Feedback

My list of genuine favorites, however, is just three acts long. Calexico, from Arizona, made the Jazz Bon Temps Room into a place of rare beauty on March 19, combining a windswept, spaghetti-Western vibe with complex arrangements that were intriguing but never fussy. The March 20 gig at La Zona Rosa by Cibo Matto was nearly as fine: The music was more sophisticated than that on 1996's exuberant CD Viva! La Woman, but Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, supplemented by celebrity boyfriend Sean Lennon on bass, retained their off-kilter sense of fun. Most memorable for me was Johnny Dowd, who I saw play in a tent behind Yard Dog, a pricey art gallery, on the afternoon of the 21st. I had first learned of Dowd in early 1997, when his independently produced disc, Wrong Side of Memphis, somehow found its way to my desk, and I was thrilled by his visceral, consistently homicidal way with rock and roll. I subsequently wrote an extremely positive review of the disc, after which Dowd himself called me up from his Ithaca, New York, home and revealed that he carried the blurb around in his pocket so that he could force it on anyone and everyone he met. In the interim, Dowd hooked up with an indie, the aptly named Checkered Past, and he's now hoping to get Memphis heard by someone other than yours truly.

Those under the Yard Dog tent certainly seemed dumbstruck by Dowd, whose black threads and gray pompadour left him looking like someone who'd just done a twenty-year stretch in the pen for killing a rival with a tomato-soup can. They wore expressions midway between joy and shock as he and his band tore up compositions whose benign surfaces only partially cloaked a nasty underbelly. When Dowd yelped, "You ain't pretty/And the sky isn't blue/But I don't care/I'm still in love with you," it was plain that if the object of his desire didn't reciprocate his feelings, she'd better hit the ground running. The music was disturbing, dangerous and, unlike so much of this year's SXSW fare, undeniably real. Dowd will probably never become a star, but he's a one-of-a-kind character. And at a festival desperately short of commodities, that's saying plenty.

--Michael Roberts

Backbeat's e-mail address is: Michael_Roberts@westword.com. While you're online, visit Michael Roberts's Jukebox at www.westword.com.