Some years ago at South By Southwest, I was pulled over for going the wrong way down a one-way street in Austin, Texas. The police officer came to my window and I began trying to explain myself; I'd just arrived, got confused and so on. I stopped talking when I noticed that he wasn't listening to me, but to the music coming out of my rental car's tape deck.
"That's nice," he said with a nod toward the deck, and we briefly discussed the virtues of the group playing (The Minus Five, featuring R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck). After ascertaining that I'd not been drinking, he let me go with a stern warning.
Whenever I get asked whether or not a South By Southwest-type event like the Hopscotch Music Festival could take off in Raleigh, I think back to that night. It says a lot about why Austin is different from most places, and why South By Southwest works so well there.
Raleigh and Austin do share many similarities. Both cities are state-capital college towns that experienced growth booms over the past 30 years. Both have well-educated populations and cultural amenities. And both have local music scenes that have earned national acclaim.
But there are differences, too. It's not just that Austin has more of a live-music infrastructure than most cities, inspiring the Chamber of Commerce slogan "Live Music Capitol of the World." It's that there's a larger critical mass of live-music culture in Austin than in any other city I've ever seen.
I went to graduate school at the University of Texas, and I've attended 23 out of 24 South By Southwests. I can tell you that going to shows is just what people in Austin do, and it's been that way going back to the "Cosmic Cowboy" era of the 1970s - when Austin had the lowest cost of living of any American city (a fond and long-ago memory). The result is a musically literate club-going population multiples bigger than similar populations in much larger cities.
South By Southwest started small, with a handful of bands playing for a few hundred attendees in 1987. But it took off like a rocket, helped by a confluence of events to grow into the monolith it is now.
Austin in March is one of the most appealing places on Earth, with the bluebonnets just beginning to bloom and summertime heat still several months off. It's the perfect time and place for people from cold-weather places to gather at "spring break for the music industry." In recent years, South By Southwest has also expanded with an accompanying film festival and interactive-media conference, both of them quite successful.
But the music festival remains the main event. So much of it happens off the grid with unregistered attendees and bands who come for the party that it's difficult to say just how big South By Southwest is. But it's well over 1,000 bands, with tens of thousands of people coming to listen. And the city's cab drivers, restaurant workers and, yes, cops are savvy enough about music to get it.
Whatever niche Hopscotch finds, South By Southwest's place at the top seems secure.
"Nothing is impossible, but rivaling South By Southwest would be very difficult for any festival," says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar magazine. "Over the years, it has developed a reputation within the music business that takes a long time to develop. There's probably not room for more than one of those kinds of events."
