South by Southwest keeps growing and so do I: For my fourth visit, I went for quality over quantity, with preference given to seeing Seattle bands and spending time with Seattle people (funny how I have to travel a thousand miles to catch up with someone who lives in my neighborhood). Truth is, the annual music-industry confab is as much about meeting your peers, eating barbecue with them, getting drunk with them, standing in line with them, talking shop with them, talking shit with them, and arguing about bands with them as it is about seeing music.
It's like summer camp but with better sing-alongs.
So it's good seeing the strong presence Seattle had in Austin, both musically and industrywise. It's good seeing locals hang together and have these experiences outside of the local setting, outside the touring setting, an island surrounded by the SXSW hype machine, a spotlight so wide and bright it can be blinding.
Friday afternoon's Ballard-does-Austin party was an appropriately cozy gathering at an outside performance space a 15-minute walk from downtown. It was low-key enough to accommodate dancing babies and curious neighbors who enjoyed Rachel Flotard's acoustic set and the Trucks' electro-punk shout-alongs. Off-the-beaten-track day parties have become more common in recent years and—in the case of smaller fetes like this one—are often the most relaxed and intimate part of the Austin experience.
Which was well counterpointed by a late-night party thrown annually by Charles Attal, a big-shot Austin promoter and booker. This year, Playboy cosponsered the event, which was at a warehouse in East Austin. All sorts of free swag (Playboy bling and rhinestone-studded, cheese-ball wristbands) was on hand and top-shelf whiskey flowed freely. Despite the anonymous environs and plenty of too-drunk-to-give-a-fuck revelers, the mood was pretty light thanks to Ghostland Observatory, a hometown electro-pop duo that kept the crowd moving into the wee hours.
Throughout the weekend, young bands from Antibalas to Mastodon to Earl Greyhound to Danava flexed their performance chops, trying to be bigger, louder, more. For a lot of groups, SXSW is a terrific opportunity to expand their business, to be seen by bookers and label folks and writers who might offer a tiny leg up in their struggle to make music for a living. Exposure is the quintessential reason for any band to save up the money and make the trip. But you have to make serious noise to be heard amid the din of 1,300 bands, and that doesn't always happen just by playing your one 45-minute showcase. L.A. garageabilly trio Muso, for instance, lit their tiny toy drum kit on fire on a street corner one afternoon as a Tonight Show camera crew led by Wayne Coyne egged them on. During his Thursday-night set, Tom Morello spiked his new material—acoustic political folk played under the name the Nightwatchman—with surprise cameos by Slash and Perry Farrell, whose appearances were far more discussed than the music itself.
The other major talking point of the weekend had nothing to do with music. The annual Vice magazine party is typically an all-night celeb-filled rager that's the weekend's hottest and hardest ticket to come by. This year it ended only a couple of hours in after a second-floor balcony collapsed. At 2:00 a.m., I walked up to a pile of concrete rubble and a throng of hipsters caught uncomfortably between ironic detachment and genuine concern. Amazingly, nobody was hurt (God watches over even the nihilists?). Seeing hype crushed by nothing less substantial than gravity itself was the most appropriate exit signal I could ask for.
Of all the experiences of the weekend, the most rewarding was also the most modest. Archie Bell made a rare appearance to play his 1968 gem "Tighten Up," a protofunk/Southern soul classic that's one of my all-time favorite songs. The sixtysomething Houstonite was hardly a buzz magnet and the crowd that gathered to watch him—along with opener Dennis Coffey, '70s Motown session-guitarist supreme and creator of disco-funk classic "Scorpio"—on Friday night certainly wasn't the stovepipe pants and neckerchief contingent. There were more fanny packs, older people, and locals, all clapping along, doing the "Tighten Up" with no shame. For just a minute, SXSW was about something besides what's now or what's next—it was about what came before. 
