I love a good metaphoric roadtrip story, probably more than I actually love being on roadtrips. For the next two weeks I'm on just such a journey, exploring a broad set of communities of American artistic independence. Unfortunately, there's always that pesky and boring travel part, which for me started with 11 hours of airports and travel from Orlando to San Francisco via Texas. I had a companion for the journy, though: songs from 737 of the bands playing at SXSW this year (worth the 3.1 GB download for the glimpse into where the independent music scene breathes and snarls.) The budding Kerouac in me thinks of it as an overture to the exploration -- my personal definitions of indie baked in the oven of SXSW and Midwest independent music scene of the early 1990s, and my roadtrip will eventually end back there again in a couple of weeks (or a decade and a half later, depending on how you view it.)

In the early 1990s a college town like Columbia, Missouri (in the tour routes of the "third coast" movement of independent bands) was a great place to fall in love with the indie band scene. I spent a number of years as a studio engineer, record producer, and tour organizer, even running a small indie label called Three Minute Dog that released a few CDs and (*gasp*) 7" vinyl singles. It was as much of a "scene" as it was an indie movement, really, although we were never afraid as a community to flyer music conventions with fliers bearing slogans like "Every band is a local band somewhere" or "Local Music: The Jockstrap of the Industry" or "Less Money Equals More Soul."

This was a regional scene, too ... the local music crowd in Columbia knew the crowd in Lawrence and Springfield and St. Louis and Kansas City and Lincoln, etc. If there was an Emerald City in this local music Oz, it only existed for a week in March in Austin, Texas. It was called SXSW, and much of beginning of each was jockeying by bands to gain slots in that lineup. Sometimes the alternate weekly in the town got to pick one. There were SXSW "local organizers" in each city that held battle of the bands for other slots. Even bands that didn't "get in" would head to Austin ... they'd play on the street corner, or they'd rent out store frontages after hours. It was the Mecca of the Midwest for musicians.

Now you can carry that 66 CD compliation of the bands playing in two weeks on your iPod: it's not the same thing as being there, by a long stretch, but the collection is a remarkable way to taste (okay, 50+ hours of music is a big taste, but it's a big festival) where the scene is now. Reflecting on those days while listening to its decendants will end up being the soundtrack of the next two weeks.

Coda: survived the 4.2 earthquake under a full moon just fine -- what a Shakespearean opening for the trip. Wrath of Nature excepted, I'll hope to write more daily during these two weeks of the Death by Junket tour.