South by Southwest by West Michigan: Grand Rapids-area bands strutting musical stuff for throngs in Austin

With hundreds of acts scrambling to get noticed, West Michigan’s own Stepdad, Rick Chyme, The Soil & The Sun and Joe Hertler & The Rainbow Seekers dive into the “zoo” that is SXSW.

 

With more than 2,000 “official” showcase performers on 100-plus stages, South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, can be dizzying for artists and concertgoers.

And that means The Soil & The Sun, Stepdad, Rick Chyme and Joe Hertler & The Rainbow Seekers, who are flying Michigan’s flag this week at the prodigious annual music, film and interactive conference event, have their work cut out for them in getting the attention of industry representatives and fans.

“It’s definitely as much of a zoo as always, overwhelming amounts of people everywhere,” Stepdad’s Mark Tafel, aka Ultramark, told Local Spins after playing a showcase concert Wednesday night. The Grand Rapids-based pop band has been to SXSW before, so it’s grown accustomed to the mayhem.

“We’re … taking it a bit easier than we have in the past and focusing our energy more on showcasing for people who already have strong interest in us that we know aren’t complete dead-ends, which is what a lot of South by Southwest ‘meetings’ end up being. It’s just been a pretty long learning experience.”

Put it this way, the Spacelab.TV website calls SXSW “a week of shows, discussion panels, schmoozing, new bands, schmoozing, drunkenness while trying to schmooze, etc.” It runs through Sunday.

The fast-growing SXSW, founded in 1987, boasts huge names such as Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, 50 Cent and Los Lonely Boys, with a separate iTunes Festival featuring the likes of Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, Pitbull and Keith Urban.

A ‘LEVEL OF SATURATION’ AND HUNDREDS OF SHOWCASES

But the list of those playing showcases on the official conference website also spans 26 pages of emerging, hip and relatively unknown but unabashedly brazen acts aiming to get noticed. And some of those 2,000-plus bands boast attention-getting names such as Death By Unga Bunga, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, Manic Sheep, Save Your Breath, Swearing at Motorists and Minor Mishap Marching Band.

“South by Southwest is a good time, but the level of saturation can really work against artists,” Tafel conceded. “It is very difficult to go there and ‘get noticed’ by people who didn’t have prior knowledge of them. I don’t at all mean to sound bitter by any means.

“I appreciate how extremely lucky and unlikely it is that we’re in the position we’re in at all, but increasingly every year, it can be disheartening at how many people and organizations are there simply to exploit and lead on artists without a genuine interest in their content or career beyond filling out time in a blog/podcast this or that or whatever.”

Nevertheless, West Michigan acts have sauntered on, playing showcases this week and rubbing elbows with other attendees.

A LOCAL SPINS EXCLUSIVE SXSW VIDEO BY RICK CHYME

The Soil and The Sun, Grand Rapids’ highly touted, space folk-rock ensemble which made its first trip to SXSW last year, ended up playing early Thursday evening in front of about 150 people in a parking lot venue as part of a “Michigan showcase” event, which also featured West Michigan hip-hop artist Rick Chyme. The rootsy, folky, pop-hued Hertler and his band were scheduled to play a different showcase at a hotel at midnight Friday, with The Soil and The Sun performing a couple of afternoon showcases today and another at 1 a.m. Saturday at a bar in downtown Austin.

The bearded, distinctive-looking Chyme made an 11th-hour decision to travel down to SXSW, snagging a slot on the Thursday showcase which he also emceed, and will play another full set on Saturday afternoon at another event.

Chyme provided Local Spins with an exclusive video of his a capella performance during the “tail end” of his set at the Michigan showcase, which you can watch here.

“Today’s performance conditions were challenging, but as always the connection with others that occurs
during the set greatly overpowered the weather,” he offered, noting some words from the featured rap were “written long ago but heard in Austin for the first time tonight and seen by you all first at Local Spins.”

As for the challenge of drawing attention to his music with so much going on at SXSW, Chyme joked in a message to Local Spins: “Luckily, I have this beard.”

AND THEN, A TRAGIC ACCIDENT

Of course, on Thursday, much of the talk at South by Southwest surrounded the tragic late-night car crash that killed two and injured more than 20 others when a drunken driver plowed into pedestrians on a crowded street that had been blocked off. Read details about the incident in this Washington Post story.

“In general, last night’s tragedy is definitely on everyone’s mind,” said Troy Reimink, a Local Spins contributor from Grand Rapids who’s attending his first SXSW. “It’s the first thing that comes up in every conversation. But the enthusiasm for music and the overall party atmosphere seems undiminished.”

Stepdad, which performed at a showcase the same evening as the accident, had parked its car on the opposite side of the block from where the crash took place.

“We were walking our gear back to the car and out of nowhere, ambulances started flying around the block in steady clusters of three to five every two or three minutes,” Tafel told Local Spins. “We were clueless as to what happened that could possibly need that level of emergency services, but of course, you start to jump to pretty frightening conclusions, terrorism being the foremost.

“But as we entered the garage a group of people coming in from the opposite end looked freaked out. … They told us they saw immediate aftermath of a hit-and-run run. … (It wasn’t) until we got back to our friends’ band’s house that news reports were popping up and that’s when we realized it was a lot more horrific and terrifying than we had imagined.”

SXSW announced that it has set up an Emotional Support Center in the Austin Convention Center that will be open to the public Friday and Saturday “to help those affected by the tragic events.”

Email John Sinkevics at jsinkevics@gmail.com.
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