By John Graney
Friends, if I showed you all of the pictures of the Californian from yesterday and last night you would have us institutionalized, or call the cops, or lift us high above your shoulders and parade us through town as heroes. But we don't have time for any of those things right now. Right now I have to tell you what happens when you attempt to drive a car in Austin, Texas during SXSW. A crippling rage and a mind melting confusion that borders on lunacy. That's what happens. And that is precisely what happened to us for the first many hours of the day.
When our heads stopped spinning we rose from an underground parking lot to hear the foot thumping ass shaking sounds of Fitz & The Tantrums. We followed said sounds, joined the crowd, thumped our feet, and shook our respective asses. That band has such a big huge awesome sound it's incredible. We only caught a few songs in the parking lot of Waterloo Records, but what we heard was rad.
Half of the band stuck around at Waterloo to watch Apex Manor. Darren and I ran over to Annie's West to catch the end of Andy Clockwise's "acoustic" set, and then watch our good friends and Darren's old bandmates Miniature Tigers. This was the first time I've ever seen Andy Clockwise outside of LA. His minions weren't there to scream his crazy hymns to the sky with him. And it didn't make a damned difference. Andy set up a full drum kit, electric guitar and bass complete with big huge loud amps at the SeaNow "acoustic" stage at Annie's West and proceeded to pound the living shit (can I say shit on the internet?) [yes, knoock yourself out. -ed.] out of everyone in the vicinity.
Next came Miniature Tigers on the main stage. For being such lovely heart warming individuals, those boys play a mean ass incredible set of indie madness. It broke our hearts to have to leave before their set ended to go find some form of legal parking before our show on the other side of town.
Parking was a nightmare. Again. I wanted to die. When it as over we had a few free seconds to run like hell over to a bar called (and themed) Treasure Island to catch the Dig from New York. It's always difficult to come up with the words to describe your new favorite band in the world. So I'll only say this. If you don't go find them online somewhere and buy their stuff on iTunes you're a freaking idiot.
Then we played a club called Lipstick 24 which was sponsored by Swinghouse. I'll leave it to somebody else to talk about our set, if they are so inclined - but I will say this. The singer of the band after us took his pants off onstage. That's all.
We then proceeded to tramp around the streets of Austin with a few local favorites in tow, including Joey Siara and Wendy Wang (who was so kind as to grace us with her lovely voice onstage for one song) We saw a raging metal rap band, an Aerosmith cover band, a line 12 miles long for Duran Duran at Stubbs. We ate ridiculously amazing panini from Austin Daily Press, we ate drunk guy pizza from a drunk guy pizza place (no that is not the name of the establishment, just an apt descriptor). We drank Mexican hot chocolate, and we drank beer.
And that wrapped up an almost perfectly quintessential day at SXSW. Stay tuned kids. The fun's just starting.
More photos from SXSW 2011.
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