Meet PAPERMAG's SXSW Guest Bloggers: The Airborne Toxic Event

Sadly, we here at PAPERMAG are stuck in New York and not frolicking around, eating really good Mexican food or seeing 875 concerts a day in Austin at South by Southwest. Luckily, the members of L.A. rock band du jour The Airborne Toxic Event are letting us live vicariously through them. The band, which is playing Austin for the first time, have agreed to blog for us, take photos and give us an inside look at the madness and insanity that is South by Southwest. Here's their first installment.

All around us, people are staring nervously at their baggage in the line at the airport. There’s a certain vulgarity to having so little real estate between strangers and your undergarments. We shuffle forward. We endure. We develop nervous tics. The air carries a certain civic harshness -- like a line for a soup kitchen -- in which we briefly, unwittingly become members of the herd.

Come to think of it, being in a rock band feels like that sometimes.

We check in. We get charged $100 for a heavy keyboard. We place our guitars on conveyor belts while the TSA people in their white shirts eye us suspiciously as they look over the x-ray pictures of our effects pedals. Effects pedal probably look like bombs to these people.

They don’t know us. A tube screamer could be a detonator.

The plane flies from LAX to San Antonio, where we’ll rent a minivan and drive to Austin. Tickets to Austin were over a thousand dollars more expensive. So we decided to economize, flying into San Antonio and driving the final bit.

A few of us are getting over colds. We’ve heard that Pabst and BBQ are great remedies for them. (Such falsehoods are easy to maintain on long trips.)

Our bassist Noah isn’t with us.

The plan for the next few days is as follows: Our first show happens tomorrow -- an “Escape From L.A.” party at the renowned Antone’s, thrown by L.A.’s own Spaceland. On the bill with us are fellow Angelinos Autolux, Earlimart, the Deadly Syndrome, Foreign Born and Castledoor, among others. For those who don't’ know, Spaceland is the Antone’s of Los Angeles. We think… Actually, we don’t really know too much about Antone’s, or Austin for that matter.

But we know the bands. We’ve played with all of them except Autolux. We’re fans. There’s safety in numbers, and it’s comforting to know that there will be familiar faces there, that we, like Andre the Giant, will have a posse. At least for one show.

On Friday, we have a radio spot to do on KROX, Austin’s rock station. We’ve rented two acoustic guitars at eight bucks a piece for this.

Friday night is the Billboard Showcase at Pangea (which, we hear, is something to see). Saturday night is the Indie 103.1 showcase. It’s at 1:00 a.m. -- which is late by Austin standards. Way past the drunken hour. We expect sweat and warm bodies in close quarters. These sorts of shows are always fun because no one ever notices if your guitar is out of tune.

There’s an endless expanse of desert in every direction outside the window of the airplane. It looks like nothing could live or breathe down there. We are hermitically-sealed up hear at 30,000 feet, drinking cold water from small plastic bottles, reading our books, staring at strangers.

Somewhere out there is Austin. One thousand, five hundred bands gathering together for the festival. It’s odd to think how many guitar strings that is -- how many amps, picks, keyboards, microphones, fragile egos, well-crafted plans. The scale is daunting.

There’s a sense of festivity in the air. That this isn't just a series of concerts, like May Day or Octoberfest or the Day of the Dead; it’s ritualistic, a celebration of something. There are 20 bands we can’t wait to see. 100 people we are planning to meet. We’ve got our guitar strings and our picks, and some well-crafted plans of our own.

We get to Austin. We meet a French bulldog named Reggie at the house where we are staying. We go out to two bars: the Long Branch and the Scoot. There are bartenders, people, music. That sort of thing. But nothing compares to Reggie. He likes beer and drinks it from the bottle. Seriously. We're in Austin. We can’t wait to play.