Music

Well, I managed to survive another fun and frantic SxSW festival. While I’m laid up at home recovering, I thought I’d bring you some of the highlights from this year’s fest.

Dax Riggs is humble. Okay, that’s an understatement – the former frontman for indie sensations Dead Boy and the Elephantmen (championed by Henry Rollins on his IFC show), is downright soft and shy. When I shook his hand after a stellar set at the Cedar Door tonight, it was like stroking air.

“That girl weighs like, 60 pounds. I’m serious.”

“White belts are okay, as long as you wear them with irony.”

“There are so many bald guys here. How am I supposed to tell Michael Stipe from Moby from some random dude?”

When walking down 6th Street at 4 p.m. on a Friday during SxSW, pedestrians hear all sorts of music spilling out of the clubs. Sometimes they peek inside, sometimes they stop for a brief moment, and oftentimes, they just keep walking. Today, there was a performer at the Chuggin’ Monkey that not only filled an empty club, but drew a crowd of dozens outside the window that continued to grow and stuck around for his whole set, staring through the windows while bobbing their heads and smiling.

Phoenix-based hip-hop artist Intrinzik is a consummate performer. Before Intrinzik took the stage at Volume, Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys jumped onstage and busted out a fierce freestyle rap that left the audience pumped up and delirious. It was a hard act to follow, but Intrinzik managed to pull it off.

I was gonna kick sooo much ass at Rhino Records’ Geekus Musicus Maximus challenge today at the Austin Convention Center. The 305-question music trivia test (dubbed the RMAT, for Rhino Musical Aptitude Test) wasn’t supposed to lead me to this rattling revelation: I don’t know nearly as much about music as I’ve always thought.

What the hell am I doing here? It’s 11 a.m., I drank an entire bottle of red wine by myself last night, I have a bad hangover, and this brunch dealio at the Four Seasons looks way more swanky than I feel.

Actually, I don’t feel swanky at all, and aside from my friend and independent musician Jody Gnant (the reason I’m at this thing), I don’t know any of these hundreds of people who are dining on crepes, drinking mimosas (yeah, gimme three, please), and lounging around in the shaded grass by the lake.

I don’t consider myself an emotional person. I rarely cry at sad movies, I don’t dote over puppies and babies, and naturally sappy people annoy me. But Sia, the Australian sensation who’s been building a buzz via distribution through Starbucks around her sixth album, Some People Have Real Problems, made me cry. I’ve seen hundreds of shows in my lifetime, but I’d never seen a performer who could actually make me weep. Until Sia. And she did it with a single note that left an audience of hundreds absolutely breathless.

Shortly after the last Concrete Blonde reunion tour (for the Group Therapy album in 2002), front woman Johnette Napolitano gave me an interview for a small press publication called Musik Kulture magazine (now-defunct). One of the things she said toward the end of the interview was, “If the world went to hell tomorrow, we’d all be out in the desert, stomping our feet and clapping our hands.”