Idiot Pilot

SXSW Round Up

In the lat­est issue of Bellingham’s What’s Up! Mag­a­zine, I wrote an edi­tion of their “Tales From The Road” col­umn regard­ing Idiot Pilot’s trip to SXSW. If you live in the area you can pick up a copy of the mag­a­zine just about any­where, but for those of you who can’t, I’ve included the full text from the arti­cle for your read­ing plea­sure. Just click below to check it out…

Idiot Pilot Set­tles In At South By South­west
By Daniel Anderson

Since it’s con­cep­tion in 1987, South By South­west has become a cor­ner­stone of Amer­i­can indie music, not nec­es­sar­ily indie as a vague genre descrip­tion, but of lit­eral inde­pen­dent music. The free­way to Austin has become the yel­low brick road for up and com­ing bands, who annu­ally throw their shit in the van and trek from all cor­ners of the world to be noticed at the fes­ti­val. Of course, once they get there they are often con­fronted with the inevitable fact that they are sim­ply one of hun­dreds of other bands who threw their shit in said van and made said trek South. The myth of South By South­west how­ever, remains intact by the fact that it is a truly great event and that, every once in a while, a band will get caught and lifted out of the sea of other bands to go onto big­ger and bet­ter things. The fes­ti­val has evolved as well, to include not only music but film and an “inter­ac­tive” por­tion that focuses on tech­nol­ogy and the internet.

I have been to South By South­west twice now and, in direct defi­ance of my lead in, nei­ther of those times was I signed to an indie label. The first time Idiot Pilot was already signed to a major label, and this time we are free agents, which is impor­tant to bring up because it dras­ti­cally informs a bands rea­son for attend­ing. For this years trip in par­tic­u­lar it meant that we were there to get out and meet peo­ple; book­ing agents, labels, other bands, and every­one in between, and to have fun.

We did the drive to Texas in what we in the band like to call a “straight shot”, which basi­cally means in one long haul with­out stop­ping at a hotel or to sleep. From Belling­ham to Austin is actu­ally the longest “straight shot” drive in the his­tory of Idiot Pilot, nar­rowly beat­ing out our trip from Austin to Cal­gary after our pre­vi­ous SXSW expe­ri­ence by just three hun­dred and sixty eight miles. (Austin to Cal­gary is almost exactly 2000 miles on the free­way, for those of you who care.) There were five of us in the van, Ian the man­ager, Michael and myself as the band, and our two aux­il­iary band mem­bers Chris and Dimiter on drums and bass respec­tively. The won­der­ful and tal­ented Paul Turpin flew down to meet us at the fes­ti­val and run our live sound. Need­less to say, by the end of the drive we were all feel­ing a lit­tle deliri­ous and ready to sleep.

Idiot Pilot’s show­case was on the first night of the fes­ti­val, with a fairly promis­ing 11:00 PM times­lot at a great lit­tle venue right across from the world famous Stubb’s Bar­beque and right down the street from the equally noto­ri­ous venue, Emo’s. We loaded in our gear through a street quickly fill­ing with music lovers, bands, and press doc­u­ment­ing the action. For­tu­nately, it wasn’t long before we grabbed the atten­tion of NPR, who asked Ian and Dimiter for a com­ment about the recent news that Youtube would be work­ing with inde­pen­dent artists on a royalties-per-view pro­gram. First day at SXSW and we’ve already got an inter­view with National Pub­lic Radio, not too bad.

The show itself was fan­tas­tic. Even though we were ini­tially told that fans could not get in unless they pos­sessed one of the very pricey SXSW passes or an artist wrist­band and that the venue was twenty-one and over, we quickly learned that nei­ther were true. An hour before show time I sent out a mes­sage though our var­i­ous online chan­nels say­ing that the gig was actu­ally much eas­ier to attend than pre­vi­ously thought and, some­how, enough Idiot Pilot fans in the area dropped what they were doing and packed the place. There were some famil­iar faces in the crowd, which is always nice when you are far from home, and even the unfa­mil­iar faces seemed to know the words. Most impor­tantly, we met some great new friends who showed our crew the best late night diner in town for a post show hang out.

The next few days at South By South­west were spent min­gling with var­i­ous indus­try folks, run­ning into old friends, or check­ing out bands. Most of the show­cases that I went to were, iron­i­cally, from semi-local artists who I could have eas­ily seen with­out dri­ving across the coun­try. I saw The Globes and Blunt Mechanic from Seat­tle, waited an hour out­side for Past Lives just to catch them pack­ing up there gear, and hung with John from Anacortes’s The Lonely For­est. Get­ting to catch those guys play was espe­cially great because Idiot Pilot and John Van Deusen have been doing shows together since the both of us were kids, and now that we are all grown up The Lonely For­est is a force to be reck­oned with. There set was one of the best I saw all fes­ti­val; a super tight, well-oiled pop rock machine with all the hooks you could ever need. On the non-local band front, I man­aged to catch Myspace sen­sa­tion Lights, Jakob Dylan and Neko Case, Doll And The Kicks, Washed Out, Cym­bals Eat Gui­tars, and the leg­endary Stone Tem­ple Pilots, among oth­ers. See­ing STP rip through a soar­ing ver­sion of The Big Empty is some­thing that has to be seen to be believed.

I also man­aged to get into a few of the SXSW film pre­miers while I was there and I was not dis­ap­pointed. On the third night of the fes­ti­val Chris and I went to see “The Loved Ones”, an Aus­tralian hor­ror fea­ture that has been mak­ing the rounds at fes­ti­vals cur­rently. At the time of our screen­ing it also hap­pened to be the only movie pre­mier­ing at SXSW that had been picked up by any major dis­trib­u­tors, and there is no ques­tion why. As a hor­ror con­nois­seur I can hon­estly say it is one of the bet­ter films I have seen in years, tak­ing all of the best parts of French New Wave Hor­ror and turn­ing them on their head, through a glit­tery pink lens nonetheless.

The film por­tion of South By South­west also insured that, along with var­i­ous musi­cal per­son­al­i­ties strolling around through­out the day (We almost got eaten by Gwar on 6th Street), there are also a few notable actors in atten­dance. When Dimiter was watch­ing Muse per­form he was bumped into by a stranger who mum­bled “I’m sorry.” He then turned around to see Bill Mur­ray stum­bling away through the crowd.

By the end of the week we had accom­plished a lot. We had a great show and made a lot of good con­nec­tions, done inter­views, had fun and seen some fan­tas­tic art. As with all mat­ters of busi­ness, not all of the details can be shared with the ador­ing read­er­ship of What’s Up just yet, but as they say about SXSW, it’s all about discovery.