WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

AUSTIN, Tx—Commitments and reality beckon, and as you read this, my last dispatch from my 20^th trip to South by Southwest, I’ll be trading bright sun and 85° for rain and a high of 35… to say nothing of no longer hearing two dozen bands a day. But, hey, Spring Break can’t last forever.

Best things first: My musical highlight Friday, and the second best show I saw after Savages throughout the festival, came courtesy of a six-piece band from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, with the unwieldy name of Shout Out Out Out Out.

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Austin, Tx—Ah, yes: THIS is how South by Southwest is supposed to work! Your feet ache from running around nonstop for the past 14 hours, then hiking two miles to yet another crappy venue with a lousy sound system. Your stomach is funky from too much meat. The mediocre to dreadful acts today have far outnumbered the good ones (four to one, to be precise; thank you, Pumcayó).

And then you see god.

Based in London, Savages are a group of four young women on guitar, drums, bass and vocals who play with a galvanizing ferocity. Their influences, especially in terms of the unrelentingly minimalist approach to song structure, melody and image, are obvious: Wire, Gang of Four and the Slits.

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AUSTIN, Tx—While finding one’s own voice as a musician was the noble theme of Dave Grohl’s keynote address, the words I’ve heard mentioned far more often than any other during the daytime panels at South by Southwest 2013 are “creating your brand.”

The more calculated side of this endeavor includes potentially troublesome things like selling your music to advertising, as chronicled yesterday. But there’s a benign and human aspect to this meaningless jargon, too, as was made clear by the tirelessly fan-friendly Amanda Palmer, as well as by the super-social networking-savvy participants in a Thursday afternoon session entitled “Internet: How to Not Go Crazy Being Everywhere.”

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AUSTIN, Tx—In the summer of 1993, I spent several days in Seattle waiting to be summoned for an audience with Kurt Cobain and enjoying quite a bit of quality hang time with Krist Novoselic as they waited for the release of Nirvana’s third album In Utero. As a drummer myself and a fan of Dave Grohl’s postpunk John Bonham thrash, I repeatedly asked both of his band mates, “Shouldn’t I speak to him, too?”

“Heck, no; why?,” came the reply, and more than once. So I settled for watching Grohl play a reunion gig with the D.C. hardcore band Scream at the Crocodile Café.

Two years later, when I queried Courtney Love on her perception of Grohl’s role in her husband’s band, she burst into that infamous evil cackle. “What you have to know about Dave is he was the guy who’d enjoy going out back to set his farts on fire with Steve Albini. That’s Dave.”

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AUSTIN, Tx—The best-laid plans tend to quickly go awry at South by Southwest, especially with these epic crowds. Yet if I missed catching a few acts I’d hoped to see on night one—Merchandise, the Black Angels, Guards—I did have a couple of great surprises in the clubs.

The first of these was a Brooklyn singer-songwriter named Laura Stevenson, who performed with her band the Cans under a tent outside a club called Holy Mountain off Seventh Street. Think of a less intense, sweeter-voiced Sharon Van Etten, but with a two-guitar, bass, drums and accordion lineup capable of unexpected eruptions of noise a la the Velvet Underground or Neil Young with Crazy Horse.

Music is in Stevenson’s blood: Her grandfather was a composer who made key early recordings of the Christmas standards “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” while her grandmother sang with Benny Goodman. But Stevenson has a voice all her own, honed over the course of three indie albums including the latest, Wheel, released on Don Giovanni, the label that brought us Screaming Females.

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AUSTIN, Tx—South by Southwest was in year six when I first made the trip to the Texas capital in 1993 for what’s become the biggest gathering of the music world in the United States. Prompted partly by the daytime conference panels relocating that year from one of the city’s hotels to the vast, sterile and still-under-construction Austin Convention Center, I listened to considerable grumbling from veterans that, “SXSW has gotten too big for its own good—it’s lost its soul!”

I’ve heard repetitions of that complaint (or variations thereof: “too corporate/too dismissive of local bands/too political,” etc.)—every March since, but I’ve usually dismissed them.

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Sussing out exactly what’s going on with the Portage Theater never has been an easy task: Witness the long and tangled tale of its aborted sale last year to the Tabernacle Church. But determining the fate of this historic Northwest Side gem has grown exponentially more difficult since its purchase in September by Erineo “Eddie” Carranza, who also owns the troubled Congress Theater in Logan Square.

As reported by the Sun-Times and Chicagoist, the Portage took a big step forward yesterday—at least in the eyes of neighborhood preservationists who’d like to see it continue as an eclectic movie palace—when the Commission on Chicago Landmarks unanimously urged that the 93-year-old venue be protected.

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