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Absolutely. I listen to music really differently now than when I was younger. I had sort of a critic's perspective all of the time. I love music now as much as zi ever have but it functions for me differently. When I saw a band when I was 20, 25, I'd look at that band and say, "Oh, they could be a great band if only," or "They're almost great." I'd compare them to the canon of great rock works and think of them along those kind of lines and sheer aesthetics and what they'd mean in the grand scheme of rock'n'roll. Now, my friends having fun playing music at the Hole in the Wall is a lot more meaningful to me. I don't think "His voice is a little bit too thin and that guitar tone needs some work and these arrangements are a little bit screwy and that lyric makes me crazy." I don't bring this fine-toothed critical comb to things now. Moreover, I don't bring the disdain- I used to have complete disdain for bands that didn't measure up to my critical standards Did you used to require music to have more worth? A different kind of worth. Part of it was that my sense of cool was attached to that. My ego was attached to the music that I was into- That's a very guy thing. It's definitely a guy thing. It's definitely a High Fidelity kind of guy thing. It never goes completely away. My closest friends and I play poker every week- That would be the media- controlling poker cabal I've been trying to crack. We'll put you on the list. No, no, no, I don't want to play. I wanted
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to get somebody from the inside to write a story about how it does control the Austin media. Excepting Rich Oppel. We do spend a great deal of time every week viciously arguing about music, because whoever's house it is plays music, and we're for the most part really like-minded people and how many times we've argued about the Greatful Dead I couldn't tell you. Are you pro or con? I'm mostly con. I'm pro the idea, I'm pro the community for the most part, but it's something that I've tried- I feel like it's my shortcoming at this point, that I should see more value there, but I still hear mostly poeple improvising that can't play very well. Giant Sand will do that same kind of free form, psychedelic thing and Giant Sand has worked for me and they're great. I saw the Grateful Dead a couple of times and I've listened to Greatful Dead records, I did the drugs, multiple times. It would be really great if I could find that avenue that would suddenly make me a fan, because there's tons of it! But I've never found that. Instead I go, "Aw, man." No, no, no. I'd like it. Access to more music to listen to would be a great thing. There's very little nationally that I've been enjoying. What is there that you like? I think that part of it is that there are so many more records put out now than there have ever been, so you can't keep track, and it's all really gragmented. In the mid 80's I had a sense of really being part of the "scene". And there were bands that knew about the bands I was working with everywhere I went and we kenw about them and the audiences weren't really big, but we all knew about each other. There was a good sense of how everybody fit together. It has gotten a lot more diverse. If you think about college radio in the 80's you think about college radio as one thing and now it's very cliquey. And now, the things that I see that is the most creative and that I do feel left behind on a lot of the time but really does fascinate me is a lot of the electronic music and a lot of the hip-hop. There's genuinely creative- there's a real scene around both of them and there's a real overlap with both of them and there's a lot of really interesting music being made and music that still challenges me that makes me go, "Now, what is that?" I was just last night having an argument wiht a friend of mine and he was saying how offensive he found all hip-hop. Gangster hip-hop in particular and hip-hop as a genre he just had no use for. I swear, it sounded like the stereotype of the 50s parent when they first heard rock'n'roll. "It's just noise, it's vulgar and it's offensive!" And I'm thinking, "Doesn't a lot of art strive to be offensive? Yeah, it's offensive, it's striving to be ofensive! Do you think that somehow they're stupid about it, they don't know they're being offesnive?" Especially when I hear it related to African-American based forms of music. I always think, "Hmm, better get my radar up". That sounds like veiled racism to me. "Their vulgarity is really vulgar."
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Is there hip-hop that you really like, that you listen to? There's a bunch of hip-hop that I like. I just got the new Pharcyde record, I like that. Heck, I like Eminem. I like the sound of Eminem. I like DMX, the sound of DMX is just unbelievable. I do speak as a former sound engineer, but the sound of those DMX records is just ridiculous. The "Conscious" hip-hop stuff, there's a whole bunch. The Black Eyed Peas are really cool, Jurassic 5. There's tons of hip-hop that I listen to, but I won't claim that I'm some great hip-hop expert. I definitely feel like an outsider looking in on hip-hop. And that's fine. I find hip-hop and dance to be entirely unto themselves. I don't know, this is a half-baked thought- but because it's not fully informed by mainstream commercial culture, it is a culture that exists as something more than just product. Because it doesn't have to pander to a pop audience, it's got an established audience that's big enough. And that's certianly true for Tejano music, which because of my poor Spanish language skills I miss a lot of, but I'm interested in anything that's I hate to ever use the word "authentic" because that's a slippery term, but I like things that strike me as real and immediate. My tastes are really catholic. I still buy tons of records- I bought 7 CDs yesterday. What'd you get? Don't lie so you'll seem cool. I won't. I'm trying to remember, that's the problem. I brought the Little Feat box, which I'd had but I lost it. And you should listen to Little Feat. You really should. I'll take your word for that. If Jason has any lying around I'll borrow his. I remember being quite surprised when I found out he was into the Allman brothers. Little Feats different, Little Feat werer much funnier. I think there's a lot of huo rto the Allman Brothers. I don't think much of what was intentional. Plane crashes are humorours. I have been tryign for years at South by Southwest- on Sunday nights we always do Hoot NightsOh, wait, the plane crash was Lynrd Skynrd. I was wrong. Duane Allman died in a motorcycle crash, but with the plane crash- for years I'd been waiting to do a Hoot Night called "Leadving on A Jet Plane," and it's all people who died in plane crashes. There's tons of really greate artists who, unfortunately, perished in the air. Pasty Cline, Buddy Holly, Lyndrd Skynrd, Otis Redding and Stevie Ray Vaughn. That's a great idea. Why isn't it happening? Some poeple think it's a little bit morbid. So, what's your title now? My title is Creative Director. And that means?
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Mostly that I'm in charge of the music festival, that's mostly what I do. Coordinate what venues we use and how many bands we'll have and what bands and I work on the panels too. And how long have you been doing that? I think 8 years now? I did panels the first year I came back, maybe this is my 7th year of doing the music fest. I'm really bad with time. I saw the toilet [part of a band's application] in your office today - do you get a lot of crap like that from the bands? Oh yeah, somebody sent a stripper in with the case that had a bottle of Jack Daniel's in it. Did she actually dance? No, and you know what's kind of dumb is, I'm kind of stupid, because they said, "Hey Brent, would you come downstairs, somebody's got something for you," and I came downstairs and there was a woman there, and I didn't quite figure it out. I didn't know she was a stripper, and everybody kind of pointed it out afterwards. I was just kind of embarrassed, because everybody was like, "Hey, somebody wants to give you something," and I was like, "Hey, I'm busy, why do I have to come downstairs?" There were all these people gathered around to watch. She didn't take her shirt off, and I don't know if she was predisposed to or not, but I wasn't predisposed to have her do it. That would have considerably lightened the workplace mood. The thing is - this sounds jaded, I suppsoe, if you don't notice a stripper walking into your office, you're clearly jaded, but there was - people have come in and done all kinds of nutty things, people have sent kegs - So did the band get in? I don't even know who it was. I made sure I wasn't going to pay attention. So do you feel you're performing a great service for these bands? Do you feel gratified when stuff happens for them? Absolutley. I know that people have fun. On one hand you just feel like you're being one of the hosts of a great big party, and who doesn't like to be a host of a party? That's always gratifying. Just that simple thing. But on top of that, if people are able to find it useful, more importantly if they're able to find it useful and actually get something that they find useful whatever that may be, that's what's gratifying. It's not enjoyable for the people that work on it, it's really hard work and nobody has much fun. You don't get to attend South by Southwest if you're working on it, so you wanna gave that thrill vicariously. The reward is in a job well done. If the prospect of being able to have other people have fun and get business don doesn't give you a sense of satisfaction, then it's not going to work out. I know that you sit around and listen to all of these completely unknown bands before SXSW, but then you get to invite the famous people to come down. I want to know the really good requests you get when you deal with acts like that. It varies. My favorite was Tom Waits. It was a really miraculous show. Every
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year we have to have a wish list, "We ought to see if Tom Waits wants to play," and I said, "Oh, Tom Waits doesn't have any reason to play SXSW. I don't see why he would be at SXSW, he doesn't have a record blah blah blah blah," I just didn't see it happening. And Tom Waits' manager called like two weeks out and said, "Tom wants to play, but he'll only play a theatre, and blah blah blah." So everybody really worked hard. My favorite thing was, the thing that really sticks in my mind, the most telling detail, because Tom was really detail oriented and his manager was also, and his manager was excellent. He'd just gotten contact lenses, so I got a call a day or two before the show and he said, "Brent can you get me the name of an optometrist in town who can put Tom's contacts in and take them out?" What the hell? A friend of mine who's also a terrific guitarist in Prescott Curlywolf, Ron Byrd, he's a doctor, and Ron stays on call during SXSW for musician's concerns. So I called Ron up and he went down and his sole responsibility was putting Tom's contacts in and taking them out. I got contacts when I was 9 - he's a grown man. That's ridiculous. how did you deal with everyone trying to get tickets to that show? People that had wristbands could line up, and then we gave them to registrants, and I'd miscounted, I'll admit it. We ended up with a few more tickets than we thought we had. So what we did with the tickets that were left over - which , maybe if I'd been better with math, I'd have a different life anyway - but if I'd counted right, they wouldn't have been left over. We took them down to the Paramount the night of the show, and scalpers of course had laid hands on a number of them, so anybody that approached a scalper, we'd walk up and give them to them. And did that to the point where every single person that showed up there and hung out long enough that really wanted to see the show, and there were people that were just huge Tom Waits fans that stayed there all night, got a ticket. Because we had a few left. Because you couldn't count! As a consequence, obviously we had rabid fans in there, and it was a great show. And I watched that show, I'll confess. I turned off my radio and watched that show. I was not gonna miss Tom waits. How did this Bloodshot thing come to be such an integral part of the festival? We're running a Bloodshot piece our friend Ian wrote in this issue. I can't even remember when the Bloodshot stuff started. It's been many years now, I'm gonna say maybe 6 years now. Early on it was real simple, they were just cool bands. The fact that they were on Bloodshot didn't necessarily mean anything to us at the time. At SXSW the fit's perfect. The kind of bands that Bloodshot does are kind of the bands that people at SXSW expect to see, with the idea of Austin being this rootsy, countryish place with rock'n'roll too. And Alejandro, who I learned a whole lot about music from - the True Believers, when I was really starting to work in music, if they weren't the coolest band,
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