Here Comes the Chronthlology

In conjunction with the Chron's 30th anniversary this year, UT Press is publishing The Austin Chronicle Music Anthology. This hulking, 314-page ride through Austin music history officially hits the streets a week from today with a big release party at Antone's. Chron music columnist Austin Powell, who co-edited the book with Austin Sound founder Doug Freeman, will reveal the full musical line-up for the party in weekly Off the Record column tomorrow.

UPDATE (3/3/11): The line-up includes Standing Waves, the Skunks, Kathy McCarty, the Gourds, the Crack Pipes, Poi Twang (featuring Twang Twang Shock-a-Boom's David Garza and Poi Dog Pondering's Frank Orrall) and special guest Daniel Johnston. Tickets here.

I'm jazzed about having a smattering of my work in the book. I didn't choose what stuff of mine went in, but I'm glad Austin and Doug used my oral history of Scratch Acid, my 1998 live review of Dale Watson at Ginny's Little Longhorn and my review of the Motards compilation, Stardom, among other things.

Although my opinion is obviously biased, I think Austin and Doug did a remarkably good job with this book. The photography is amazing throughout and the pre-online archive selections from the 80s and early 90s read like opening a window into Austin's past. The late Jeff Whittington's writing is some of the best music writing you'll ever read in Austin or anyplace else. And no one could do hilarious, spot-on snark like Michael Corcoran during his mid-80s run as music columnist.

In pulling together three decades of next week's bird cage liners, Austin and Doug wisely avoided a "definitive history" rubric, instead remaining steadfast to the rambling, tangent-prone vibe that - for better or worse - has traditionally defined the Chron's music coverage. It's a unique way to tell the story - and a very Austin one at that.

The Return of Bubble Puppy

I'm excited to hear that Bubble Puppy - 3/4 of the classic line-up, anyway - is reuniting at this year's Austin Music Awards. Although their legacy has long been in the shadows of fellow International Artists like the 13th Floor Elevators and the Red Krayola, "Hot Smoke and Sasafrass" was actually the Houston-based label's best-charting single, clocking in at #14 on the Billboard chart in 1969. Their sole album, A Gathering of Promises, is also worth seeking out.

Back in 2004, I interviewed Bubble Puppy guitarist Todd Potter and drummer David Fore on the occasion of Fuel 2000's rerelease of Promises. Their description of the band's up-and-down history was the stuff of movies. While writing the story, I actually drove over to Riverside Farms Road with Promises on the disc deck and tried to imagine what it was like in 1967, when the band lived and practiced in an old house on that street. To hear Potter and Fore describe it was positively idyllic.

One quick note about that story - the Municipal Auditorium where Bubble Puppy opened for the Who was in San Antonio, not Austin.

And finally, here is a very rare video of the band performing "Hot Smoke and Sasafrass" at an undated reunion show. I'm guessing it's from their mid-80s reunion, but it could be older.

Tight Trousers On a Wire Fence

Between proposed state austerity measures and the recent drying up of a steady freelance writing gig, my economic prospects for 2011 are increasingly bearish.

Maybe things have turned the corner, but the spoils of "recovery" will accrue largely to the investor class while people who work for a living will be asked to work harder for less.

Could things be worse? Absolutely. Will they get so bad that this looks good by comparison? I sure hope not.

Welcome to the Texas Century. Now step into those tight trousers and get up on that wire fence, boy.

Put This On: LBJ Buys Pants from Put This On on Vimeo.

A Check from John Lennon

I don't have a particularly poignant recollection to share about John Lennon on the 30th anniversary of his murder. But I know someone who does.

Rob Patterson, who was my first editor at the Austin Chronicle, wrote an astute and moving essay for the Huffington Post about the time he received a check from John Lennon. Read it here.

SXSW Getting New Digs

SXSW is getting a new home at 400 W. Bowie St. The 3-story building, now housing an architectural firm, is conveniently sandwiched between the Whole Foods behemoth and the Spring condo tower on the site of the Electric Lounge. This will put SXSW considerably closer to the epicenter of festival-related action in March than their current Hyde Park offices on 41st St.

This is a long, long way from the late 80s, when SXSW was run out of a conference room at the Chronicle's old offices on the corner of 29th and Rio Grande. Not long after that, I remember marveling at the fact they needed an entire ranch-style house (year-round, no less!) to run the fest.

Credits Roll for Dobie Theatre

It's the end of the line for the Dobie Theatre. The 4-screen cinema across the street from UT will close Sunday.

The Dobie was never a particularly great place to see a movie. Parking was a hassle, the screens were small and the auditorium seating configurations were weird. Despite all that, the Dobie's adventurous programming during its 80s/90s heyday made it an integral part of Austin's film scene. In many ways, longtime Dobie owner/manager Scott Dinger set the stage for the Alamo Drafthouse's ascendancy.

The first movie I ever saw at the Dobie was a midnight screening of Liquid Sky 23 years ago this month. I saw a lot of midnight movies at Dobie between 1987 and 1989 because it was an easy stumble from my dorm room. Alcohol definitely enlivened repeated viewings of low-budget, Troma-style gore vehicles like Blood Diner, Street Trash and Surf Nazis Must Die. Then there was the 3-D porn movie with the late John Holmes literally coming right at you.

I remember going to see Slacker there in 1990 when it was just a weird local indie film. The girl I went with thought the movie was pointless, but for me, Slacker epitomized why disregarding potential career opportunities to stay in Austin after graduation might not be such a bad idea.

The last movie I remember seeing at the Dobie was the Ramones doc End of the Century in 2005. After Landmark Theaters took over the Dobie in 1999, they gradually began shifting toward more typical art-house fare that could just as easily be seen at other cinemas around town. Landmark announced it was abandoning the Dobie earlier this year. The chain sought a new operator to take over, but like many formerly thriving UT-area businesses, the Dobie has become functionally obsolete.

When I came to UT, you could see movies at the Dobie, the Varsity and at several on-campus locations curated by the Texas Union Film Program. What a difference a quarter-century makes (adjusts dentures).

The Texas Troubles

This summer is the 150th anniversary of the "Texas Troubles," a forgotten spate of pre-Civil War racial hysteria started by a fire of disputed origin that destroyed the Dallas business district. The most likely cause of the fire was high temperatures combined with highly combustible phosphorus matches. However, other fires in Denton and Pilot Point fueled the notion that a coordinated slave revolt was underway.

Without any proof of the latter, the editor of the burned-out Dallas Herald called for vigilante justice to be carried out against suspect slaves and white abolitionists. This ultimately led to the public lynching of three slaves near Dealey Plaza. All told, at least 30 and as many as 100 blacks and whites alike died at the hands of vigilantes across North and East Texas. Some credit the Texas Troubles as a major-but-largely-unexamined factor in the South's swing toward succession.

Dallas-based writer Julia Barton has an very interesting story about the Troubles and their aftermath in this month's Texas Observer.

The Bass Line from "The Brady Bunch" End Theme as Rendered by Some Guy in Shorts

Back off, Barney Miller! From Listener Kliph Nesteroff at WFMU's Beware of the Blog, get ready to experience "The Bass Line from The Brady Bunch End Theme as Rendered by Some Guy in Shorts."



The "Guy in Shorts" is actually named Jason Long, and the awesome bass line from The Brady Bunch End Theme was originally performed by the great session bassist Carol Kaye, who also played on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep - Mountain High," Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" and a bajillion other hit records produced in L.A. during the 60s.

Continental Trailways

One of my fondest childhood memories was riding on a Continental Trailways bus with my mom from Dallas to Victoria via Houston to visit my maternal grandparents. In the early 70s, Continental Trailways Golden Eagle buses still had on-board hostesses who would bring you soft drinks and light snacks. Bayou City History blogger J.R. Gonzales has unearthed a November 1968 Houston Chronicle profile of one such hostess accompanied by plenty of hairspray-infused photos. Although the photos are in black and white, I totally remember the fabric patterns on those seat cushions.

The hostesses disappeared from the buses sometime in the mid-70s, but we continued to ride. Once we moved to Houston and I got a little older, my parents even let me ride the bus to Victoria by myself. I'm pretty sure we won't be letting Alex ride the bus alone until he's 35.

Disco Demolition Night!

I meant to post this on July 12, which was the 31st anniversary of Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago.

By 1979, disco had become a musical trend pushed too far. Hell, even Ethel Merman had a disco album out by then. A nation of disaffected - and, it must be said, overwhelmingly white - rock and rollers took up the rallying cry, "DISCO SUCKS!" You saw it on T-shirts and bumper stickers everywhere. While much of the knee-jerk disdain for disco can legitimately be ascribed to barely latent racism and homophobia, the velvet-rope exclusivity famously epitomized by Studio 54 was fairly deserving of a massive backlash.

Disco Demolition Night was conceived by Chicago DJ Steve Dahl of album-rock station WLUP-FM (a.k.a., "Loop 98") as a promotion to get more fans to come cheer for the then-moribund Chicago White Sox as they took on the Detroit Tigers in a doubleheader. Everyone who brought a disco record to Comiskey Park would gain admission to Comiskey Park for just 98 cents. Between games, the records would be collected and ceremoniously blown up at midfield between games.

What could possibly go wrong with that? Watch this ESPN clip and find out...

Farm Aid 2

On July 4, 1986, my high school pal Alex Botas and I trekked up Highway 290 from Houston to Austin for Farm Aid 2. Willie Nelson's benefit concert for America's family farmers was originally slated to take place at UT's Memorial Stadium. Then they announced it would be held at Southpark Meadows. Finally, the show landed at Manor Downs, a dilapidated horse racing track that offered little in the way of amenities.

At 17, I hadn't yet discovered that sitting in a shadeless, dusty field in 100-degree heat with 50,000 people is no way to enjoy music. I remember we had a cooler stocked with cans of root beer, but they wouldn't let us bring in cans, so we just poured the root beer into the cooler and ladled it out with paper cups. We didn't think to bring food, blankets or sunscreen. A nice lady in her thirties found us pitiable enough to donate a couple of sandwiches from her well-stocked cooler to our lost cause.

We got there in time to see Willie join War for a round of "Why Can't We Be Friends?" and stuck around through the fallow rock jam session led by Bon Jovi. I should've known it was going to be anti-climatic when Don Johnson was drafted to introduce everyone. Joe Walsh meandered through an unsteady "Rocky Mountain Way" before Motley Crue's first-string drunk driver Vince Neil showed up to sing "Smokin' in the Boys Room" while Willie and his longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael played along just for fun.

If you think the TV clip below sounds bad, imagine how it sounded a quarter mile away from the stage.



After four or five hours, we gave up and drove into Austin to watch the rest of the show on TV in a cheap motel room.

The 1970 Lubbock Tornado

Today is the 40th anniversary of the 1970 Lubbock tornado. I was born in Lubbock in 1968, but our family moved to Dallas a few months before this storm.

In addition to killing some 28 people, the Lubbock tornado was notorious for slamming into the 20-story Great Plains Life Building and causing a permanent 12-inch deformation in its steel frame. Three of four elevator support rails were bent and approximately 60 percent of the windows were blown out.

While many predicted the building would collapse in the days after the storm, civil engineers from Texas Tech said it could be repaired and didn't need to be torn down. A series of out-of-town owners let the building sit vacant for years, attracting pigeons and occasionally shedding bricks onto downtown streets. The building was auctioned off to Amarillo investors Rufus and Kenneth Gaut in 1974 for the princely sum of $115,000 in back taxes.

The building reopened to tenants a year later and the now-renamed Metro Life tower still stands today as the tallest building in Lubbock.

For a dated-but-interesting look at Lubbock's emergency response to the 1970 tornado, check out Twister!, a 26-minute educational film that was produced by the federal Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (FEMA's precursor). You can view it online at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image's ever-growing video library.

1970 photo from the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

This is Only a Test

When I was growing up, long before I understood the threat of nuclear holocaust, I was profoundly disturbed any time a broadcaster in my area conducted a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

Having a mellow afternoon of Al Brodax-era Popeye cartoons callously interrupted by that godawful attention signal was pure nightmare fodder to my young mind. Even though the Emergency Broadcast System was replaced in 1997 by the Emergency Alert System - which has its own equally annoying attention signal - I still occasionally have nuclear war dreams in which EBS figures prominently.

When I was a college radio DJ at UT, I always hoped I'd one day get to conduct an EBS test myself as a symbolic triumph over childhood fear. Sadly, KTSB was only "broadcasting" on cable radio back then, so we didn't commit the time, training and expenses to do EBS tests. By the time the station took to the airwaves as KVRX, I'd long since graduated.

Occasionally, you'd hear a local EBS activation for a tornado warning or something like that, but the system was never activated for a national emergency. Except once. Sort of.

At 9:33 a.m. EST on Saturday, February 20, 1971, the EBS was accidentally activated because of an erroneous message from the National Warning Facility at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado. Interestingly, very few stations did what they were supposed to do if it had been an actual emergency. Many stations didn't get the activation messages and the vast majority of those that did ignored it. A contemporary Austin American-Statesman story about the goof reported that KVET didn't do an EBS activation because it occurred at approximately the same time as a regular weekly test of the system. Although the National Warning Facility sent a cancellation message at 9:59 a.m., that message didn't use the proper authentication code. A cancellation message with the correct code didn't go out until 10:13 a.m.

I've read several print accounts of this false alarm, but I've always wondered what it would've sounded like if I'd been listening to one of the stations that actually announced the false EBS activation back in 1971. Fortunately, an astute radiohead named Jim Cassell has preserved a recording of WOWO's broadcast out of Fort Wayne, Ind. from that morning. You can hear it - with the attention signal presumably (and mercifully) edited out - right here.

Although announcer Bob Sievers is very professional and careful not to unduly alarm the public, hearing this would've scared the oatmeal out of me. Needless to say, this would've been a much bigger deal had it occurred in the middle of a weekday instead of on Saturday morning. And the worst part of it is that the last record you would've heard before the missiles struck was "Doesn't Somebody Want to be Wanted" by the Partridge Family.

Over the Edge

Last September, Vice published an excellent oral history of Over the Edge, the awesome 1979 suburban teen rebellion film that launched Matt Dillon’s career.

Like many recovering teens my age, I stumbled onto Over the Edge via repeated airings on cable. It was quite a heady rush to see junior high school-aged kids portraying junior high school-aged kids setting police cars on fire while I myself was a junior high school-aged kid.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole for Harry Northrup, the actor who portrayed the much-reviled Sgt. Doberman, to hold Over the Edge in the same esteem as Rebel Without a Cause. Anyone who grew up on reruns will have a hard time watching the latter without likening Jim Backus’ portrayal of James Dean’s dad to Thurston Howell III, or worse, Mr. Magoo.


Although I wasn't much of an adolescent troublemaker, kids who looked and sounded like the kids in Over the Edge were ubiquitous when I was growing up. Maybe you'd go over to their houses when their parents weren't home to blast album-oriented rock music, take a few furtive belts from the liquor cabinet or pass a handgun around the room.

Looking back, I think most of these failed afterschool special auditions arose from boredom rather than delinquency. While Over the Edge took that notion to an exploitative extreme, no other movie does a better job of capturing the overall aesthetic of the late 70s/early 80s suburban latchkey kid generation.

Incidentally, I did a phone interview with Cheap Trick bassist Tom Petersson about 10 years ago and brought up the opening sequence of Over the Edge in which Cheap Trick's version of Terry Reid's "Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace" sets the film's desolate, sneering tone. I was surprised when Petersson said he'd never seen it.

Texas Stadium Imploded

Texas Stadium was returned to dust this morning in a Kraft Macaroni and Cheese-sponsored implosion for the ages. I didn't bother to watch it live on TV, but here's some pretty good footage of the implosion - and nothing but - that was shot from a nearby building.



I like the way the roof span in the left half of the frame just sort of hangs there for a few seconds before crashing down.

Houston's Variety Fair Closing

Variety Fair 5 & 10 has been selling this and that in Houston’s Rice Village since 1948. Growing up in the nearby bedroom enclaves of West University and Bellaire, I purchased a healthy chunk of my Topps football card collection from Variety Fair during the late 70s and early 80s. It seemed like founder Ben Klinger was always there working the mechanical cash register, which was old-fashioned even in 1978.

After 61 years, Variety Fair will close up shop in June. So if you happen to be near Houston anytime soon, make a pilgrimage to see one of the last authentic five-and-dime stores in America.

Video on Variety Fair closing from Houston Chronicle:

The Last Days of Texas Stadium

Texas Stadium, home to the Dallas Cowboys until 2008, is slated for implosion just after dawn on April 11. The Dallas Morning News website has a bittersweet slideshow chronicling pre-demolition preparations, which includes filling the sunken football field and lower ring of seats with dirt to bring it up to ground level so they won't have to dig debris out of a hole.

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is sponsoring Texas Stadium's implosion as a launchpad for their new "Cheddar Explosion" flavor. Some lucky kid who wins Kraft's essay contest will get a free trip to Irving to mash the detonation button, which is almost as good as having Willy Wonka give you a chocolate factory.

The S from Hell!

Seeing and hearing the 1964 Screen Gems logo with its proto-synth score by Eric Siday takes me right back to the earliest days of my lifelong affair with television. Somehow, the logo evokes way more nostalgia than the TV shows that preceded it. Perhaps the logo's incidental, effervescent nature makes it feel like a more authentic totem to my lost childhood.

Sadly, not all of my generational contemporaries remember the Screen Gems logo with such fondness. In fact, some are downright terrified by it. Brave filmmaker Rodney Ascher chronicles the horror in his short documentary, The S From Hell.

New Year's Day, Dallas, 1973

From Robert Wilonsky at the Dallas Observer's Unfair Park blog via Dallas radio know-it-all George Gimarc, here's a six-minute snippet of a January 1, 1973 aircheck tape from Dallas progressive rock station KAFM.

The DJ on duty epitomizes the laid-back prog attitude mocked by Bill Murray's "Mel Brewer" character on the 1975 National Lampoon album, Goodbye Pop. A little Boz Scaggs, something obscure from a cat named Jack Schnectman and a spot for the upcoming Traffic/Free concert at Tarrant County Convention Center makes this a super-mellow New Year's Day come-down.

Depressed Christmas

On Thursday, John Seaborn Gray listed his picks for most depressing Christmas songs of all time on the Houston Press music blog. Sure, John Prine’s “Christmas in Prison” is pretty grim, but Gray overlooked the yuletide suicide note right in his own backyard.

Culturcide’s “Depressed Christmas” was the B-side of the experimental Houston group’s 1987 single, “Santa Claus Was My Lover.” I played it just now and Kate offered the following succinct assessment:

“It woke me up from my nap in a very unpleasant way. Make it stop!”