I woke up Sunday morning feeling like I was underwater. I had a 10 am meeting that lasted until around 2. I coasted through most of it, partially because I couldn’t hear anything, but mainly because I got 4 hours of sleep. Needless to say, Sunday would be the first day in several years that I got to enjoy a nice, lengthy nap.
I called Matt at around 5 in the evening. “I slept ‘till 3:30 today man!” he boasted. After Friday night, he had slept until 2:15, while I was up at 10:30.
“Shut the fuck up dude,” I muttered to him. “You want to do this between 8 and 9?”
“You read my mind,” he said. “I feel rough today.
By the time Matt and I showed up reenergized at Maison, the early show had already ended. Though it would have been nice say that I was there for everything, I wasn’t bothered. With 23 solid hours of live music in a span of 48, it’s safe to say I was pulling my weight.
We met up with James for a reboot of his birthday celebration (he’d been guilted into not coming out Saturday night), and we shot the shit with Aaron at the Maison bar until about ten, then took it to Blue Nile to start the night.
Local Skank would be the only ska band we’d get to see this weekend, and it’s likely that they were the only ska band at Foburg period. It’s unfortunate, because this all-girl-and-a-boy-drummer third wave band played some pretty good straight up ska, including a fun little Reel Big Fish cover (Could it be anything other than “She’s Got a Girlfriend Now”?).
At 11:15, Matt, James, Aaron, and I were upstairs at the Blue Nile catching a band called the Show is the Rainbow. “They’re from LA, I think,” said Matt. They were what you’d expect from an indie electronica act – high energy, rock n’ roll vibe – and they were pretty damn good. Especially the bass player, who I could have sworn I recognized from somewhere. “Internet?”, I thought. “I don’t know. They don’t seem all that popular.”
It was at the moment the lead singer said “We’re the Show is the Rainbow from Nebraska,” that I realized where I’ve seen the bass player – Here. I immediately got on my internet phone and confirmed my suspicions. Matt further confirmed that it was in fact the same guy in the picture by noting that he happened to bearing the exact same striped whatever it was. Later on, I went on their Myspace page and found that he goes by the name Saber Blazek – this guy is absolute gold.
We all got a really good laugh at that poor guy’s expense, but I have to add that he played a really mean bass. “If I was that good at bass, I’d probably be that ridiculous too,” I told Matt afterwards.
At this point, you could take a look at my face and Matt’s, and you’d see the faces of two extremely exhausted rock amateurs. The evening before, as we were sitting at the Maison, I told Matt, “I feel like a total bad ass right now. We just had like 3 people tell us that they’ve heard our podvast and love it. We’ve got press clearance, free range of the place, and I feel like we know someone at every venue we go to. I can see how some rock journalists walk around with a serious Lester Bangs swagger.”
“Yeah, I could really get used to this,” Matt replied.
However, now it was Sunday night at 11:45. The two of us had been to too many concerts to mention (though I did try to give some ink to as many bands I saw as possible). We were having trouble taking down High Lives and whiskeys, and we honestly weren’t even really drinking. Both of our ears were ringing so bad that was needed earplugs tonight. However, Aaron seemed unaffected by exhaustion or noise, and he had seen a good bit more than we had this weekend.
“I think this is why other rock critics display a scintilla of humility,” Matt said as we walked outside to the balcony of Blue Nile Upstairs to get some air.
Thank God for Big Rock Candy Mountain. Aaron wasn’t kidding when he said this band was phenomenal. And there was Michael, yet again: this time, behind the keys and showing off some braggable range on the lead vocals. To top it off, they had Misdemeanor of Partners-N-Crime came onstage to play “Hot Boy Hot Girl”! Apparently BRCM was going to be backing PNC up at South by Southwest in Austin the following weekend. It was at that moment that me and Matt accepted the fact that Michael was officially awesome.
It was also at that moment that I decided to go to South by Southwest. Earlier in the night, I had been talking with James about a wedding that we were both going to the same weekend as SxSW. James was the best man, but I was just a lowly periphery guest with no +1. When I told James I wasn’t going to the festival because of the wedding, James glared at me like a was a disgrace to fun and yelled, “Are you seriously considering missing South by Southwest for this wedding?”
“Well, I mean, I can’t miss the wedding.”
“The Hell you can’t! You gotta go to this thing, dude. You’re going to do Foburg and not follow the bands to South by?”
I took James’ words to heart, but I was on the fence for a good while until I saw this set. Big Rock Candy Mountain and Partners-N-Crime sealed it for me.
I went to South by Southwest the following weekend, and had a great time: I drank a lot with some old friends while concert hopping. But I had more fun at Foburg. Obviously, South by Southwest had more to offer than Foburg in terms of up-and-coming and already-there bands. After all, the biggest band at Foburg, Peelander-Z (who put on the greatest stage show of the weekend by far; if you ever have the chance, go see them), played SxSW on a Saturday afternoon at a venue a mile and a half away from downtown Austin.
However, as SxSW gets more popular and exponentially more crowded by the year, it becomes more difficult for anyone to see these “it” bands. All I can say of Austin is that it has lots of lines – to get into concerts, to get drinks, to use the bathroom, to get a taco, to get a sip of water from a fountain – and if you’re averse to crowds and packed spaces, you may be miserable.
Foburg on the other hand is in its infancy. I think anyone around Austin when SxSW was first getting started in the late 1980s would say he had a lot more fun when it was small, when the bands were mostly regional, and the festival still had a feeling of intimacy.
Bigger isn’t always better: other than one or two bands, nothing I saw at SxSW was as good as anything I saw at Foburg; and I mean that not just as a biased local – It’s the 100% absolute truth. That said, I hope Foburg was as much a financial success for everyone who invested in it as it was a morale booster for all the bands that got to participate and all the people who got to witness the beginning of a nationally legitimate rock n’ roll scene in New Orleans.
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