For our last day/night in Houston we went back to hang out with friends at JP Hops, said our goodbyes to Pam and played their open mic – and promised not to be away for quite so long. We head out early, back to my brother’s apartment and pack up, preparing for we know not what in Austin… we catch ourselves up on Battlestar Galactica though we’re doomed to fall back again while camping on Sunday. We fill water bottles, Love the dog, and go to bed early.
I’m optimistic about South by South West, eager to see Austin. More and more people are really enthusiastic about Guero’s Taco Bar, and all I can hear as I fall asleep is GIR screaming TACOOOOOO!!! shrilly in my ears.
The next morning George and Del are running around in circles with last minute preparations for joining us in Austin. It’s a lot easier when you pack EVERYTHING. Heather and I can just walk around the apartment and say “is that mine? Yes? Put it in the car.”
Austin is almost generic in appearance. It’s only the people on the street corners and the sheer number of music venues that at first make make it stand out. The white, sandy soil of Texas comes to the surface rarely between asphalt and sidewalk, and you can almost forget that you’re so far from home.
We pull into Austin at around two in the afternoon and meet up with George’s old roommate, Brett, who takes us all out to lunch at a local bar. When we get there a huge billion-piece brass band is playing music and we have some of the best taco / fajita thingies I’ve ever had. Delicious barbecue sauce, good sweet tea (my Mom would’ve hated this stuff), good music, weird metal roosters in the trees. I’m beginning to see the charm of Austin.
It’s not in the streets, and it’s not in the standard-fare office buildings that make up every city skyline in America, if not the world… it’s in the venues, the bars, the people. I see more handmade clothing and dreadlocks than I’ve seen since art school (and even then, most of my contemporaries had shaved their head by the end of college). After visiting the shops, the clothing is explained… for all the “Keep Austin Weird” logos scattered around, the t-shirts for sale are more generic than Hot Topic.
We wander the city on foot from three to close to midnight and hear more bands than I can count and the streets are flooded with people and the noise is overwhelming. I am officially no longer impressed with the French Quarter of New Orleans. At all.
Of course, as we wander, it also becomes more and more evident that we never had a chance of getting booked in the main part of South by South West. For all that it’s a mecca of Live music, the majority of acts fall into your standard radio fare. There are a couple of exceptions… just about everything that Pete Simple booked at his Gueros Tacos showcase has some pretty individual flare. As we wander the main strip of SxSW we run across a pretty bad-ass metal group (I think they were Dappled Cities Fly) who’s stage antics we stopped and watched through the windows of some bar on 6th Street. The singer STARTED on stage, wriggling like Jim Morrison in his prime and we left him up on a precarious stack of amplifiers and house speakers looking for a way back down.
The main reason we’d come into town early was to see Amber Rubarth at a little corner bar early in the evening. We catch her outside and talk for a moment and watch her play, mesmerising a new audience that evidently includes a couple of people who know her, and who almost 100% are in Love with her by the time she leaves. When she sings “and now we should only date people over 30” I feel like waving my hand, volunteering frantically for her affections. I can only dream of having her charisma.
After a couple of hours of auditory, visual and general sensory overload, we slowly make our way back to Brett’s place and watch cartoons until darkness takes us.
Psh. We’re rockstars… ON DARKNESS WE SUBSIST!!!
