In 1994, the cyberzine Mondo 2000 asked me to cover SXSW. I got a press pass for myself, and one for FringeWare art director Monte McCarter, who agreed to take photos. We discovered in the crowds of attendees and performers a DIY sensibility and a struggle to balance art as art with art as business. We were also attending the first SXSW to incorporate multimedia technology, and saw the potential in bringing Internet culture into SXSW (which led to SXSW Interactive). Mondo chose not to publish the article – we were pushing hard to get more Austin material published in the magazine, but “domineditrix” Queen Mu wasn’t an advocate.
“They can go to hell, just like any other audience.”
– Mark Rubin of the Bad Livers, in Tara Veneruso’s “Janis Joplin Slept Here.”
“What is too stupid to say is sung.”
-Rocker Gretchen Phillips, quoting an anonymous SXSW panelist.
“The first time I ever thought about why underground music meant so much to me, I was 13. I raved to a friend about several bands I was into and she asked, “Is this your life now?” I answered no then, but music’s so important to me, and to every underground fan, that it’s almost as central to our lives as freedom.”
– Susan Shepard, in her zine “Hope You Die Before I Grow Up.”
“…it is more obvious than ever how great is the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The event requires little in the way of financial sacrifice for label high-rollers, corporate expense-accounters and freeloading journalists…who fill the hotels and float from one industry party to another, while musicians are scrounging for sleeping space on somebody’s floor, hustling for burgers, playing for little or nothing.”
– Don McLeese, in the Austin American-Statesman
“About ten years ago there was a VERY strong network of indie distributors but many of them shut down. It’s awfully hard to get paid by the stores unelss you ahve a big name coming down the pike that you can hold over their heads, and all those big names (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur, Nirvana etc.) are either broken up or on big labels now themselves. The indie distribution network is suffering greatly. Hope it changes somehow.”
– Author Lorry Fleming
Conventional reporters from the slicks, the trades, the alternative newsrags were nowhere in evidence as Monte McCarter and I crawled the streets of Austin through ecstatic crowds of music fiends who would listen to any fucking thing you played anywhere in any club…they were flocking to see Johnny Cash attempt a new-edge comeback at the alternative grungelounge Emo’s, they were piledriving into Liberty Lunch for a mosh-driven set by Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon, they were crawling into Esther’s Pool for spoken word performances that evolved avant-garde jazzlike organisms suspiciously like Sun-Ra believers Liquid Mice. We made our way from the surfoid guitarmanic set by Teisco del Rey at the Continental Club to The Terrace, where a line snaked all ’round the club, which was filled to capacity, hoping for a leak or two from the Morphine set droning on inside. The crowd outside were wearing admission bands you can buy for thirty bucks, a sort of lottery thing, a CHANCE at admission but no guarantee…if the club’s filled to capacity and you’re late, you lose. But they stood there anyway, waiting perhaps, or perhaps just standing, digging the scene. Who the fuck knows what motivates a rockazoid fanatic? Those of us who’ve been listening to rock and its mutations for all its forty years have endured agonies of the flesh and torments to the soul to make the Ascendant Gigs, not knowing for sure where they’ll fall or what they’ll be…but if you keep going, if you pick the right time and the right place, you’ll catch sight of immortality in this most transient and mysterious of commercial art forms. It’s very postmodern; rock and its many derivatives are driven by truly evil forms of commodification on the one side, the side where the forces of Industry live, and by a transcendant vision of ultimate ecstasy on the other side, the side where the rabid fire-eating nail-crawling fans live. And somewhere in the middle there’s a great clueless majority, the masses of consumers, and as Susan Shepard sez:
“Commercial radio listeners, the Camelot/Musicland/Sound Warehouse target market, MTV watchers — I’m sure they experience some cute little emotional response to music, but they don’t come close to the passion that your average Sound Exchange customer or fanzine writer or Kilimanjaro-goer has for their music and all that surrounds it.”
THE MORE I THOUGHT ABOUT COMMODIFICATION, THE HUNGRIER I GOT. It’s in your relationship to your appetite that you reveal yourself. We ate pizza nonstop while watching The X Files before the Teisco del Rey thing. We should’ve been at a press conference, but we were obsessed with food and paranoia, in that order. Monte and I gorge on Mr Gatti’s mushroom pizza and whole-bottle gulps of Corona Extra, and just when we’re ready to hit the streets we notice The X Files on the tube, so we assume the couchspud position and glare dazily at the tv screen dimming while Mulder and Scully investigate mysterious deaths associated with a born-again punkoid preacher who can bring the dead to life, eyesight to the blind, cure warts, etc. The episode smokes a haze of religious metaphor thick as a Texas duster, but our trance is broken as the episode ends and we lurch for the door and make our way to the clubs.
The day gigs are harder, really. There’s panels, but who’s got the patience? Then again, that’s where we found Susan Shepard and her zine, “…Hope You Die Before I Grow Up: Why you suck and what you can’t do about it…” She’s talking to the music industry, which has thrown commercial sleaze on the music – which is more than just music, it can be a whole kind of psychosocial infrastructure. We all know that, right? The guys in the music industry, weren’t they hopping to one of the diverse beats that’s pounded the global psyche into willing submission to guerilla fuck music? No, man, not in Susan’s eyes. These guys were sitting in the dentist’s chair listening to Karen Carpenter sing “Close to You” and digging it as the nitrous oxide kicks in and they’re thinking, this is JUST LIKE being STONED!
Why is it that these are the guys who rule the industry? They’ve got the money, is why: it’s money, not passion, that drives the world to spin…but that’s what’s so fucked about the scene, the money’s pouring into the wrong pockets.
Meanwhile aspiring rockers from all corners of the globe make their pilgrimages to meccas like South by Southwest, new music festivals where they might be SEEN, make an IMPRESSION, grab a CONTRACT. We ran onto a hot little band called The Verve Pipe playing Emo’s, f’rinstance…the drummer filled us in on their travels. They’d piled into a van and driven to Austin, and we got the impression they were sleeping in the van. The drummer’s earplugs were stolen along the way, but he’d put his hearing on the line and played anyway….
Their mission was accomplished, they arrived on time, played their set with passionate intensity, and passed around CDs of their work… in fact, it seemed that everybody had a CD or a cassette or a pile of ’em to hand to record company execs, journalists, etc. Many of them so well-produced you wondered why they would need a record company. The answer, for those who don’t already know, is Marketing and Distribution. That’s the real bitch: if you’ve got the money to make your product, how do you get it to your potential audience? More and more musicians, like zinesters, are finding alternative methods of distribution, selling directly to the small weird record stores and posting, sometimes spamming, subvertisements online. The beauty in this is that they get more of the profits, and they get their stuff out; the down side is that they have to spend time and energy moving product rather than making art.
You have to wonder about the bands that do, eventually, sign. Remember stories about deals with the devil? Well, any contract that requires you to sell a piece of yourself, in this case your work, in exchange for money (and that’s not promised) has aspects of negotiation with a demon or two, because in making the commitment you’ve given a piece of your freedom away. Unless you’re supergroup-popular, you have to produce so much product by whatever time, and you lose your freedom to create spontaneously. Think about the major personalities in music, television, film, etc., that disappear from the scene…they make some money, they sign a contract, and next thing ya know they’re living for that contract’s end.
“Anything that despises and tries to negate society’s prevailing values….Whenever someone refuses to be a target market or a product for a target market, or when a group of people decline to be labeled…they become part of the underground.” — Susan Shepard
In the 60s Grove Press, publisher of avant-garde rants by Henry Miller, Beckett, Genet, Burroughs and other writers outside the bourgeoise mainstream ran an ongoing subvertisement for its slick zine, Evergreen Review. Focal point of the ad was the pronouncement (in large readable type) JOIN THE UNDERGROUND!
The slickness of the ad and the publication was ironic and perhaps misleading, but Grove Press’s mission was serious, and The Underground was real. Within the Great Silent Majority living their lives in postwar Amerika were folks who understood that the puritan hypercommercial gloss on this society of soap suds and milk duds concealed a reality where folks were fucking around with exotic drugs, kinky sex, all-collar crimes, etc. The mainstream called it a counterculture (label it, and you dispense with it, said Gnossos Pappadopoulos in Richard Farina’s “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.”)
Whether you put it underground or on the fringe or in a box just behind MTV, whether you label it or pump poison into it or co-opt it and call it yer own, the alternative scene won’t go away…because it’s generated not by scam but by realization. And there’s an ongoing tension between the somnambulistic mainstream and the desperately awake alternative culture; it’s the tension between those who gotta sleep and those who can’t sleep, gotta Stay Awake, gotta Party, talk, fuck mind in the most literal possible sense, and think things over. Dismiss it as a bohemian sensibility, the grasshopper among the ants, but it’s alive and, today, generating media, generating vicarious experience for the postmodern world of isolated basket cases basking in the glow of their monitors, plugged into the virtual realities that are ubiquitous beyond our knowing.
This is what Monte and I found ’round every corner at South by Southwest, the tension between the underground and the clueless mainstream trying to package it as entertainment for the masses. In the odd ‘multimedia showcase’ the tension was entirely missing. It was hyped as a reflection of Austin’s place on the cutting edge of interactive technologies, so their mission tied them to technology and biz first, with almost no reference to, for instance, the kind of garage tech that you find on the fringes of VR and Multimedia development. (There were exceptions, most notably The Residents’ Freak Show, and the interactive games displayed by Karen Pittman and John Witham.)
Organizer Dewey Winburne of the International Interactive Communication Society told me that organization’s fastest growing and most progressive chapter is in Austin. So what’re they into? Evidently, CD-ROM is pretty much it…there were banks of computers run by vendors who were showing their wares, CD-based games, educational and infotainment packages, even packages to address critical social problems (symptoms??) like violence, addiction, etc.
But interactive went only so far, there was no local area network, no link to the Internet, no sense of being truly wired. The evident decision to focus strictly on (mostly local) authors of CD ROM stuff locked out many of the best and the brightest, but what the hell — this was a first try, cut ’em some slack, maybe the ’95 version will be plugged into what’s really happening. (The Austin Robot Group’s annual gonzo-tech Robofest two weeks after South by Southwest was the real thing, and probably attracted more locals, especially the teen and preteen hacker crowd, who were effectively locked out of the SXSW event by the price tag.)
So we drifted back to the music. It was Saturday night and we were crazed…our partner in crime Paco Xander Nathan had returned from his travels, so the three of us wandered downtown looking for the Electric Lounge-surrogate. The Lounge’s building had burned a couple weeks before, so they were doing South by Southwest with a TENT somewhere nearby.
After getting sloshed at Katz’, we found the circus tent, in which an odd combination of local freaks, tattooed, pierced, and tie-dyed, stood with black-and-white A&R folks and a few rock journalists who’d gathered to see a couple of Austin’s hottest bands, Sincola and the Horsies. Sincola played a raging set, Rebecca Cannon capturing the stage, showing amazing range of vocal and physical expression like a femme Capt Beefheart with a good steroid rush. The audience exploded in response while Monte crept around the stage, slightly dazed from an overload of carbs (the beer & fries at Katz’), shooting photos from high and low, dancing with the images he was capturing. After the set broke, we rushed across town to Chance’s to catch The Gretchen Phillips Experience. Gretchen, formerly a member of Two Nice Girls, blasted the audience with bursts of intense guitar madness while Andy Loomis chopped Farfisa simulations on his synthopopper. WHUPS! Then it wuz time to hit the streets again, back to Electric Lounge (huff! puff! pant!) for The Horsies, their demented blend of white-trash worldbeat and Austin slacker riffs kicking up a tent-shaking wind….We were dancing fools, the world was incredibly FREE, and postmodern angst could suck wind…as the Horsies sang
I’m glad
There’s something wrong with me….
