Red Collar is looking for a Passenger Van, one of those 15 or 12 passenger church vans. Under 120,000 miles and under $4000 (please don't laugh too hard at the implausibility). If you know anyone that's selling one please let us know. We have another road trip to the 6 Points Festival in DC in April and then a tour in August sometime.
Back to our story...
The weather was wonderful the whole trip. No rain. Plenty of sunshine. I think in some of the pictures from our show you can see a little bit of a sunburn on my left arm from walking around for hours the day before. Our show was at 2:00PM and our hotel was about 10 minutes away from the venue. You can never be sure what the traffic is going to be in an unknown city so we woke up early to get to the Dirty Dog Bar at the very unrock and roll hour of 10:00AM.
The Dirty Dog is about the size of the Cat's Cradle which I think has the capacity of about 650. This fact made us a little bit nervous because even though there's free food and drink at this event, 650 is a lot of people to try and get into a place. I think our band like most bands thrives on the audience and if there's some space between the stage and the first member of the audience, it makes the place feel empty even though there may be 200 people behind that first person. I'm not sure about the rest of Red Collar but I think in general it's much easier to play to 40 people in a 30 capacity place than to 200 people in a 650 capacity place. It has better 'feel' to it when people are crammed right up against you. Bigger rooms can sometimes mean bigger echos:
Thank you thank you thank you. We're Red Collar Collar Collar.
Most of the action in the venue was around the bar area where the bartenders were stocking up their beer and whatnot. It was a little dark in the place but I thought I saw something moving on the stage. A muskrat? Something was definitely moving on the stage! I saw this wiggling and then a scruffy bit of hair and then a human head poking out from underneath a sleeping bag on an air mattress. My first thought was that the show had already began and I was walking in on someone's performance art (...these days, you seriously never know...). I wasn't sure if I should clap and ask for 'ONE MORE!!' or if I should ask if he'd like a couple of Excedrin and a raw egg in orange juice for the hang over. After what was most defintely a late night, an employee decided to just sleep over as opposed to going home. One employee at another venue had on a shirt:
Welcome to Austin. Please remember to leave.
Before our show, the band went to get some coffee and I was shocked to run into someone that I used to work with at the Chelsea Theater and Carolina Theater in Chapel Hill (both are owned by the same person). I hadn't seen him in years since he moved to LA with another mutual friend of ours. Our mutual friend got into USC's film school and I just saw his Master's Thesis film (at I think that's what it was for). We briefly caught up but I couldn't help but wonder, "What the hell are the chances of that happening?" Small world or just small industry?
The turnout for the first band of the day wasn't great but what I did expect for a noon show? I just read an article somewhere that actor/rock star (I use the term 'star' very lightly here)/paramour of Mischa Barton/supposed douche Cisco Adler played a show at SXSW this year. This guy seems to always be in the Enquirer or US Weekly and no one can quite pinpoint why this guy is famous. He's in that whole Paris/Lindsey crowd. He played SXSW and fifteen people came to rock out.
In a tent.
First time that I've ever felt bad for someone and felt guity about feeling bad for them.
There are a few things much worse to playing in a 650 person venue with only 15 people in it. One of them is playing in a tent with a capacity of whatever number you wish to imagine and only 15 people show up. That would be frightening. At least you have nice solid walls in a club. But a tent? It's just you, grass and a big white sheet. There's no echo, but worse: a vacuum.
But at least with a tent you have the, um, tent. The only worse that it could be is if there's no tent at all and it was outdoors and only 15 people show up. I know this from personal experience. Most outdoor shows have the capacity of, well, the world's population. And when there's no one there, it is very very tough. You can't stop but think, "Man, look at all that grass. It'd be so awesome if the stage was as big as the lawn and the place for the audience was as big as the stage. Man, that'd be awesome" and then someone off in the not so far distance says, "Git yer country fried snickers here. Country fried snickers everyone" and then you think, "Man, what an awesome name: Country Fried Snickers. We can have stickers that say CFS and this guy over there can go around the country with us cross-promoting on the Unhealthy Food/Music Tour 2007. Man, that'd be awesome" Your mind starts to wander and it does become tough to concentrate. I've seen plenty of bands just die onstage at these things.
Have you ever caught those peace rallies or rallies for green energy or something on CSPAN? Don't they always look like miserable failures? The camera angles are all wrong. Doesn't matter if millions showed up to this thing. It's always these full body shots of someone on stage in front of a microphone where all you see is a lot of green stuff behind the person and a lot of blue above them. If you ever have the opportunity to film an outdoor rock show, please, please, please only include medium to close shots and if you do include full body shots, make sure the audience is seen in the picture (like a shot from the drum riser or from the side of the stage). This goes for public speeches too. Tim Robbins gets up to the podium to talk about Soldiers dying. It's always miserable and ineffective not because it's Nuke LaLoosh saying these things but because of the producer of the thing. Remember Dr. Martin Luther King's I have a Dream Speech? Of course you do. It's always him in close up and then cut to the crowd. Magnificent close up. And then cut to the crowd. The filmmaker's rightly decided that Martin's wingtips would probably not do much to further the cause of Civil Rights but for some reason CSPAN thinks the anti-war movement would briskly be moved along if we knew the hem length of Joan Baez's skirt.
Rock music is so much better when it's dark out. When it's light out in an outdoor venue, people look around, there's birds in the air, leaves are falling, cars whiz by, the sun is out, kids are playing 'what's that cloud?'. For poets, this is a cuisine. For bands, this is spoiled milk.
Don't let any musician fool you, we're all attention whores.
At this point I was grateful to be playing a show in a 650 person venue and not in a tent. Or outdoors. With Jewel. We'd play with her later on in the night.
We prepared ourselves for 15 people but slowly people started trickling in. Free breakfast burritos will have that effect on people. So will free beer. For our show, I'm guessing around 100 people were there (author's full disclosure: I'm horrible at guessing this shit). At the end of the set, maybe 80 people stayed but again, I'm horrible at guessing this stuff. Our show was happening at the same time as some other really spectacular lineups so I think that's pretty good. Brian (our friend who came along for the trip) said that it sounded great and that Used Guitars never sounded better. I'm awful at evaluating how we sound because I have had many experiences where I thought we sounded great but then people have said, "ahhh, not so much" and other times I think we sounded awful and people thought it was the best that we've ever sounded. It seems like the response was a mild lukewarm to warm but I don't know. I've already written about the crowd's responses in previous posts so take away from that what you will.
There's a weird phenomena that I noticed at SXSW. When we first arrived, when went to see a couple of shows and I leaned over to Beth and said, "No one has any merch". It was true. Out of the dozen or so bands that I saw, no one ever said, "Thanks a lot for coming out tonight. We have CD's and T's for sale right over by the South Park pinball machine."
I thought that this is what SXSW was for but I guess not. There wasn't hordes of people waiting in line to talk to bands after their sets, no one was carrying around CD's from bands they just discovered. It was really really strange. Don't get me wrong, there was plenty of other Merch that people were carrying around: from DirectTV, from Verizon, from AmEx, from IFC, etc. I'm sure Labels were giving out plenty of sampler CDs. But as far as bands proper were concerned? Nothing.
There's a band that I have been a fan of for years and I heard that they swore off SXSW because economically it didn't make any sense. This was a band that traveled the world and in my opnion had a pretty significant impact on indie rock and they swore off SXSW. Never sold any merch at this thing. Never got paid (enough). Never meant any more exposure for them. Why go to Austin when you can go to San Antonio and play for your fans and make some good money? The only reason they were playing SXSW this year was because their record label paid for them to do so. Some of you may think that this may seem totally against the whole 'artist' mentality and it's against the whole 'community' mentality. 'Hey man, it's a festival, dude, don't be such a capitalist' It's really easy to say something like that when the cost of your festival ticket is kept down by the 'artist' and 'community' friendly sponsors of Miller Light and Verizon. I'm not saying SXSW is wrong for getting sponsors. I'm saying it's wrong to not see this band's particular point of view. These people have to make livings somehow.
Regardless, we sold some CDs and T-shirts and we had a blast. We had some strangers come up and introduce themselves to us at the end of the set so that was nice. I got to see a former student of mine who is stationed at Ft. Worth and came to the show. We're going to be posting a video of the show at some point but I can't be involved in that stuff. When I look at our video, all I see is the chinks in the armor, the weak spots and the things we have to work on. I'll defer that to everyone else and stay out of it. Stay tuned, it'll be up here soon.
One extra surprising thing came out of our show: there was finally, finally a bad picture taken of Mike. I've seen hundreds of pictures of him from our shows and that guy does not take a bad picture...except this one. Thank god he didn't go into modeling or something, I'd still be trying to do my Eddie & the Cruisers imitation.
We had anther show that night for gogirlsmusic.com (WARNING: DO NOT GO TO GOGIRLS.COM, MAKE SURE IT'S GOGIRLSMUSIC.COM). It's been two weeks and I keep on checking gogirls.com every day, sometime two or three times a day to make sure that it's still there. It still is. I'll check again today for you and let you know. But go to gogirlsmusic.com. Oh the extent of research that I'll do for my dear readers.
Anyways, their festival idea is a very very interesting concept: 20 bands and every band plays 2 songs. All the equipment is backlined, just bring your guitars and cymbals. We got to the bar early and I think the whole thing just started. I don't mean this to come out how it is probably going to come out (re: sexist) but please bear with me:
Imagine a lineup for a festival for women. Close your eyes and do this now.
Now I realize some of you out there are saying, "I imagined The Breeders and I imagined The Runaways and I imagined des_ark and are you implying what I think you are implying mister sexist pig?" Well half of you imagined just what my imaginary feminist friend did in the previous sentence. That is a festival that many of us (including myself) would like to see. The other half of you imagined the Lilith Fair half. The Jewel half.
Half of you imagined exactly what we walked into.
Mike turned to me and said, "They are going to hate us."
Fortunately like all good festivals that decide to book a wide variety of acts, they sensibly started with the Jewel half and ended with the Joan Jett half. We were preceeded by some acts that didn't mind turning it up and screaming it out. We did Witching Hour and Hands Up and we had fun and had a good reception (I think a better reception than the earlier show), met some great people and sold a couple of CDs.
The morning next, after a day of being unsure of how to receive our reception and frankly unsure if we're supposed to grade our reception on a sliding scale and frankly my dear unsure if we should even give a damn, we ran into someone from another band who saw us the day before.
"You guys sounded great. I though, 'Wow, these guys really mean it'"
One of the greatest compliments I've ever heard in my life.
And in a few hours we would be in Baton Rouge to play the Gas, Food and Lodging festival.
