Austin Music is A Scene Not a Sound is one of the clunkiest book titles I’ve come across in quite a while. But after reading Michael Corcoran’s 150-year history of Austin music, the title makes perfect sense.
Music has always been a participatory exchange between performer and audience when you think about it, even if the communication goes no further than the sound of hands clapping. In Austin, where the oldest business in the city (and the whole state) is Scholz Garden, a beer hall founded by a singing club, the scene makes the music. Dancing remains a deep tradition, and more recent physical expressions such as slam dancing, mixing it up in the mosh pit, and stage diving have carved their own niches.
Corcoran, a writer for this magazine, has a long history as a smart-ass music columnist for the Austin Chronicle (and as their sports columnist who called himself Red Corcoran), the country music critic for the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American-Statesman gossip columnist, stringer for the National Enquirer. One of his finest missives about Austin was a 2012 blog headlined “Welcome to Mediocre, Texas,” teasing the music scene’s inflated sense of itself, observing that “in nearly 50 years as a hotbed, Austin has not produced a single Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominee. Timbuk 3 ain’t gonna make it, folks. Rock stars aren’t launched here, they go to Austin to retire, work the steps, and wait for their Margaret Moser profile.”
Corcoran is also a serious music historian who shined a light on the blind gospel singer and pianist Arizona Dranes, settled some doubts about where deep blues master Blind Willie Johnson died, and documented Washington Phillips and his unusual stringed instrument, the manzarene. He’s the star of the film documentary about the Jones Family Singers gospel group, whom he “discovered.” He also wrote two very good history books about Texas music, All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music and [Ghost Notes] Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music.
Both of Corcoran’s roles come through in his latest book, which was released by TCU Press at the end of January. The historian emerges early, citing the German community for institutionalizing music in Austin, not at Scholz, but at Turner Hall, built in 1872, which he called Austin’s first dedicated music venue. He introduces ensembles such as Steve Gardner and His Hokum Kings, the all-female Texettes, and George Corley and His Royal Aces, a nine-piece “colored orchestra.”
Austin music, the way Corcoran writes it, isn’t a sound so much as an attitude and permission to cut loose with music. Local music hubs are detailed: Sixth Street long before Dirty Sixth, Red River when it was part of what was known as The Dogleg, the Drag by UT Austin, and East Eleventh and East Twelfth where most of the Black clubs were.
So are eras: post-war country, early rock and roll, folk revivals, the birth of the Cosmic Cowboy, and hardcore punk. The Armadillo World Headquarters, Split Rail, Broken Spoke, and Soap Creek Saloon and Continental Club get their due as significant venues, as do lesser-known joints like Henry’s, the Back Room, Charlie’s Playhouse, the Skyline, Mother Earth, and the Victory Grill.
Radio is recognized mainly through the influence of KOKE FM Super Roper Radio disc jockey and newspaper columnist Joe Gracey, a major player in 1970s Austin, along with the Black disc jockeys at KVET and Tony Von at KTAE in Taylor. Inner Sanctum and Waterloo Records get props as critical community hubs that built scenes.
The fun is in the details. I personally knew old-timers cited, including Robert Shaw, the Grey Ghost, Gene Snowden, and Ray Campi. But I didn’t know Charlie Giddens, and that he owned both Charlie’s Playhouse in East Austin, home of HL Hubbard and the Jets, and Ernie’s Chicken Shack, an afterhours joint at the end of Webberville Road with gambling in the back (the writer Nick Tosches showed up at my door at 5 a.m. one morning saying the 50 bucks he lost shooting craps at Ernie’s was the best money he’d ever spent).
Janis Joplin, Willie Nelson, and Stevie Ray Vaughan are celebrated, but what makes the scene are the less-well-known characters such as Smokey Rhodes the dancer, Western band Dolores and the Bluebonnet Boys, gospel entrepreneur Junior Franklin, singer-songwriters Townes Van Zandt and Daniel Johnston, and glam blues rockers Krackerjack.
Once the storytelling gets to the early 1980s, Corcoran the historian yields to Corky, the redheaded punk with the pointed pen. That’s when Corcoran, who grew up in Honolulu, hit town with his friend the tattoo artist Rollo Banks and set up shop on The Drag just down the block from Raul’s.
His personal recall of nights at the Beach, the Black Cat, and Liberty Lunch is laced with snark, mean-girl jabs, and speed, which kind of disrupts the historical flow, but is so enthusiastic and heartfelt—sentimental, even—that I can’t think of a better way to explain Austin music’s appeal. On a good night, in the right club, with the right band hitting the note, even the crankiest hardass can turn into a slobbering fanboy.
Corcoran and I were on a weekly Zoom call that started before the pandemic. We talked about this book a lot. He supported himself during the writing process by posting segments on Substack, promising subscribers AMIASNAS when it was published.
Last July, after edits, arguments, and back-and-forths about the title and the cover, and other conundrums that go with making a book, he finally declared himself done.
His history of Austin ends in the late 1980s with the birth of South By Southwest. Some of the chronology is picked up in a companion memoir Corcoran also finished, titled Overserved. He was pushing himself, he said, because he wanted to leave a legacy. Now he was ready for a break.
There would be more books, he hoped. He’d spent time last spring at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington at the invitation of John Troutman, curator of music and musical instruments at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He came back saying there were three books he needed to write, starting with a biography of the Texas blues pioneer Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Two days after I left for vacation in New Mexico last July, I got the call. Michael had died. It’s been a gut check ever since. No one I know was into Austin music like he was, and no one was as acerbic, witty, funny and insightful in writing about it. I enjoyed reading him no matter if I liked the music he was writing about or not (eg. Oasis). I eagerly anticipated the Zoom calls to hear what kind of dirt Corcoran had dug up, or hear his opinion of the latest new shiny thing. The sadness of his passing is tempered by the arrival of this book with the long title.
As for that legacy he was after, I know Austin music pretty well—well enough to have reminded Corcoran many times that he got to Austin 10 years too late, which is what older Austin folks like me like to tell younger Austin folks like him. Knowing what I know, I’d say that this book is all the legacy he could have wished for.
