SXSWORLD

Pages from the by Peter Blackstock 1992-1996: Burnt Ends and New Beginnings The first five years of South By South- west had been in the books for barely 24 hours when the next five years kicked off at a full blaze. Literally. "It was the Monday night after SXSW and an impromptu, semi-True Believers reunion was taking place at the Hole in the Wall," remem- bers Michael Corcoran, writer for the Austin American-Statesman and former music columnist for The Austin Chronicle. "It was about 1:30 a.m., and Alejandro [Escovedo, True Believers' frontman] announced that they were just going to lock the doors at 2 a.m. and play for hours. I had some mushrooms in my pocket, so I figured I'd take them since the party was going to go on all night. But after about 20 minutes it was all over. Last call, all hopped up and no more booze to help me come down. "I was walking with Debbie Pastor to her house, I think, just looking for a place to hang out the next few hours. When we passed the Chronicle/SXSW office [at Nueces and 28th streets, just a few blocks from Hole in the Wall], we saw fire trucks arriving and a fire in the back part of the building. I told the firemen that I was an employee (I wasn't really at the time), and went to the part of the office not on fire and called Louis Black [Chronicle editor]. He went back to sleep, so I called Roland [Swenson, SXSW director], and about half an hour later he came screeching up." Swenson picked up the story from there, in an account published in 2001 by The Austin Chronicle on the occasion of the paper's 20th anniversary: "When I got to the office, it was like a scene from a movie. The entire area was bathed in an eerie color with white spotlights and red flashers. The parking lot was filled with fire trucks, and firemen were dragging hoses everywhere. Relieved that I'd shown up instead of going back to bed, Corcoran took me to see the lieutenant in charge of arson investigations. The lieutenant looked like Steve McQueen in The Towering Inferno, his face smudged with smoke, wearing his fire hat and gear. He leaned close and fixed his gaze on me, asking in a solemn tone: "Do you have any enemies?" You can't grow a music conference from scratch to the cusp of world renown without accumulating a few enemies along the way. One leg- 18 SXSW ORLD / F EBRUAR Y 2011 endary handwritten note from a "Concerned Musician" that arrived in the mail around this time began with the greeting, "You're a bunch of puss-fags, cock-sucking discriminating mother-fuckers," and went downhill from there. The 1991 event had been especially revealing of SXSW's growing pains: It was the first and only time the event was not held during the University of Texas' spring break, and clubs overflowed as a result, leading to long lines and fire-code closures. SXSW SCRAPBOOK It was clear that the major challenge during the next five years would be managing SXSW's growth. From 1992 to 1996, South By Southwest not only moved its office of daily operations, but also transitioned the event's headquarters from the Hyatt Regency hotel to the brand new Austin Convention Center. Conference attendance increased dramati- cally amid a booming age for both the music industry and the American economy. The number of performers surged from about 400 to nearly 700 (a detail I recall quite vividly, given that I was responsible for writing a few words about every single act for the increasingly catalogue- size program guide). SXSW began to experiment with satellite regional festivals in different areas of the country; and in Austin, the main event's purview began expanding beyond music, first with a film fest and then an interactive element. Though regional in name, South By Southwest was growing more international in spirit, with significant contingents from Europe and beyond making the annual trek to Austin in March. By the time New York's New Music Seminar—on which SXSW had loosely been modeled back in 1987—folded in the mid-'90s, South By Southwest had emerged as the biggest event of its kind in the country, and perhaps the world.

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