Kevin Bronson on March 25th, 2009

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[The Henry Clay People continue their tour diary, getting all sweaty about last week’s frolicking at the South by Southwest Music Festival.”  Joey Siara reports:]

So we officially survived our second SXSW. It’s kind of like running a marathon, not that I would know, but I imagine the exhaustion is comparable, except instead of drinking water and Gatorade you drink Lone Star and cheap whiskey.

The fact that this was our second “South by” made it infinitely better than last year. We knew what to expect, more or less.”  We weren’t rattled by showing up with no backline and playing through crappy gear. We understood the geography of downtown Austin. We learned how to pace ourselves with drinking and Texas BBQ. Also, having six shows in three days is kind of nice because if we screwed up one then we’d always have another, as long as we didn’t screw up the last show.”  I think that makes sense.

One of the best parts of SXSW was seeing some familiar faces. It’s been roughly five weeks and it was so nice to see (and play with) Le Switch and get to hang with Wendy Wang. Our friends mean a lot to us. We played a party for Aquarium Drunkard at Peckerheads, and it was your standard quick changeover nightmare ordeal getting set up.”  Once we started playing though, we looked out into the crowd and even with the room being at capacity I felt like I was looking at more familiar faces than unfamiliar. It was definitely a highlight for me. It felt like coming home a bit but we were in Austin. Kind of a weird feeling.

Overall, good things happened for us in Texas.”  I’m not quite at liberty to discuss in detail, but it was better for us than anticipated.

Here are some other Austin highlights:

1. Meeting Spoon.”  They are one of my favorite bands.”  Jim Eno (Spoon’s drummer) gave us a tour of his studio and it was a trip to see where some of my favorite records were made.
2. The Wrens at the Mohawk. I love this band. Love!
3. Seeing Justin from Aquarium Drunkard jump for joy when Metallica started playing “Master of Puppets.” Seeing Metallica at all was something I never thought I’d do. But I did. Check that off my list.
4. Hot Freaks. I went both days. Free tacos. Tasty beer. Terrific bands. I could hang out at the Hot Freaks event for the entirety of SXSW and be very happy. Jason Lytle doing a Grandaddy tune is tough to beat.
5. Sneaking into Rachael Ray’s party by pretending to be Airborne Toxic Event’s guitar tech, then watching the Thermals play to small but captivated crowd. This was immediately followed by about 10 free mojitos and hanging with Dave Newton, which is always a good time.

These are bands that I have never seen before that I will definitely see again: The Delta Spirit, the Roadside Graves and believe it or not, this was my first “proper” Silversun Pickups show. They killed it.