Alex Lahey is a great songwriter with a talent for recounting the little details in life, things that may be specific to her experience yet also come across as universal.
Also, as it turns out, her lyric “Let’s go out and have fun tonight/Let’s go out and get drunk tonight” really could be a rallying cry for the partiers out on Sixth Street during SXSW, though some lyrics from another of her songs about drinking too much lately and gaining weight might hit a bit too close to home for said partiers at the same time. That song was introduced by Lahey as being about reaching out to her mom. “Her name’s Vicki, her favourite song is “Smooth” by Santana. This song’s about that,” she said, before clarifying that it was about her mom and not Santana’s 1999 hit single featuring Matchbox 20 frontman Rob Thomas. Although that could be an interesting exercise in songwriting, kind of like an updated version of ‘Killing Me Softly.” Killing me smoothly? I digress.
Lahey definitely had a bit of buzz going for herself during SXSW and deservedly so. The songs off of her B Grade University EP are full of smart and catchy songwriting and the newer material off of her upcoming, still untitled full length show similar promise. She ended of her set though, by talking about a different kind of buzz. “We’ve got a show later tonight at Barracuda, but if you just wanna stay here and smash mimosas … you’re only human.”
First, a bit of venue overview. Alamo Ritz wins the prize for the “most alternative” fillers of any theater I’ve attended. No black screens of boredom here before your show. There were 70s French art house music videos with people bowing as if playing violins on body parts; a band called Telegenics singing about dominatrix; cat videos; bollywood music videos full of transforming smart phones, belly-dancing men in tiger costumes, and of course large group dancing. Just before the show starts, Bobby the Giant Child from Food of the Gods II reminds would-be texting viewers that if they violate that sacred trust, they need to “get the fuck outta my room!”
I feel obligated to start with a buoyant tone, because nothing about this film is light. Disgraced opens when Patrick Dennehy, a star player of the Baylor university basketball team, went missing in 2003. A few days after the police was informed, a full canvas and investigation began. But the deeper they delved, the less clear the case became. The local police forces and the FBI slowly pieced together a trail that revealed how his friend and roommate had gunned him down in a grassy field, without any motive whatsoever. But this story only gets more bizarre. In his zeal to win a basketball championship, it appears that the head coach Dave Bliss had made deals with players that breached NCAA code of conduct. Somehow, Bliss’ involvement was intricately linked to the murder. The details were not just suspicious. It was serious enough that Bliss applied pressure to turn his players into accomplices. They wanted to besmirch the dead in order to save Bliss from an NCAA investigation. If that’s not a case worthy of Sherlock Holmes, I don’t know what is.
In real life, detectives don’t have an all-powerful Mycroft at their beck and call. Even though this tragedy garnered national attention back then, it was never resolved on a level that would be satisfactory to anyone. Yet since the issues were local to Texas, once the national optics turned elsewhere and the news cycle faded, these influences came into the fore. Prominent among these local interests is Baylor University itself, which saw the murder case and the associated issues with the basketball program as a scandal, and sought to sweep things under the rug. If not for just one wrinkle, we would not have this documentary – Patrick’s roommate was found to be mentally-ill, confessed and was sentenced; Bliss resigned; everything seemed settled.
However, Bliss’ assistant coach recorded him scheming. On tape.
Those tapes, the fallout, and what truth they obscured, are in fact the whole point of Disgraced. The cinematography and reenactments are clearly well-produced. But these elements serve to set the desired context, in order that the audience can appreciate the recordings. It permitted Bliss, who was interviewed comprehensively, an ostensible chance to defend himself. In the Q&A after the screening, the Austin-based filmmaker Pat Kondelis suggested that in the early days while arranging the interview, Bliss led him to believe that a type of confession would be forthcoming. These exchanges and discussions, even now, are still tinged with a very local and emotional element. There were support for either side: I spied a few Baylor supporters who left in disgust right after the screening, and there’s certainly no doubt where Kondelis stands. One might be turned off by this type of potential bias. But it still doesn’t detract from the compelling and damning evidence. What this documentary mimics is a traveling courtroom. And each audience as jury, I expect, experiences that cast-the-first-stone moment: the sheer gall of the officials and Bliss in constructing the lie; their insistence that the victim “deserved his fate”; the destruction these memories and lingering questions wrought on Dennehy’s family. The audience booed each bold face lie, jeered at Bliss’ amateurish denial, and shed tears with the parents. It’s a remote yet strangely participatory film. 14 years since that time, Baylor University is again in the spotlight with a new scandal, this time regarding sexual assault. Though it may take a first-class mind to wade through the minutiae of evidence, it takes only a first-grade one to see that denial is no longer working. Although as the film seeks to remind us, Bliss IS still working as a basketball coach. Now, that is something to think about.
“It’s quite early for some punk songs, but y’know, what do you do?” announced the frontman for Food Court near the outset of their early afternoon show as part of Sounds Australia’s Aussie BBQ showcase at Brush Square Park and it’s a fair point. During SXSW, that’s frankly a bit early for almost anything, though it is a pretty good time to grab a sausage on a bun, which is what i happened to be doing for the first few minutes of their set. The appropriateness of waiting in line for food while watching a band called Food Court was not lost on me. One I’d grabbed a bite to eat, I made my way closer to the stage where the band’s fuzzed out garage punk sounds definitely grabbed my attention.
From there i made my way from Australia to Spain, or rather from Brush Square Park’s East tent to it’s West tent for Sounds From Spain’s Paella Party (food and bands go together at SXSW like, um … alcohol and bands I guess) to take in Joana Serrat’s short set and while it wasn’t too far of a trip, Serrat certainly brought travel to mind. “Let’s all go to the forest,” she said before one song and described another as being about being away from home on the road. If Serrat’s sound could be correlated to a physical journey though, it would definitely be a road trip through the countryside – light, breezy, and utterly enjoyable.
“The sun came out just for us. And for my pale skin. And I don’t have sunscreen so let’s do this.” Luckily for Karen Elson, her band wasn’t quite ready to go at that point and the false start gave someone in the audience a chance to offer some of her sunscreen, which was gladly accepted.
Elson offered to present us with her “sardonic English comedy show” while the band (which included a fantastic harpist) got things ready but that never materialised. What we got instead was a taste of the songs off of her upcoming sophomore album Double Roses, the title track of which was named for a Sam Shepard poem. “It’s all about the Texas landscape,” she explained, which made performing it in Texas quite appropriate.
Also quite appropriate for a sunny Texas afternoon was the sun-baked, hazy psychedelia of Temples, whose organ driven retro psych rock manages to somehow come across as both heavy and as light as air at the same time.
