Will Sexton – The Pleasurecraft

March 15, 2011

Chances are that by Saturday you’ll want to strangle the shit out of anyone carrying an instrument case, sporting an outrageous hairstyle, or handing out any kind of printed material. “So your steampunk barbershop quartet has a 3am unofficial showcase at the Brixton? Well do-re-mi-fa-so what motherfucker?” By Saturday you’ll be sick of free beer but too broke to buy liquor. You’ll also be craving a salad but still eating free barbecue and Wonder Bread. In fact, by Saturday the only thing keeping your digestive tract flowing will be dangerous overdoses of ibuprofen and promotional vitamin C packages. Cannonball those in the morning with a couple of quarts of water, and you’ll experience a vigorous cleanse – something similar to what you’d get after a couple of weeks ingesting nothing but lemon water and cayenne, or drinking Tijuana sewer water. It’s best to travel light anyway, and by Saturday you will have reduced your club crawling essentials to flip-flops, a banana hammock (or daisy dukes), and a lanyard attached to a plastic pocket that contains your South by Southwest badge, ID, credit card, and a pair of dirt- and wax-covered swag earplugs pungent enough to be used as trolling bait for catfish. If those earplugs are that gamey, imagine what must be going on down in those daisy dukes … the only thing that’s keeping you from being trailed by a herd of feral cats is the fact that there are several hundred thousand other roving tuna canneries throwing them off the scent. Maybe you should take a short walk across the bridge to South Congress and pick up one of those overpriced Mexican sundresses. Yes, they’re the same dresses you can buy at the mercado in front of the Fiesta Mart for $15 a pop, but these have cute shit like hummingbirds and geckos silk-screened on them. Regardless of what you pay, Mexican sundresses offer superior ventilation, and if nature is overly insistent, you can cop a squat in the middle of Sixth Street and not cause a big scene. Easy enough, right? As thousands of doe-eyed musicians prove every year, it’s not easy to cause a big scene during SXSW. You have to be truly remarkable. It’s not enough to be a really awesome band that plays really awesome music. You have to be a really awesome band that plays really awesome music, dances like OK Go, dresses like Lady Gaga, and gives away free cocker spaniel puppies at every show. Why? Because the Perez Hilton party has Madonna performing with Justin Bieber on a leash in a gimp suit, free D.O.M and Beluga, a bouncy castle lubed with Astroglide, and gift baskets that include cocaine-filled Fabergé eggs and mittens made of baby seal fur. Oh yeah … and a tribe of pygmies is going to slaughter a bull elephant with machetes. “What was the name of your band again? Oh … that’s right … who gives a fuck?” By Saturday you’ll probably have that phrase tattooed on your forehead. Like every other SXSW attendee, you started out an innocent lover of music and ended up a bitter, jaded, and exhausted hater. Perfect! You are now ready to experience the Austin Music Awards. This Saturday the Chronicle will honor the bands that made it through the meat grinder of the live music capital of the world and came out on top – no small feat. Austin audiences feel like SXSW attendees do year-round, so when they recognize talent, it’s usually legit. Come see for yourself this Saturday at the Austin Music Hall. Yes, there will be awards, but also sizzling sets by the Wagoneers, Joe Ely, Sahara Smith, Will Sexton, Bubble Puppy, Bright Light Social Hour, the Meat Puppets, Roky Erickson, and the God-stomping, 18-piece orchestra Mother Falcon. If you see Mother Falcon and still want to choke the shit out of musicians, you’ll have your work cut out for you.

December 8, 2010

Austin Music Hall

Mental health is a bit of a sticky wicket – especially where musicians are concerned. It’s no wonder. The constant vacillation between unbridled egomania and soul-crushing self-doubt is bound to leave a few frayed ends. It’s difficult enough for the average person to cobble together a sense of identity and self-worth. Musicians tend to compound the difficulty by pressuring themselves to be much more interesting than they really are – to be larger than life. The type of wacky, harebrained behavior that would land the average person in the loony bin (if such bins still existed) is actually tolerated and even encouraged in musicians. After all, normal isn’t very entertaining is it? The result is a whole slew of aberrant dress and bizarre behavior. Consider the questionably pedophiliac, body-mutilating, androgynous insanity of Michael Jackson (arguably one of the greatest entertainers of all time), or the karate chopping, UFO-sighting, rhinestone jumpsuit-wearing (also questionably pedophiliac) Elvis, who may or may not have been involved with the FBI, CIA, and extraterrestrials. Throw in a goat, a monkey, and a 50-gallon drum of Vaseline, and you have one seriously bizarre clusterfuck. Unfortunately, in the music world that’s the kind of thing it takes to get noticed. Liberace was probably at one time a fairly unremarkable Polish kid from Wisconsin; Madonna was just a high school cheerleader from Pontiac, Mich.; the members of Kiss were just hardworking metal musicians from the boroughs; and GG Allin was just a boy from Vermont who was born with the name Jesus Christ Allin, cross-dressed for the last three years of high school, did a stint at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, and made a career(?) out of urinating, defecating, flinging feces, bleeding, and vomiting onstage. OK, so maybe Jesus was crazier than a shit-house rat from start to finish, but he still managed to get gigs, and that’s the point really. In the music business, there is always someone willing to encourage and reward insanity. Lady Gaga is a pretty good singer and all, but could she make it without the meat dress? Or the bubble dress? Or the Kermit the Frog dress? At some point her career will slow down and she’ll end up paying Franc Fernandez to design her a dress out of dalmatian puppy hides, human placentas, or maybe circumcised foreskins. At some point you either decide to wear the hamster carcass earrings or end up doing matinee shows in Branson, Mo. In music, you’re either on your way up or on your way down. In one night you can go from windmilling power chords in front of a club full of screaming fans to washing your underwear in a gas station restroom on the interstate. One month your album is at the top of the charts; the next month it’s not even on the charts. One night you’re on Leno, the next night you’re on Leno. It’s no surprise that many musicians try to even out the peaks and valleys with drugs and alcohol, which are always easily available. Often as not, they only amp up the insanity, and bartenders and drug dealers aren’t necessarily predisposed or trained to deal with complex emotional and psychological issues – especially if they’re not getting paid. Thankfully Austin has an organization that offers musicians opportunities to seek help from people who are trained to deal with psychological and substance abuse issues. It’s called the SIMS Foundation, and this Saturday it’s hosting the SIMS Benefit Bash at the Austin Music Hall, a fundraising concert featuring a who’s who of Austin Musicians: Eliza Gilkyson, Ian McLagan, Will Sexton, David Garza, Graham Reynolds, Kat Edmonson, Don Harvey, Brownout, Lauren Larson, Ruby Jane Smith, Amy Cook, Mark Andes, and Scrappy Jud Newcomb, among others. For less than the price of a round of Jäger shots, you can show some musicians how much you appreciate them in a way that actually does them some good.