SXSW: Battle of the punk wits with Be Your Own Pet, J Mascis and Thurston Moore

Some self-proclaimed SXSW experts advise that you shouldn't see established acts at the music festival. They argue that with 1,500+ bands you should take in the new talent, the unearthed gems, the kids who wanna rock. The problem with that argument is that if you simply see the new blood, you have no baseline to compare them with.

On Friday night, Thurston Moore's underground label Ecstatic Peace! held a showcase at the Mohawk Patio on Red River, and what a showcase it was. The punk rock battle royale of sorts started with a bang when Be Your Own Pet climbed onstage, asked the crowd if they were ready and proceeded to bring the noise like nothing we had seen all week. After three songs, the power went out. Some say because the generators ran out of gasoline, but others suspect because the Lord Above needed 15 minutes to gather his angels together so that they could witness the rock that was going down below.

The Nashville youth got back to their punk assault after the generators were attended to and the fury somehow was released at an even higher level with singer Jemina Pearl Abegg (bottom photo) writhing around the stage like a young girl who had far too much evil inside her that needed to get out. She humped the monitors, rolled around the stage, screamed and yelled as her band jumped around her.

She and her band exemplified the power and beauty and energy of punk rock and they did it in front of two legends, J Mascis and Thurston Moore (pictured at the top), who were not about to be shown up by anyone half their age.

Mascis (pictured above) was the first to accept the challenge. The Dinosaur Jr. frontman, who played a few shows at SXSW behind the drums with his pet project, Witch, plugged in an acoustic guitar, sat on a fold-up chair, laid down some loops and did one of the most punk-rock things anyone could imagine: He destroyed the world with an acoustic. The first two tunes were above average Mascis, but the third and final number, "Get Me," was a miracle. The gray-haired, bespectacled, soft-spoken musician created some backing loops of rhythm guitar and complemented those with some of the most fascinating solos that, if you heard them from the street, you would have sworn were coming from a Hendrix-era Strat, not a simple acoustic. With each phrase, Mascis sent the crowd higher and higher, and he didn't let up. "Get Me" went on and on and the audience was right with him. It was a phenomenal exercise in what a master could do with tone, artistry and barbed-wire soul.

Not to be outdone, Moore also had an acoustic guitar. But unlike Mascis, who did it alone, the Sonic Youth front man brought his drummer bandmate Steve Shelley, a violinist, a rhythm guitarist and a bassist. Although it was interesting to see Moore also transform the acoustic guitar into something far more powerful and ironically electric than most would imagine, his songs from his latest solo project, "Trees Outside the Academy," didn't match the virtuosity of Mascis or the energy of BYOP.

Until, of course, he performed his first encore with a scorching rendition of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Not a Young Man Anymore" (a song he and the band the New Wave Bandits rocked even harder at the Lou Reed tribute the night before). When Moore returned for a second encore, we saw he had just been pacing himself. "Staring Statues" from Moore's first solo album brought all the rock and punk rock spirit that BYOP had exemplified. When Moore offered the crowd a chance to strum his guitar, people seized the opportunity.

-- post and photos by Tony Pierce