Around Hear

For 13 years, the South By Southwest (SXSW) Music and Media Conference has accorded the South revenge on an industry controlled by the East and West Coasts. Hundreds of international bands, record execs, publicists, and music fans gather in sunny (except this year) Austin, Texas, for five days of waiting in lines to get into shows. It's a fair barometer for what is happening in the industry and what audiences likely will be exposed to musically in the coming months.

This year's festival, held March 15 through 19, may have benefited the South most, but it wasn't all that bad for those in the Midwest. Six acts from around KC (Lawrence and Manhattan included) were accepted to the prestigious shindig out of some 75 who applied. To put the region's six selections in perspective, a fellow music editor at a Cleveland weekly newspaper divulged that only a single act had been chosen from his city. Cleveland is a larger market -- and one that boasts the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

With so much live music to behold, three PitchWeekly journalists (J.J. Hensley, Jon Niccum, and Jeff Brown) split the coverage of how the hometown bands fared 643 miles to the south. -- Jon Niccum

Mike Ireland and HollerWhen you come from a town where people always have something negative to say about the music scene, it makes you worry a bit when musicians from said town take their shows on the road -- to a camp of music scenesters and insiders no less.

Some of these worries started to fade on the opening night of South By Southwest when I stumbled on the members of a band formerly from Lawrence, The Playthings, taking the stage to provide backing vocals for Harvey Sid Fisher. (For those without the cable mainline running through their veins, Fisher is the lounge singer whose musical interpretations of astrological signs are aired on Comedy Central's The Daily Show.) Tim Brown and Jenny Hart proved to be the perfect match for Fisher's hilariously scathing take on love and the stars, and the crowd, mostly there to see Pong, ate it up. But The Playthings moved away from the KC area to pursue their musical dreams, so there were still plenty of questions to be answered.

Luckily that answer would appear over the next few days, and not in the form of a generic saccharine rock band but in the kind of real, gritty music that takes you back to a time when South By Southwest referred to a cross-country tour itinerary to be traveled by pickup truck, not an industry schmooze fest. Country boy Mike Ireland and his band, Holler, said as much when they started their Friday night set at the Ritz Lounge by proclaiming this the first show with a new lineup and promising to have some kinks to work out. Thing is, whatever kinks were there got covered up nicely by new keyboardist Mike Deming, whose deft touch around the ivory played like laughter in Holler's rollicking jams and provided some sublime serenity on Ireland's mournful ballads. With new band members John Horton and Spencer Marquart, many of the songs were also new, though there were some off Learning How to Live and even a few covers, including a particularly poignant version of a Charlie Rich classic.

Ireland may have done too much explaining between songs, but after his lengthy hiatus, he felt like he had lots of 'splaining to do. Besides, anyone who could afford Ireland these few words between songs found himself in the middle of an emotional set from a group whose material can sound flat without feeling. Tonight, however, with the bass-playin' Ireland and his drummer slapping away in perfect time to the guitarists' Clapton-on-Cale drawl, there was plenty of emotional baggage brought on stage -- it's just too bad for the next act, Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire, that Ireland and Holler took it all with them. -- J.J. Hensley

Split Lip RayfieldAs good as Mike Ireland and Holler were on Friday night, there was no way the group could outdo the work of Split Lip Rayfield from the night before, but few acts in Austin this weekend could. There was a time during Split Lip's Thursday night set at Saengerrunde Hall (it has a bowling alley, but it was closed when we got there) when you could look around the nearly packed house and see everyone wearing the same sort of awestruck expression that spells the near end for Carol Anne in Poltergeist. It sort of makes sense, considering the four players in Split Lip move their fingers about as fast as that mesmerizing TV fuzz. But these weren't girls between the ages of 6 and 11 being scared into silence; it was leather-skin industry types with 30,000 minute-a-month phone plans being played into submission.

And submit they did. After the initial shock wore off (halfway through the night's opener, "John") and first-timers could firmly establish the number of strings on that '65 Chevy gas tank bass (it's only one), the players sped up and the joint turned into some sort of urban hoedown, complete with enough kissing cousins, square dancing strangers, and rebel yells to film an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard. All that is sort of fitting because the old Hall could have passed for a souped-up Boar's Nest, but unlike any of the country stars caught in Boss Hawg's speed trap, and almost any other band at South By Southwest, Split Lip Rayfield got called back to the stage for an encore. That feat is unheard of for an act that's not the closer -- at least that's what I thought until it happened to Split Lip again the next day at Bloodshot Records Back Yard BBQ, and all the worries were over. -- J.J. Hensley