This is the second installment of our LAMF (Live Austin Music Forum). Feel free to leave a comment.
Roger Wallace at the White Horse.
by Roger Wallace, Austin country singer
I’ve been playing with my band at The White Horse every other Friday night since the day they opened. If you don’t already know about the White Horse, it’s one of the live music lynchpins of Austin’s now-happenin’ East Side. On any given night, the place is jampacked, ayholes-to-elbows, from the gyrating honky tonk dance floor to the taco truck outside. It’s a full-on blast most every time I go there, whether I’m at work or at play.
In a recent year I was glad to see that one of my Friday nights fell on the first weekend of the Austin City Limits (ACL) Festival. I expected to see the White Horse at beyond capacity, with the multitudes of out-of-towners vying for space with the usual hordes of regulars, and a fantastic Friday night ensuing.
Turned out, the night was like a Tuesday happy hour in the middle of January. Half full at best, which in White Horse parlance translates as “empty.” There was a freaking echo in there, for God’s sake.
Why? ACL. The Austin City Limits Festival.
Conventional Austin wisdom says that festivals — what seems like 473 thousand of them, and seemingly more and more every year — are supposed to be great for the Austin economy, and therefore great for everyone, including Austin musicians. But is “the economy” all there is? Is that all that really matters to Austin residents? And whose economy are we talking about, exactly? If you are a restaurant/bar owner, a hotel owner, a bartender/waitstaffer, or a vendor directly involved in the festival, then yes, sure, it’s great for you. Other tourist-dependant businesses do well also, like taxis, or those who rent out their home space to tourists. Thousands upon thousands of customers descending upon the city, ready to buy what you’re selling.
But one of the sectors that generally falls through the cracks in Austin’s music festival culture is, ironically, live music.
Festival-goers do just that: go to festivals. There are around a jillion bands (actual number, I looked it up) who play at these Austin festivals every year — the vast majority of whom are not from Austin, rarely play in Austin, and have pretty much nothing to do with Austin — and about 100 bajillion (also totally the real number) people who go to see these bands. They do that. Then, after their long day of festival-going, they either go to the hotel so they can get up and get a fresh start on the following day’s activities, or they visit their hotel bar, or their hotel restaurant, or whatever super cool looking bar/restaurant they saw on the way to the hotel. Or whatever is within walking distance of their Austin Festival Package hotel shuttle’s rendezvous point. And the next day, if they’re feeling adventurous, they might rent a car and take a day trip (don’t get an Austinite started on what festivals do to our already-miserable traffic, by the way) to the Hill Country or other local scenic tourist destinations. Then the next day they get up and start the whole shebang over again. For anywhere from 3 to 5 days, then they go back from whence they came.
Did you see anything in that all-too-familiar festival goer itinerary about seeing local live music at night? Me neither.
ACL Fest 2014. Photo by Otis Ike.
But besides the out-of-towner festival-goers, what about the locals? It varies. Austin residents seem to choose one of 3 familiar refrains: 1) “I love ___ Fest! I’m totally going!” They buy the tickets or passes or wristbands and go to the festivals just like the out-of-towners, which also leaves them little time or energy (or money) to hit their local night spot scene routine that week. 2) “No way I’m going out in all that madness. I’m staying home this week.” The classic Austin Hunker-In. Or 3) “Oh hell no, I leave town during ____ Fest. And I can rent out my house to some Scandanavians for 3 months’ mortgage payments!” Basically, Austin’s very own “get the hell outta Dodge”.
So, we’ve cleared the out-of-towners out of the picture for going to see local live music at night. And now we’ve cleared the locals. Who does that leave? Pretty much band girlfriend/boyfriends and bar staff. Hence, an empty White Horse on a Friday night during ACL. I would also be derelict in my duties as a long-time Austin musician (I’ve been here 20 years) if I neglected to mention the very large-looming and often ignored fact that during festival times, many local musicians have to give up regular gigs or get paid significantly less, or ZERO, all in the name of that tired old nonsensical saw, “exposure.” Even if you get to play parties and festival-specific gigs and events… to what end? So you can play to a crowd of visitors and tourists for free-or-mostly-free, and give up a decent-paying regular gig that would be half populated by visitors and tourists anyway? This is Austin. That happens all the time. We don’t need festivals for that.
My story is not unique. It’s the story pretty much any Austin musician will tell you when asked, as I was for this piece: “Are festivals good for local musicians?”
The short answer. No. Not really. The long answer: Does anyone ever stop to think that hyper-driving Austin’s economic wealth isn’t the only thing that might be important to the people who actually try and have a life in Austin? Yes, a rising tide does lift all boats. But it’s especially bitchin’ if you have a yacht. Not so great if you’re in a rowboat. Most of Austin’s local musicians — whose name and ethos the city has exploited for many years as a means for our growth — are furiously paddling our rowboats and bailing out buckets of water most of the time anyway. But, unfortunately, and contrary to what the Austin facade would have you believe, it gets even worse when the massive waves from these glorious rising tides hit our shores.
Country singer Roger Wallace, whose albums include “Hillbilly Heights,” “That Kind of Lonely” and “It’s About Time” and “The Lowdown” recently added co-booking the Hole In the Wall to his responsibilities.