Pitchfork

Five million dollars. What could I buy with that? 500,000 pairs of Dr. Scholl's foot pads. Ten million cans of Hy-Top fruit drink. A struggling alternative rock music magazine. Maybe even a guest list spot for the Arctic Monkeys' SXSW show.

But one thing I couldn't buy is a Smiths reunion. So said Morrissey in an interview with Rolling Stone's David Fricke yesterday. According to everybody who managed to stumble out of their hotel rooms at the ungodly early hour of 1:15 pm and crawl their way to the Convention Center, Moz revealed that he and his former bandmates rejected Coachella's five mil offer to perform at this year's festival "because money doesn't come into it."

Hey Morrissey, have you met Dave Chappelle?

Money also doesn't matter when it comes to Morrissey's clothing budget. Throughout the course of his hour-long set at the Austin Music Hall last night, he sweated through four shirts. Three of them were removed on stage and tossed into the audience, revealing his naked chest. Apparently he does this all the time. Regardless, it was still shocking to come face-to-face with the reality of Morrissey's man-boobs.

His performance was expectedly debonair and theatrical, heavy on songs from the forthcoming Ringleader of the Tormentors with a few solo oldies and Smiths chestnuts tossed in for good measure. "The good old days are good and gone," he smirked before the band tore into "How Soon Is Now". It ended, appropriately, with a bang on the giant gong at the back of the stage.

 

Photo: Neko Case

Earlier that day, I found myself on a picturesque hill overlooking downtown Austin, surrounded by the lush greenery of the Zilker Botanical Garden. Neko Case was performing at a day party put together by Harp magazine, Anti- Records, and the Chicago venue the Hideout, and I can't think of a more appropriate setting for her good-natured, folksy presence than the Zilker Clubhouse, a stone-walled cabin confusingly adorned with Christmas decorations.

Everybody there seemed to know each other from the alt-country trenches, and Neko greeted friends and told inside jokes between songs during her laidback set. She looked so happy and relaxed, in corduroys with no makeup, that her pitch-black death ballads lost more than a bit of their bite. But it didn't matter at all; Neko Case was performing "Set Out Runnin" and "Furnace Room Lullaby" in front of me and maybe 50 other people in a cabin on a hill on a beautiful day in Texas. Her voice literally rang out over the peaks and valleys, the fields and streams. Pardon the sappiness, but that's magic.

 

Photo: Goldfrapp

Goldfrapp had the unenviable task of playing to a three-quarters-empty Austin Music Hall right after Morrissey, but the divine Alison Goldfrapp and her fabulously trampy backing band pranced like peacocks in heat nonetheless. Positioned in front of a fan that kept her bleached tresses and pink cape perpetually windswept, Alison vamped through "Strict Machine", "Train", "Ooh La La", and all those other scary/sexy hits that have put her group on cheesy club compilations next to Danii Minogue.

Her bassist played a clear plastic instrument, she wore silver platform shoes with heels up to here, and two of her backing musicians proved that the only thing better than one key-tar is two key-tars. Tastefulness be damned!

Stay tuned for more daily updates from SXSW. Even though the rest of Pitchfork takes the weekend off, I don't.