Nonfiction: An Encounter South by South West

TO LOOK FOR AMERICA:

An Encounter South by South West

Austin, Texas smells like tacos. Tex Mex. Sizzling onions. Yeah. It smells of onions. Or maybe I’m just hungry and am inventing smells in my head. Surely there is something easier to describe. The vibe? Perhaps. The vibe is mellow, mellow and comfortable. I walk into Buffalo Exchange or the Wheatsville organic supermarket or Juan In A Million and the shop-owners look really pleased that I’m there. Really pleased. It feels like I live around the corner and they know who I am and I know who they are and it’s Springtime and how about we all go and have a beer and a taco later on? Meet you at Maggie Mae’s on 6^th? Sure. See y’all there.

“Y’all”—that’s another thing. I thought it was just a stereotype used in shows such as Jerry Springer or The Beverly Hillbillies to make Americans look funny. Not quite. For local Texans, even the ones who talk normally and without the typical Southern drawl, the term “y’all” is put to use every couple of sentences at least:

I hail a taxi.

‘Where y’all going?’

I attempt to get into a club.

‘Y’all got ID?’

I walk down the street.

‘Y’all got a dollar?’

I divulge the fact that I’m a foreigner.

‘Ooh, awesome! Y’all here for South By?’

Addictive. Within half a day I am saying “y’all” to everyone I know. To my bitter disappointment, my brother shakes it out of me within an hour. He claims it sounds stupid coming from an Australian, and that I am just going to embarrass myself. I am also using it incorrectly, apparently. He tells me it doesn’t make sense when I protest, ‘Jack, y’all should stop telling me what I can and can’t say!’ because I am only talking to him, and not more than one person, hence the “all” in “y’all”, but I don’t think it really matters. Y’all didn’t know what he was talking about, and that was for damn sure.

There’s no denying it, though. Austin is a little different from the rest of Texas. It’s the black sheep in the family, the eccentric cousin, a pinch of chilli in your hot chocolate - or, as the locals would say, the blueberry in the tomato soup. My first impression of Texas is its capital city, Houston, a city infested with Longhorns paraphernalia, larger-than-life fast food joints and Keith Urban-adoring, God-fearing, rodeo-frequenting yokels.

My first meal is dinner at Planet Hollywood for fish—“The Aquarium Restaurant”. It feels more like underwater Disneyland than a restaurant or an aquarium, let alone some strange combination of the two. There is something cartoony about sitting at a blue table with blue sea-horse-shaped salt and pepper shakers in a blue room that is sheathed in a lava-lampesque glow that also happens to be blue, all the while being assaulted by over-excited waiters with bulging eyes exclaiming, very nearly singing,

‘Welcome to The Aquarium, an underwater dining adventure! Submerge yourself in a dining experience like no other!’

Not to mention the slight awkwardness of eating fish whilst watching fish, because of course, one of the many beneficial features of a restaurant-aquarium is that fish are swimming all around us in enormous tanks. I feel clammy and nervous, as if the fish are watching me back. They’re watching me eating up their friends, and they’re plotting revenge somehow.

As if my underwater dining nightmare isn’t American enough, Jacqueline—Jax for short—a friend of my brother’s who let us stay with her family in Houston for the night, refuses to change the radio station, so our three-hour drive from Houston to Austin is spent unhappily with 96.1 FM, Houston’s Home For Country Legends (“maybe the mightiest little station in the nation”).

We drive through the heart of downtown Austin, slowing down to catch a glimpse of 6^th, the city’s most bustling street. It is littered with bars, a few cinemas and not much else, unless you count the tacky souvenir shops rearing their ugly heads to leer at our wallets, boasting Tshirts that read, Fuck ya’ll, I’m from Texas and Keep Austin Weird. The street is completely closed off from cars on weekends, but during the music component of South by South West (SxSW) festival, they’re closed off indefinitely. Already, the scene from Houston has changed dramatically. Every second person looks like, well, a musician. There is an abundance of boys in skinny jeans and leather jackets sauntering down the street, cigarettes slicked behind their ears, black Fender cases in their hands and a look of careless superiority. This is it. This is one of the most vital music events in the world, and here to be see it all is little ol’ me, with nothing but a little suitcase full of gleeful anticipation and duty-free gin.

I’m staying further uptown in what they call the West Campus area, the official hangout for University of Texas students. It isn’t hard to tell, what with the profusion of University Co-ops, lost in a sea of orange Texas Longhorns merchandise that college kids devour hungrily. What’s more, every second house is large, old-fashioned and somewhat gaudy in all its splendour. These, I am soon informed, are what they call Frat and Sorority houses, and they play host to rowdy university students who regularly scour the streets in Hummers and SUVs. At this time of the year, however, West Campus is curiously quiet, and this is because most of the students have gone home for Spring Break. Most. I still suffer the rather bothersome experience of getting heckled by Frat boys in SUVs. Walking down 22^nd street with my brother, we hear the roar of an engine, the “pimpin’” vocal stylings of Snoop Dogg blaring, and then a loud popping sound.

‘Dude, your girlfriend just farted!’

Whoops of laughter and hooting ensue, and the wheels screech obnoxiously as our new friends speed away in manner of children knick-knocking. All I can do is gape in bewilderment, and try to identity which lame American teen movie I’ve magically woken up in today.

Nevertheless, most college kids have gone home, and are instead replaced with avid music lovers from all over the world, either striving to make a name for their bands, or just searching to find something fresh to listen to. I find myself in the latter category, eager to open up to mind-blowing live music and come home to Melbourne with a suitcase full of CD demos from bands that no one has heard of—yet.

Such is the beauty of SxSW. Sure, there are some big names floating around, I spend time circling a handful in the SxSW gig guide: Primal Scream, Peter Bjorn and John, PJ Harvey, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Proclaimers, The Drones, Explosions In The Sky, Dinosaur Jr. Yet none of these bands really become top priority once the festival begins, and I find myself more inclined to wander around the streets and stumble upon a backyard somewhere that just happens to be hosting some insane new act from Helsinki, or Auckland, or New Jersey.

The official opening day of SxSW maintains this natural sort of flavour. In the West Campus area, corner Guadeloupe and 29^th, there is a radiant little dwelling that goes by the name of The Spiderhouse Café. The “Spiderhouse” makes a lot of sense when you walk into its exuberant courtyard. The array of offbeat, oxidized furniture and flowerpots strewn about would certainly make a charming home for spiders. And you get the feeling that some of the particularly charismatic wrought iron chairs, those that brag twirls reminiscent of a patio in Tuscany, look like they really would grow eight legs if they could. The venue is alive, to say the least. Quirky, comfortable café by day and incendiary bar by night – it is surprisingly easy to stay there from noon on Thursday until four the next morning.

The first band on the bill is Planet Creature, fresh out of Toronto, Canada. These girls are part of a group I hung out with when I lived in Toronto during 2007, and part of my motive for going to Austin in the first place was to surprise them here, at the Spiderhouse, and see them play. There are two other bands playing too, The Hoa Hoa’s and The Disraelis, who are on the road with Planet Creature and also close friends. They had no idea I wasn’t still on the other side of the world, twiddling my thumbs in Australia. The shock they receive in seeing me there, two years later, and in Texas of all places, is the most entertaining thing I’ve ever seen. It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for, and I’m not disappointed.

‘That was a nasty trick,’ Kristina growls between bouts of hysterical laughter, clutching my shoulders. ‘A nasty trick, Charlie!’

Most of the others are staring blankly at me as if they still haven’t quite worked out the joke yet. When we’ve all calmed down, the girls ask if I would play the tambourine on stage with them. I’d been the sixth member of Planet Creature in 2007, when we’d only written two songs, didn’t have a name, and only played to our friends simply because it was their house and gear we hijacked for band practice.

‘The girls are actually sounding pretty good,’ I would overhear Richie—front man of the Hoa Hoa’s—saying as we rehearsed.

‘They are, they are, you know,’ Lee (another Hoa Hoa) would respond, laughing jovially for no real reason, a typical Lee thing to do. ‘They’re not half bad, eh?’

Not half bad at all, and it’s a pretty insane moment for the Planet Creature girls, getting the opportunity to rock out to their own tunes at one of the biggest music festivals in the world.

Giddy, I snatch up a tambourine, and we have a ball up on Spiderhouse’s sunny outdoor stage, which is entangled in vines and fronted by garden gnomes and small stone gargoyles. Planet Creature’s upbeat, grimy, summer sounds driven by guitars and uplifted by tweeny keyboard melodies has everyone dancing. Their music provides the same sugary, dizzy feeling we were all getting from the frozen margaritas being served. The sun is shining. Life is sweet.

South by Southwest has begun.