THURSDAy, MARCH 19 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
the coronavirus outbreak
Joseph Alberts, part of a Austin Transportation Department crew,
rolls up a SXSW banner removed from a lamppost last week after
coronavirus concerns prompted the cultural festival’s cancellation.crowd to donate money — and to
wash their hands. And award-win-
ners showered love o n the city.
But when SXSW co-founders
Black and Barbaro took the stage,
the audience seemed to pay re-
spect as if waiting for a word of
comfort f rom them.
“They said cancellation, but we
say celebration!” B lack s aid.
Barbaro added, “We celebrate
together, we mourn together, and
we move f orward together.”
[email protected]nity Foundation. “Their ability to
recover from t his is l imited.”
Swenson also is confronting
questions about his o rganization’s
future. SXSW staffers moved into
a new building last summer, and
the lost revenue could push them
to borrow money to keep a float.
The disappointment about the
festival’s cancellation permeated
the Austin Music Awards last
week. W hile the i rreverent emcees
sought to lighten the mood, they
also encouraged the emotionalsoften the impact with funds to
support a rtists and h elp l ow-wage
or service workers. Local officials
are urging people to donate mon-
ey to help all the workers losing
out on the festival, and there are
grass-roots efforts underway urg-
ing the p urchase of gift cards from
local b usinesses.
“We are talking about people
who work in hotels, people who
don’t have health insurance and
work minimum-wage jobs,” said
Mike Nellis of the Austin Commu-restaurant Threadgill’s, are con-
sumed b y rising rents t o make way
for new places like Hotel Van
Zandt.
“Southby exists because o f plac-
es like this,” said Jane Jennings,
66, pointing to the blinking red
neon sign of the Continental Club
on a recent night. Inside, Mike
Stinson and his band played un-
der rouge lights as a couple two-
stepped i n slip-ons.
The club was supposed to play
host to several acts during SXSW
but had to cancel the gigs. It’s a
blow to business, but bouncer and
musician Ben Todd said with all
the bands still in town, it had still
been a ble to take n ew b ookings.
“I know a lot of people who lost
work, vendors, caterers, stage
hands,” Todd said, noting that he
hoped talent scouts would stick
around to sign emerging bands.
“Gigs are still going on.”
But o n Monday, t he Continental
Club o pted to close t o do its part to
stop the s pread o f the virus, calling
it a “difficult decision.” Then on
Tuesday, Mayor Steve Adler or-
dered all bars and restaurant din-
ing areas to shut their doors.
Just the idea of canceling the
show — as places like Broadway
and Disney World had already
done — i s anathema to Austin.
“It so contradicts every instinct
you have to cancel a gig,” said
Graham Reynolds, an Austin mu-
sician and producer. “A t the same
time, t his i s such a rare o ccurrence
that any of those rules have their
limits and we just seem to have
run up t o the limit.”
Blake Bermel was putting the
final spray-painted touches on a
mural at Seventh and Red River
last week, a portrait of a clean-
shaven Austin cowboy — too put-
together for cattle-rustling but
perfect for a night of dancing at
the Broken Spoke. The toothy
cowboy’s exclamation voices the
city’s frustration in a cartoonish
speech bubble: “Can’t Cancel Te x-
an!”
Bermel, better known as Mez
Data, c reated t he piece after l earn-
ing that the $7,000 he expected to
earn painting murals all over the
city for SXSW would not be com-
ing — the type of funds that many
around here count on to help cov-
er their mortgages or keep their
businesses running during the
re st o f the y ear.
Austin’s community is trying towanted to bring more attention to
what had happened organically
on the local level. Swenson, a mu-
sic producer, writers Louis Black
and Nick Barbaro and promoter
Louis Jay Meyers wanted to help
local t alent r each t he world.
“We mirrored w hat was a lready
here in Austin,” S wenson said. “It’s
a city tolerant of eccentrics and
people who did unusual things
that might’ve gotten them in jail.
We w anted t o bring this c ulture to
other like-minded individuals in
the world.”
South by Southwest was born in
1987 and, within a decade, built
film and interactive into its for-
mula. Each new iteration of the
festival reflected the city’s DNA.
Filmmaking and tech are intrinsic
to Austin, home to director Rich-
ard Linklater and IBM. Today,
Austin has the most start-ups —
and still, bars and clubs — per
capita i n the nation.
Independent film producer Ja-
net Pierson, who m oved from New
York to Central Te xas i n 2004, said
the unpretentious vibe meant she
never had to worry about having
the right bag or clothing at a
screening with other film lovers.
“In Austin, it was only, ‘A re you
interesting?’ ” said Pierson, now
SXSW’s director of film. “The city
is a vital component of why SXSW
worked.”
As the festival grew, Austin
gr ew. For eight straight years, it
has been the fastest-growing city
in the n ation, adding an average of
about 155 new residents each day.
Downtown Austin is a patchwork
of glittering skyscrapers and con-
struction sites. It’s airport grew
from a military airfield into a
world-class transportation hub —
with live-music stages.
Swenson remembers the day he
knew they had created something
special. He was sitting at the cor-
ner of Sixth Street with a brick-
size mobile phone to his ear
watching people dashing from
club to club to catch all the bands
in town.
But with prosperity came chal-
lenges. T he c ost of l iving in Austin
is increasing faster than what
some of its creative class can af-
ford. Homelessness is a growing
problem. Traffic is a mess.
T he commercialization of Aus-
tin’s culture is troublesome for
some residents who watch in hor-
ror a s their old h aunts, s uch as theBY ARELIS R. HERNÁNDEZaustin — The trucks rolled in
and were ready to unload, staffers
were pulling programs and badg-
es out of boxes at the convention
center, and the customary ban-
ners were going up on city streets.
Austin was stoked for its annual
celebration.
Then the coronavirus stopped
everything.
South by Southwest — one of
the world’s largest gatherings of
culture c reators — s hould be going
on right now as a spiritual and
financial windfall for tens of thou-
sands of residents, musicians, art-
ists and low-wage workers. This
funky state capital in the heart of
Te xas has depended on the 10-day
tech, music and film festival since
198 7. B ut with a pandemic s pread-
ing across the country, a panel of
health experts shut it all down, n ot
wanting the “Southby” revelers
acting as coronavirus couriers —
into and out of A ustin.
“I was crushed,” said a
shellshocked Roland Swenson,
the festival’s co-founder and man-
aging director. He had minutes to
tell his staff members before it
went public and later laid off a
third of them. “We were right on
the edge before we put on the
brakes. It’s going t o be d ark.”
Fear of virus transmission has
disrupted life across the country,
pausing professional sports, can-
celing festivals and shrinking so-
cial interactions. But for Austin,
canceling SXSW is not like calling
off any party: Twitter debuted
here. Greta Gerwig blossomed
here. John M ayer g ot a record deal
here. President Barack Obama
was here.
The festival is a conclave of
creative social progress in a world
pushed into quarantine. The
growth and history of the festival
is intertwined with the fortunes
and c ounterculture i dentity of this
city of outsiders, nonconformists,
dreamers, oddballs and smart-as-
a-whip folk with audaciously pro-
gressive ideas and even bolder
ambitions.
Four locals embodied the city’s
risk-taking ethos when they gam-
bled on the idea of creating a
festival to showcase the city’s
homegrown music. It evolved
three decades later into a career-
boosting behemoth, spanning in-
dustries and reverberating far be-
yond Te xas. The late f ormer gover-
nor Ann Richards once said the
“natives” b elieved — e ven if no one
else did — that Austin was the
center of t he musical u niverse.
“A nd this week, that is literally
truth,” t he Democrat s aid at S XSW
in 1993.
Without it, Austin is still weird
ol’ Austin. But the festival was
created to open doors, and what
hurts s o deeply about t he c ancella-
tion, organizers and city leaders
say, a re the opportunities that will
be missed.
Films won’t be seen. Start-ups
won’t find investors. Musicians
won’t b e discovered.
“We are art junkies, and we
didn’t get our fix this year,” said
Casey Monahan, former director
of the Te xas Music Office and a
former music critic who has at-
tended every SXSW. “A nd i t breaks
our h earts.”
When soft drinks were 35 cents
and a ticket to see a pre-famous
Bruce Springsteen was $1, some-
thing weird was happening in
Austin. The Vietnam War was on,
the culture was divided, and un-
certainty reigned. But, as local
historian Joe Nick Patoski said,
one thing united hippies and red-
necks, cowboys a nd s toners, s lack-
ers a nd geeks: music.
Austin’s music buffs credit Wil-
lie Nelson’s 1972 performance at
the Armadillo World Headquar-
ters with spawning the c ity’s musi-
cal explosion. Outsiders migrated
to the city for its sincere love of
artistry, and that music scene fit
with its abundance o f government
jobs and opportunities for gradu-
ates from the state’s flagship uni-
versity.
“The rest of Te xas was built on
extracting natural resources. Aus-
tin w as built on the creative m ind,”
Patoski said. “If you didn’t fit in
your small town, you’d go to uni-
versity and it became a place to
work out your idea, however con-
trary, a nd people were t olerant.”
Any given night in the city —
with its outsize number of bars
and c lubs — m usicians o f all tribes
tried out their compositions on
supportive audiences. Austin be-
came the live-music capital of the
world.
Four guys who met at a bar and
worked at the city’s alternative
newspaper, the Austin Chronicle,
South by Southwest cancellation hits at Austin’s heart
Efforts to keep the party
going were dashed with
bars now shut downPHOTOS BY TAMIR KALIFA FOR THE WASHINGTON
Antone’s Nightclub is one of the many Austin venues that were planning to host events as part of South by Southwest. Now all bars and restaurant dining areas are closed.WindowNation.comBuynow