Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2008 > February > 05
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Video: Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars played to packed house Friday night at Flamingo Cantina. In a testament to the amazing resiliency of the human spirit, this group, formed in a refugee camp after fleeing a brutal conflict in Sierra Leone, radiated with positivity throughout the upbeat performance, which mixed elements of reggae, soca and dancehall with traditional African sounds.
“There is power in love,” lead singer Reuben Koroma explained, “enormous power.” And as the group jubilantly sang and danced, it was love that filled the club.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
Fight for control at SXSW
UPDATE: Swenson speaks on piggybackers below
Piggybackers. Pirates. Parasites. Since about the second year of the South by Southwest music festival, which heads for its 22nd campaign March 12-16, organizers have complained about fringe entities that are not sanctioned by SXSW, yet benefit from its sizzle. There’s no question that SXSW has become a youth market phenomenon, turning Austin, for four days, into the trendiest city on the planet. It’s a brand corporations are increasingly trying to attach themselves to, either in an official capacity or with big, splashy parties they do on their own.
The peripheral events add to the glamour of SXSW — even Perez Hilton came last year, and he didn’t need a badge or wristband to party around the clock. Still, SXSW fights hard to keep as much control of its moveable beast as possible. In recent years, they’ve even formed a “parasite crew” to seek out entities improperly using the SXSW name or trying to compete with sanctioned venues, the house of cards that SXSW is built upon. A few years back, SXSW even revoked the badges of Revolver magazine principals, refunding more than $4,000, because the magazine flew in the Cult to play a private party. Is SXSW being paranoid or protective?
Last year, organizers took heat for providing the fire marshal with a list of unofficial SXSW parties. Co-founder Roland Swenson’s reasoning was that if the fire marshal was going to enforce its safety codes and permits at official SXSW venues, they should do the same at other events in town. After all, if a deadly fire breaks out at a pirate party, the headline’s still going to read “Seven die at SXSW.” Subsequently, parties at the Blue Genie Theater, Factory People and the Gibson Guitar showroom, which each cost organizers tens of thousands of dollars, were shut down because party planners did not know about recent changes in the permit process and didn’t have their paperwork in order.
Did SXSW go too far? Or, having watched the demise of NYC’s New Music Seminar, the model for SXSW, are organizers just fighting to keep their baby from meeting a similar end? In an e-mail interview, we let Swenson tell his side of the control issue.
American-Statesman: Why does SXSW care if private party organizers fly in acts that aren’t part of the official SXSW lineup?
Swenson: There are three main reasons. First, we have an obligation to deliver the best shows we can find to the Austin clubs who work with us. When private party organizers use corporate sponsorships to bring in exclusive talent, build a temporary venue and give away alcohol, it impacts SXSW and our client venues in a very negative way. Corporate parties never book an unknown act; they only want headliners. The way that SXSW booked over 350 unsigned, relatively unknown acts last year was by using headliners to support those shows, and every known act we lost to a corporate party hurt.
Second, these corporations are using our name, our work, our reputation and our event to further their own business goals at our expense, and never acknowledge they are doing so. Last week I saw a proposal from a corporate sponsorship marketing company soliciting $150,000 for a “SXSW Show” that had nothing to do with us. If these entities are putting on these free parties to “help” artists and fans, there are 51 other weeks of the year that need it a lot more than during our event.
Finally, we sincerely believe that this is the trend most likely to eventually put SXSW out of business. We never take it for granted that SXSW will keep happening every year. We’ve watched huge events like ours collapse when they had once seemed invulnerable. Nothing in those cities has successfully replaced the events that collapsed. Despite what some people seem to think, artists and music fans from around the world won’t continue to flock to Austin every March if SXSW isn’t around to do what it does.
The once almighty New Music Seminar went out of business, in part, because they lost control of the clubs, many of which decided to book their own acts and run the door. What are some of the other events that have collapsed?
Besides New Music Seminar, the other big example is Popkomm, which was held in Cologne, Germany. For several years it was the largest music industry event in the world, attracting 15,000 registrants. The reasons for their collapse are complex and not totally comparable to SXSW. Probably their biggest problem was their dependence on government funding. But like the Seminar, they lost control of their festival booking to outside promoters. Because Popkomm was unable to book enough developing acts to maintain their music industry base, companies stopped attending the conference en masse, and it was over three years or so after their peak.
Subsequently, a group in Berlin bought the rights to the Popkomm name and have been presenting it there for the past five years or so. It’s a great event which I attend, but it has never approached what the Cologne event was at its peak.
Events like CMJ in New York and the Winter Music Conference in Miami are also struggling from being undermined by fringe events, and their influence has been diminished. But unlike SXSW, their events aren’t their primary businesses. CMJ is an industry trade magazine and Winter Music is a dance club promotion agency. Neither event has a comparable impact on their cities as SXSW and Austin.
How has SXSW operations been influenced by those failures?
Knowing that our continued existence is far from guaranteed makes us willing to fight (when we can) what we see as damaging to SXSW. The struggle is over who is ultimately going to control SXSW, our organization or guerrilla marketers backed by corporate interests. If SXSW loses, then SXSW eventually disappears. SXSW exists only because more entities choose to pursue a symbiotic relationship with us rather than a parasitic one. However, every year more marketing groups representing huge multinational corporations and their local proxies choose to feed off of us.
But every big event is going to have fringe elements. Do you think the NFL had a problem with corporate Super Bowl parties taking place in the Phoenix area to coincide with the recent Super Bowl? How is SXSW different?
There was no chance that Eli Manning was going to go play another game down the street from the stadium instead of playing for the Giants.
This is the first part in an ongoing dialogue with SXSW director Roland Swenson.
UPDATE: More from Roland Swenson
American-Statesman: Does SXSW consider all day parties to be piggybackers, or do you think some add to the event? If so, where do you draw the line?
Swenson: I’ve always said that the day parties at SXSW are part of what makes the event fun and useful. In 2007, SXSW sponsored 64 official day parties. All of the groups that put on those parties (and numerous other nonofficial parties, too) worked with us in a cooperative manner, and we helped many of them organize and promote their parties. Where we draw the line is when party organizers want to bring in artists that aren’t going to also make themselves available for a public, official SXSW Festival show.
One of the frustrating things the music festival has to often deal with is that many of the buzz bands’ handlers want their acts to play in a small venue where a lot of people won’t be able get in to see them. Causing a line of people waiting in line down the street, unable to get in is what they think looks successful.
Our protocol is to always get the people with badges in first, the people with wristbands next, and the “VIPs” wait along with everyone else. With parties, the “VIP” list is always first.
If SXSW turns into an event where the hottest acts only play private parties, where the sponsors control who gets into the show, SXSW won’t be the same event anymore, and we won’t last for long.
Definitely, there are a number of events that we consider to be parasites or as piggybacking on our event. Particularly damaging are the ones that go out and sell sponsorships to consumer products, telling them they are buying a “SXSW show” when they have no connection to us.
The whole “guerrilla marketing” trend is built on latching onto an existing event and draining off its resources by selling sub-events to sponsors, blurring the line to suggest they are part of the main event. We think that’s misleading and unfair competition.
We’re usually willing to come to some accommodation with corporate sponsors if they are willing to help us underwrite SXSW activities, but in some cases they just want to pose as the “rebels” while casting us as the “man.” How billion-dollar corporations can get so many people to believe that is a mystery to me.
The other phenomenon we’re seeing develop with the corporate sponsored private parties is that if you don’t fit the “target demographic” of the sponsor, you don’t get in to the party whether you have a badge or a wristband or no pass at all.
- Photos: SXSW music preview
- More SXSW
Permalink | Comments (36) | Post your comment Categories: SXSW
Review: The Bangles and the Go-Go’s
The Go-Go’s Antone’s, Feb. 4
The Bangles La Zona Rosa, Jan. 31
Twenty-seven years after “Beauty and the Beat” became the first No. 1 album written and performed entirely by an all-woman rock band, the Go-Go’s’ unique place in history remains as untouched as the 1972 Dolphins’ perfect NFL season. There’s been scads of formidable female artists before and after the Go-Go’s heyday, but even here in 2008, with a woman gunning for the presidency, the self-contained, all-girl band remains a very rare beast in the rock mainstream. So much so, that having both the Go-Go’s and their immediate heirs to the ’80s pop charts, the Bangles, hit town in the same week was bound to feel like a nostalgia fest (or overload) to the casually curious, or a veritable battle of the bands (girl fight!) to die-hard fans.
Not that there ever was such a rivalry — the bands’ original chart runs never overlapped, and members of both acts have collaborated on side projects for years. But if this had been a showdown, the Go-Go’s walked in with one hand tied behind their back. Minutes before showtime, Austin’s own prodigal Go-Go Kathy Valentine (bass) took the stage to break the news to the sold-out crowd that guitarist Jane Wiedlin had just left the tour upon hearing that her mother was terminally ill. In her place — with a day to learn the set — was 24-year-old local blues guitar phenom Eve Monsees. No stranger to playing with legends on the Antone’s stage, Monsees was shy but held her own, winning encouraging grins from Valentine and lead guitarist/keyboardist Charlotte Caffey.
But Wiedlin’s absence was still palpable; she was missed both vocally and for her role as frontwoman Belinda Carlisle’s main foil for flirty, catty stage banter. That put the onus on the rest of the band to raise their game while working out a few kinks (most notably, Carlisle and Valentine debating mid-song over who would sing Wiedlin’s bridge on “Our Lips Our Sealed” — with Valentine reluctantly putting on her best pixie voice). The 18-song set was heavy on hits like “Vacation,” “Head Over Heels” and even Carlisle’s solo debut, “Mad About You,” but also featured choice album tracks like “Fading Fast” and later day gems like 2001’s “Unforgiven” and 1994’s “The Whole World Lost It’s Head.” All in all, an imperfect but invigorating performance — far from the firing-on-all-cylinders set the Go-Go’s delivered at Stubb’s two years ago, but characterized by a scrappy tenacity closer in spirit to their pure punk roots than any other show they’ve played in years.
By contrast, the Bangles’ performance Thursday at La Zona Rosa was a model of precision — a veritable Electric Light Orchestra to the Go-Go’s’ Sex Pistols. They were missing a key original member, too, with singer-songwriter Abby Travis standing in for retired bassist Michael Steele. They also had a male keyboard player, key to the instrumental mix but tucked discreetly back in the corner to leave the spotlight on sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson (lead guitar and drums, respectively) and Susanna Hoffs (rhythm guitar). All three took turns on lead vocals; Hoffs, never the frontwoman so much as the one who sang most of the catchiest singles (or in the case of “Walk Like an Egyptian,” the funnest verse), left most of the talking to Vicki. “You can’t love her,” Peterson playfully chided one outspoken Hoffs admirer, “because her name isn’t Susan!”
With 20 songs picked evenly from across the band’s four-album catalog (including several from 2003’s spotty reunion effort, “Doll Revolution”), the Bangles offered fans a lot of blissfully harmonized bang for their buck. But apart from the encore — a romp through the Seeds’ garage rock classic “Pushing Too Hard” — surprises were few. To wit: autographed copies of the set list were hawked at the merch table even before showtime. Sorry gals — that’s just eternally lame.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Reviews
Unreleased Bob Wills recording discovered
A previously unknown recording of Western Swing legend Bob Wills telling his life story has been discovered.
Austin resident Dwight Adair, owner of www.bobwills.com, learned of the recording’s existence through an e-mail sent to him by a Bob Wills fan and former musician Gary Frietag of Florida.
Frietag told Adair that the recording was made on a reel-to-reel tape deck by a musician friend, Ray Riggs, also of Florida.
Riggs made the recording in a hotel in Fresno, Calif., in 1949 or 1950. Wills and the Texas Playboys were appearing there. Riggs has kept the tape.
“I tried to contact the Wills estate but never heard back from them,” Riggs said in a press release. “So I just kept it, hoping that someday it would see the light of day.”
Adair says the recording is of Wills talking about his career. “It’s about half an hour long and it is certainly Bob Wills’s voice, answering questions asked by Ray Riggs and elaborating about his feelings for the music he created.”
The recording is available for download here.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment
New Austinite wins Super Bowl contest
Kina Grannis, who moved to Austin in May after graduating from USC, has received a record contract from Interscope after winning the “Crash the Super Bowl” music challenge sponsored by Doritos. Fox aired a 60-second video of Grannis’ song “Message From Your Heart,” during the Super Bowl telecast. Click here to see the clip.
“This entire experience has been so surreal and nothing short of amazing,” the 22-year-old Grannis said in a press release. “I can’t believe that just months ago I was working at a coffee house and playing music in my spare time; now I’ve been in my own music video during the Super Bowl! I am so thankful to Doritos and especially to everyone who voted for me.”
