a more recent hard-rock a la Mastodon. That's a tall order, but the guitars and rhythm section came close, while the anemic vocals were a definite weak spot.

I saw parts of several other sets as the night wore on and I walked up and down Sixth Street, but nothing else was nearly as worthy of attention as 120 Days, an electronic/dance/art-rock quartet that's the best band the New Wave of New Wave scene in Brooklyn has yet produced - even though the group actually hails from Kristiansund, Norway.

120 Days released its self-titled debut album on Vice Records last October, and it's a strong disc, but the group's sound is best appreciated live, where the driving drum-machine rhythms blend with live percussion and great, sweeping waves of heavily echoed keyboards and vocals to create an all-enveloping swirl. Their performance was as strong a set as I've seen at SXSW, and one of those is all you need to make your night.

5 P.M. FRIDAY, MARCH 16 -- AT THE CONVENTION CENTER

As part of the lineup of panels on Friday, Chicago Tribune rock critic Greg Kot and I had the privilege of interviewing Booker T. Jones, the legendary organist of the Stax-Volt house band, Booker T. and the MG's, which played on some of the greatest recordings ever made ("Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding, "In the Midnight Hour" by Wilson Pickett) as well as scoring a timeless hit of their own with "Green Onions."

Jones' accomplishments didn't end there, and his resume contains many other high points; he produced Bill Withers' "Just As I Am," Willy Nelson's "Stardust" and Neil Young's "Are You Passionate?," to name a few. But the most inspiring things about his career are that he never stopped learning (he recently returned to school to study digital recording); he always kept moving forward and growing as a musician (he is gearing up to record an ambitious new album) and he always refused to be easily confined to any pigeonhole.

Later on, veteran rock journalist Ed Ward interviewed one of the most

interesting behind-the-scenes forces in rock history, Joe Boyd, the man who produced the early Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention. Boyd had a bevy of great tales from these adventures, but unfortunately, he was committed to reading long stretches from his recent book, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, rather than answering questions from the always-knowledgeable Ward, and the readings made for a much less interesting panel.

The most entertaining session of the conference so far brought together the three veteran members of punk godfathers the Stooges. Iggy Pop and Ron and Scott Asheton may not have come close to living up to their legacy with their new album, "The Weirdness," but it was a pleasure to hear them talk about the unique Detroit/Ann Arbor scene that led to the creation of "The Stooges" (1969) and the time they spent in L.A. recording "Funhouse" (1970).

The first album's classic "No Fun" was inspired by the "no, no, no" in the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," the Beach Boys' "Fun, Fun, Fun" and the chord progression of "I Walk the Line" by Johnny Cash, Iggy said. And the highlight of that stay in L.A. was when John Wayne almost ran him over as he was crossing Santa Monica Boulevard.

Here are some more choice tidbits.

2 A.M. SATURDAY, MARCH 17 -- EXHAUSTED AND BACK AT THE HOTEL

Alright, tonight was more like it! There were some low points, to be sure, but the high points more than made up for them.

My third night in the clubs started with Peter, Bjorn and John, the Swedish pop trio whose third album "Writer's Block" has generated considerable buzz in the indie-rock world. Though its melodies are irresistible, the group can seem a bit too twee and affected on album. In concert, there's more of a rhythmic bottom and drive - many fans danced throughout - and you begin to appreciate the spaces in the band's arrangements and the way those emphasize simple but effective parts in each song.

Although there are only three musicians, they often seem to create a sound as big as ork-pop bands with 10 or more members, and that's a good trick.

Speaking of ork-pop, I caught the new incarnation of the Polyphonic Spree, as big, bold and brassy as ever as it gears up to release a new album on TVT Records, but with new costumes - black paramilitary uniforms - and a darker vibe replacing the white robes and relentlessly sunny outlook of the last two albums.

Darker still were Austin's Black Angels. I first heard the group at SXSW last year, but it just keeps getting better and better, and I felt the need to lose myself in its massive, metronomic rhythms and pulsating, hypnotic waves of Velvet Underground-inspired noise and drone after enduring the evening's low point, a performance by singer, songwriter and pianist Rachel Fuller.

Fuller is Pete Townshend's partner, as she reminds the crowd on the average of every 10 minutes, and she often has the legendary Who guitarist participate in her "In the Attic" music talk show podcast, which she also takes on the road. (She and Townshend have already done their joint thing in Chicago twice, at the House of Blues and Martyr's.) On her own, she is a mediocre to downright awful performer and songwriter - a second-rate wannabe Tori Amos. She's fond of writing songs about how she can't quit smoking - there were two in one eight-tune set - and pretentious, "songwriterly" exercises such as matching her own lyrics to a classical sonata by Beethoven.

With several performances scattered throughout the festival, Fuller drew huge crowds every time, as fans showed up and waited for the moment when her partner would come onstage to do a song or two of his own. Listen, it's wonderful that Pete is happy and in love, but there's something distasteful about Fuller holding Who fans captive and trying to capitalize on this relationship to forward her own career. Absent this connection, few would care.

Back on the positive end of the spectrum, the veteran psychedelic pop band the Apples in Stereo proved that the songs from their recent "New Magnetic Wonder" are as effervescent and undeniable onstage as they are on album, though it was hard to endure a 45-minute delay for the show to start while they endlessly tweaked the sound. Finally, there was the Good, the Bad & the Queen, the English supergroup led by Blur and Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn and featuring former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, ex-Verve guitarist Simon Tong and 73-year-old Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen.

The British music press has hailed the band as nothing less than "the

future of rock," while the American critics have generally been disappointed with its self-titled debut, whining that it doesn't do justice to its pedigrees (in particular Blur and the Clash). Both extreme views miss the point that the project is a collaboration of friends who came

together for a one-off project to explore a very particular mood and sound - a trancey, gently grooving extension of the sort of trip-hop introduced by bands like Portishead a decade ago.

Judging on its own merits for what it is instead of what its members once did in different guises, it's beautiful, powerful music made all the more effective live by a four-piece string section and the ability to watch Allen in action, playing deceptively simple but extraordinarily effective rhythms while hardly seeming to move at all.

MARCH 18

With the panel schedule less interesting on the final day of SXSW XXI, I spent the afternoon ducking out to see some movies that were part of the film fest (which started more than a week ago, but lingered through the weekend) and catch up with some friends over the best fajitas north of Mexico, the better to muster my energies for the final night of music.

From there, with no must-see's on my list for the next few hours, I set out to do a bit of blind club-hopping and found a band named Tulsa. I should say I decided to stay because that was my editor's home town and I wanted to pay him tribute for reading these reams of copy, but the truth is that the group captivated me from its first notes. Besides, the quartet actually hails from Boston.

Led by songwriter Carter Tanton, Tulsa's core sound is alternative-country a la Wilco's "Being There," but this is enhanced with gorgeous Fender Rhodes keyboard and heavily echoed guitar reminiscent of Pink Floyd at its pre-"Dark Side of the Moon" trippiest, combined with effective harmony vocals throughout. The group recently released a strong EP called "Hunting With Cats" on the digital-only Park the Van label.

My dumb luck continued as I happened upon a set by The Affair, a quintet from Brooklyn that puts its own unique mark on the New Wave of New Wave sound so familiar from those parts (and too often blandly generic). The biggest asset here is fiery vocalist Kali Holloway, but the Affair also benefits from more direct rhythms, textured keyboard parts and a pop sensibility that owes as much to early Blondie as it does to bubblegum pop and the girl groups of the '60s.

With memorable tunes such as "Left at the Party," "Jailbait Date" and "Anything But Disco (You Ruined My Life)," the powerful debut album "Yes Yes to You" was released by Absolutely Kosher Records last January.

The evening took a slight downturn courtesy of another Brooklynite, keyboardist-vocalist Chris Garneau, who played with the accompaniment of cello, bass and drums. "Creating a sleepy bal-musette for the new century, [the artist] draws you into a world of gauzy twilit skylines and moss-covered piers on brackish rivers," according to his blurb on the SXSW Web site. Actually, I heard a derivative and oh-so-precious third-rate Jeff Buckley imitator. What that has to do with French accordion music in the 1880s, I haven't a clue — and no, I'm not just grouchy because I had to look up "bal-musette."

Next, it was back to the good stuff courtesy of The Pipettes, who played the last of five SXSW gigs, counting showcases and parties, at a ridiculously overcrowded tent that left as many people standing on the street as made it inside the venue. As their name suggests, the three women from Brighton, England, are also big admirers of the girl groups, but they blow up the sassy feminism that was a mere suggestion in those bands to modern proportions (think Lily Allen) while boasting a winning, self-deprecating sense of humor (think Art Brut) and adding a hefty dose of garage rock. It's a winning combination, onstage and on the debut album "We Are the Pipettes."

Finally, faced by endless lines and massive crowds waiting to see the Stooges (who come to the Congress Theatre on April 15), I opted instead to make my way down Sixth Street one last time to catch a band from Australia that a clear-eyed fan could argue is as good a Stooges in 2007 as the Stooges themselves.

Melbourne, Australia's Beasts of Bourbon made six cult-favorite albums of glorious grungy punk before dropping off the scene in 1997. Back and better than ever, they spent a grand total of three days recording and mixing the recent album "Little Animals," and they were even better onstage, with the amps cranked up to 11, sweat and beer flying everywhere and their anger and lust for life thoroughly undiminished.

It was a great way to end the SXSW experience, even if my ears are likely to be ringing and my feet killing me well into the coming week. But as one of the Beasts' best new tunes puts it, "I don't care about nothing anymore" -- and that's exactly the way good rock 'n' roll and the SXSW experience should make you feel.

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