In the make-believe world of the annual South by Southwest Music and Media Conference that concluded early Monday, 400 bands grappled for the attention of 4,500 talent scouts, record executives, journalists and assorted other industry movers, shakers and fakers. But the reality of South by Southwest is that most of those bands would have a difficult time attracting attention from their own mothers, let alone an industry seduced so easily by more glittery attractions.
The humbling reality of South by Southwest was found in bars like Babe’s, where a band from Little Rock, Ark., calling itself Ho-Hum lived up to that unfortunate billing by providing background noise for conversations among stray college students and a handful of desultory writers cooling their heels between late-night escapades.
The inescapable reality of South by Southwest was found on the stage at the base of 6th Street and Brazos on the eastern fringe of this venerable music town’s night-life district. The latecomers were bunched a city block up the hill, squinting down into the lights. From the stragglers’ vantage point, Joan Osborne looked about the size of a pea, albeit a shouting, strutting, mini-skirted one. Maybe the folks atop the hill couldn’t see the ringlet hair or the nose ring of Osborne too well, but they sure could hear that throaty blues mama imitation she was throwing down.
Even though she was shut out at the recent Grammy Awards despite five nominations, Osborne is riding high with a top-10 album and the hit song of the moment, “One of Us.” Her appearance at an event once largely reserved for unknown or regional acts merely confirmed an impression that had been bubbling ever closer to the surface since the music industry’s key event, the New Music Seminar in New York, bit the dust a few years ago.
In its 10th year, South by Southwest isn’t for the little guys and gals anymore; it has become the most prestigious national gathering in the pop-music industry. Once a largely home-brewed event designed to showcase Texas music–alongside all the pork ribs, Shiner Bock beer and sunshine that visitors from the chilly North could inhale in one five-day blitz–South By Southwest is now an event where non-Texans such as Osborne, Liz Phair, George Clinton and Iggy Pop can promote their latest product, as they did last weekend.
Another veteran rocker, Lou Reed, stole the thunder from the opening night’s local music awards when his first area concert in more than a decade siphoned off numerous registrants. By day, the various record labels promoted their bands by luring the well-connected with drink, Tex-Mex finger food and more drink. At past conferences these industry parties typically kicked off in earnest around the dinner hour, but this year things started rolling about noon, and it was possible for conferencegoers to stumble from one feed to the next without once having to set foot inside the Austin Convention Center, where sparsely attended panel discussions were held.
Over the top
The five-day event’s big shows were Osborne’s outdoor shriekfest and Phair’s solo appearance at the Liberty Lunch club, where she unveiled a clutch of new songs, presumably scheduled for her work-in-progress album. Listeners who know Osborne only from her relatively polished, blues-tinged studio debut, “Relish,” saw a different, far more aggressive performer on the 6th Street stage.
Live, the singer’s fixation on Aretha Franklin-Janis Joplin-Etta James-style blues shouting is an undeveloped cliche. While her role models all have courted excess in their worst moments, Osborne makes a habit of it, her powerful voice often breaking into a tortured rasp, with all the discipline of someone who has just been jabbed in the ribs with a fork. After a strong opening of “Right Hand Man,” Osborne remarked on the preponderance of audience members “doing that Grateful Dead hippie dance,” and it was all downhill from there. Osborne and her band love to boogie in a way that made them sound like marginally proficient Canned Heat imitators, and the nascent songwriting skills evident on “Relish” were smothered in neo-hippie jamming.
After her set, Osborne joined what seemed like the rest of Austin in trying to get into Liberty Lunch to catch Phair’s set. Osborne made it backstage and reportedly asked the Chicago singer-songwriter to join her on tour this summer. If Phair takes up the offer, she’ll need to improve on her South by Southwest performance, which found the singer once again roller coasting between unrefined extremes.
In contrast to her powerful and assured performance last summer at the Vic, Phair surrounded notes instead of nailing them with her erratic voice, and her guitar-playing occasionally labored for clarity. But several of Phair’s new songs, among them “Oh My God,” “K.C.,” “Russian Girl,” “Perfect World” and “Rocket Boy,” affirmed her peculiar talent for the resonant lyric, the fascinatingly twisted arrangement, the idiosyncratic guitar riff. Her songs still don’t sound quite like anyone else’s, while her voice still sounds too much like it belongs to the girl next door–a combination that can be both charming and confounding. On this night, it was both.
Given the vocal excess of Osborne and the vocal malnourishment of Phair, it was a pleasure to walk into a performance by a virtual unknown, Gillian Welch, and hear a pristine voice that seemed to float in with the evening mist from 1930s Appalachia.
What it’s all about
Welch has gained notoriety as a songwriter in Nashville, recently landing tracks on Grammy-winning albums by Emmylou Harris and the Nashville Bluegrass Band. But in a brief set with the gifted acoustic guitarist David Rawlings, Welch demonstrated that she is perhaps the most accomplished interpreter of her sparse, jewel-like lyrics. Dwelling on the metaphysical mysteries that underpin country’s greatest music, Welch never oversold her songs. Instead, the voices of Welch and Rawlings melded like a coed version of the Stanley Brothers, a slight ache detectable as they pined for elusive salvation.
Wearing a junk-shop dress and her hair in a bun, the bespectacled Welch had all the rock ‘n’ roll brio of a computer programmer. But her songs, in their unflinching depictions of sadness, death and regret, sound as at home on her forthcoming debut album as they would have on a Carter Family 78-rpm release.
In a half-filled hotel ballroom off 6th Street, only a few dozen steps away from where Joan Osborne would be affirming her star power the next day, Welch was more than just a performer pushing product. She was the best kind of music-conference act, the type that reminds the been-there-done-that crowd why they got caught up in this business in the first place.
