Digital Hipsters and Analog Blues

March 17, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 0 comments

Alan Haynes is tearing the roof off the place.

It's a small place, crowded on a Saturday night. But on Sixth Street in Austin, this is the kind of place you want to be. Alan, who looks a little like Springsteen, a little like Steven Van Zandt, is wearing a leather flop hat, pulled down low. It almost covers his eyes and his hair, the color of wet cinder block and mesquite, peaks out and reaches over the collar of his worn flannel shirt. The jeans have some miles on them too, as do his black cowboy boots.

He's standing down among the crowd, two steps down from the stage where his equally experienced bass player smiles as he keeps time. The drummer, who is maybe 30, could pass for an architect. Wire-rimmed glasses, close-cropped hair. But there's no mistake to be made; this band has little to do with the rhythm section. It's a trio, but, really, it's all about Alan.

I watch his fingers on the rosewood fretboard of a vintage Strat — auburn and worn, the kind of guitar you would kill to find in a thrift shop — and they seem to move independently of thought. They are storytellers, teaching the man connected by sinew and skill a thing or two as he looks around the audience with the still, friendly face of a staring grandparent. The guitar, it turns out, he bought from Stevie Ray Vaughan, 27 years ago, before either of them had any money. Stevie Ray was a friend of his, took members from his band to form Double Trouble on his way to the top. Stevie would make blues important in a world full of Oingo Boingo and Flock of Seagulls. Alan is making it important to the people in this room, on this night.

He's just reaching a pinnacle, a long drawn phrase is coming to fruition and I watch in transfixed anticipation when... two people with iPhones jump in front of me for a picture. And suddenly my buzz is gone. After an hour of being sucked into the timeless world of small bar blues, I am reminded of where I am and who surrounds me.

It's South-by-Southwest. SXSW. A two-week bacchanal of new ideas and new ways of doing things. I'm here for the interactive portion, which runs concurrent with the film festival. The music festival starts the day after I am scheduled to leave.

I didn't really know what to expect when I set out last week for the South-by. A few thousand people getting together to share ideas on the future of the Internet. A bunch of brainy types tweeting on their iPads about the latest offerings from Silicon Valley. Maybe some art house film buffs waxing poetic on the social implications of zombies in films featuring gratuitous amounts of fake blood, but ostensibly making a statement about technology's role in the modern educational system. A few panels, a couple of keynotes, some "Core Conversations" sprinkled in for good measure. I didn't know. It was my first trip to SXSW (South-by to all you cool cats out there). My first time in Texas. Preconceptions were rampant and, as soon as I landed I realized, irrelevant.

I guess I imagined Texas to be the physical manifestation of a Willy Nelson song. Dusty roads. Pointy boots. Men with broad shoulders and narrow waists stoically peering from beneath well-worn Stetsons. And I'm told parts of Texas are like that. But not Austin and not during SXSW.

For five days, I walked among the digital generation, the movers and the shakers of the online world. A lot of them looked like they stepped from a photo shoot for Urban Outfitters or J. Crew. Not a bad thing, but certainly a contrast to Alan Haynes's devil-may-care cool. I'm not one to belabor what a person (or people) wear, but costume emphasized the contradiction, the incongruousness of modern Austin. For these two weeks at least, it is a crossroad of craft and consumption, of musical skill honed over years of practice and disposable thoughts conveyed through disposable means.

And I'm not sure what to feel about it. I learned a lot in my visit to SXSW. I learned about the future of journalism and the new frontiers of business, communication and expression. I met a lot of interesting people. But, as Alan reminded me, I wonder if we are building kingdoms out of wet cardboard. I wonder if our obsession with the new, the latest and the greatest, the ever-shifting sands of technology and online community has ruined the possibility to produce someone like Alan. Do our personal varieties of apps mean we are forcing ourselves to be proficient in many things? And does that make it impractical to become masterful at just one?

The sad part is, even this blog is temporary. It will be replaced by another tomorrow or the day after. In a month, I will have forgotten about it. But, watching and later talking to Alan Haynes, I get the sense that he never forgets a gig. He's never far from the thing he loves the most. And while he learns new songs, he doesn't feel the need to keep up with the times. Sure, inventing the next big thing can make you rich. And, true, Saturday night on Sixth Street is probably the best a guy like Alan can hope for. But it seems to me like maybe he has something figured out — like maybe he knows that patience and persistence are the keys to permanence. And that constantly chasing those things in vogue--the new device, the new fashion, the new idea--is like chasing your tail.

You may catch it, but it won't last.

After his set, I bought a CD from Alan. I talked to him about his career, his guitar, his music. He told me about the emails from Jeff Beck arguing over whose vintage Strat was better. He told me about playing with Stevie Ray when they were kids. He told me I could find some video of him playing on YouTube. It sounded a little awkward coming out of his mouth, but he was right.

So much for my romantic notions of the digital outlier.