In the morning Jason made us some fantastic French Press Coffee… It had been a good two days; nice coffee without hitting a Starbucks at all, quite a rarity in this part of the world. After some chatting, we hit the road to Austin, our final destination for a few days, at least. I was excited, since our hotel is only about 20 minutes from downtown Austin and we’ll only be in the car for probably a maximum of an hour each day. My legs and body were definitely looking forward to that. So we got to Austin, threw our stuff in the hotel and headed to Bikini’s, the site of our first gig. Now, I’ve been to Hooters a few times, but this place was really strange. I just don’t understand the rationale of women totally exploiting themselves like that and I was wondering how much they actually get paid and whether that justifies walking around in a Bikini for 8 hours or if they just enjoy it. Plus, I often times hear women complaining about buying Bikini’s (and please; correct me if I’m wrong) so how many Bikinis do these waitresses have? Do the other waitresses make fun of them if they wear the same more than once a week? Unfortunately, I didn’t ask our waitress these questions, but we did have her do the video tour… its pretty hilarious.
The show itself wasn’t too bad; we played decently and Bikini’s gave us a $60 gift card for food and drinks, which was very nice. So, after we finished up, we headed downtown to check out what the “real” SXSW was like…
I have to admit; downtown was like a carnival for bands… So much stimulation everywhere, I really couldn’t believe it. After walking around and checking in with the venues we were playing the next few days, I became quite overwhelmed at the sheer number of venues and bands performing. I didn’t think it was possible to ever stick out in a place where every other person on the street was in a band (or thought they were). I think the video for the next few days will be far more telling than anything I can say. We did happen to meet a photographer from Boston while in line at the ATM to refresh our monies, Kelly Davidson (http://etchedonfilm.blogspot.com/) who we knew (by name) but have never met in person. She seemed very cool and we handed her the flyer for our list of shows, actually not expecting her to show up.
We wandered around for a bit more and ended up meeting our publicity agent, Janelle Rogers from Green Light Go Publicity. Janelle was great, and her, Mike, and I probably chatted for about an hour about the various ins and outs of the music biz today. We then headed back to the hotel; preparing to get ready for the next few days.