Scenes From Day 4 of South by Southwest Music

Performances on the fourth day of the festival included ones by Usher, Half Moon Run and Outer Minds.

SXSW Music: The 1960s, Getting Better With Age

AUSTIN, Tex. â€" Ever since I’ve been coming to the South by Southwest Music Festival (and the CMJ Music Marathons, too), I’ve been running across young bands aiming to recreate the psychedelia of the late 1960s â€" which is, as the years go by, a time before many of them were born. You might expect that as the era recedes, so do its traditions, not to mention the inevitable breakdown and disappearance of authentic equipment. And beyond the indie-rock circuit, it’s pretty unlikely that that totally 1960s-style psychedelia would become a commercial force. But against those odds, young bands keep doing the 1960s better.

One band straight out of the time capsule was Outer Minds from Chicago, which combines a garage-rock drive, and the bite of a Farfisa organ, with a deep understanding of Jefferson Airplane â€" the eager three-part harmonies, the right combination of fuzz and reverb on a 12-string electric guitar, the cosmic musings in the lyrics.
Another was Föllakzoid, a self-described “cosmic music” band from Santiago, Chile, that lives for drones, repetition, reverberations and galvanizing buildups: meditations that gradually turn into eruptions. The band draws on the legacies of Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Can and Neu, starting with steady-state riffs that have analog synthesizer parts swooping around, and soon putting everything up for grabs; a vocal drifts in occasionally, but soon gets swept up in the surging, pulsating momentum.

Ives Sepulveda, who plays keyboards in Föllakzoid, also brought his other band, The Holydrug Couple, which moves him to guitar and shifts the music toward the late-1960s power trio: more aggressive, more lead guitar, still making every sprawl worthwhile. The only glimmer of the present was the visuals, which included light-show liquid blobs being shaken on the spot, ! but also had op-art moires and infinite spirals generated from a laptop to make the music even more immersive: a forgivable anachronism.

SXSW Music: After a Hiatus, Green Day Returns

AUSTIN, Tex. â€" Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong said little about his recent stint in rehab during a two-hour concert at Austin City Limits Live on Friday night, but he made it clear that he was in a celebratory mood, whipping the crowded theater into a frenzy with exhortations to “get crazy.”

The concert at the South by Southwest Music Festival was the highest profile event Mr. Armstrong and his Grammy-winning band have done since he went into treatment for drug addiction last fall, postponing a tour of arenas. The band did three less-publicized shows last week at theaters in Pomona, Calif., Tempe, Ariz., and El Paso.

Mr. Armstrong, 41, made only one oblique reference to his problems with substance abuse. When a technician ran onstage to change a microphone during a sudden stop in the middle of a song, switching it just before Mr. Armstrong started to sing, he broke character and started giggling. “And I wasn’t even on drugs,” he said, when he regained his composure. At other ties during the 25-song marathon, he sat down on the drum platform and placed his face in his hands for a moment, as if trying to regain composure.

But over all he was energetic and jubilant, giving a big kiss to a teenage boy he invited on stage to sing with him and yelling repeatedly that he loved Texas. He let the crowd handle some of the verses on his best known songs, including the first verse of American Idiot, which was an encore.

Mr. Armstrong’s genial performance was a far cry from his profane temper tantrum at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas in September, when he complained that the band’s time was being cut short and smashed his guitar. Two days later, Green Day announced that Mr. Armstrong was headed to treatment for substance abuse.

Green Day is one of the big-name acts at the festival this year, along w! ith Justin Timberlake, Dave Grohl and Snoop Lion (formerly Snoop Dog). Prince is scheduled to play an intimate finale on Saturday, the last official night of the event, at a small Austin club.

Green Day’s delayed tour will begin March 28 in Chicago. Band members also appeared at a showing here earlier Friday of the documentary “Broadway Idiot,” which is about their project to turn their 2004 album “American Idiot” into a musical.

SXSW Music: For 3 Teenage Brothers, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll

AUSTIN, Tex. â€" Radkey’s tour bus is the family minivan, a venerable 2000 Plymouth Voyager with the nickname Harvey Dent because of a deep dent in one side that was never repaired.

The band members, three teenage brothers, all sleep in the same bedroom at their parent’s modest home in St. Joseph, Mo., because a second bedroom has been converted to a rehearsal studio.

“They are all self-taught â€" it’s just crazy,” said their father, Matt Radke, who manages the band when he’s not doing his day job at Walmart. “Less than three years ago, Solomon and Isaiah couldn’t play their instruments. They have worked so hard. They have made a crazy leap forward.”

The band landed a gig in one of the official showcases at the South by Southwest Music festival here when Mr. Radke sent in some MP3s of their songs to the festival’s bookers.

Many of the bands who get attention at the festivalalready have booking agents and publicists, and quite a few have recorded debut albums, either on their own or with a label. But there are scores of others, like Radkey, who come to the festival on a shoestring budget in hopes of furthering their nascent careers. They pool their money, eat frugally and sleep on floors, all for the chance to play for critics and talent scouts.

“We wanted to do something to where people would figure out who we are,” said the bassist, Isaiah, who is 17.

When Radkey (the band’s name adds a y to the family name for pronunciation’s sake) took the stage behind the Shangri-La club here on Friday, there was little immature about their sound. They play hard-driving rock and pop-punk, with intricate guitar and bass riffs. They got hooked on music, they said, through their father’s record collection and cite influences like Nirvana, the Ramones, the Misfits and the Foo Fighters.

The lead singer and guitarist, Dee Radke, 19, possesses a rich baritone a! nd delivers the songs with conviction, while Isaiah plays bass and sings harmonies on most songs. Solomon, a slight 15-year-old, has a light but sure touch on the drums. They write songs about teenage angst, the racism they have felt and even their love of animé comics. “Whatever pops into our heads,” Dee said.

The band has developed a following in Kansas City and Lawrence, Kan., where they have regular club dates. Last year, they played the Afropunk Festival in New York and, as a result, were invited to record an EP at Wreckroom Studios in Brooklyn.

Matt Radke said he and his wife, Tamiko, who works at Target, home-schooled their sons because they thought the public schools were lacking. They have also supported their sons’ ambitions, squiring them to weekend gigs at clubs where they need a legal guardian to enter.

Isaiah said that he and his brothers had been insulated from many of the aspects of high school that might distract them from their musical goals, like drugs, alcohol an teen romances.

“We don’t drink, we don’t do drugs, we don’t have chicks, we just do music,” he said. “It doesn’t sound very rock ’n’ roll but its fun anyway. We are the weird guys out of everyone.”