ACT ONE
Six bands, several DJs and a healthy handful of scenesters are bound for the Tampa Bay-centric party organized by WMNF staffers for the first day of South by Southwest. At least a dozen of them are on the 6:40 a.m. Southwest Airlines flight from Tampa nonstop to Bergstrom International Airport in Austin, Texas. Of those, probably half are excited enough to order cocktails at this ungodly hour. Once the "Fasten Seatbelts" light goes off, the fuselage assumes the attitude of a mixer, with folks traipsing up and down the aisle, comparing plans and enthusiasm levels.Pagan Saint Mark Bustin, having come straight to the airport from his job at The Hub, declines the first two times Urbane Cowboys Kamran Mir and Steven Schumacher insist that he join them for a drink. The third time's the charm, however, and a Heineken and two Bloody Marys are soon on their way. Mir is particularly stoked, as this is his first trip to the city that has so successfully marketed itself as "the live music capital of the world."

Our flight attendant handles the subdued rowdiness with aplomb. WMNF-88.5 FM music director Flee manages to conjure some of the subtle networking magic for which he's known: As the flight taxis to the concourse, the flight attendant gets on the plane's PA and announces the Tampa party's time and location, inviting everyone to attend.

"Did I mention the part about free beer?" she blares over the speaker.

"Did you say free Jack Daniel's?" inquires the pilot's disembodied voice.

Ahh, Southwest Airlines.

After a bit of baggage-claim jocularity, we emerge from the terminal into a muggy, overcast Texas morning. The partygoers rally for a group breakfast before checking into their hotel.

I am unable to attend; my parents moved into the Austin bedroom community of Oak Hill some six years ago, and my Mommy's picking me up.

"You look tired. I brought some tissues, do you need a Claritin? Oh, look, are those your friends? HI!"

Hi, Mom.

The soupy atmosphere holds all day. An early afternoon trip downtown to the sprawling, ultramodern Austin Convention Center for check-in reveals an early dearth of parking and some substantial trickles of humanity that lead one to believe a dam designed to hold back young music fans has ruptured somewhere upstream, and the flood is a-comin'.

The Film portion of SXSW's annual multimedia shindig (added in 1993, the festival's seventh year) has been in full swing for several days, but the music conference's kickoff speeches won't happen until tomorrow. Nevertheless, the Convention Center's huge lobby/staging area is already a living mass of faded thrift-store denim and dark, carefully tousled mop-tops.

Any notion that South by Southwest represents a look toward the future of popular music, rather than a world-class celebration of the moment, dissipates at the sight of the throng crowding its welcome station. Ryan Adams, The Strokes, The Hives and any number of additional garage-rock luminaries could be slouching about, and you'd never notice. Almost everybody looks like they just got photographed for the cover of Spin's 2002 "Rock Is Back!" issue. There are certainly some exceptions, like the older, vinyl-clad CyberGoth group in the corner, handing out fliers for their show this weekend, or the kids with dreads and knit handbags. But the overwhelming impression is one of gleeful, guileless trendiness.

My kingdom for a concessionaire's license and a cart full of white belts and jelly bracelets.

To become completely and accurately checked in for SXSW, one must stand in various lines of the constant-body-contact sort. There's the registration line, where you wait to be photographed, then wait for your photograph to be printed onto your badge, then wait for your badge. Immediately following the registration line is the swag-bag line, where you get a canvas tote packed with several useful things and tons of other stuff that companies paid to have put in there. It's awesome and features original art by Devo principal Mark Mothersbaugh of what appears to be a cow-man farting musical notes. There are also lines corresponding to the specific purpose of visits, i.e. the press line, the performing artist line, etc.

All of this is to be expected and comparatively painless for an event of this size. In hindsight, however, one has to wonder whether it's also some kind of test/acclimation period for the waiting games to come. If you freak out a bit, maybe they just lead you away to a room in the bowels of the Convention Center where they keep you sedated for five days, then wake you up and tell you that you had a great time. After all, if you can't handle 20 minutes of trundling toward the registration desk, trying to get into the Lookout! Records showcase at 11 p.m. on Thursday is utterly beyond your coping abilities.

Anyone nurturing a love for music has heard of Austin's mythic Sixth Street. However, a large percentage of the city's cooler, edgier and more open-minded live-band watering holes line a few blocks of Red River Street, a colorful/seedy strip crossing Sixth's east end. Walking north along Red River toward Club DeVille, the site of the Tampa Bay party, affords a handy barometer of what's going on. Musicians hand out fliers for non-SXSW events, and several soirees are up and running at various clubs, but the real crowds have yet to show. All day, every day of conference, there are parties. The vast majority of them are not official SXSW events. They're thrown by record labels, magazines, media-relations companies and even individuals early, lucky or wealthy enough to secure a venue. They offer free food and/or booze, varying degrees of exclusivity, good bands, something to do before the festival's shows get started after dark. Many are annual traditions.

Following last year's conference, WMNF staffers including Flee, Jennifer Hollowell, Beverly Capshaw and Norwood Orrick hatched a plot to throw a bash celebrating unsigned Bay area talent. Today's party is the fruit of their collective labors and features free pizza, four kegs' worth of free beer and six bands' worth of free entertainment.

Club DeVille is several blocks removed from the Sixth/Red River hub, yards from the fault line where "downtown" segues abruptly into "warehouse district." I actually decide I've walked too far before spotting the Cadillac-logo sign a bit farther along. It's a funky, comfortable place with a small, dark bar and low ceilings that open on a larger outdoor patio tented for the occasion. Colorful shards of broken glass line the top of an old stone fence that surrounds the compound, broken by a large wrought-iron gate.

Young Tampa bluesman Damon Fowler and his band are finishing a stomping set highlighted by Fowler's pedal-steel prowess. A larger group than I'd witnessed at the other parties I'd stuck my head into applauds enthusiastically. Several familiar faces apart from the expected band members pepper the crowd, but these are mostly strangers, locals and festival attendees.

"We had a real good reaction, so it was cool," says the longhaired, 24-year-old Fowler. "It was definitely worth the trip."

I'd say so; as we talk, EMI Records field representative and one-time St. Petersburg resident Darrin Schnur solicits some material from the guitarist.

Power-pop favorites Barely Pink are up next. Given the near-liquid humidity -- it drizzles sporadically -- I hope those are summer-weight suits they're sporting. Despite the monitor glitches that will plague Club DeVille's sound system for the rest of the festival, the foursome turns in a spirited performance.

So does everyone else, as the crowd's size and appreciation continue to swell. Not even the news that the free beer is gone can slow things down. Will Quinlan and Mark Bustin, half of the lauded alt-country act Pagan Saints, are joined by members of The Gita and Urbane Cowboys for a joyously sloppy rendition of The Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated." Roots singer-songwriter Ronny Elliott, who received an official showcase slot and will perform four times at various functions over the course of the festival, plays solo before heading off to his set at B.D. Riley's. The sun sets in time for an earnest, eclectic appearance by Pinellas pop fivesome The Gita, and twang-rockers Urbane Cowboys close things out for a well-lubricated audience that's beginning to show signs of some seriously reduced inhibitions.

The Tampa party slowly winds down to that point where people start to wonder what to do next, milling, grabbing one more drink and collecting in small tribes in the parking lot. The masterminds and some of Club DeVille's staff put the attendance number, over the course of the evening, at around 400. I suspect that number is a bit high, but not by much, and either way, the event surpasses all expectations.

"I was overwhelmed," understates Flee. "I can't believe how good it was our first time out."

It's 8 p.m. along Red River, for miles up Sixth Street and radiating untold blocks outward from it, South by Southwest is beginning in earnest. The Austin Music Awards are kicking off at Austin Music Hall, and even on this Wednesday, the festival's second most poorly attended evening, some 200 groups from all over the world are playing 40 or so clubs. The streets are hardly teeming with fans, but when I catch a marvelously atmospheric rock band from Oklahoma called Ester Drang as part of an official SXSW showcase at a club called La Privilege Patio, the venue is surprisingly crowded. It definitely makes you wonder what the meat of the weekend is going to be like.

ACT TWO
There's no trace of viscous gray in the sky on Thursday. It's too sunny, too hot and altogether too beautiful a day to pile up in stuffy, un-air-conditioned grottoes, slamming draft beers and watching bands, but it certainly does Austin justice. It's a breathtaking city, one that works with the region's uneven cliff-and-creek topography to gorgeous effect, rather than razing it in the name of straighter roads and uniform sight lines. Every street seems to eventually take you across the snaking Lake Travis on an iron-and-steel trestle straight out of the Railroad Age.It also seems like every street takes you through some serious roadwork as well. Austin is a burg in transition; its beauty and history lie uncomfortably with its reputation as a booming tech center and haven for newly affluent post-boomers and disenfranchised collegiate types. Even in the midst of the dot-com fallout, roads are being widened, downtown high-rises are going up, and outlying neighborhoods are spreading to accommodate the influx. Like Tampa, Austin suffers from a "world's biggest small town" syndrome. Unlike Tampa, Austin gives off a feeling of having been born with it, like a congenital heart condition, as opposed to having run around outside in the cold, shirtless and with wet hair, in an effort to catch it.

There is time to mull this type of shit over during a leisurely noonish Thursday drive into downtown.

After that, most insights regarding Austin at large are washed out by the immediate reality of a hip, citywide, five-day version of Guavaween where the bands are better, the crowds are younger, the only parades consist of folks following what they think is a celebrity, and most participants bought their costumes at the same Goodwill. Somehow, the romantic notion of South by Southwest as a serious industry confab where unknown bands can play for bigwigs and get signed has endured, but that hasn't been the case in ages -- if it ever was. Panels, seminars and cachet aside, SXSW is, more than anything, an expo. It's a cool-music product showcase with some really big names (Willie Nelson, Joe Jackson, Camper Van Beethoven) and some unknown soldiers (a slew of unsigned Austin bands and Champaign, Ill.'s regrettable Centaur) thrown in for good measure. It's a working vacation for nonmusicians who work in music, where responsibilities are vague to begin with and start to dissipate completely at around 4 p.m. It's a state of the union address, open to the public, but for the rank and file. It's rock 'n' roll's version of those annual get-togethers found in any industry, like when all the guys in America who sell large appliances meet in Grand Rapids or Omaha. Ostensibly, they're checking out the latest advances in washing-machine technology, but they're really there to get away from the shop for a while on the company's dime and drink with their peers.

In other words, it's a party.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday surf by on a tidal wave of live music, handshakes, business cards, complimentary drink tickets, great food, foot-miles and shared cab rides. The following impressions come from those three days, and from a small notebook that now smells indelibly of Lone Star, Texas' cheapest pridefully named beer.

Venerable Red River indie-rock cavern Emo's had its name before the term became a catchall music-genre assignation. Ironically enough, it's emo and punk shows that now keep the two-room venue in business, and the club is ground zero for the festival's massive contingent of kids with backpacks, glasses, denim jackets and wispy facial hair. Here, Los Angeles group The Jealous Sound reintegrates the elements of the style more compellingly than any band I've seen in the last couple of years. It's here that I witness a solo set by Britt Daniel, singer for local/national heroes Spoon, which derails charmingly every time he attempts to play a keyboard. Also, heavily buzzed soundscape architects Pinback turn in a too-brief set on the big quasi-outdoor stage.

What I don't witness at Emo's -- due to block-stretching lines that inexplicably remain in place even after the evenings' showcases end -- are sets by Tampa garage-rock act The Washdown, vagabond power-pop auteur Ted Leo and veteran Seattle-scene upstarts Mudhoney, all of whom reportedly slew.

At the insanely crowded daytime party for Texas label New West Records and elsewhere, Rolling Stone editor David Fricke is repeatedly mistaken for the friendly reanimated corpse of Joey Ramone.

If you approach someone on the Seventh-Avenue-reminiscent Sixth Street strip after, say, 8 p.m. and ask them the time, odds are 65-35 that you'll get an answer either two hours earlier or one hour later than actual Austin time.

It's very cool to watch an idiosyncratic but unbelievably catchy set by San Francisco songwriter John Vanderslice after about eight drinks, and come to the conclusion that he might be the best thing underground pop music currently has to offer. What's even cooler, however, is seeing his band play again at landmark record store Waterloo the next afternoon, completely sober, and realizing that it's true.

When seen from a great distance through beer goggles, singer/songwriter Michael Penn (1989's "No Myth") bears a striking resemblance to Malcolm in the Middle's Frankie Muniz. Seriously.

I attend an official panel because it seems like I should hit at least one for posterity's sake: "Which Publishing Deal is Right for Me," or some such thing. The bedheaded hip-rock masses are nowhere to be seen; the 60 or so attendees here all consider themselves serious songwriters, from young metalheads to middle-aged folkies. Unfortunately, the reason they came -- to find out how to get a publishing deal -- is thwarted as the panelists spend most of their time politely arguing over whose company is more beneficial to the artist. The whole thing comes off more as a commercial for their respective employers than anything else. Plus, the door to the noisy hallway keeps drifting open, making it very difficult to sleep.

The varying attitudes of unsigned hometown acts toward South by Southwest are displayed on fliers advertising nonaffiliated shows: one promises "Free Booze for All!" while another has christened itself "The Fuck by Fuck You Showcase."

I see tortilla chips everywhere. On every plate, in every to-go carton carried by a strolling eater, in huge clear plastic bins on top of bar-kitchen ice machines. I imagine Tex-Mex restaurants in Fresno, Richmond and Bangor struggling to meet their customers' tortilla-chip needs: "Sorry, we have a 'one basket per table' rule today. South by Southwest is this weekend, you know."

Legendary Austin concert venue Stubb's B-B-Q is a bit like St. Pete's Jannus Landing -- if Jannus Landing were on a big, grassless hill in your back yard, and your fence were made of bars. Not bars as in "burglar-proof" but bars as in "no Cuervo, but try this, it's a local brand" strung together in a gold-rush town motif. Stubb's is a comparatively large venue and hosts one of each evening's biggest shows. Friday it's Spoon and Cat Power, the buzzed indie band of notoriously flaky songwriter Chan Marshall. But first we've gotta endure Dead Meadow, a southern-tinged stoner-rock band that takes what seems like five days to play what seems like two songs.

So what's the big deal with Chan Marshall? She's crazy? Who isn't? In a large open-air setting, Marshall's best assets, her lyrics, get lost in the PA. Everybody's just here to see her freak out anyway, and she obliges a bit, taking a powder after a horrible, unfinished take on The White Stripes' "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground." Spoon fares better, their surprisingly loose, unconcerned set connecting easily with a crowd full of more hometown fans than one might expect.

In line for the can, several locals and I develop the "Empty Port-O-Let Theory." It goes like this: At every major event where more than 10 Port-O-Lets are clustered in an area, at least one of those Port-O-Lets goes completely unused, simply because no one sees someone exiting it, thusly letting them know it's all right to enter. At the time, this seems to neatly explain many of the universe's more ambiguous mechanizations.

Asian hipsters can wear anything, and pull it off. A crinoline ballet skirt with combat boots and a top hat? No problem. Bunny ears and a black tank top that says "Bitch Kitty" in pink sequins? Bring it on.

Every punk club in Austin sports the kind of rotting, poorly buttressed wooden ceiling that first makes you wish you hadn't looked up, then inspires nervous speculation about how much heavy pre-Industrial Revolution agricultural equipment is being stored on the second floor.

Sharing taxis is a uniquely entertaining way to engage the festival's itinerant throng. One might find oneself in a cab with a cheerful Australian named Brian and discover that Nada Surf and Weezer are "mega" Down Under, but that the fans are bumming because they never tour there. One could conceivably also listen to a Brit who looks and sounds like Jamiroquai and a cab driver who looks and sounds like Tommy Chong argue in an increasingly disconnected way about Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines' in-concert slagging of President Bush. They may even go on to discuss what's cool about a band having their own cheerleaders while a young woman whose outfit and demeanor scream "Manhattanite" -- black pantsuit, black pageboy coif, sunglasses on, holding two conversations while simultaneously on a cell phone -- tries to decide where to go next.

Solo rides can also be intriguing.

"You can meet people from all over the world in one weekend," says cabbie Monica, whose sultry, hypnotic accent I can't place. "You can hear crazy bullshit stories."

Monica's been carting folks around Austin for a year and a half. This is her second time working South by Southwest, and it's always her best weekend of the year, but she loves her job year-round for the confessional relationships it fosters after last call.

"We are like bartenders for sad and depressed people," she explains, deftly belying the myth that only bartenders are like bartenders for sad and depressed people.

The Ritz is the darkest bar on Sixth Street during daylight hours. It's also the weeklong headquarters of music/lifestyle/cleavage magazine Blender, but alas, no scantily clad nubiles saunter out of the gloom to offer me a free hat and a shooter. At the sparsely attended bar, the main topic of conversation is Austin's fire marshal, and the intense scrutiny afforded SXSW and non-SXSW venues alike. At the end of the weekend, the Austin American-Statesman will report that no clubs were cited for exceeding capacity, but now, mid-festival, owners, managers, patrons and officials alike are tense.

At the swank Speakeasy, naturally located unobtrusively in an alley off Sixth, I see my only real celebrity, R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck. He and friend/Minus 5 principal Scott McCaughey perform a set with their side project Tuatara. It's a self-indulgent mix of World Beat, free jazz and lounge-skronk, and it looks fun but sounds the opposite of that.

I also brusquely interview a young South by Southwest volunteer. There are a couple of them outside every affiliated club, making sure the doorman doesn't kill and eat anybody who paid $119 for a wristband granting them access to every official showcase, contingent upon capacity. This one says the opportunity to see shows for free motivated her to volunteer, but she seems unfamiliar with all but the highest-profile performers. Interesting.

By Saturday evening, I'm afraid to look down and confirm the growing certainty that most of my feet and liver have abraded away. Also, I have to look at the tiny display on the back of my digital camera in order to arrange the events of the past 72 hours in anything remotely resembling chronological order.

There's a Chicago-centric party being thrown outside Pok-E-Jo's Smokehouse by the owner of legendary Windy City rock club The Metro, but by this point, not even the female bass player onstage in panties with the word "Yankee" scrawled across the ass makes much of an impression. Adrenaline, excitement and alcohol are all galvanizing, but their effects are fleeting, and the festival has become something of an endurance test.

I'm briefly brought back to life by an amazing set by almost completely unknown Irish outfit The Frames, and the friendly, unpretentious mixed crowd here to quaff microbrew trucked in from Illinois. A few hours, a few dozen blocks and a few too-packed clubs later, however, I trade in an opportunity to see lauded art-indie band Songs:Ohia for a long trudge back to the car and nine hours of death-like stasis.

ACT THREE
Sunday is another impossibly beautiful day. Freeway feeder roads near every bridge are lined with parked cars, abandoned by their owners in favor of a few hours of sunbathing, canoeing, Frisbee and even early-spring swimming.Compared to the activity of days past, downtown Austin appears completely deserted. The vast parking lots, last night crammed with showgoers willing to pay any price for a space, are empty. The monstrous LED sign in front of the Austin Convention Center no longer advertises South by Southwest; the building's doors are locked. There is absolutely no sign that dozens of computer terminals, hundreds of vendors and thousands of people were in there not 24 hours ago.

A few pods of people meander up and down Sixth Street but probably not any more than represent your average touristy spring Austin Sunday. The entire area has that purged and newborn feel that accompanies the aftermath of a riot or monster freak storm.

Today is still technically a festival day, but for all intents and purposes, it's over -- people have planes to catch, drives to make, lost credit cards to cancel and dubious expenses to justify. Tellingly, the three South by Southwest showcases scheduled for tonight are heavy with local bands and a few obscure underground touring acts. They'll be sparsely attended by local scenesters, like any other hometown Sunday-night shows, with the occasional SXSW pundit lurking in the corner or at the bar and feeling uncomfortable.

Red River Street shows a little more life than Sixth, if only because of its intrinsic street-life/rock 'n' roll hangout nature. A couple of skinny, shirtless, tattooed guys work under the hood of an ancient Ford van across the street from Emo's.

"Hey, who are you guys?" calls a strolling hipster from the Emo's side.

"We're the guys that are trying to fix our van so we can go the fuck home," answers one would-be mechanic with a predatory sneer.

The hipster gives a humbled thumbs-up and continues on with his head down.

There's a free punk matinee in mid-blast at a wonderfully seedy club called Beer Land, a block or two on down Red River. You've got to be 21 to get inside, but most of the band members crowding the small stage have large black "X"s inked across the backs of their hands, marking them as underage. Thirty or 40 locals cut from the same postured, anti-glam cloth that typified the hipper SXSW crowds hang around, smoking, drinking and eating vegetarian chili that the bartender pours right into single-serving bags of Fritos.

Several of the bands on the garage-fuzz-heavy bill are less than seasoned, and I assume that they're hometown kids pogoing on the grave of another South by Southwest installment. The Mystery Girls, however, catch my attention with some amped blues-rock spasms and surprisingly adept harmonica work. The singer is a shaggy kid maybe 20 years old and absolutely smashed at 5 p.m. on a Sunday, but they go at their set with an enthusiasm and potential that outshines several of the "name" acts I'd seen over the course of the weekend.

I find out The Mystery Girls are from Green Bay, Wisc., when I buy a seven-inch and talk with Jaymis, their young drummer. The quintet couldn't give a shit about playing the lost last day of the festival. Actually, they couldn't give a shit about the festival at all; they're on tour, and this is their third time at Beer Land.

For them, like most of the young unknown bands traversing America's live-music dives in a van, attempting to escape rent and day jobs for a few more years, South by Southwest's combination of cool and commerce, enjoyable as it is, has little to do with being in a rock band. They just happened to land in Austin, one of their favorite places, on the soiree's last day; what motivated them to get there was something different entirely.

"The weather," says Jaymis with a grin. "We love touring the south this time of year. Have you ever been to Green Bay in March?"

Scott Harrell can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or scott.harrell@ weeklyplanet.com.