More than 1,800 acts played this year’s South by Southwest, and that’s not even counting all the unofficial events—including several small anti- or parallel festivals—happening all over Austin. I saw about 20 and overheard dozens more spilling from outdoor concerts as I walked from party to showcase to in-store. Often I caught a song here or there simply because I was waiting on the curb for the traffic signal to change.
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Later that afternoon I ventured off SXSW’s main drag—only just beginning to acquire its odoriferous crust of piss and puke—to Book People, Austin’s big indie bookstore. Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance of Superchunk, co-owners of Merge Records, were reading from their new book, Our Noise, which chronicles their 20 years of DIY success. (In the interest of full disclosure, we share a book publisher.) In between they played acoustic versions of Superchunk songs and covers from the Merge catalog (Magnetic Fields, Spoon, Butterglory). When I got there they were doing “Driveway to Driveway” for 16 people—I hadn’t seen them play such an intimate show since 1991, when they were touring behind their first album.
At that point I realized that I’d failed to give much thought to how I’d be getting back into the city. I’m five months pregnant, so the prospect of hoofing it for 2.6 miles (thanks, otherwise useless Google Maps!) at 10 PM on a school night was daunting. But the buses were running every half hour and I’d just missed one, so I started walking. I kept passing little concerts in yards and garages—it was like John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” except the parties were louder and I was sober. I stopped at a backyard rap show for a few minutes. I don’t know who was playing, but they were angry about not being rich and they loved Austin. Me too, I thought.
Friday afternoon, though, I saw another bona fide bad bitch just a few blocks away: Courtney Love and the reconstituted Hole played their first show in America. (“Reunited” would be too strong a word, since the new lineup is all hired guns.) They opened with a medley: “Pretty on the Inside,” the title track from Hole’s 1991 debut; the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”; and “Skinny Little Bitch,” the lead single from Nobody’s Daughter, due in April. Love was in proving mode, knowing that most of the audience was hoping for an ugly, immodest spectacle. To her credit, she denied them that. But the set was uneven. The old material, with its discordant thrust and loud-quiet-loud drama, still suited her voice best—and the audience, pumped to hear it, sang along. The new material, save for “Skinny Little Bitch,” fell flat: heads went down (time to tweet about the guitarist’s top hat), beer lines doubled, crowd chatter almost overpowered the band. A song about a highway started out sounding like No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” and wound up getting more and more Velvet Revolver as it wore on. Love took some cheap shots at Poison’s Bret Michaels, but it seemed like she was trying to beat him at his own power-ballad game. A lot of the new songs felt samey and overbroad, without the ups and downs that made the old ones work—something that may be partly the fault of new guitarist Micko Larkin, who’s young and British and thus presumably grew up under the delusion that Oasis was a band worth emulating. Love’s between-song banter was strained and obvious, a kind of potty-mouthed kabuki clearly intended to reestablish what we already know: she’s as nasty as she wants to be.
