SXSW Wednesday Part One

Since I hadn’t made any plans as far as my schedule went, I decided to start at Emo’s where there is at least two bands to choose from, and plenty of space to make further plans. I wasn’t in the place longer than two minutes before running into someone I knew. So much for remaining anonymous for this festival! Black Joe Lewis was playing R&B on the main stage and sounded great; however, I had already violated my guideline of seeing only non-Austin bands. I love them of course, but I do have the rest of the year to see them. So, after a few songs I went into Emo’s Jr. where an electronic band called Paper Rad from Providence was performing. Performing might be pushing it—there was an interesting video showing on a screen and music playing, but no band that I could see. So I guess that’s the old clueless guy in me emerging. I was getting used to the idea of the kind of electronic performance where there’s just a guy on stage pushing buttons, but I didn’t think we had gotten to the point where people aren’t required at all. Don’t get me wrong, the music and video were really interesting, but I’m a little old-fashioned in wanting to see musicians. I stopped by LJ’s for a minute where I got the one thing they make better than barley wine, which was a free barley wine.

From there I went to Mohawk and saw the end of Soiled Mattresses, who consisted of keyboard, drums, and what sounded at first to me like a trombone but was actually a soprano sax. My ears were deceiving me already. The sax player was a geeky looking guy who played the sax in an over the top out of tune fashion, which made me laugh and didn’t repulse me for some reason. Maybe I was already halfway through the 32oz high life I bought. He wandered out into the crowd occasionally which was fun. This band also had a Nord—I still wanna get one of those. Airwaves from Brooklyn was next. They were a trio of two guys on bass and drums, and a girl lead singer on clean guitar that cut through. Liked ‘em. I wish they used more b/u vocals. I wandered outside to see a few songs from the band I came to see, Call Me Lightning, just because they were from Milwaukee. They were a trio as well but all guys and heavily distorted guitar instead of clean. Two of them were long haired bearded types, and the drummer was clean cut with short hair. The guitar player had a real beat up looking Fender, liked that. After a few I went back inside having decided I preferred the other band, but they were done already. I felt a little guilty for leaving them, and I think I may have said as much to their lead singer after the show!

Man I took a lot of notes on Wednesday. I still went to another 4 places I think! So, there will be a part two for Wednesday. Good for me that my notes got shorter and shorter as the festival went on, otherwise this could take me all year to write up.