Nathan Christ is a director from Austin, Texas, whose documentary Echotone focuses on Austin’s music scene during a turbulent year, all culminating at South by Southwest 2009. The film has already been screened in San Francisco, and will be released to mass audiences in the fall. I sat down with Nathan in East Austin to discuss his path to film, the documentary itself, and the future of music in Austin.

Where are you from, and why did you pick Austin as your subject for the film?

I’m from San Antonio originally, but Austin’s the headquarters, so I travel a lot. I went to the film school here and I’ve just grown so accustomed to the rhythms of the city. I know a lot about it, I know a lot about the clubs downtown, and this is just kind of like – home is where your people are and your music is and your art is and this is where all those lie.

So the film came about organically?

It was totally organic, ‘cause I was in kind of a bubble during school and it wasn’t until after school that I started drifting. You know, it’s always great to mix with people who aren’t a part of your craft. I always considered myself someone who wrote, I always wanted to be a filmmaker, or I always wanted to make films and tell stories. So part of Echotone that’s so amazing is I got to basically mix with these people who are having these same struggles and the same pursuits but they were a totally different crowd, music, you know. I’m not a musician. It was very organic, it has to be. When you don’t have any money and you don’t have any set plan, and you don’t have your future planned out for you, organic is the only way that it can happen.

How did you pick the musicians to focus on in the film?

Well the main one, the first one was Belaire. I was introduced to Daniel Perlaky, who runs Indierect Records, and City On Fire photography and design, and I was introduced to him and he was kinda the guy who was really hyping us about Belaire, this was back in 2008, early, early 2008. And they had released their LP before, Exploding Impacting. I don’t know why, I didn’t really want to like them. I don’t know why – the way people described it I guess, before that, turned me off. It was this very catchy pop and all this kind of thing, and then I put the album on and it just blew my mind. Every song is just, is so solid, so thought out, so well recorded, it’s never overdone. It’s rough where it needs to be. It’s visual, visual music. So we did a demo, short five minute film, not really knowing what we were getting into. We borrowed cameras and the audio was kind of rough. We did this little five minute film basically starring Daniel and Belaire, and just kind of like they’re about to go on tour, there’s a lot of anticipation, this kind of thing. We didn’t know where the story was going, we just knew there needed to be a music documentary made in Austin, just because there were so many sounds that were happening that certainly broke out of the Stevie Ray Vaughan mainstay culture, the Texas Roadhouse Blues – which I’m fine with that, the other night I went to Townes Van Zandt’s birthday tribute thing; it was so moving, and people like Townes Van Zandt are part of the reason I’m so proud to be from Texas, so I’m not dogging their culture but you know, especially the Roadhouse Blues thing, I just never, I never knew until that time, till I saw Belaire and started getting into them, how vibrant and expansive the music culture was here. I never wanted to call it a scene, it’s just a bunch of people making music, felt like it needed to be coalesced somehow.

I always knew about Bill Baird and Sound Team, ‘cause Bill’s originally from San Antonio and I knew about them ‘cause I knew the brother of the guitarist for a while in high school, all this stuff – I knew this band was so special and had heard they had gotten dropped from Capitol Records, and I was like where are they now? And I heard Sunset, Bill’s newest project we’ll say, it’s just trippy psychedelic folk like the Harry Nilssons and the Lee Hazlewoods, you could just tell Bill’s influences were just prolific. They were all over the place but yet grounded. I knew that there was a story there.

And then I got the opportunity to film Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, was just reading about them, too – they’re blowing up, man! They have I guess already. I knew that by night he was a soul singer and by day he was a fish delivery guy, so I really saw that dichotomy there, so basically it was just asking them. Being human and real with them and saying, look, I know that a lot of people have probably tried to make documentaries before, but we actually have a bit of an infrastructure and good cameras and talented people, and will you let us in? And they all did. It took a while, it took months. And it was harder to get started but I think we just grew a trust and now I consider them all friends.

How did everything develop from there?

Part of it was testing it to the producers, Reversal Films – these guys I went to school with. They’re the one thing that Austin has really lacked in the film world:  an infrastructure of producer-minded people, people that can organize the funding, the money, the outreach, the media support. All the stuff that most people cringe at, they can do it right and tastefully. So Daniel, and the four guys from Reversal Films, Vic, Nick, Justin and Josh – they were able to push me, because I was friends with all of them. They pushed Robert Garza and me; he and I were production partners. They were like, there’s a feature film here that you guys need to do. And my original thought was like, what’s so special – all these musicians are great but how are we gonna connect them all? How is it all connected? So my original feeling was, let’s just do a series of ten minute short profiles. I know what it takes to make a feature film, I’ve worked on them before – it can be a nightmare, and it can destroy your credibility if you don’t do it right. So my immediate thought was, how is this all connected? Then, just look no further to downtown Austin, Texas, and how quickly it’s changing, and the live music task force springing up, saying that there’s a music crisis here in town. So in terms of the artistic pursuit and how it pertains to commerce and making it and selling out and basically – what it really comes down to is getting your music out to as many people as possible, and how that’s achieved – that’s the question, and that’s the thread that ties them all, all the bands that are on the periphery of our film, like the Black Angels, Ume, Machine, Dana Falconberry, all these amazing people. I’m telling you, this is the thread that binds, and Daniel Perlaky too, ‘cause he’s the guy trying to commercialize Belaire’s art and make them money, and they don’t really want that, so. There was a period when we first bought the cameras – most businesses would say that we’re crazy because we just took a leap of faith, we just bought the cameras, and it’s right when we did that that I was like, wow, there’s definitely something happening here. Now it’s already gone, the live music task force has been disbanded, the cranes are – the condos are going up, and who knows where the culture may go. We managed to get it right in this critical, crucial year, when the recession hit. It was cool. And terrifying.

What does the closing of the Cactus Cafe mean for Austin?

I went to that place a lot throughout college, and saw David Garza there a lot, it was great. And Townes, who’s an icon and a hero of mine – I listen to him probably twice a week, and I have for years and years and years. He just grounds me. The thing about that place is the etiquette and the respect for the songs and the lyrics, which you just do not get anywhere else in town. The respect for the past, where people have been. The fact that it’s on campus, and where it’s on campus – attached to the union among the fucking Wendy’s and Starbucks – you can write the fucking Wendy’s. Everyone realizes that it’s a cultural landmark that can not be quantified. And so we at Reversal Films and Echotone and everything related to it, that’s part of what the website’s trying to do is just, when it comes time for us to get behind a cause, this is one of the causes. And really I see it as a part of what Echotone is really about. And it’s not, Echotone is not a polemic or a rant, it’s just – a culture can go away, and it can fade. I mean, a lot of some of the old timers in our film bemoan Liberty Lunch and Steamboat closing, and I’m not necessarily one of those that says, ah it should have been this! But the Cactus is definitely something different and special because of the students, and it’s like if you don’t have that playground for the kids to play in then they’re going to become hardened businessmen. So it’s very, very sad.

But then, according to a New York Magazine article you’ve posted on the Echotone website about the scene in Brooklyn, don’t you think the scene will just move somewhere else in the city?

That’s what’ll happen, that’s one of the arguments that Daniel Perlaky makes in the film, just in life, and I’m inclined to feel this way too at times. Ok just take the example of, you take a street like Red River, right? Say the Mohawk can no longer keep running, keep its doors open. Say that, hypothetically. Of course the culture will go elsewhere, you can’t kill love and music, you can’t kill that stuff, and friendship, ‘cause that’s all that comes out of it. But it takes a long time to build up a location and infrastructure. The Mohawk has been around for years, and I feel like the Mohawk in the last year is just starting to find it. And those guys at Transmission Entertainment, luckily they have their hands both in the real estate community and the live music community, so they’re able to be like brokers between the two, referees even. Those guys are kind of my heroes also in a way. So it’s just kind of an esoteric thing, like will it go elsewhere? Of course music will always go elsewhere, but there’s also something to be said about a sense of place, or a street, like a CBGB’s or a – I didn’t live in San Francisco, but I know that changed a lot in the ‘90s when the internet boom happened, so it’s kind of like – it’s kind of inevitable, but I think you have to realize it when it’s there, realize it when you’re happy, realize it when there’s night after night of shows on one street. It’s magic, it’s really magic.

So where are you guys at with the film?

We look at the film like a chocolate sundae, with all the ice cream and sprinkles on top, and we have like half a cherry on top, it’s almost done. Super! Alright! on Third and Chicon, it’s like a BFX post house, they’ve basically graciously – because they love film, they’ve let us work there for months now.

And what’s the next step?

We’re gonna do a few community screenings up through the summer, and maybe end of summer as well, and the official release is going to be in the fall. So we’re basically building all the bones up until then. And hopefully just show it a few times to people in Austin. There’s so many seeds that have been planted and a few are starting to poke through.

We already played in San Francisco, an advanced screening, which was like a huge hit, it was a full house. And it was really gratifying to have people in that city respond so strongly to the story of Austin. It’s not just an Austin story, it’s an American story.

Do you think you’ll continue making documentaries now, even though that wasn’t necessarily your initial intent?

The documentary form, because we had such fascinating people involved like Bill Baird on camera, everything he said – I don’t know, it was something about the life we were casting our lens onto, it made me put into question my own ability to foresee a story from start to finish. Part of the beauty of this is we had an idea and a structure, and we let it happen on camera, and it happened. So I can’t make any promises, but I would love to of course do fiction. My other thing is I wrote a book about travels I did from Holland to West Africa, called Migrations, which I’m trying to push at the same time, and I’ve incorporated some documentary shorts into that as well, footage I took on the road. So I don’t know, it’s all kind of being blended these days. I think we’d like to turn Echotone into a series, and put it, place the same kind of struggle – development, integrity, artistic integrity, and culture, and put it on other cities, like Brooklyn, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, maybe Chicago, maybe L.A., we don’t really know – that’s the goal, and I could see this getting some mileage. The thing that keeps coming to mind is Alan Lomax, he’s the guy in the ‘50s who went down to the Mississippi delta region with his tape machine and recorded Mississippi Fred McDowell, all the blues legends that basically the Rolling Stones wouldn’t exist without. And they’re all gone now, and he got it all on tape and put it out to the world, that was sort of his legacy. And that’s another inspiration where it’s like we’re obviously in a critical moment in American history right now where the gulf between the poor and the rich is getting larger and larger, and it’s like how does that affect the creative class? Which is a very real class. That’s the idea. So we probably won’t make feature films in other cities, but we could see it being like a continuing kind of authentic series that happens, hopefully on a network like HBO, but I can’t say anything about that. That’s just me dreaming.

How did you get into film in the first place?

They’re potentially going to close the magnet school, North East School of the Arts. When the city’s bankrupt and when school districts lose money, arts are the first to get chopped up, and that school changed my life. It was because of that arts program, I went to the public high school and took the cinema classes there, I got to go to Sundance in high school and really if I didn’t have that kind of nurturing playground to play in, who knows. It would have been the norm to chalk that creative impulse up to a hobby instead of something you can create yourself constantly, really make your own future. And I’m broke right now, so I’m not looking back at the good old days or something, but that gave me confidence beyond belief and I still keep in contact with a lot of people up at the school and they’re doing great. So it’s unfortunate, really unfortunate. It’s like the Cactus.

The internet has changed the way people share and market their music. Has it changed things for filmmakers and the film industry?

The internet – I don’t know, it’s a little bit different because we’re not going to put Echotone up on Youtube and be like, alright, we worked two years, we’re this much amount of money in the hole, and here’s our film! We don’t want to – it’s not this free-floating thing. We’ll screen it for free, but we want to sell it, we want it to get seen by a lot of people. It’s different with music because a lot of people in our film, they put it up online and that’s where it lives. You can’t sell your music online that way. Just look at it as, like, the best promotional tour in the world. Like Facebook, all this shit. That stuff can either be a hub for all your weird late night thoughts that you want all your friends to hear, or the most amazing marketing tool in the world. It can be either one of those things.

The thing is that the game has changed. What I was so excited about with Echotone is I feel like – we didn’t set out to do this, I’m not saying we achieved it, I think we did – was that, like with the Sound Team story for example, we don’t talk about the inner dynamics of the band, but we talk about the fact that Capitol Records merged with EMI in 2007, the president of Capitol Records was fired, all the top guys were fired, and it was just this trickle-down thing where bands as big as Everclear and the Dandy Warhols were just laid off, it became simple economics. If a band hadn’t sold enough records, they were dropped. And basically the major labels are just catalog houses now, you see Capitol doing it right now, they packaged and repackaged all the Radiohead albums, the “best of”s, and all that – you just watch it happen. Except for the bands like Coldplay you know, those are the bands that still remain viable, like Katy Perry. But unfortunately the Sound Team story – and it’s also fortunate for the drama of Echotone – is that, their’s is just a uniquely American industrial kind of story. It’s an amazing band that cut an album that, I don’t think they were entirely proud of, a lot of other bands would be given a second chance ten years ago, because they obviously had staying power. So it was just this unbelievable lightening bolt, the thing that happened right when they were getting signed. So I’m glad it’s in the film, because it tries to make sense of this loss. And that trickles down to what’s happening in Austin right now, and now you see Black Joe Lewis coming up, and Belaire making amazing music to this day, but they just want to kind of stay this cult thing, this regional local cult thing which is fine. I mean the internet causes all sorts of pressures. If I scribble on this napkin right now and it’s great, you might pressure me to say like, why aren’t you trying to sell that? You’ve got the skill! And it’s like I just want to scribble on the napkin! It’s not quite that cheap, but, you know what I mean?

So do you feel that the film has one big take-home message?

I think the film’s good because it comes at the conversation, and it opens a lot of questions. You can come back from every side. We’re not giving you the answer. Well, what are we gonna say? I could rant for hours about it and I wouldn’t give any answers.

The film’s like a really big red flag that flies up, and it says, listen developers, listen journalists, listen musicians, listen politicians, fans, baristas – this is how we see the city right now, and it’s changing, and it’s changing fast. What’s important to you? What’s important to you in your current music or arts scene? And ask yourself that and be real about it, and realize that there are changes that are potentially beyond you, but you still have a voice in it, whatever it might be. We took a lot of influence from a film called The Decline of Western Civilization, a film made about L.A. punk in the 1980s by Penelope Spheeris, the director of Wayne’s World, of all people – like her first film out of UCLA. Whether you like the music or not, it’s like the Germs and Circle Jerks and, it’s good, I like it. But I like that film because it looks at it from every different point of view, from the musicians to the manager to the journalists to the guy that’s like poo-pooing on it, and then it becomes this palpable thing by the end, like wow, there was this thing happening in this corner of the world at this time, thank God it was put on celluloid.
We can’t of course get everyone – we didn’t represent any jazz in Austin. We didn’t represent the Tejano community here which kinda haunts me a little. We just followed our instincts and followed the story that was happening here and it just led us to certain bands, you know.

Any last thoughts?

The gap between the industry and the guy who picks up his guitar, it’s become enormous. I don’t know, it’s like – there’s so many more independent musicians now because that happened, you know?

I’m such a fan of the venue. I think the Transmission Entertainment guys call it – they call the music venue the incubator for music, and I love that term. Live music incubator. So, sure the incubator will go away and the music will be out there floating, but the incubator – that’s where people go when they buy their booze and meet with their friends and they see on the wall a poster for next week’s show. You feel a sense of like, I don’t know. I guess making this film has given me the first real sense of community in this city. I didn’t feel connected to the city at all for a long time. It’s just a project, making a project with a bunch of people.

Watch the trailer for Echotone here.