Tex-Max

What. Ever.

It doesn't help that text messaging has become so pervasive. So while you might be seeing a relatively uneven greatest-hits set by, say, World Party, the Beatlesque band led by the hard-luck Brit Karl Wallinger, your phone might buzz with "Lips klld boho rhaps." At which point you kick yourself for not having gone to the secret Flaming Lips show that you'd heard about two hours earlier. Because if there's any band whose cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody" you know you'd enjoy, it's absolutely theirs.

At least you're not alone in your angst. "When I'm here, I get stressed out because there so much good stuff I want to see, and it's all at the same time," said Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore. The iconic indie-rock figure attended this year's festival as a non-performing fan, and he had a front-row spot during a superlative set of snarling punk by the Nashville teenagers in Be Your Own Pet. Led by a firecracker of a singer, Jemina Pearl, the coed quartet eschews big pop hooks and favors aggression and adolescent attitude above all else. At the conclusion of BYOP's set, one of the boys in the band blasted the music industry with an expletive -- a hilarious thing given that the various band members come from music business families. How so very punk rock.

Seconding the motion that the kids are alright, the Flairz also tore up Austin with an explosive set of ragged garage-rock songs about high school and such. But they're getting ahead of themselves: The average age of the coed Australian trio is 12, which no doubt added to their appeal. Still, the Flairz were among my favorite accidental finds at SXSW. (As it turns out, I'm somewhat late to the party, as Stevie Van Zandt has been playing the Flairz' "Rock and Roll Ain't Evil" on his satellite radio show.)

Going into the confab, the majority of names on the SXSW schedule were unfamiliar to me. There's an incredible urge to investigate many of those acts in the off chance that you might discover something great, a la the Flairz. More often than not, though, it's a dead-end option, which I confirmed by wasting precious time randomly sampling multiple bands that were average at best. I didn't know their names going in, and it's not worth repeating them coming out. (Note to upcoming bands: If you play a festival like SXSW, it's a good idea if you tell the crowd who you are -- early and often. Don't assume the audience knows your name simply by virtue of being in the room.)

But as always at SXSW, there were big names in town, too, as artists from Morrissey and the Beastie Boys to Rosanne Cash and Chamillionaire came to town to promote various projects to the international pop press that returns here every year in search of the Next Big Thing while drinking midafternoon margaritas. There were also plenty of buzz bands, with the Arctic Monkeys topping the list.

The Monkeys are the most hyped British band of the past decade, which is really saying something given the U.K. music press's penchant for hyperbole. As such, the group played to a ridiculously packed house that just dared the boys to impress. And for the most part they did, despite the presence of a few hecklers. Though the Monkeys are a young band playing stateside for the first time, they don't lack for confidence. At one point, as the crowd cheered its approval, singer Alex Turner wryly said, "Yeah, I know, we're good, aren't we?"

Standing out here isn't easy, so some artists resort to guerrilla tactics. Or gorilla tactics: One member of Facing New York, an indie-prog band from San Francisco, spent most of Friday night wearing a gorilla suit on Sixth Street, where most of the SXSW venues are. One of his band mates had on a cardboard robot outfit, and two others were decked out in bright-colored sandwich boards promoting their unofficial SXSW show the following night.

Omar Cuellar, the sandwich-board-wearing drummer, said the group initially planned to hand out fliers. "But then we went ape!" Ha. Ha.

"I don't know if it's going to get anybody out to our show, but it'll hopefully get people to at least remember our name," he said.

Alas, we couldn't make it to the Facing New York show. Too much competition on the schedule -- much to Jimmy Jam's delight.

The Grammy-winning songwriter and producer was attending his first SXSW and was thrilled by the sheer volume of artists in Austin.

"The vibe here is amazing," he said. "It proves that the music business is great. The record business may be a little shaky right now, but the music business is good. Music itself is a spiritual thing. We attach business to it, but music comes from the soul, the heart. And you can see here that the passion is still there."

Seymour Stein was looking for that very thing when I ran into him on Sixth Street. Stein is the co-founder of Sire Records, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a guy who knows a thing or two about greatness: His signings over the years have included everybody from the Ramones and Talking Heads to the Replacements and some woman named Madonna. He could be resting on his laurels and bank account. But he was rushing from one showcase to another.

"If you find just one great band here, do you know how lucky you are?" he said. "And if you find two or three, it's like breaking the bank in Las Vegas. Just don't drive yourself crazy worrying about missing anything. Because it'll kill you."

Don't I know it.