A Tiny Fee ($100 per Band) and Lots of Exposure : Orange County rock ‘n’ roll groups go deep into the heart of Texas for a big wingding, and find the scene more to their liking

What a difference a few months make:

The last time Orange County rock bands National People’s Gang, Don’t Mean Maybe and Eggplant played together, it was to a near-empty Coach House last December, where the lure of a charitable cause, a low ticket price and a lineup of most county acts of consequence wasn’t sufficient to draw a crowd.

But on March 16, the three bands, along with O.C.-scene cronies the Swamp Zombies performed to a packed, enthusiastic audience that was churning like a trout farm, giving back at least as much energy as the bands were putting out.

That may seem like considerable progress in three months, but there’s also the little matter of 1,400 miles between the two gigs.

The four bands, all of whom record for Orange’s Dr. Dream Records, and three other O.C.-bred acts--Chris Gaffney & the Cold Hard Facts, the Wild Cards and Johnny Monster & the Nightmares--had hit the highway to the Texas capital to take part in the fourth annual South by Southwest Music and Media Conference, held March 15 through 18.

Lest ever it be believed that musicians think like normal people, consider this deal: Most performers put in well over 24 hours of nonstop drive time each way, braving deserts, high winds and Texas cops; each played for less than an hour, spent a few hours in town, then headed out to make it back to their day jobs or to gigs on the road. They did this for a total of $100 per band, barely enough to meet a group’s Snickers outlay on the road.

And most of the Orange County musicians say they want to do it again next year.

The rationale they might offer a spouse or an accountant for making such a trip is that the South by Southwest Conference is a chance for musicians--417 acts performed this year--to be heard by some of the conference’s 2,500 managers, club bookers, label heads, broadcasters, journalists and sundry folk connected with the business of getting original music heard.

Modeled on New York’s New Music Seminar, South by Southwest is devoted to alternative and independent music of all stripes--from bluegrass to rap; any style that is largely ignored by the corporate media. Decidedly non-corporate--SXSW, as it is more concisely referred to, opened with an invocation by Exene Cervenka and concluded with a softball tournament and barbecue--the conference was host to dozens of workshops and panels, including a handful on accounting and contracts. But conference co-founder Louis Meyers maintains, “Because this is Austin, the music will always come first.”

The heart of SXSW is its four-night music festival, with hundreds of acts spread among 23 of Austin’s typically jumping venues.

Meyers said the conference aimed to “move the bands a step up the ladder, regardless of what step they may be on. We try to get them heard by people who can make a difference in their careers. We don’t make any ridiculous promise that a band is going to get signed, but I think we have helped promote the idea with them that their path is not so impossible any more, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Most performers were chosen by panels of Austin music professionals, who pare the choices down from thousands of demo tapes and press kits. Some groups were chosen by regional publications that co-sponsor the event with the alternative weekly Austin Chronicle. The O.C.-based Pacific News and Review was one, and editor Randy Jay Matin selected the South County’s Johnny Monster & the Nightmares after seeing a frenetic, packed show locally.

The hard-touring National People’s Gang, which spent 9 1/2 months on the road last year, drove down from tour dates in Canada. Most of the other groups defrayed their expenses by playing gigs between the coast and Austin. Chris Gaffney, who estimates that it cost $1,300 to take his band to Austin, found he should have planned further ahead: “We thought we were going to line up gigs on the way here and back, but I think there was about 5,000 other bands with the same idea.”

Even though Dr. Dream’s acts got to Austin under their own steam, the company spent about $5,000 establishing a label presence at SXSW, bringing six staffers out, hosting a party and creating a special seven-inch EP of the four acts for insertion into the registration packages of the participants.

“We’re not expecting to conduct much business there; most people are really going there to enjoy the music,” company co-owner Dave Hansen said. “We’re chiefly trying to get some exposure for the artists and raise the identity for both the artists and the label.”

With the participants spread between so many venues, there is no guarantee that influential industry persons will see any given show.

But the event isn’t exclusively for SXSW registrants. It’s also open to anyone in Austin who has $10 to spend for a wristband that allows admission to all clubs. So even if no industry wand-holder sees a group, there is still the enticement of discerning, enthusiastic audiences in a city that thrives on music the way other cities feast on finance. In that respect, 1,400 miles may be the least of the distances separating Austin from Orange County.

Don’t Mean Maybe drummer Jeff Fairbanks was astounded by the teeming throng moving from club to club on 6th Street, Austin’s music row: “I was climbing up light poles with my camera to take pictures of the crowds to show back home because I knew people in Orange County wouldn’t believe this. You really can’t without seeing it.”

While Texas may have always produced fine music, it didn’t always have such an official tolerance for it. A Rolling Stone cover story 22 years ago, entitled “The Dispossessed Men and Mothers of Texas,” related how the repressive, anti-hippie atmosphere of the time had driven out virtually a whole generation of Texas musicians.

Such music scene as there was had taken root at an unlikely spot: an Austin gas station. Owner Kenneth Threadgill had sung and played beside Jimmie Rodgers in the ‘30s and still liked a good strum in the ‘60s, when his service station became a place where musicians would meet and play. It was the first place that Janis Joplin performed, before she, too, escaped the state. (For the past decade, Threadgill’s has been a thriving restaurant, with the motto: “A diner by day and a dive by five.”)

That exodus reversed in the ‘70s. According to Clifford Antone, whose Antone’s easily is this globe’s most respected blues venue, “It just happened. I guess it’s magic, like the Chicago scene of the ‘50s or San Francisco in the late ‘60s. It became a mecca where all these musicians and young people moved to.”

By 1975, the newly opened Antone’s had two house bands: the Fabulous Thunderbirds and the Cobras, which featured a young Stevie Ray Vaughan. The Soap Creek club was promoting Joe Ely, Delbert McClinton and other roots renegades, while the Armadillo World Headquarters was boosting Willie Nelson and a new strain of “outlaw” country music.

With a music scene that now draws residents from all over, such as Hawaii’s Poi Dog Pondering and Wisconsin’s Timbuk3, Austin well may be home to the hottest music scene in the United States. And there are a variety of local and state commissions devoted to making it so, including the Austin Music Industry Commission, which recently loaned 6th Street’s alternative-music Cannibal Club $7,500 to help it get started.

“On the West Coast, music is more of an industry, it’s a product,” Antone said. “The language is different, so much more centered around money. Here, we never considered money when we got into this. There’s a lot of people that really, really love music here and have sacrificed a lot over the years to make this scene happen, but that’s just the spirit of Austin.”

-- MARCH 15: On the kickoff evening of the conference, the Orange County-based Wild Cards (which nevertheless is listed as a Los Angeles band by its sponsor, Miller Beer) performed with other Miller-tapped bands in the brewer’s showcase at the Austin Opera House. They drew a rave review in the Austin American-Statesman, which stated that the Wild Cards held the show’s “winning hand,” and that their “Responsibilidad” is “a tune so dance-happy and laden with hooks that it virtually defines what an up-tempo hit single should sound like in the ‘90s.”

Things weren’t quite so beatific at the cavernous Ritz on 6th Street, where Johnny Monster & the Nightmares’ campy ‘n’ crude theatrics fell flat with the Austin crowd.

Festooned in capes, furs and finery, and with local strippers hired to dance, clothed somewhat, in go-go cages behind them, the quartet’s performance was part Alice Cooper, part Cramps and part Adam Ant, or as one audience member put it, “like a cross between loud and bad.”

Austinite Chelsea Taylor, 19 and the daughter of former Joe Ely sideman Jesse Taylor, saw the Nightmares’ show and wasn’t any happier for it, judging by the international “gag me” sign she made to a friend.

“They sucked,” she opined. “Give me a break. Austin music is so much more wacky, so much more intense than this. . . . Everyone has already heard what they’re playing so many times.”

Brian Brown, a writer for the Oklahoma Daily out of Norman, Okla., concurred: “It was just a sloth metal thing. It didn’t have any verve. It’s all been done before, like by Alice Cooper. I thought it was pretty boring.”

Johnny Monster’s manager, Berkeley Green, had his own explanation for the show response: “People out there (in Orange County) are a little more screaming mad, you know, more rambunctious. People seem more reserved here (in Austin).”

The band had planned on spending the next night in Austin, but Green said they had done so well the night before in a Dallas club called the Video Bar that the manager had asked them back. Meanwhile, Austin’s Thursday night went on in its reserved manner, the clubs packed and jumping until 2 a.m.

MARCH 16: The next morning, National People’s Gang consigliere Sam Lanni staggered into the lobby of the Hyatt, a lit cigarette providing perhaps the only flicker of life on his road-tired face. Lanni had just driven the band’s RV all night from Lawrence, Kan., the last leg of the group’s three-day, two-show, 1,960-mile jaunt to Austin from Saskatoon, Canada.

Differing, one presumes, from typical Hyatt conventioneers, many participants in the South by Southwest Conference could be found sleeping in their cars and vans in the Hyatt parking lot. NPG’s RV was parked at an edge of the lot near Town Lake, a dammed portion of the river running through Austin. It was an idyllic spot for Lanni to rouse the band, since, as vocalist Chad Jasmine later explained, “Stepping out of that RV, there was really our first taste of spring. We went from some seriously cold weather to that Austin sunshine.”

Fresh from a gig with Eggplant in Santa Fe, the Swamp Zombies also arrived that morning, their equipment hauled behind their station wagon in a trailer garishly painted with a vicious alligator and words proclaiming “Gamba, King of the Swamp,” “16 Feet of Reptilian Terror.” Guitarist Josh Agle noted, “We’ve never had a problem with break-ins.” While the bands checked into Dr. Dream-provided rooms to grab some stationary rest before their gig that night, the Hyatt’s halls buzzed with SXSW panels and workshops. There was a “Meet Philadelphia” workshop where insiders gave such roots-level pointers as which record stores would allow bands to play on their sidewalks. “And we’ve got killer cheese-steaks!” enthused one panelist. A similar “Meet London” panel gave hints on how bands could sneak their albums past British customs.

In a hands-on workshop in the Hyatt parking lot, a local mechanic showed musicians and roadies how to repair their vans on the road. One of the larger panels featured legendary early-rock producers Cosimo Matassa, Huey P. Meaux and other musical mavericks. Though much of the independent music boosted by SXSW was far removed from their rootsy specialties, both were still excited about any music that railed at the status quo.

Meaux declared: “It would be a hell of a thing if every painter painted the same thing all the time, and they (major record labels) are making music like that now.” Matassa commented on the difficulty that original music has always had getting media attention: “They say every dog has his day, but we all know there’s more dogs than days.”

Following a pre-show barbecue (What in Austin isn’t a barbecue?) reception held in their Hyatt suite, the Dr. Dream staff and bands headed for the Cannibal Club for their four-act showcase. Spray-painted on a wall behind the club was the graffito, “Nazis fight cuz they can’t dance.” On the sidewalks out front was the previous night’s throng, multiplied by the weekend.

Later, Don’t Mean Maybe’s Jeff Fairbanks remarked: “I’d notice whole groups of people would filter into a place, and then if they liked it, they’d stay, and if they didn’t, they’d filter out to another place. There’s all that choice, and that’s the way it should be. It was like free-market capitalism.”

That flow didn’t work entirely in the Dr. Dreamers’ favor: New York-based Reuters writer John Swenson liked some of the showcase. “But it isn’t enough to keep me from wondering what’s across the street,” Swenson said, and off he went.

There were others to take his place, though, and the club was packed nearly throughout the evening, due partly to National People’s Gang and the Swamp Zombies’ previous Austin appearances.

Eggplant started the evening, bolstering its solid songwriting with instrumental excursions ranging from spacey post-psychedelicisms to the raucous country riffs of its “Eli Riddle.” Don’t Mean Maybe pummeled through its thicket of convoluted Beefheartian rhythms, and the goofus acoustic folk songs of the manic Swamp Zombies kept the crowd stirring.

The audience response seemed largely positive, with Mike Clifford, a deejay from college station KRUX in Las Cruces, N.M., saying of Don’t Mean Maybe: “I liked them a lot. They kind of reminded me of the old Minutemen. They really go at it. They have that punk energy, but they also have the weird time changes and all. I hadn’t heard them before, but I’m real inclined to play them now.”

The highest praise for the Zombies, perhaps, came from Vito Savino, a mechanical engineer from Lake Hiawatha, who said: “Most of the bands I’ve seen tonight are pretty different, but this one is more different.”

And of Eggplant, Austin Chronicle writer Luke Torn said in the March 23 issue that it was “the weekend’s most unexpected surprise,” citing its “intrepid guitar signatures” in a sparkling set that ended all too soon.”

The biggest surprise for this writer, though, was National People’s Gang’s set. Where I had always thought its home-turf gigs to be cluttered with artsy pretentions, its Cannibal Club set was pure electricity. Chad Jasmine’s theatrics, including tearing oranges up to toss slices to the audience and soliciting audience dollars, which he also tore up, heightened the communal feeling of the performance. Most of that rapport, though, was the result of a taut musicianship and a boundingly kinetic performance that had the audience churning throughout.

Philadelphia’s Christina DeGaitis, who works for the Rykodisc label, shouted her enthusiasm over the club noise: “Compared to the other stuff I’ve seen down here, they had 50 times the energy. I mean, they had the whole crowd going, and how many of these people had ever even heard of them before? I hadn’t. But they have what the Red Hot Chili Peppers have in terms of turning a crowd on.”

In print, Austin American-Statesman writer Michael MacCambridge cited Jasmine’s “over-the-top theatricality” and guitarist Chad Forrello’s “state-of-the-art L.A. art-rock Angst “ in his noncommittal review. He also noted Jasmine’s chucking of oranges into the crowd: “The band’s recent release was ‘Orange’; good thing they didn’t call it ‘Pineapple.’ ”

Chronicle critic Joseph P. Mitchell, meanwhile, claimed that the set “left me mesmerized. . . . The lead singer was enthralling. Most of the songs dealing with politics, populism and a new non-materialistic consciousness were accompanied by his gripping dramatic gestures.”

Singer Jasmine felt pretty good about the show himself. “Something has really jelled on this tour,” which has been going since February. “I feel there was a lot of magic going on. It’s becoming more real, where there’s not a big separation between the act and the people seeing it. Every time we play live, we try to forget about tomorrow, and let loose what we have to offer and make friends.” Judging from the showcase success, Dr. Dream’s Hansen thinks: “We have a real foothold in Austin now, where we can send any of our acts here an they’ll take a chance with them. And for us, it’s such a boost. Either on the road or working the phone, you’re up against so many ‘no’s’ that one little breakthrough like this can make all the difference in the world.”

Eggplant’s Jon Melkerson said he was encouraged to see so many other independent bands at work, in that “I don’t want to sound big-headed, but of all the alternative bands I saw, there was nothing that seemed that far ahead of us. It made me stoked that we’re not so out of step.”

Said Fairbanks: “When you play for a lot of people in a town where there’s so much stuff going on, it makes you feel you’re doing something a little more legitimate. I feel that way in most towns we play outside of Orange County.”

Of the piles of demo tapes he listened to, SXSW’s Meyers said, “Chris Gaffney’s was one of my favorite tapes that came in this year. I tried to push a lot of people out to see that show.” He evidently succeeded, as Gaffney’s Saturday night set at the Hole in the Wall was as packed as a fire marshal’s nightmare.

Gaffney isn’t the first singer to carry Orange country to Texas--expatriate countian and Jerry Jeff Walker cohort Chris Wall now even smiles down from Austin billboards--but it’s still a fairly audacious thing to do.

Unless one does it as well as Gaffney. The Costa Mesan works in a boatyard by day, but he’s been playing country for the last 20 of his 39 years. At the Hole in the Wall, he and his five-piece Cold Hard Facts authoritatively mixed hard honky-tonkin’ with zydeco and Tex-Mex flourishes. It hit with a directness that had the crowd demanding an encore, a rarity at the tightly scheduled fest.

When last seen at the club, Gaffney was holding his accordion over his head, trying to squeeze through the well-wishers blocking his way. Later, he was to remark, “We haven’t been adored like that in a long time.”

That to find such a lively scene the Orange County bands had to leave one of the most affluent population centers in the nation and go to a town surrounded by hundreds of miles of Texas dirt and scrub oak is an irony that wasn’t lost on the participants.

Reached a few days after SXSW, in Athens, Ga., where an ecstatic club owner had just held NPG over for a second night, Jasmine said: “Orange County is a great place. We all live there and think of it as home, and I think we do really well there. But going around playing lots of places and meeting people all over North America, I do think we’ve done a lot of growing up. That might never happen when you sit in one place and try to bang your head against that Orange County door.

“I’m sure there are a lot of people there who want things to happen, but as far as city councils and city governments and their stranglehold on everything, there’s too many damn regulations. There’s such a conservative thing going on that it’s completely taking away from the artistic thing. And you go to Newport Beach, and even the young kids with skateboards are so unaware. I hate to make that generalization, but nobody’s ever shown them what can be.

“They live in Orange County and they don’t understand the steps of how to make things happen. It seems like Austin has a completely different feeling. When people look at each other, they smile, and there’s an overall goodness going on that makes us all feel really good. Every time we’ve been there, it’s been great.”

Dr. Dream’s Hansen said: “I don’t know how serious it was, but we were talking a lot about how we should relocate down there. Aside from the great music scene there, it makes a lot of sense money-wise because you can do things a lot cheaper there. Here, it’s just a struggle to do anything. So many people don’t give the music a chance, and I don’t know how you conquer that.”

Eggplant’s Melkerson and the Swamp Zombies’ Agle are both glad for the audience and support that Orange County has given them, though Agle noted, “Audiences usually are more responsive on the road,” and Melkerson said, “It’s never going to be like Austin here.”

Like Jasmine, Don’t Mean Maybe’s Fairbanks chalks the difference up to an overabundance of government control, pointing out how Safari Sam’s, the county’s last full-time venue supporting local music, was closed by the city of Huntington Beach four years ago. “In Austin, it’s like there’s 25 Safari Sam’s.”

When NPG manager Lanni, who had owned Safari Sam’s, was asked how to best change Orange County for the better, he suggested, “with a bulldozer.”

“Even to have five Safari Sam’s on one block,” he said, “which would be only one-tenth of what is going on in Austin, is pretty near impossible to imagine happening in this county. It would be like them declaring democracy in China tomorrow. This is the bedroom community of the country right here. People want to go to sleep. They want strip-mall shopping centers.”

Gaffney was back playing in a Costa Mesa bar three nights, one windstorm and an interminable Texas Highway Patrol vehicle search (“I was 39 then; I’m 41 now”) after his Austin show. The small crowd was chiefly busy shooting billiards and drinking.

As he talked during a break, the Austin show was still clearly on Gaffney’s mind. “It was really great. It seemed like everybody in the world was there. We haven’t really been accepted that much here.”

Asked how he perceived the difference between O.C. and Austin, Gaffney referred to one far-gone woman who had tumbled onto the dance floor during his set: “Did you just see that girl fall on the ground? During a ballad , for goodness’s sake? That’s the difference right there. I think they stay standing in Texas.”

Back behind the microphone, Gaffney grappled with the old Animals’ standard “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” If there was more than a hint of desperate determination in the way he howled out its lyric, no one took any particular notice.