Undercover Art: The Secret Show Knows No Boundaries)
Living in Austin, music litters the city. On any given night you can show up to a sanctioned venue, crack open your wallet, hand over the contents therein, and you are magically permitted entry. For the next few hours, you may gossip with your friends, fix your eyes on the stage, or do a little dancing. It can be a roaring way to spend an evening and a cherished part of our city culture. But what if things were slightly different? What if you didn’t need an ID card, cash or credit, and simply spent an evening with your friends? What if you combined sitting on a grassy knoll under the stars, candles flickering, feeding on evening air, with a quiet performance of strings and harmonies? Could such a simple alteration of place and electricity transform your experience? Over the course of the last year The Secret Show has revealed the answer to be a primal and resounding Yes.
Austinites indulge in a banquet of discreet ongoing events focused on dance, film, dance music, and tasteful vandalism. Yet the Secret Shows add something gingery to the fare: hushed acoustic recitals nestled in outdoor public spaces. Like Red Hunter’s now-fabled Order of the Owl shows in random spaces around town, the Secret Shows’ re-contextualization of the music in an unique atmosphere not only breaks down the traditional, club-based relationships between performers and audience, but also provides new perspective on the songs themselves. Foregoing payment for their time, bands instead are drawn to the opportunity to play in picturesque and intimate settings. One of the few catches of the gratis admission is that the announcement detailing the date, time, location, and performers goes out via MySpace mere days prior to the event. Only due to a rain out of the last show do we know the January line up.
The quick and dirty is that Tuesday evening, January 22, at an undisclosed location near Auditorium Shores, the Secret Show promises a bill unlike any before it. Despite a theme of quiet music, it would be impossible to get a feel for any one band by seeing the others. The Austin faction of the ebullient Electric Mountain Rotten Apple Gang fiercely possesses mandolin, accordion, banjo, and upright. The discursive harmonizing of Charles’ Potts Magic Windmill Band delivers a self-described “working man’s country” yet ranges over topics including sleeping in a ditch to errant waterbeds. But it is the inaugural performance of Reverend Glasseye that should not be missed. A recent relocation from Boston to Austin will bring together an almost entirely new band that is expected to remain foreboding storytellers but likely with softer edges, if for no other reason than the lack of amplifiers.
But what of the Why of The Secret Show? After learning of the event, I admit entertaining visions of a scrappy lot of revolutionaries, bound by blood oath to free art from unnatural and odious things like city ordinances. Discovering that the committee of founders was willing to meet with me, I expected monochrome berets, promised allegiances to Liberty, Equality, & Fraternity, or at least a Che Guevara tee-shirt or two. Alas, at the door of the Bouldin Coffeehouse, I was forced to hand in that vision for the reality. Secret Shows are truly about people performing the music that they love in the way that they love to play it, to hear it, and to share it.
A little over a year ago, a man looked at a cemetery and saw a place to play music. Gathering up a handful of friends, late one night they converged carrying the barest of musical instruments. There was no audience, no sound checks, just a small collection of companions playing their favorite songs, humming out potential new ones, and enjoying the company of the night. Perhaps inspired by “The Crow’s Nest” at the June Kerrville Folk Festival, the matriarch of the committee reached out six months later and invited additional participants. On an August night, folksinger Raina Rose, Portland artists Hunter Paye, Nick Jaina and Dustin Hamman of Run on Sentence played underneath the trees and vine-encased gazebo at the Austin power plant, marking the first official Secret Show. Sounds of clarinet, drums, violin, and even a glockenspiel infused the extended jam session. Bringing the evening to a close, the vintage gospel of The McMercy Family drew everyone together for the aptly chosen hymn, Amazing Grace. The Portland crew, so taken by the event, plan to return to Austin simply for the pleasure of playing another Secret Show.
Drawing on the concoction of friends’ bands, performers with a regular crowd, and a bit of lottery luck, the Secret Show became more than just a collection of a few . Advertising as The Murder Collective, their first flyer was an invitation to Austin for a Halloween performance. An audience largely unknown to the performers filtered their way under fences and into the graveyard site. Despite a brief concern of police officers crashing the event, the mountain music of Manny & the Brokeback Boys, The McMercy Family Band, and the tumult of Wino Vino held the audience throughout the evening. Casting the net wide, each iteration seems to draw a completely different crowd. The breadth, if not the volume of the audience seems to slowly be translating into an increase in bodies at city-sanctioned venues that the bands later play. Although not all musicians are willing to do anything extra legal, by and large, most are thrilled at the opportunity to play and willing to lug even grandiose sized instruments to remote Austin locations. One performer even put an upright bass in a cart behind his bicycle to make the journey. As the interest in Secret Shows grows, so does the musicians among their number. The fourth and most recent materialization featured new Austinite Frank Smith, Ted Hadji, and Some Say Leland. Casting aside the political hoops of getting booked at certain venues and the frustrations at last minute cancellations, Secret Shows turn instead to more important goals. In bare and stripped down settings, devoid of sound boards and barstool chatter, the true sound the musicians bear fruit. It’s no wonder that playing SS are often favorite experiences among performers.
Concerns that additional exposure of the event would result in a less intimate feeling, a rather stoic SS emailed me, “if it gets too big, some people will just stop coming; certain bands will decline to play; it’ll be self-regulating. Besides, it’s good to get support for the bands.” So with that in mind, this Tuesday you have a choice. You could stay home, you could go out and trade in one artificial shelter for another, or you could bundle up and rediscover something beautiful: quiet music. A campfire would chase the chill from the air, a host of candles would light your path, and you would hear music without the static, without the feedback, without the distortion.
Surreptitious events often occur during the hours of darkness, in relative silence, and with people you never imagined yourself sharing an intimacy with. It certainly is true that we are all bound to one another in more ways that we can imagine, more instances than we have time to even catalogue. Perhaps enveloped in basics: night, fire, strings, songs, and neighbors, you may see the city through new eyes or at least hear it in a new way.
This Tuesday, 8 p.m. Auditorium Shores. I’ll see you there.
(If you happen to be The Man, rest assured this is a work of fiction. Any pictures, MySpace accounts, or bands announcing a performance — all are merely elements of an elaborate delusion I am trying to convince you is real. I may sound like a professional but as a child my sister and I engaged in blindfolded boxing bouts; I haven’t been right since then.)
