Searching out Sound
Every Wednesday on Austinist we feature one of our multitude of ridiculously talented writers, writing written things for your eyes to consume. The opinions expressed by the writer are strictly their own, and are not necessarily shared by the Ist Network or any of its affiliates. For this week, meet: Adam Schragin. Enjoy! -- Columnist Editor
San Antonio has a long history of frustrating the expectations of young people trying to find something, anything to do on any given evening, and when a group of friends and I went to see a band we’d never heard called Buttercup on a Monday night, what curiosity I felt was tempered by the realism that we were in S.A. - a place where bad punk and metal rounded out what music scene Tejano hadn’t already conquered.
Situated next to the creepiest day care center I’ve ever seen – Alice in Wonderland faces all over, no doubt lodged in the nightmares of children that very second – Buttercup was playing in an art space downtown, and when I exited the car I heard them running through ELO’s “Living Thing,” one of my favorite songs at the time. It was the first of many happy surprises for me that evening, and I would come, over the following months, to appreciate this band through all of their self-challenging, morphing idiosyncrasies.
Switching venues and putting on themed shows was their weekly goal, and the results were never gimmicky but always interesting. Some evenings the band would ask that we participate by choosing postcards out of a stack to send to our loved ones, and other nights might have a “sleep-over” theme, and on a few memorable occasions, the band set up in a back room and serenaded each audience member one by one while the rest loitered and hung out, waiting their turn. These shows, and performances like them, toyed with the all-too-typified experience of going to see a band, which can often be all about observation and not interaction. Buttercup reminded me of the flowering possibilities everyday art had in store for us, were we to just seek it out.
Unlike San Antonio, Austin has so many more opportunities for musicians to play in actual venues attended by actual attendees, so at first glance the need for more private, unique places for bands to play seemed to be less of a necessity. But the deeper a person burrowed, the more they could uncover – with The Church of the Friendly Ghost, out on Pedernales street, standing in as the most odd and accommodating venue for which a music geek could wish. A former site of a real, honest-to-god church whose landlord was glad to rent it out to musicians and curators of The Church of the Friendly Ghost – a step above the wacky fundamentalists who had the space before – the Church had a distinction of being a welcoming place that also catered to fringe music for those in the know. Of the shows I saw there, one of the most memorable featured a group of local musicians playing the “gamepiece” that is John Zorn’s “Cobra,” and another was a hushed acoustic show featuring Carolyn Berk of Lovers, followed by the hermetic Josh Pearson formerly of Lift to Experience. The Church stopped shows in May of 2005, which seems like eons ago, though the spirit, and now physical presence of the venue, has thankfully been resurrected (tee hee). Teaming up with The Salvage Vanguard, The Church of the Friendly Ghost is still dedicated to showcasing music in Austin that escapes the “indie” niche thrown around these days like the equally meaningless “alternative” was back when lumberjack-chic seemed unstoppable. While the easy atmosphere and community spirit of the old Pedernales church has been supplanted by the no less exciting, but perhaps more “official” feeling Salvage Vanguard theater, a change had to be made, and it is one for the better.
But what about those truly on-the-fringe experiences? You’ll just have to go out and look, but if it’s any consolation, many musicians here are keen on turning just about any place with a special ambiance into an impromptu venue. From Red Hunter’s moonlit folk sets in graveyards to these secret shows, musicians are exiting the bar/club box and into some woolly but very potentially rewarding performance spaces. House-venues like Natrix Natrix and Rancho Relaxo are also stepping up to place performers and spectators together in a way that eschews the tired formality of backstage (or “stage” in general), and that fourth wall that generally does more to separate us from music than to bring us closer.
The internet is also a breeding ground for performances of this caliber. First visit the website for The Retread Sessions, which our own Austinist music editor Paige Maguire helms. The series takes musicians from Austin and elsewhere and puts their music in unusual places, from Bill Callahan rhapsodizing over Mt. Bonnell to YACHT tripping down Congress with a boombox performing “See A Penny (Pick it Up).” The London-based Black Cab Sessions take the confines of – you guessed it – a black cab (but not always!?), and ask performers ranging from Daniel Johnston to St. Vincent’s Annie Clark to run through a song. The result is free form and pretty fascinating, but not for the carsick, I suppose.
Suffice to say, music is everywhere, and a viable venue can be anyplace where a performer can find attentive listeners, unique surroundings, and a desire to start spouting off a song. It’s about curiosity, imagination, exploration, and a willingness to take chances. And fortunately we’ve got a lot of that here.
