Austin's Dangerous Addiction to Live Music

Anyone that knows me has invariably heard me bitching about Austin's ridiculous efforts to keep up with it's own reputation. I'm talking about live music. First of all, the notion that any place can actually be the capitol of live music is arrogant and absurd, as if people in the desert banging on drums are turning west and sending tribute to their activity's loyal homeland, as if the entire world, and all of the world musical traditions are subject to the whimsey of this capitol city's ideas about music. Monumentally ridiculous. And maybe that's what it was supposed to be. A hilarious slogan from the city's stoned out past meant to conjure up an impossible notion. But if the genesis of this term was a joke, it can hardly be said to be one now. When you print enough t-shirts and brochures, when you spend enough millions promoting events and when you hear the phrase uttered without pause or question to the actual meaning of what is being said enough times, it becomes serious, or rather, it is forgotten that the intent of the statement is explicitly meant to be un-serious. And when you see an entire city trying so hard to make this absurdist fantasy a reality, it piques emotions ranging far beyond and more intense than embarrassed pity. I'm talking here about the inescapability of live music here in austin. Live music in the most unlikely of locations seems to be its goal, but to the power of earshot ubiquity. Go to any club, bar or restaurant and you  can expect to be dominated by a wall of local (read: bad, high-school) sound. But there's precedent for that, and so you can expect it. What broke the straw for me was going to the grocery store, where I go to be lulled into a stupor by the gentle undulations of the overhead florescent so that my impulses can blow my week's worth of groceries on ice cream, sausage, and peanut butter, the grocery store and getting harassed by the house band intent on rocking everybody through the isles on the way to world music domination. And in that moment I was truly afraid. Will they stop at nothing, is there anywhere left that is sacred to them, I wondered, and leaned to speak to the person next to me in line in order that I might share with them my worst fears. But can you guess what, they couldn't fucking hear me because of the god-awful PA and the resonance, because the grocery store doesn't exactly lend itself to the projection of good sounds or a quality listening experience.

That being said, occasionally, rarely, sometimes Austin does surprise me with a feat of live music unexpectedness. Because in truth, I do, I really do like it when I'm surprised by things, when I see things completely out of place, exactly where they shouldn't be. When it's done right, when someone has obviously done the work to bring live music to a place where you usually don't get to enjoy it, there is a magical quality to the sound and the place that turns it into an experience, something I'm big on. 

I got this experience the other night at the full moon party at Barton Springs. Maybe had the experience been in the day I would have been annoyed, but it was at night,  there was a full moon, there were as many people there as would have been in the daytime, dancing in the water. And it was free, so who was I to complain? The event was put on by the Save Our Springs Alliance as part of their Poolside Live! series, which occurs sporadically from what I can tell by their calendar. S.O.S. does a lot of cool stuff for and around Barton Springs, but they've also said and done some stupid stuff, so I'm just going to stay away from that one. The band was Atash. They're a world music group that have been playing around Austin in one form or another since 96', and appear to have some clout in the world music scene, which I have no idea what that would be good for. 

Talk about unlikeliness of live music. Water + electronic equipment usually don't make great friends, and these guys were set up right behind the diving board. Which was awesome, because there is a rocky ledge there that people could stand on, and then some water that you could swim in, all the while being 10-15 feet away from the band that is playing. Oh, there were definitely people doing 'belly flops' and 'can openers' off the diving board trying to splash the band, which was hilarious to watch. And usually, actually always, I could give a shit about world music, but the thing about pulling off this kind of unlikely musical event is that nine times out of ten it doesn't matter what the music is. There is something more going on than the music, because the place where you go to do something that is completely unrelated to live music, the place where you have no reason not to expect things to operate as they normally should, is transformed. I wasn't swimming, exactly. I wasn't just hanging out or dancing to music. But what I was doing was some kind of combination of those things and being completely blown away. And the thing too was that everyone else there was participating in this rare nightly event, and so there was a sense of sharing something with all of those people. And while I may not go up and talk to them, there was a feeling in the air of community and festivity. And that's the magic that I'm talking about that can be part of an unlikely musical experience. It seems like a simple juxtaposition of live music in unlikely places, but when it is effective the experience has a transformative effect on the place and all of the participants. But jesus Austin, have some self restraint. Leave this kind of thing up to the people who should be doing it, the renegade environmental groups, burnout hippies, and kids in woods with power generators.