I
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the highest praise I can give when asked about the skills of those I work with is to say that someone is “competent.” At first, this sounds like a backhanded compliment – even to my ears, though I have used it again and again. It doesn’t seem like the word indicates much of an achievement. Rather than indicating high praise, the word “competent” sounds like it conveys the lowest rating of acceptable performance. But when I’ve tried to detail further what I’m trying to get at, “competent” is still the best launch word.
Usually, I hate going to the dictionary because definitions therein are made mostly to try to tie words down. But with “competent,” those definitions include: “having the necessary ability, knowledge, or skill to do something successfully” and, in further clarification, “efficient and capable.” My favorite, found on Wikipedia, is “the ability of an individual to perform a job properly.”
The compliment is in direct proportion to the achievement. When the truly competent tackle a job, you never have to check up or ask about it again. It absolutely means performing a job properly, and when it is thus performed, then it’s finished.
II
Many of the jobs I have held fit into traditional categories that are widely accepted and can be almost clinically defined. It is understood what I do, for instance, as an editor at the Chronicle and as a writer.
Much of the time, however, I’ve been involved in performing jobs that were essentially invented as my colleagues and I went along.
When I worked with Richard Linklater and other Austin Film Society folks to create the Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund, there were models – nonprofits that gave grants to creative talent – but they were only helpful in the most obvious ways, not when it came to specifics.
The Austin Studios project was such a completely unique venture between a city and a nonprofit that one could not find even the hint of a precedent for any facet of it. Working with dedicated, hard-working city staff members and some extraordinary professionals who donated time – bankers, architects, builders, and lawyers – it took essentially a full year to work everything out.
The longest, most open-ended act of making it up as we go along has been and is South by Southwest. In the beginning, we weren’t even entirely sure what it was. I mean, we got it – the idea, the structure, the momentum – but it went through growth spurt after growth spurt. It was an intense, no-sleep swirl. Imagine trying to rearrange the furniture in the middle of a sandstorm.
There was no blueprint for SXSW, no book describing how it was to be structured and operated. Even from the earliest days, there was no other event quite like it.
Over the years, under the leadership of Managing Director Roland Swenson, SXSW has constantly improved and reinvented itself. The event is always evolving; new initiatives are added regularly and better ways to do things introduced.
III
This is not just self-congratulatory self-aggrandizement or a cheap advertisement for ourselves. It is a eulogy for Biff Parker.
It is somewhat defensive, in that so many of the projects in Austin that we undertook at one point or another are now regarded by younger generations as natural geological formations, solid and out of the earth, that have always been there. It was astonishing when, during a couple of different discussions, it became apparent that there are a number of folks who really believe that all those bands come to Austin for a week in March not because of but in spite of SXSW. Somehow, we had managed to pirate the swallows that annually and naturally returned to Capistrano.
The above is all to try to set a context; it’s trying to convey a setting where “competent” is not just a personal quality but, under many circumstances, the most desired and appreciated one.
On Monday we learned that Biff Parker had died. It was as if a storm had hit. Any number of SXSW folks have been walking around in a near-daze since. I’ve known Biff since at least 1989, when he came to work for SXSW.
IV
Imagine it is the fifth or sixth or seventh year of SXSW. As always, we are all out on the streets working, troubleshooting, and helping out. Imagine there are crowds everywhere. You are at a club where the electricity just went out or where the manager has decided to simply ignore his contract with SXSW, or a band has decided that it is more important than any other band so it needs to be treated differently, or there are long lines in front of the club or crowds in the back. Over the years you have been in similar, though often not exactly the same, situations. As SXSW constantly changes, there are always new problems and issues.
If you are me, then many who meet you almost immediately peg you as an East Coast intellectual type, always quicker at thinking than at action. In some cases, this means technical and security people don’t take you quite seriously. There are almost always, however, other SXSW staff members working there as well.
Things are not completely out of control; it’s just that you are in an impossibly tense situation, one that almost always has to be resolved to the satisfaction of any number of parties (club employees and owners, audiences, bands, sometimes the authorities, etc.).
Imagine this: You are raising your voice just to be heard, and, if you are me, your hands are gesticulating wildly. You’ve been in similar situations before, and you know you’ll be in them again. More than a few times, you’ve managed to solve the problem and create calm on your own, but there is never a guarantee of that happening.
There you are, the seas swirling ever more intensely around you, and you’re beginning to feel certain that things are just about to get worse. Then you look up to see Biff Parker approaching. Relief is barely the beginning of what you start to feel.
Wearing jeans that always seemed to me to have just been pressed and a carefully laundered cowboy shirt (he certainly wasn’t a dandy; the shirt probably came from Goodwill), he was well-dressed, respectful, and professional; yet in the same way Pig-Pen always has a cloud of dirt over his head, the cloud following Biff was one of sweet calm.
Biff approaches, takes charge, begins solving the crisis. He was almost always smiling. He’d start by talking to everyone from club managers to bouncers, from band kids to audience members, from SXSW staff to the police.
Actually, “talking” is wrong; the correct word is “listening.” As he leaned in to catch every word of the person with whom he was speaking, tension dissipated and things righted themselves. He’d ask what the problems were, what issues needed to be addressed. Then he’d solve the problem and deal with the issues. Biff always could and always would fix whatever needed fixing.
It wasn’t just in tough situations that he shined. On more than one occasion, we threw him into a building that I thought was barely standing. Some time later, we’d come back to a club with good sound and a dance floor, looking as fine as
any honky-tonk, and Biff would be just outside chatting with the housing inspector or cops or the bouncers from
surrounding clubs.
Biff – friendly, funny, and helpful to anybody in any situation – was absolutely in tune with the rhythms of SXSW. Whatever job he started, always and anywhere, he worked at until it was finished properly.
V
Roland tells me that his real name was Steven Stelmach. Then he adds: “The way I heard it, was he was nicknamed ‘Biff Parker’ by the Reivers when he was their tour manager/roadie. I guess because he was so earnest and capable.”
I could rewrite this column over and over again, because Biff was so spectacularly competent it really is hard to describe what he did and how he did it.
On the SXSW website (www.sxsw.com), there are a number of staff reminiscences about Biff. It begins by stating that “Our hearts go out to his girlfriend, SXSW Production Manager Leslie Uppinghouse and the Stelmach family here in Austin.”
As an appropriate end note: SXSW Music Creative Director Brent Grulke has written there: “Biff was someone anyone was always happy to have on their team because he Knew Things and Got Things Done. He liked to make others look good and lived to serve people – but he was his own master and answered to no one. Biff was a stylish dresser, yet utterly lacking in vanity or pretension.”
When asked about SXSW, I always mention how much I love working the event because I’m so completely taken with everyone with whom I get to work. Whenever I’ve said this, Biff has always been one of the first people I think of. That’s not going to change.
For more on Biff Parker, see “Off the Record,” Music.
This article appears in November 4 • 2011.