Mardi Gras ruins everything. The proximity of the pre-Lenten feast to St. Patrick’s Day ensured that all of Fat Tuesday’s bad habits would eventually be assimilated into the celebration of Ireland’s patron saint. Some have said Patrick was austere enough to shun alcohol altogether. Now his day is all imbibing, food coloring, chintzy plastic beads, and novelty headwear. Patrick held a shamrock between his fingers and tried to explain God. Revelers added a fourth leaf and called it lucky, and there was nothing left to explain, and nothing left to do but make merry.
Mercifully, Austin apparently left off most of the strange visual excess of the holiday’s modern celebration, but they certainly kept the drinking. At the Paste Magazine party, they handed out bottles of free Magic Hat as Denton’s Seryn played one of the day-gathering’s brief sets. Seryn’s formula is simple enough: a vocal arsenal that never seems to find crescendo’s end. I know this in advance, but I still can’t help getting knocked off-balance when they play, slightly weepy with a chill down my neck. These reflexive moments are, perhaps, embarrassing, but that is largely music’s utility.
If, like me, you had never been in Highball before, you might have shared my wonder. Highball is like something from Jeff Lebowski’s most stimulating dream, with a handful of vintage bowling lanes imported from New Orleans and a bar that infuses its own liqueurs. It was the site of my first St. Paddy’s Day Guinness and also where Astronautalis and Bleubird performed their staggering sets.
Bleubird is from Miami, which he summarizes as “totally tribally and sparkly,” and Astronautalis is from Seattle by way of Dallas and everywhere else. The two formed a partnership called Boyfriends Inc. in an effort to be black-listed from rap society. Together they soften the boundary between music and comedy. For Astronautalis and Bleubird, the world is hilarious. The two rappers, by vocation, are professionals at thinking quickly. Consequently, audiences are treated to the simultaneous delights of jaw-dropping flows and top-shelf improv comedy.
Astronautalis recently replaced his laptop with a three-member band; a change he admits is a step backward from efficiency. Regardless, Astronautalis was clearly giddy about having his beats dished out so organically. From the stage, he declared, “I will never, ever, ever … ever go back [to the laptop].” Then he called out the next song — “Gaston Ave.” — and I realized that having your street of current residence announced as the title of the next song is a fairly rare experience.
I do not like living in a world where it is more difficult to get into a Duran Duran show than an Emmylou Harris show, but that is the world in which we all live. The 63-year-old Alabaman has cheated time, her beauty having almost crystallized into timelessness. There is a tried, patient wisdom in her voice for those who have the ears for it. Singing songs of rescue and reconciliation and gathering the wanderers under sheltered wings, it takes a truly soulless wretch to avoid being moved.
I became acquainted with a woman who shared my enthusiasm for being in a room with a legend like Emmylou Harris. Wearied, I had resigned myself to sleep whenever Harris’s set finished. The girl wouldn’t have it, claimed she would show me “real Austin” if I craved it enough. She said she was a dancer, and she had contours in all the right places, so it was predictable enough when she literally led me by the hand, like Dante’s Beatrice, into the Continental Club to see Scott H. Biram, a man she called possessed, an inveterate bluesman who could “blow some lonesome” on the harmonica.
The woman told me Biram had been hit by an 18-wheeler. Correspondingly, he plays with the frightening urgency of a man who knows he’s on stolen time. His primordial blues-riffing and moaning and screaming have no sanction on this earth. It is a guttural blues that sounds like it floated backward up the river as it escaped fate’s attention. It sounds like a raving, boiled prophet exiled on Patmos. I do not know if he’s an archangel or a seraphim flinging live coals from his lips or from some other unnamed depth, and I don’t want to know. Biram is a man who conflates earthly and heavenly love, confuses baptism and drowning. He is everything my psychopomp promised: a possessed bluesman, real Austin.
