Photos by Andy Beta
In the past decade, the small Texas town of Marfa has become a curious nexus for art, music and fashion, with concerts from the likes of Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Feist and Jeff Tweedy taking place in a town whose population now hovers around 2000 people. It’s become a destination of a sort, with some pilgrims coming for the stark art of Donald Judd (the town’s unofficial patriarch, who passed away in 1994), others for the low-key music scene in a town kept decidedly weirder than its nearest Texas counterpart, Austin, which remains some 6.5 hours drive to the east. This past weekend, the Mexican Summer imprint (in association with the non-profit arts organization Ballroom Marfa) staged an inaugural music festival on a local campground, featuring ARP, Weyes Blood, Quilt, No Joy and Connan Mockasin. And the next night, the Burger Records imprint staged another concert (fittingly at Padre’s, a bar boasting the best burgers in town). Both imprints stage mini-showcases here in Marfa before heading onto South by Southwest later this week in Austin.
To reach the enclave that is Marfa is no easy feat. The closest airport is in El Paso, and it requires a three-hour drive east into a landscape bereft of even a gas station, though it does showcase the rarest of sights in Texas: mountains. The only sign of humanity is the passing Union Pacific train. On this drive, your phone will pick up cell towers in Mexico and tell you "Welcome Abroad." You will enter a new time zone and lose an hour. And you will pass the border checkpoint in Sierra Blanca, made famous for busting the likes of Willie Nelson and Fiona Apple. At almost three hours exactly, Marfa appears suddenly out of the landscape like a mirage; you’re in town before you quite realize it.
As a native Texan, Marfa is not wholly unfamiliar to me (nor to anyone who saw No Country for Old Men, which was filmed here), a one stoplight town with a Main Street that leads towards the stately courthouse. Yet it’s a peculiar town. There are as many gas stations converted into art galleries as there are functioning gas stations. The local bookstore houses a gallery. An art gallery also serves East Coast-style pizza. A grilled cheese restaurant hosts the strangest video installation in town. Humble ranch houses and crumbling adobes are neighbors to newly erected modernist homes.
I hear more European accents in Marfa than Texas drawls: a Swiss couple on a road trip stops here to visit The Chinati Foundation, a Frenchman waits to eat Mexican food at Marfa Burrito. At times, Marfa feels like a small Texas town as art installation. Or, as a member of Quilt will tell me: “Even the ‘Missing Dog’ signs here have a nice design.” When next I see him, he’s bemoaning the silk-screened font on an artisanal grocery store’s canvas bags.
Retroactively named “Southwest of South by Southwest,” Mexican Summer and Ballroom Marfa staged an inaugural festival at El Cosmico campgrounds on Saturday afternoon. Against a backdrop of airstream trailers, teepees and tents, Arp opens the low-key festival. I know Arp’s gentle kosmische records, but today they are an Anglophile four-piece, sounding like early John Cale as well as post-Cale Velvet Underground. Some three-dozen campers emerge, sit at picnic tables. Kids and dogs run free. Yesterday, temperatures reached into the mid-70s, but today is a dust bowl of a day, windswept and cold when the desert sun goes behind a cloud. Weyes Blood, the solo act of Natalie Mering, sings against loops and closes her set with a cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin,’” “going where the weather suits (her) clothes” as the sharp wind whips at her white silk outfit. By the time of Quilt’s light psych and No Joy’s shoe-grunge sets, the crowd grows more eclectic: there are crust punks and retired campers, artists and locals in cowboy hats.
Headliner Connan Mockasin only plays three songs before the organizers move the show to Padre’s later that evening. Mockasin curiously now opens for local hardcore band, Solid Waste. After that mosh pit winds down, Marfa denizens head over to a house party located at the end of a dirt road. Having attended dozens of house parties in Austin, New Braunsfels, Killeen, Denton (not to mention staging my own when I lived in San Antonio), even this Marfa house party is peculiar. The band playing tonight is called Foundation for Jammable Resources, and tonight has been announced as their last show. Not that we can see them, as the band has wrapped the stage and walls in tinfoil. Locals have told me of the antics of FFJR’s lead singer all day, which range from taking an axe to a piano to playing video games onstage in a slowly inflating fat suit. Also, the lead singer doesn’t actually sing.
The music starts and a strip of tin foil is cut away, revealing the lead singer clad in Raw Power silver jeans and a tinfoil headpiece. Once that foil is balled up, I recognize him as the guy who manned the Food Shark food truck the night prior. And I realize that the girl who sold me a bandana at El Cosmico earlier that day was also the bassist for Solid Waste. In much the same way that a football player for a small 1A Texas high school plays both offense and defense, Marfa residents hold many positions here, giving it a sort of familiarity everywhere you wander. In a stranger’s house after midnight, Marfa now feels like less of an art installation and more like what would happen if everyone in attendance at a DIY punk show founded a town. So even as Marfa continues to draw more attention, more touring bands and more visitors from foreign countries, the locals here will no doubt keep their town weird.