SXSW-Barback POV

Just in case, "POV" means "point of view".

As I mentioned earlier, South-by-Southwest is an internationally known music and film festival that rolls through Austin usually in mid-March, and the city is inundated with hipsters. And here I thought Brooklyn was lousy with hipsters...sheesh...

The single-day or multi-day passes are financially a little out of my league, but since I don't know new music really at all, the fact that hipsters priced working stiffs like me out doesn't really bother me (having a car with a radio and only one speaker means I've rediscovered radio, and my favorite station plays "oldies"--equal parts Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd).

While I may be a square when it comes to music, I would have looked into the film events a little closer had I any nights off during the festival. In fact, I did have a night off, but I spent it working as a barback at a bar called the Rusty Spur. The Spur is, on any given non-SXSW night, one of Austin's gay bars, and the night I worked the managers were scrambling to hide a poster that was missed in the week-long effort to hetero the place up. The poster was a collage of pornographic scenes, with the explicit stuff artfully subtracted, and the twice repeated phrase "Are you a pitcher or a catcher?" glued over like a header and footer in seventies-style font. It was in a urinal and had gone unnoticed.

During SXSW, every bar is straight.

Working that night kinda zoomed by in a loud blur of moving from venue to venue picking up glasses and sweeping up butts, replenishing beer and liquor and taking out garbage. The Rusty Spur as a bar has two sides separated by a wall, and connected by a large back patio area with its own bar, so as a venue, they were able to have three acts going simultaneously. Until it got too crowded, you could just walk around from inside to inside through the outdoor area, and every time I went that way, among the constant cloud of tobacco smoke that drifted over the zone permeated the thick smell of ganja, as people were blazing joints regularly without apparent fear of repercussions. It almost made me miss it. Almost.

Money-wise, I would have been better off going to work and picking up the overtime that was offered, but this was about more than that. I wouldn't have seen any music in that case, and this way, I got paid for being around music.

But, while the only band I remember--Shinobi Ninja--was pretty cool, it's not like I got to watch anything. Shinobi though had an interesting hip-hop/funk/rock/soul thing happening, and were quite entertaining. The next night I came and helped Corrie close down the place (I worked for one day, she worked for the next three) and the last band that night sounded like Led Zeppelin, but was a jam band, and the musicians were all wild-gray-haired-and-bearded Japanese guys. Seriously, a circle of gray hair surrounded their face in a wild aura, and they sounded like Godzilla ate the Dead and Zeppelin, absorbed their music abilities, then shrunk to human form. I'd never seen anything like it. Nobody who worked at the Spur even knew who they were.

That's how it is at venues.

One final quick note about hipsters...listening to my radio station through my one speaker I heard the jockey mention a theory he has concerning hipsters: he said, out there there are musicians, who are basically lazy, disheveled artists, who wear a certain kind of clothing (usually a rock and roll staple, like tight jeans), and make music. This music becomes loved by hipsters, your educated and intellectual young people with too much money, who spend gobs of their money on looking disheveled, poor, lazy, and, probably most importantly, on the music they love--on downloads and actual physical cds and records, helping along the industry, keeping bands alive, discovering other bands, and making things like the SXSW festival possible. So that's not so bad, I guess.