Editor's Note: For five days, Senior Editor Matt Melucci and Senior

Writer Gil Kaufman are soaking in the sites and sounds of the 12th annual

South By Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, held from March 18-22.

This year's event has brought some 6,000 visitors from around the world to see

more than 800 bands of every musical persuasion perform at clubs throughout

Austin. In addition to the music, there are panel discussions featuring

artists and industry professionals at the Convention Center and all sorts of

strange happenings in and around the downtown. The following are excerpts from

their running diaries:

Friday, March 20

1:15 p.m. -- I'm seeing Robyn Hitchcock as much as I see that guy who

steals the aluminum cans from my garbage can every night in Oakland.

Everywhere I go, there he is. Today he's playing the acoustic daystage inside

the convention center. The title track from his upcoming album, Viva

Seatac, an homage to the Seattle-Tacoma airport, features the lyrics,

"Hendrix played like an animal/ then he escaped," followed sometime later by

the line, "Viva Seattle, Tacoma, viva, viva Seatac / they got the best

computers, coffee and smack." One of the exhibitors has decided to hand out

Mardi Gras beads as a promotional item, which is only slightly more annoying

than the cheap, straw cowboy hats someone handed out last year. --

Kaufman

2:20 p.m. -- British folk-rocker Billy Bragg wears his cowboy hat and

plucks the notes to a song he recently wrote around Woody Guthrie's lyrics.

It's called "Supersonic Boogie" and it was written about flying saucers in the

1950s, he says. "Why is it Americans are always the ones who are abducted?" he

asks the crowd gathered around the acoustic stage just before launching into

the song. Bragg then tells the story of how he came to write the music for a

number of the folk legend's unrecorded songs, which will be performed along

with Wilco on an album released later this year. There are more than 1,000

that were never recorded, he says, explaining that Guthrie had written music

for each but never put a note down on paper. Bragg seems to have captured the

mood with his interpretation of these songs. They are simple and seductive and,

though sung in his voice, echo the essence of folk hero Guthrie and, for

a moment, Guthrie is standing there, singing a song he wrote decades ago, "Ingrid

Bergman, Ingrid Bergman / Let's go make some movies." -- Melucci

5:26 p.m. -- The Interview magazine-sponsored daytime party for

Spacehog feels like a Chinese-themed bar mitzvah party. Plenty of those

crunchy noodles, fortune cookies with Spacehog promo fortunes, hanging

lanterns and free margaritas. Singer Antony Royston is puffing out his cheeks

as if he's hyperventilating behind his '80s-style wrap-around Terminator

shades. A non-affiliated publicist leans over during the new tune "Lucy's

Shoes" and calls the band's Bowie-meets-Steely Dan-meets-T. Rex style a

"guilty pleasure." I watch Come singer Thalia Zedek nod in appreciation and

have to agree that I don't feel that guilty. --Kaufman

10:30 p.m. -- I breeze past Electric Airlines, the new group from

former Urge Overkill guitarist Eddie "King" Roeser, barely noticing their

straightforward indie rock, free of the Overkill swizzle factor, on my way

toward the Electric Lounge for the end of a set by Scottish rockers Arab

Strap. The quartet's melancholy, dead-pan rock nearly lulls me to sleep before

they unexpectedly explode into a torrent of noise and chaos, during which the

singer disappears below eye level, making indiscernible noise on a hidden

instrument and raising the curiosity factor. Next up are fellow Matador

Records band Cornelius, a Japanese quartet that is one of the buzz bands of

the evening. Mixing techno beats, punk-rock guitars and quick-edit video

montages, the group, all dressed in matching red and white-striped shirts,

come off like a Sonic Youth-meets-the-Monkees hybrid, heavy on the shtick.

After the theremin version of "Love Me Tender," executed to the accompaniment

of an Elvis movie with Japanese subtitles, it's time to go. -- Kaufman

12 a.m. -- The sidewalks are jammed with people trying to get into

clubs or finding their way to some late-night party. It's like an adult

version of spring break, a crazy mixture of punks, cowboys and New Yorkers

clad all in black, walking around with drinks in their hands, shouting at the

top of their lungs. For the most part everyone is just looking to party and

find great music, which blasts through the doorways and windows of practically

every club along 6th street. Taxi drivers are having perhaps their biggest

evening of the convention, as it's cold out -- some 40 degrees -- and few

people want to walk far, myself included. Besides, I have to go to Emo's Jr. to

meet up with a friend I haven't seen in years and hear his band, the

Botswanas, do their thing. Unfortunately for the Botswanas, one of the

evening's most-talked-about acts, Nashville Pussy, is playing in the

adjoining bar next door. They steal the New York band's '70s pop thunder, not

to mention the hundreds of people dying to get in from the cold. --

Melucci

12:30 a.m. -- I don't care if Los Angeles' the Urinals were one of the

seminal post-punk bands, they still sound pretty tame to me. A few songs into

their set at Emo's, they reveal they haven't played Austin since 1979. I find

that easy to believe for some reason. A guy in front of me jokes about them

being "pre-post-punk-post-punk." I think I get that. Ironically, just next

door, at Emo's Jr., New York punks the Kowalskis are playing the kind of new-

wave-punk ditties the Urinals may have played 20 years ago, only they're doing

it for the first time, so their enthusiasm is infectious, so infectious, in

fact, that a hipster with blue hair and a ripped Zeke shirt has been inspired

to step into a hula hoop and shake her hips to the Kowalskis' over-the-top

tunes. I guess matching costumes are tonight's theme, since the Kowalskis all

sport matching red jumpsuits. The night ends on a perfect note with a skull-

banging set from the grimy Nashville, Tenn., quartet Nashville Pussy. What can

you say about a group that has a song called "Go Motherfucker Go"? Rude, crude

and definitely lewd, Nashville Pussy is the kind of killbilly punk that makes

Motorhead seem like wedding-reception funk. Rock critic quote of the day: "I

heard the chick gets naked." Yeah, well, she didn't get naked (neither of them

did; not the six-foot-six bassist or the bad-ass guitarist with a head of

long, wavy, heavy-metal hair, although they got close). But the bassist spit

fire and the two women did perform a sensual tonsil tango to the tune of Ted

Nugent's "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang" during a guitar duel. It was perfect; the

boys didn't know, but the little girls understood. -- Kaufman