SXSW Day 2: Roller Derby Rock & Roll

My first full day at SXSW yielded a few musical, culinary, and er, athletic surprises. Carla Parisi and I stopped by the New West party, where I didn’t see nearly as much of Buddy Miller’s set as I would’ve liked, but did manage to eat my first taco of the trip. Then I hoofed it up to the Emmylou Harris tribute at the Driskill where I ran into No Depression’s Grant Alden, Bob Mehr from the Commercial Appeal, Zac Crain from American Way, and a few other SXSW stalwarts.

The real revelation of the day came at Threadgill’s, where I had dinner with Molly Nagel from Sugar Hill, a good portion of the Harp Magazine masthead, Abby White from Performing Songwriter, Eric Danton from The Hartford Courant and a few others. See, I have a thing for fried pickles. Turns out Molly does too. We discussed our favorite fried pickle spots - hers: Rotiers in Nashville, mine: Parasol’s in New Orleans - and the ultimate fried pickle debate: chips vs. spears. Threadgill’s serves a fried spear, and while we both agreed that chips are vastly superior - the batter to pickle ratio is much higher with chips - we decided to give the spears a shot anyway. And I have to say, they were damn good: Piping hot, excellent texture and sour/salty balance, mmmmm. I almost ordered seconds.

ANYWAY. Several members of our dinner party then went to see our own Future Clouds and Radar play the Alejandro Escovedo evening at the Convention Center. As were were walked the cavernous hall in search of FCR, Carla and I came upon - and I have the pictures to prove it - a full on women’s roller derby tournament.

Undeterred, we continued on to the Future Clouds show and were rewarded with the most mind-blowing set I’ve seen them play. At one point they had 14 musicians onstage, including full horn and string sections. This is a band that belongs in a big room.

From there, Alexis Tedford and I spent the rest of the night at the Norton Records Showcase. Sam the Sham did his Wooly Booly best, The Reigning Sound totally smoked, and our own Mary Weiss slayed ‘em all. You can count on one hand the number of shows Mary has played since her group The Shangri-Las broke up in 1968, so anticipation was high. The new stuff sounded incredible and when the band played the opening notes of “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” the crowd flipped!

Back to the hotel by 3am, then up at 9 to do it all over again.