AUSTIN, TEXAS -- The annual South By South West Music and Media Conference has traditionally been a Thursday to Sunday affair. But in recent years they've started staging outlaw showcases a day early - to run opposite the Austin Music Awards.

Though this year's Wednesday lineup was the weakest of the fest, there were a few notable surprises. While New York City's Soviet were boring the tightly jammed Emo's crowd (note: Rolling Stone's David Fricke, still looking like the drummer in a Ramones tribute act, split after the first tune), sweaty Athens punks the Agenda were next door tearing up Emo's Jr. with their fearsome frat-stomps. I haven't seen anyone whip up a too-cool-to-care Emo's crowd into such a wild, beer-spraying lather since Zeke back in the day. Amazing!

Back at Emo's main room, the wall of noise being built by Kinski seemed to mesmerize the audience. - although they could've been stunned stiff by the fact that Kinski not only sounded like early Sonic Youth, they looked like them too, in a bizzarro-world kinda way. Many were biding their time, accepting that they may need to put up with a lame act or two to see the midnight set by Austin's hometown favourites ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, who confided earlier that they'd be backed by the Tosca strings.

Sounded sweet, but Tony Joe White would be playing at11 pm at Antone's on the other side of Congress, so making it back (and getting in) to see the Trail of Dead wasn't a good bet. A tough call to be sure. My instincts said, Go with the Swamp Fox.

From the first incredibly raunchy chord White plucked with his fingertips, I knew I was in the right place.

There was no hired band, no fancy string section, just a drummer and Tony Joe with his battered Strat and his trusty whomper-stomper pedal. That was enough. He had the whole place shaking to those badass grooves knocked out with deep distortion. He even got funky on Rainy Night In Georgia, which he off-handedly introduced as "a little thing I wrote in Corpus Christi," and had half the room, including Lucinda Williams and Steve Wynn, doing the dirty boogie.

Afterwards, Wynn recalled that I'd hooked him up with a mint copy of White's Black And White some 15 years before and asked if I wanted to go and see Small Faces keyboardist Ian MacLagan over at the Saxon Pub. Of course, I was down with that.

When we arrived, old pals Peter Buck, John Wesley Harding and Mudhoney's Steve Turner were already there. Mac started telling us a story of how a 13-year-old Robert Plant used to show up at Small Faces gigs in Birmingham, then went on to explain how a Steve Marriott vocal became the basis of Led Zep's Whole Lotta Love.

Buck, chuckling, recalled how in the early days of R.E.M., they had no idea there was anything wrong with recycling a line or two from another tune.

"After one show, this guy came up to me, saying, 'That last song you did had some lyrics from a Millie Jackson song.' I was like, 'Yeah, Millie Jackson's pretty cool, huh?"