On the Hunt for Mack McCormick, a Houstonian and Folklorist Who Loved Texas Blues
The Smithsonian Institution brings a closer understanding of the music collector with the release of a book, exhibition, and box set of field recordings
Written by:Joe Nick Patoski
Published: July 28, 2023 at 2:01 pm
Mack McCormick (right) photographed with drummer Spider Kilpatrick. Photo courtesy National Museum of History Archives Center, Robert Mack McCormick Collection, 1485, Box 10, Folder Photographs of Mack McCormick, modern, 1960-1998, undated
The first time I saw Mack McCormick’s name, it was attached to the liner notes on the back of the first albums issued by Arhoolie Records, the storied American folk music label founded by Chris Strachwitz. At the time, I didn’t know McCormick had led the Polish-born music enthusiast, who passed away earlier this year, to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, and Clifton Chenier—Arhoolie’s core artists—before falling out with him. The break was a familiar pattern for Mack McCormick, as I came to learn.
Eight years after his death in 2015 at the age of 85, the self-taught music folklorist and field researcher from Houston is finally having his moment. The Smithsonian Institution has recognized Robert “Mack” McCormick with a book, an exhibit, and, coming Aug. 4, a box set of 66 field recordings he made that are nothing less than the most comprehensive collection of Texas blues music ever assembled.
McCormick was a high school dropout who held a series of odd jobs to underwrite his passion—collecting, recording, and writing about music from what he called “Greater Texas,” East Texas and surrounding states extending back to Mississippi. He was particularly fond of African American blues. From the 1950s through the 1970s, he traveled throughout Texas and the South searching the places where early recording artists and their music originated and seeking out the music makers and people who knew them. For McCormick, it was all about the hunt for music and information, which he rarely shared, even while he dealt with personal issues including anger and isolation and clinically diagnosed manic depression.
As a field researcher chasing music, McCormick was directly influenced by John Avery Lomax and his son Alan Lomax, the trailblazing song hunters and music folklorists who were also from Texas. Lomax’s eldest son, John Avery Lomax Jr., and McCormick were both involved with the Houston Folklore & Music Society, founded in 1951, which nurtured the careers of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Townes Van Zandt, Nanci Griffith, and Guy Clark.
Unlike the Lomaxes, who were tied to academia and the Library of Congress, McCormick was an amateur obsessive. To support his habit, he drove taxis and worked for the U.S. Census Bureau in Houston’s Fourth Ward in 1960, just so he could learn more about barrelhouse pianists in the neighborhood. In addition, he did contract work for the Smithsonian in the late 1960s and early ’70s, scouting the South for talented musicians to perform at the institution’s summer music festival.
Mance Lipscomb with his family, photographed by Mack McCormick. National Museum of History Archives Center, Robert Mack McCormick Collection, 1485, Box 20, Folder 17, Outsize photos, Texas Blues, undated
Of all the musicians McCormick studied, none captured his attention more than Robert Johnson. In May, the Smithsonian published McCormick’s much-anticipated Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey about the influential Mississippi Delta blues guitarist and singer who once recorded 42 songs at sessions at the Gunther Hotel in San Antonio in 1936 and the Warner Brothers/Vitagraph building in Dallas in 1937 before dying in 1938, allegedly under shady circumstances. He would become a major influence on Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and other British rock guitarists of the 1960s, and one of most mysterious figures in blues music.
Twenty years after Johnson’s death, McCormick started chasing Johnson’s ghost. Studying phone books and maps and making cold calls, he drove all over Mississippi following leads, visiting neighborhoods, asking around. McCormick’s manuscript about his quest was first finished in the early 1970s, but he continued making revisions without ever publishing it. After McCormick’s death, John W. Troutman, curator of music and musical instruments at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, edited the manuscript and wrote the book’s detailed preface and afterword.
Here’s my suggestion to truly appreciate Biography of a Phantom: Skip Troutman’s commentary until later, forget you’ve ever heard anything about McCormick, and dive in.
It’s a fun ride, part detective mystery, part anthropological travelogue. McCormick’s research methodology may seem quaint and dated, but it led to opportunities for direct contact: He speaks with relatives and friends who knew Johnson very well—and under another name. As the hunt progresses, McCormick’s appreciation of the secondary characters as real people changes, and he understands the artist more in the context of the community he lived in, culminating in a vivid scene in 1970 in a Mississippi Delta shotgun shack, where the music so familiar to his friends and family is played back to them on recordings.
John A. Lomax’s Adventure of a Ballad Hunter is the template for all books about collecting music. Other books, such as Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches and Do Not Sell at Any Price by Amanda Petrusch, do deeper dives into that obsessive world, but Biography of a Phantom hits the sweetest spot. It shines the light on the music chase at a time when scores of collectors were fanning out to the countryside trying to find out about a blues song’s origins or a recording artist’s roots.
McCormick’s friend Roger Wood, author of the books Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues and Texas Zydeco, says the published manuscript reminded him of John Graves’s Goodbye To A River. “[I]t takes the reader on a very personal trip with the narrator, who intertwines history and immediate experience, prior knowledge, and discovery, to communicate how a place, a culture, has changed over time (and will change more in the future),” he tells me in an email exchange. “I see/appreciate this book as great writing, the most fully articulated presentation of Mack’s narrative voice and capacity for engaging his audience.”
Wood adds, however, that McCormick would have hated it. “Mack would likely be furious about myriad details and developments with this [or any] publication beyond his control and the process that led to it,” Wood says. “He would likely threaten lawsuits, claim victimhood, add several new names to his enemies list, etc. Even if he had consented to whatever transpired, he would likely be furious, if not immediately, eventually—after he had taken time to sprout and nurture grievances. That was Mack.”
With fury and resentment no longer impediments, the story that finally has come out stands on its own merits. It’s a quest that anyone who has loved a particular song or artist can relate to. For blues researchers and scholars, this is as deep as the hunt for music ever gets.
When doing his field research a half century ago, McCormick knew he would draw scrutiny of white law enforcement and Black community leaders, but he jumped the color line nonetheless, a brazen act at the time. A Black researcher chasing white music could not have done the same. This reality is addressed in Treasures and Trouble: Looking Inside a Legendary Blues Archive, the exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of History opened in June in Washington D.C.
For Texans unable to travel to the nation’s capital, the exhibition showcases artifacts from “The Monster,” McCormick’s nickname for his massive collection of work, along with a reexamination of the process of gathering and preserving music. There is a focus on the patriarchal dynamic of a white man documenting a Black man’s history in the Jim Crow segregated South, and a frank assessment of McCormick’s myriad issues, which included grifting and hoarding.
McCormick persuaded Johnson’s siblings and heirs to share photographs and stories and sign agreements to share in profits from his estate, but he did not return materials to the relatives, as letters in the exhibit document. A Memphis producer named Steve LaVere subsequently secured an agreement from Johnson’s half-sister Carrie Thompson that effectively undercut McCormick. He wasn’t the only music hound chasing Johnson’s ghost, and the realization that he might not be able to capitalize on his quest might have contributed to McCormick’s fragile mental state.
McCormick preserved critically important music and information about African American musicians in the early and midcentury, and how he went about it is rightfully called into question. Certainly, what he did then is not what someone could do today. Then again, what they were chasing no longer exists.
Finally, there’s the music. On Aug. 4, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings releases Playing For the Man At Door, a 66-song box set of field recordings made by McCormick between the 1950s and ’70s, along with 128-page liner notes that include essays from producers Jeff Place and John W. Troutman on McCormick’s life, the musician’s daughter Susannah Nix on growing up with the massive collection, and musicians and scholars Mark Puryear and Dom Flemons on the marginalized communities to which McCormick devoted his life’s work.
Any controversy about McCormick vanishes when listening to these songs. The field recordings are McCormick at his obsessive best—on the street, being so bold as to request someone perform for his recorder (a request usually fulfilled), taking notes, occasionally interjecting a question, trying to capture the moment, in living rooms, porches, backyards, bars, and even prisons.
There are some familiar names. The storytelling preceding songs like Mance Lipscomb’s version of “Tall Angel at the Bar,” and Lightnin’ Hopkins’ duet with Long Gone Miles, “Natural Born Lover,” is priceless. But most of the performers of these recordings were neither famous nor notorious outside their communities. I got to know some of the lesser-known characters, including barrelhouse pianist Robert Shaw, the ethereal Gray Ghost, and drummer-rapper Bongo Joe Coleman (what may be his first recordings). Performing live in person, each comes off as an original.
Revelations abound. “Quills” by Joe Patterson features one of the last players in Texas skilled in blowing handmade quills, or pan pipes made of cane, a talent famously articulated by Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas from Big Sandy in the 1920s, who McCormick also extensively studied. “St. James Infirmary” by Dudley Alexander and Washboard Band, sung in English and French, is a stellar example of Creole music that predates zydeco.
Mack McCormick leaves behind a dilemma. He was a terribly flawed individual. He obsessively guarded what he knew. He became paranoid his research would be stolen. In other words, McCormick consigned himself to death before the rest of the world could learn what he knew.
The world that McCormick dove into so zealously is gone.
What is left is all that McCormick learned about Texas blues and roots musicians, particularly African Americans. That work was both critical and monumental. Now that that knowledge is accessible, recognition of what he did is something to celebrate, nevermind the baggage of the tortured life that came with it.
from the Houston Press 6/8/11
http://www.houstonpress.com/2011-06-09/news/finding-austin/
by John Nova Lomax
photos by John Anderson
Armadillo World HeadquartersAustin food by John AndersonEddie Wilson by John AndersonYours truly, holding an old Soap Creek poster by John Anderson
Finding Austin
The neo city on the hills is a far cry from its cheap pot, cold beer and low-rent former ways.
From the outside, nothing about Eddie Wilson’s near-north Austin bungalow would indicate that a prime architect of the city’s mystique lives inside. Once through the door, though, and the whole fantastic story becomes plain as a giant javelina sucking on a six-story jug of tequila. Over the fireplace, in the living room where Wilson jokes that prior to remarrying his ex-wife he spent five divorced years cavorting as Austin’s “fat Hugh Hefner,” there hangs a painting of the Armadillo World Headquarters, the venue and “beer garden of Eden” he opened in 1969 and sold to a partner in 1976.
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk…
Photos by John Anderson
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk…
…and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the ‘Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
…and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the ‘Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
More so than any other place in the Texas capital’s history, the Armadillo was where Austin got its merit badge in cool. Just for starters, it was the epicenter for the rise of redneck rock, the sacred place where cosmic cowboys like Waylon and Willie united the hitherto-warring tribes of rednecks and hippies. Next to the painting, on the mantel stands a Day of the Dead shrine to Doug Sahm, another Armadillo regular and perhaps the one man who truly mastered every single style of Texas music from gutbucket blues to conjunto. To the left is the ‘Dillo’s old piano, played by
everyone from Fats Domino to Johnny Winter to Mose Allison to Van Morrison.
The idea for Austin City Limits — the brand name that indelibly stamped Austin as the “Live Music Capital of the World” to a generation and counting of PBS viewers, and the driving force behind Texas’s largest music festival today — was hatched at the Armadillo. Indeed, ACL’s raucous Gary P. Nunn theme “London Homesick Blues” famously choruses “Take me home to the Armadillo…”
While you are taking this all in, Wilson is regaling you with tales of this bygone Austin. He explains how people were able to smoke weed with impunity there; powerful men like Bob Bullock liked to ogle the coeds in their halter tops and faded cut-off Levi’s. And Wilson also shows you a picture of him goosing a youthful Ann Richards. The heat wasn’t gonna come down on the fat cats’ playhouse.
In the study, amid thousands and thousands of books and Burton Wilson photographs and psychedelic Jim Franklin posters and other lore, hang five paintings of giant armadillos prowling rolling bluebonnet prairies amid towering Lone Star longnecks. Yep, Wilson’s club inspired that whole National Beer of Texas, “Long Live Longnecks” ethos, too.
“Cheap pot, cold beer and cheap rent,” Wilson says in his courtly, old-school Texas rasp of a voice. With his snow-white mane and goatee and piercing eyes, he looks for all the world like a potbellied Mark Twain. “That’s what got it all started here and now we’re running out of all of it.”
Well, maybe not the beer, but the point is well taken. Eddie Wilson’s Austin, the one people flocked to from all over Texas and the nation to come join, where people could share $60-a-month rent houses and while away their lives hanging out down by the water and partying, is buried, if not dead.
Sure, you can still find vestiges of that magic in places like the Continental Club on South Congress and the Saxon Pub on South Lamar, and Wilson’s own Threadgill’s restaurants, and the other pockets of freakiness that dot the city from the North Loop to deep East Austin, not to mention in farther-flung outposts like San Marcos and Martindale, but by and large, Austin is coming more and more to resemble places like Dallas and Houston, the cities so many adopted Austinites fled in disgust.
And at the same time, Texas’s larger cities are getting cooler and more livable, much “less suffocating,” as Wimberley journalist and Willie Nelson biographer Joe Nick Patoski puts it.
As Wilson approaches 70 and battles lung cancer, he is wondering what will happen to his legacy and the city he worked so hard to craft in his image. It’s been 30 years since the Armadillo met the wrecking ball. Wilson says he watched as a loader tipped remnants of the old stage into a dump truck. He swears he saw the glitter Doctor John once tossed in the air twinkling among the foam, dust, floorboards and mortar, but nowadays that seems less like an omen of great things to come than a coda to an era that will never return.
Today, where once the Armadillo rollicked, there squats an utterly sterile, suburban-looking, glass-sided office building. It’s as if Austin had declared an official intent to abandon its good-timing days, sober up and get in the hamster wheel with the rest of the rat race, to mix rodent metaphors. Austin officially decided to barter its imagination for a bid at Houston- and Dallas-sized stacks of cash.
“What’s even more ironic is that was initially a bank. And it failed,” says Wilson. “That piece of real estate was the first flip in Austin, and I believe it flipped twice or three times before the thing got built and failed.”
_____________________
From a distance, Austin still looks as beguiling as it must have appeared to its earliest settlers, even if today’s western hills — so exquisitely violet in the setting sun — are studded with McMansions. Austin is easily Texas’s most outdoorsy city. All over town, cyclists whiz past in far greater numbers than anywhere else, and at least on the south side of town, many suburban neighborhoods mesh well with the surrounding hills and thickets. Greenbelts and rocky, shaded creeks streak the city like veins of precious ore, and huge nature preserves and state parks are minutes from town.
The lake, a treacherous river in the old days, is more crowded than ever, but still an amazing downtown amenity, and Hippie Hollow has managed to hang on and is now officially Texas’s only clothing-optional swimming hole. There’s also Zilker Park and Barton Springs — in Wilson’s vernacular, “our G-spot.”
No, Austin is not a truly gorgeous geographical Shangri-La, like San Francisco, Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Seattle or even Chattanooga, Tennessee, but it’s pretty enough and easily the beauty queen of Texas. What’s more, its violent-crime rate is a merciful fraction of those of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.
Fats, Jerry Lee and Van the Man were but three of the touring legends to have radiated the Armadillo piano’s 88 keys; above, a portrait of the iconic Austin shrine as it appeared in its heyday.
Photos by John Anderson
Fats, Jerry Lee and Van the Man were but three of the touring legends to have radiated the Armadillo piano’s 88 keys; above, a portrait of the iconic Austin shrine as it appeared in its heyday.
While Austin has recently developed a new tier of high-end restaurants, it’s still a town where you can eat fast, cheap and tasty meals tailored for a student budget. Most recently, the city has seen an invasion of over 2,300 food trucks like this one from Franklin BBQ.
John Anderson
While Austin has recently developed a new tier of high-end restaurants, it’s still a town where you can eat fast, cheap and tasty meals tailored for a student budget. Most recently, the city has seen an invasion of over 2,300 food trucks like this one from Franklin BBQ.
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While the music scene isn’t quite what Austin’s boosters would have you believe, it does have its moments, day in and day out, week after week. “I’ll start on a Thursday at five o’clock at happy hour at Continental Club, and then go from there to the early show at the Saxon, and then maybe go over to the East Side to TC’s, and then end up between midnight and two in the morning at Antone’s, perhaps with Del Castillo,” says Wilson. It’s a concentration of reasonably compressed world-class talent Wilson can drive to in minutes. “My friend from L.A. tells me it would take him approximately 18 months to see that much world-class talent in L.A.,” he says.
As an eating town, Austin was once home to little more than sausage wraps and brisket and breakfast tacos, nachos and guacamole — cheap fare to fill the bellies of UT students while leaving them a few extra bucks for partying. Today, that tradition of cheap eats lives on in the 2,300 hipster food trucks that patrol the city, and they offer much more diverse fare than what was available in the past. And while Austin has not yet caught up to Dallas or Houston in fine or ethnic dining, it has made strides, especially in high-end eats. UT grad and former Austin and Houston food critic Robb Walsh says that Austin has developed whole new foodie-tiers in recent years. “Recently, some really good and really expensive restaurants have opened and been able to survive,” he says, citing examples such as Uchi and Vespaio. “It’s very competitive on that level, but you can make it now.”
However, in many, many other areas, Austin is mired in an intermediate stage between overgrown town and true metropolis. To Wilson, the Austin of today is “like a good-lookin’ chick who got knocked up and can’t get into her britches anymore.” What’s more, a great many of the citizens can’t seem to see the way forward.
Austin is home to precious few top-rate museums and little in the way of high art or fashion. The only international flight out of its airport goes to Cancun. Austin is America’s largest city with no pro sports teams (though some would debate the amateur status of the Texas Longhorns). While the real estate market is a bargain to Californians, by Texas standards it is both costly and cramped.
Above all that, there’s traffic, the “sheer hell trying to get around that city,” as Greg Ellis, a former Dallasite and Houstonian and now the manager of Sundance Records in San Marcos, puts it. Austinites have a curious attitude toward their clogged roads. In a recent poll, 70 percent of them said it was their city’s top concern, and a 2010 study conducted by Texas A&M’s nationally renowned Texas Transportation Institute, one that used the latest high-tech GPS devices and even iPhone data to measure travel times, concluded that in all of America, Austin trailed only Los Angeles and Washington D.C. in average travel times.
Yet when you read the Austin American-Statesman’s article about the study, there’s this weird parade of denial in the online comments. Yes, traffic is bad, dozens of the commenters say. They will all admit that I-35 is a nightmare from Williamson County to San Antonio, and that it does suck being America’s largest city with only one interstate. They’ll grant that Highways 183 and 290 are hell-paths, and that MoPac is an inadequate north-south conduit, and that major arterials such as Lamar, Airport, Burnet and Manor all have poorly synchronized traffic lights.
And yet still, even given all that, they will insist that traffic in Austin is “not as bad as it is in Dallas and Houston.” (Others, like Wilson, just shrug it off and say things like “That’s why you are supposed to smoke a joint in your car.”)
That denial is typical, according to Julia Youssefnia, a 28-year-old accountant who graduated from UT and has since lived in both Houston and Dallas, and it’s not limited to traffic. “Austin is a city with tons of problems — segregation, gentrification, problems with affordable housing — but most people there tend to ignore them,” she says.
Indeed, some in the city seem to celebrate their woes. That’s what makes Austin weird, they claim.
But Houston blogger Lou Minatti points out that so much of what Austin touts as being weird is actually ordinary. Bats under bridges? Houston has those. A large population of panhandlers, or “dragworms,” as they are called in Austin? Both Houston and Dallas have them.
The one thing he grants is truly weird about Austin was the population’s hatred of ease of transit, an antipathy manifested by residents’ refusal to do anything to alleviate their woes.”More highways will make us just like Houston and Dallas!” is the rallying cry, and to be like those towns would not be weird.
But to people who have actually been to all three cities recently, it’s apparent that they are already more alike than different. “I cannot truck people who say they don’t want Austin to become Dallas or Houston, because it is,” says Patoski.
Author Joe Nick Patoski holds a relic from the tail end of Austin’s glory days: The Soap Creek Saloon was the soul of Austin’s scene while the Armadillo was the heart. Today, Patoski believes that Austin has the same big-city problems of Houston and Dallas, while the two larger cities have both gotten less suffocating.
John Anderson
Author Joe Nick Patoski holds a relic from the tail end of Austin’s glory days: The Soap Creek Saloon was the soul of Austin’s scene while the Armadillo was the heart. Today, Patoski believes that Austin has the same big-city problems of Houston and Dallas, while the two larger cities have both gotten less suffocating.
When South by Southwest was launched the late 1980s, its goals were to show off local and regional bands and fill downtown bar stools while the UT kids were on spring break. Now, it’s morphed into three conferences spanning most of March and is a spring break destination in its own right, not to mention an international Shangri-La for techno-nerds.
John Anderson
When South by Southwest was launched the late 1980s, its goals were to show off local and regional bands and fill downtown bar stools while the UT kids were on spring break. Now, it’s morphed into three conferences spanning most of March and is a spring break destination in its own right, not to mention an international Shangri-La for techno-nerds.
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Nowhere is that more apparent than downtown, where the past ten years have been home to a crass real estate boom that would shame even Donald Trump. Austin’s downtown was once home to much that was funky, family-owned and attitude-free.
That vibe has been vanishing, especially since 2006, when a strong ordinance dictating an unobstructed line of sight to the Capitol from pretty much all points was weakened to the point of near-meaninglessness. Ever since, high-rise luxury condos and hotels and glitzy shopping centers have erupted like enormous rainy-day toadstools. Austin’s tall landmarks were once the Capitol and the Texas Tower — politics and academia. Now the city’s skyline declares that Austin is really about flipping condos.
In a real estate developer-driven bid to weaken the Capitol Corridors ordinance, Austin mayor Will Wynn stated that he wanted to have 25,000 people living downtown by 2015. And what kind of people did they want? Rich ones, as attested by the fact that the one true grocery store in the area is the Whole Foods flagship.
Like the city of its birth, Whole Foods is a lot more corporate and ritzy than it was in the hippy-dippy ’70s, and Patoski believes that store is helping solidify downtown as a paradise for wealthy Bobos, to mangle the title of David Brooks’s memorable 2000 book. “It’s their theme park,” he says of the flagship. “I’ve seen people moving into high-rises down there so they can be close to Whole Foods.”
The kind of people who can afford to do their regular shopping at Whole Foods are not the bohemians Austin once drew. Instead, they are the people who can afford to live in the brand-new, 683-foot Austonian condo tower, now Austin’s tallest building, where studio condos start at $500,000 (with $700 monthly fees) and prices ascend to a cool $8 million for a penthouse. At the time the project was announced, one of the developers reportedly stated that these would not be first or second homes for their typical buyers, but fifth or sixth, somewhere in the portfolio amid properties in the south of France, Manhattan, Aspen, Tuscany and Malibu.
Today, downtown Austin is cramped. It’s hard to park. By and large, the people you see on a night out are alternately pretentious, thuggish (on skanky East 6th Street, where gang shootings and fistfights are becoming common occurrences) or douched-out, as on West 6th Street, which now rivals or exceeds Uptown Dallas as a spawning ground for vulgarian 30k millionaires swilling bottle-service Grey Goose. (While the exact number of douchebags prowling Austin was not tracked by the census and is therefore impossible to quantify, suffice to say that a production company recently found it fertile enough ground to announce they were casting a Texas-style Jersey Shore ripoff in Austin.)
By night, the one thing much of downtown Austin has in spades is vapidity, an affluent airheadedness that reigns everywhere where it is not supplanted by its cousins: lunkheaded testosterone head-cracking or the putting on of airs, depending on whether you are east or west of Congress.
Austin Community College librarian Red Wassenich spearheaded the Keep Austin Weird campaign of the last few years. He says he’s been encouraged by some recent developments in the city, but he did tip us off to one place whose mere presence would seem to toll the death knell of any city that claimed to be cool.
“There are these horrible bars downtown like Qua where they have, like, live sharks swimming under the dance floor,” he said.
We thought he had to be exaggerating, but no, Qua really exists, on West 4th Street. It’s got it all, including that stupid, meaningless name. It’s got the velvet rope and the dress codes. It’s got bottle service, and, yes, Virginia, there are in fact actual live sharks swimming under the glass dance floor. “They are fed fresh seafood (from Whole Foods) daily,” notes the info page on Qua’s Web site.
Downtown Austin, 2011: where even the nightclub sharks dine on Whole Foods seafood daily.
Molly Ivins wept.
_____________________
It’s fitting that the supermarket chain that white people like most was born and bred in Austin, the Texas city that white people like best. Austin is easily Texas’s milkiest big city, and the inner core is getting more ivory by the minute. It’s curious — Austin is Texas’s most progressive city, and it’s hard not to imagine that its residents wouldn’t speak highly of diversity as a concept. (Indeed, President Obama enjoyed his greatest Texas margin of victory in Travis County, though he took both Dallas and Harris counties, too.) And yet the stats don’t lie: Austin is 8.8 percent black, Houston is 18.7 and Dallas is 20.7 percent.
The Hispanic population of all three cities grew between 2000 and 2010, but in Austin, that growth has been tempered by a simultaneous gentrification of the East Austin barrio / black neighborhood, both just across I-35 from downtown. According to U.S. Census figures, the Hispanic presence in Central East Austin declined by 9.3 percent, and that of blacks by 27 percent. (Both groups have been pushed to the burbs.) At the same time, the white population boomed by 40 percent.
Many of those white people are hipsters, but to Patoski, that “hipness” comes at a dear price. “As hip now as east Austin appears, what made it cool was the black and Mexican ethnic aspects, and that is now basically gone,” says Patoski. “They’ve run it all out.”
Jeff Liles and friends have transformed a section of Dallas’s South Oak Cliff into a place even the hippest Austinites envy.
Alex Scott
Jeff Liles and friends have transformed a section of Dallas’s South Oak Cliff into a place even the hippest Austinites envy.
Designer Judy Masliyah followed her soon-to-be-husband from Los Angeles to Austin, but quickly determined that Austin’s creative scene was “just for show.” Now she runs a boutique on Houston’s Main Street and loves the Bayou City’s cosmopolitan flair.
Troy Fields
Designer Judy Masliyah followed her soon-to-be-husband from Los Angeles to Austin, but quickly determined that Austin’s creative scene was “just for show.” Now she runs a boutique on Houston’s Main Street and loves the Bayou City’s cosmopolitan flair.
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This odd phenomenon has been replicated in other progressive cities such as Portland and Minneapolis. Attracted by stuff white people like such as farmers’ markets, bike lanes and hipster culture, they flock in from slightly stodgier yet much more diverse cities like Houston and Dallas. Once ensconced in their ivory bastions, they look back at the chaos and hurly-burly of the places they left behind with smug self-satisfaction.
Writing on the Web site Newgeography.com, Aaron Renn wonders if they have earned the right to such snobbery. He believes that what they see as progressivism could also be interpreted as “White Flight writ large.” Say you grew up in the suburbs of Dallas or Houston and would love to be in the middle of the action of the big city, but places like Oak Cliff or Houston’s East End are just a little too real for you, with their methadone clinics, police sirens and 24-hour cantinas.
In Renn’s view, that’s where places like Austin come in. Why move to or stay in the suburbs of your square city to escape minorities and get slammed as a bigot for doing so, when you can move to some hep place like Austin and win praise for your progressivism?
“They often think that by moving to Austin they have done something great for humanity,” notes Youssefnia.
Smugness about their monochromatic progressivism is just one aspect of “Austitude,” a collective municipal narcissism shared by so many Austinites. To them, Austin is better, smarter, friendlier and utterly unlike everywhere else in Texas. Austitude is very prevalent not only in Austin but also in California, a prime source of migrants to Austin since the 1990s tech boom.
Tell Austinites that you live in Houston, and some will actually say to your face, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Delia Swanner, a Houston native now living in California, says she is sick of hearing Californians — even ones who’ve never been to any city in Texas — tell her Austin is the only place in Texas they’d consider living.
Other manifestations of Austitude drove Judy Masliyah right out of town. Back in the 1990s, Masliyah, a California native and designer of quirky, retro clothing, met her soon-to-be-husband Glover Gill in Los Angeles. Gill is a Houston-bred, then-Austin-based musician and composer whose tango-infused keyboard work appears in Richard Linklater’s films. They would seem to be the perfect Austin couple, and Masliyah followed Gill there and set out her designs. At first, Masliyah enjoyed Austin somewhat, even if she chafed at Austin’s creative-class hive mind. “I just really hate being told what’s what, this expectation of what I am supposed to like or believe,” she says.
Those misgivings turned to terror once Masliyah and Gill tied the knot, and it suddenly dawned on her that she might be living in Austin for the rest of her life. “I would have to somehow identify with it,” she says. She says she “lost it” after a fashion show she put on. “After it was over, one of the models said, ‘I really love your clothes. If I lived in New York or L.A., I would wear them.’ That was just it for me,” she says. “Austin is just for show. They want to have all this stuff like fashion shows, but only so they can say they can. Nobody wanted to wear it, but they wanted to say they had it. They weren’t there, but they still wanted to act like they were there.”
Later that day, Masliyah told Gill she couldn’t live in Austin anymore. “So we started this half-and-half thing, living in both places. (She now owns the My Flaming Heart boutique on Main Street in Houston.) “And it’s not that I don’t like it there, but it’s complicated my life so much, and his life, but I’m totally willing to do that. I don’t have any snobbery against Texas. It’s just Austin that gets under my skin.”
“I’m not from here / but people tell me / it’s not like it used to be / they say I should have been here / back about ten years / before it got ruined by folks like me.” — James McMurtry, “I’m Not From Here” Austin boosters can say all they want about the nerd chic of the new tech sector and the reflected Hollywood glamor of the city’s growing film industry, but the jewel in Austin’s crown of cool has long been the music scene. And oddly enough, Austin has the shortest musical history of any big city in Texas. As late as 1963, Austin’s pop music scene consisted of touring old-school country bands and cover bands working the frat-house circuit. The Austin of that time had a lot in common with Baton Rouge — both were formerly Confederate state capitals and seats of learning. About all that was different was the rainfall and the fact that chili ruled Austin and gumbo Baton Rouge.
Around that time, Kenneth Threadgill, a fiftysomething country music lover and former bootlegger (and proud owner of the first post-Prohibition beer license issued in Travis County), started welcoming an autoharp-toting, ballad-belting Port Arthur wild child by the name of Janis Joplin and her UT student crowd of folk music-loving proto-hippies to Wednesday night jams at his redneck roadhouse on North Lamar. Wilson, also a Threadgill’s regular at the time, maintains that Threadgill’s ability to calmly host both rednecks and beatniks served as a template for his Armadillo World Headquarters.
Mescaline and LSD swept through Austin right about then, giving rise to the lysergic sonic tsunami that was the 13th Floor Elevators, the city’s first nationally known rock band, and still Austin’s most dangerous. By 1969, Wilson was managing Shiva’s Headband, another psychedelic Austin band. Since Shiva’s had trouble finding a place to play locally, Wilson had to open one himself. He bought a former National Guard Armory on Barton Springs Road and renamed it the Armadillo World Headquarters.
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk…
Photos by John Anderson
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk…
…and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the ‘Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
Photos by John Anderson
…and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the ‘Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
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There followed a decade or so of Austin’s glory years, where Willie’s Django-infused gypsy country finally found its spiritual home and where Waylon’s high-octane, cocaine-amped West Texas honky-tonk stomp coalesced, all in front of howling crowds of “headnecks in cowboy hats” and the scantily clad foxy hippie chicks.
Wilson wants it known that the Armadillo was not just a hippie club that became a cosmic honky-tonk. Blues guitar master Freddy King tore it down there on many a night, as did international stars such as Jimmy Cliff and Van Morrison. And it wasn’t all shades of popular music. “No one ever gives us credit for all the bullshit we did. We had ballet once a month for ten years, musicals, folkloric groups from around the world,” Wilson remembers.
In 1976, Wilson sold out to a friend, and the club marched on to the early days of Texas punk. Around that time, Patoski detected some ominous minor-key music amid the carefree parade. “I remember in the mid ’70s seeing a banker snorting coke and going all on about Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. I knew it was over then,” he says.
But it wasn’t, quite. By about 1981, punk was on the march all over town, and Austin was hip for a whole new generation of disaffected kids from all over Texas, albeit these with Mohawks and Day-Glo hair and piercings. Dallas’s Jeff Liles was chest-deep in the punk scene. “I lived there when Club Foot was happening, and Raul’s was happening, and Club 29 and all those great venues. It could not be beat back then. Oh my God, Austin was the shit back then. That was before the whole concept of alternative music. Classic rock was on its way out, and punk, alternative and new wave were this brand-new thing, and Austin was a really cool, subversive place to live.”
By the middle of the ’80s, some of that punk scene would evolve into a new wave sound, something like a slightly twangier take on the Athens-jangle rock scene that gave the world REM. At the same time, Austin’s bluesy retro-rock scene was going great guns under the auspices of iconic late club owner Clifford Antone. The major labels signed lots of Austin-based acts in the ’80s from both the new wave and blues camps, with the latter winning out in sales in the form of the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
In 1987, South By Southwest was launched. Its original goals were to fill up downtown bars while the UT kids were away on spring break and showcase local bands, and boy did it ever succeed, at least at the former.
Since its inception, SXSW’s trend has been toward bigger, grander, louder and more. Today, there are three SXSW festivals — the original music confab and others for film and tech. The emphasis on regional and, to a lesser extent, unknown music is long gone, as some 2,000 bands from dozens and dozens of countries are spotlighted. Huge established acts now perform regularly, and it has sprouted a glitzy layer of B-list celeb scuzz on top; it is now the kind of event that is apparently proud to allow the likes of Perez Hilton to host day parties.
It has also become a Music Biz 2.0 event that is less about music than it is about corporate branding and data mining, according to Austin punk godfather Jesse Sublett. You don’t think all those bands, those mounds of tacos and oceans of booze are really free at those day parties, do you? Sublett doesn’t. He says when he saw the New York Dolls at a recent SXSW, he had to fill out an invitation that mined him for about 15 different items of information, and then, he says, he had to “watch Rachael Ray’s fat ass bounce around to the Dolls. I mean, I’m glad she hosted the show, but come on.”
Greg Ellis believes the 1990s were a horrible decade for Austin culture. MTV discovered SXSW, and suddenly the insider regional event became a destination for college kids who wanted to be like MTV’s frothy host Tabitha Soren. And then Richard Linklater’s Slacker came out. Ellis thinks it is an amazing film but that, like SXSW as presented by MTV, it made Austin seem cool for all the wrong reasons. “Slacker and SXSW established Austin as the place to be for the types of hipsters that you didn’t want here,” he says. “These were people who just wanted to he hipsters. That’s not who you want.”
Meanwhile, out in the northern suburbs, the rise of Dell helped kick-start the tech boom. “That brought in a lot of people who just thought Austin was a pretty place, or they came on a visit and liked what they saw, so then they wanted to make it exactly like the place they had just come from,” says Ellis. “They wanted to turn it into the fuckin’ East Bay. And it wasn’t like that at all.”
At the same time the Californians poured in, the surrounding suburbs filled in with typically Republican Texans, delineating a bright red ring around Austin’s island of blue. “Nowadays you can’t give a party in your own fuckin’ home without suddenly realizin’ that your house is full of fuckin’ Republicans,” Wilson grumbles. “Man! It’s a disgusting state of affairs.”
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk…
Photos by John Anderson
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk…
…and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the ‘Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
Photos by John Anderson
…and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the ‘Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
Details
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BLOG POST: Cover Story: Taking Austitude Down A Peg Or Two
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More About
Eddie Wilson
Houston (Texas)
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All those forces, all those tens of thousands of people who moved to Austin because it wasn’t “like Texas” (as if people like Molly Ivins, Lady Bird Johnson and John Henry Faulk were not Texan) have conspired to erode Austin’s unique sense of place. Eddie Wilson’s Austin was like Texas, only it was Texas at its most laid-back, and it was proud of its provincialism and reveled in its native music.
Today, save for the old-timers, there’s no Austin music that “sounds like Austin” the way the cosmic cowboys, retro-blues folks, and even the Austin punks and new-wavers did. The bands that have created national buzz out of Austin in the last five or ten years — Ghostland Observatory, Spoon, Okkervil River, the Octopus Project — could just as easily be from Portland, Brooklyn, Toronto or San Francisco. Likewise, today’s Austin City Limits could as easily be called Indie City Limits. But that’s a national trend: music everywhere is starting to sound like music anywhere.
And there’s nothing unique going on in Austin. “Tell me what the cool venue is in Austin right now,” says Ellis. “There’s not one. There’s nothing like Liberty Lunch or the Beach or anything like that anymore. You’ve got the Red Eyed Fly, which is okay, but it’s a hellhole, really. And then you’ve got…um…Stubb’s I guess is the coolest thing that you’ve got. And that’s controlled by [corporate concert promoters] C3, and there you go. You wanna go see Primus at Stubb’s? Well, that’ll be $45. Lauryn Hill? $63. That’s not Austin.”
Given that there’s no special sound to the rock bands there, and given that rents are so high, and given that there are so many musicians there that club owners feel free to pay starvation wages, it’s worth wondering why bands continue to move there.
And maybe they don’t. While it’s impossible to take a direct count, it has seemed as if the trend has slowed in recent years in both Houston and Dallas. And Wilson thinks it just might start moving in the other direction.
“Because of the economics of the situation, we’re gonna send a huge number of creative people in every direction just lookin’ for a place to live,” he says. “Hell,” he says, “If I was pushin’ 40 instead of 70, I’d probably be tryin’ to find a piece in Fort Worth,” he says.
_____________________
Jeff Liles made the move back to his native Dallas from Austin in the early ’80s and hasn’t looked back since. A mover and shaker in the glory days of Deep Ellum, Liles has since helped establish an arts colony of sorts in a neighborhood called X-Plus, in the northern part of Dallas’s Oak Cliff area.
Oak Cliff is different from the rest of Dallas, Liles says. (Hell, not too terribly long ago, it attempted to secede from Dallas.) It’s across the Trinity from the rest of town, and the river clearly marks a delineation between the two. “There’s a different mind-set. Most of the people who live in X-Plus hung out in Deep Ellum in the late ’80s and early ’90s and now they are married with kids,” Liles says. “They still have creative inclinations, but family is the first priority, a day job is the second, but they still play music and they want to live in the midst of an arts community.”
The epicenter of that community is the Kessler Theater, a listening room/arts space managed by Liles. While Liles is an interested party and can come across as a (very confident) booster, Joe Nick Patoski vouches for Liles’s claims. Patoski says that the Kessler is one of the best listening rooms he’s ever been in, and he was shocked by the hipness of its environs. “Oak Cliff is now hipper, edgier and more affordable than east Austin is,” he says.
Liles radiates pride when he talks about X-Plus. He says his neighbors are not “hippy-dippy people,” but instead are just “really smart, intuitive people and they are trying to change things for the better.” Such changes include more bike lanes and dog parks, created from scratch. “They really care about their surroundings, and they are really trying to preserve X-Plus and Oak Cliff as it always has been, trying to keep that snapshot in time, so it doesn’t become like the rest of Dallas: overrun by empty buildings and development that’s not even real,” says Liles. The neighborhood recently scored big when it turfed out a bidness-friendly city councilman and replaced him with a liberal who managed to stop a Walmart from going in.
Liles doesn’t know of any Austin artists who have moved to X-Plus, but he says they are taking note of the changes. Some even blaspheme their own hallowed hometown, he says. “I’m telling you straight-up, they enjoy playing the Kessler because there is nothing in Austin like the Kessler,” he says. “All the artists who come up here love being from Austin. They are very proud of the fact that they are from Austin. But they come to the Kessler and they see this neighborhood and they say, ‘Damn, this is the way Austin used to be. There is nothing in Austin this cool right now.'”
Meanwhile, Houston has at last apparently stanched the exodus of young rock bands to Austin, a stampede that began in the ’70s and finally started slowing about five years ago. Ellis, a 35-year veteran of the music scene in the Austin area, Dallas and Houston, ventures to say that Houston’s scene is better than Austin’s right now.
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk…
Photos by John Anderson
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk…
…and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the ‘Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
Photos by John Anderson
…and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the ‘Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
Details
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BLOG POST: Cover Story: Taking Austitude Down A Peg Or Two
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More About
Eddie Wilson
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“You can’t live cheap [in Austin] anymore,” he says. “There’s no cool places to play. There’s nothing really happening. It just doesn’t have the appeal anymore. Certainly someone like Blaze Foley couldn’t survive there anymore, though the argument could be made that he couldn’t survive then either. But today nothing like that would even be embraced.”
Today’s Houston finds more rising young rock bands choosing to stay here than at any time since the 1960s. Fitzgerald’s is back as a cutting-edge venue after years in lunk-core alt-rock purgatory. The Heights, Houston’s own mini-Austin, is filling up with fun beer gardens and low-key restaurants, and there are other scattered pockets of cool in Montrose, the Museum District and the East End. Taking in a concert in Discovery Green can trick you into thinking you are in Chicago, only with better weather, and Austin so loved our Art Car Parade, they’ve attempted to steal the entire concept, just as they’ve attempted to steal the memory of our Townes Van Zandt/Guy Clark/Steve Earle/Rodney Crowell songwriting history.
What’s more, Houston is a city and proud of it. Masliyah loves living in the kind of city where it’s easy for her to buy her dressmaking supplies and also to travel the world without leaving home. “The other day I went shopping at Phoenicia and it was like I’d gone around the world,” she says. Youssefnia also loves Houston’s cosmopolitan atmosphere and realistic sense of itself.
“Houston has a strong scene and many hidden elements that keep it interesting,” she says. “People realize the problems it has — the corrupt oil money, the sprawl, the pollution — and don’t deny the problems like people in Austin do.”
Back in Eddie Wilson’s bungalow, the man is still railing. “I’m still an Austin booster,” he says. “I’ve gotta be, but it’s kinda like bein’ in an arm-wrestling contest. You’ve just gotta persevere and hope that sooner or later the other side gives in.”
He doesn’t think that’s going to happen, though. “Greed never sleeps,” he says. “It never takes a day off. Everybody from the jolly side of life wants to celebrate, at least here, there and yonder, but greed can’t afford to because it’s always after what it is you’ve got.”
He catches his breath. “When you run the cops and schoolteachers out of the town they are servin’…”
“It finally happened,” he continues. It has finally come to pass that Austin really and truly was better before you got there, and won’t ever see such creative days again.
“We had ’em on the run for a while, but I believe they’ve taken over the goddamn front-end loader now,” he says. “C’mon. Let’s go on over to Threadgill’s and have a beer. On the house.”
Photos courtesy of Miller Outdoor Theatre Advisory Board
Brave Combo
Accordion Kings & Queens Festival
Miller Outdoor Theatre
June 4, 2011
Timing can be everything. And it only took about ten seconds standing in the wings 20 feet from Clifton Chenier’s former guitarist Lil Buck Sinegal and the rest of Corey Ledet’s zydeco band as they kicked off their portion of Saturday’s Accordion Kings & Queens festival to realize that these guys had just opened a can of Deep South Louisiana badass, and that something very special was about to go down.
It was also immediately apparent that Clifton Chenier’s Houston-born baby, zydeco, had met New Orleans’ Congo Square head on in a massive groove collision somewhere near Breaux Bridge and that all was right with the world.
People always bring up guitar technical whiz Sonny Landreth when they talk about Chenier’s classic zydeco band, but Sinegal (right) was the man behind the sound for many, many years, and Saturday night he was the coolest of the cool cats as he locked in with the backline of bassist Tony Delafose and drummer Rusty Metoyer.
Sinegal was doubling Delafose’s bass line note for note, cutting the groove deeper and deeper and turning the orchestra pit at Miller into a dancehall. There isn’t much live music more joyous than listening to and watching a locked-in Louisiana rhythm section laying down the voodoo hoodoo.
While many of Houston’s music lovers battled the heat and crowds of Saturday’s opening day of Summer Fest, another 4,000 or so took advantage of an unusually breezy cool evening for early June on the hill at Miller Outdoor Theatre to catch the finals of Texas Folklife Resourcess 22nd annual Big Squeeze contest, followed by the Accordion Kings & Queens extravaganza.
Fifteen-year-old Ignacio “Nachito” Morales of Dallas was this year’s Big Squeeze champion, beating out Pasadena’s own 12-year-old child accordion prodigy Isaiah Tellez, as well as La Joya’s Omar Garza and Joseph Garcia of Victoria. Morales received $1,000, a new Hohner accordion and recording time at Corpus Christi’s Hacienda Records for his victory.
Accordion Kings & Queens, emceed once again by Willie Nelson biographer Joe Nick Patoski, also serves as a showcase for the stylistic diversity of Texas’ national instrument. The large, festive, family-oriented crowd cheered mightily for conjunto veterans Mickey y sus Carnales, who fired up the proceedings and brought back fond memories of Houston’s Tejano heyday with their old-school Tejano/conjunto set.
And just to add a taste of spice and a feeling of kismet to the proceedings, the festival organizers brought in Denton’s nuclear polka band Brave Combo as the evening’s headliner. One of the truly unique bands in Texas for over 20 years, the Combo moves in rarified air, floating effortlessly from klezmer to conjunto to “Chopsticks” without a change of expression.
The band is, in a word, musical virtuosity personified, but with a very Texan stamp. And if the true test of music is joy and dancing, you should have been at Miller Outdoor Theatre to see the smiles on the faces of the children who were present. That said it all.
The Houston Texans play their first game this fall, but players such as Avion Black and cheerleaders have been perfecting their moves for months.Photograph by Jerry Gallegos
Touchdown!
Texas Journey BY JOE NICK PATOSKI July/August 2002
Houston, we have a football team. Again.
The scene was vaguely familiar: rowdies with painted faces; fans decked out in Battle Red, Deep Steel Blue, and Liberty White jerseys; a long line of supporters-some with portable radios plugged into their ears-eager to have temporary tattoos of a bull glued to their faces; a palpable buzz of excitement in the air; and outbursts of cheers and chants, egged on by a bull mascot named Toro and a bevy of cheerleaders waving pom-poms.
“Hous-ton Tex-ans! Hous-ton Tex-ans!”
Never mind that the crowd was cheering a team that’s never played a single down, or that opening kickoff was some six months away. Pro football was back in Houston, and that was reason enough for several thousand fans to show up at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston, alongside players past and present, a squadron of front office personnel, and an infantry of media types, including a full ESPN crew providing live coverage.
The event was the first and last official Houston Texans Expansion Draft, a process that would ultimately determine the nucleus of players for the newest franchise in the National Football League. The actual gridiron at Reliant Stadium was miles away in south Houston, and the only hard hits were on the NFL highlight films showing on the big screens. Even the first player drafted, offensive tackle Tony Boselli of the Jacksonville Jaguars, was a foregone conclusion. But no one was complaining. After going almost six years without a home team to root for, in a city where football is practically a birthright, Houston fans were warming up for their brand-new team, the Houston Texans.
Tackled for a Loss
In 1997, Bud Adams, the only owner the Houston Oilers ever had, finally gave up negotiating with Harris County to build a stadium to replace the Astrodome and moved the franchise to Nashville. It was not a happy parting. The general sentiment voiced around Houston to Adams was, “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out of town.’ Charley Casserly, the former general manager of the Washington Redskins and one of the few people on Earth entitled to wear three Super Bowl rings, couldn’t believe what had happened. “Six years ago, I’m driving through downtown Houston and I look in my rearview mirror at the skyline and think, ‘There’s something wrong with this picture. This is the fourth largest city in the United States, in a state where football is king, and there isn’t a football team?’ How can you not have a premium franchise NFL team in this city?”
Fans J.C. and Juan Chapa were wondering the same thing. The brothers were heartbroken when their team left town. “I haven’t been able to watch football in a while,” said J.C. Chapa before the expansion draft began. But the brothers apparently had gotten over the hurt, because they showed up duded out with war paint on their faces, wearing football helmets with bull horns coming out of the sides and matching jerseys-one with the number 32, representing the H-town franchise as the 32nd team in the NFL and the other with ’02, the year the Texans joined the league.
The Big Comeback
The Reliant Stadium promises to live up to its state-of-the-art reputation. Photograph by Jerry Gallegos
The Chapas’s game gear is part of the Sunday extravaganza that will be playing at Reliant Stadium this fall. They’re season ticket holders in the end zone seating section known as the Bull Pen, where the really crazy fans are being directed to whoop it up in the tradition of Cleveland’s Dawg Pound. “The Texans are already doing more for the fans,” says J.C. Chapa. “With the Oilers, it was just show up on game day. Houston always had first-class fans. Now it’s got a first-class team. McNair is first-class, the whole organization is first-class.”
McNair is Bob McNair, the billionaire whose deep pockets, determination, and will not only brought professional football back to Houston but also elevated the standard of how the game is played and watched. As majority owner, McNair beat out Los Angeles-the preferred choice of the league’s owners for an expansion team-by raising the $700 million admission fee the NFL was charging the new club and helping lead a public/private financing voter initiative in Harris County to build the state-of-the-art Reliant Stadium.
McNair didn’t stop there. He hired top-shelf personnel, starting with the aforementioned Chancy Casserly as executive vice president and general manager. McNair then added Dom Capers, the head coach who had led the expansion Carolina Panthers to the National Football Conference championship game in their second year, and offensive coordinator Chris Palmer, who also knows a few things about starting from scratch as the first head coach of the new Cleveland Browns. All of a sudden, Houston sounds like one of those premiere franchises Casserly was talking about.
It’s about time. Pro football came to Houston with the Oilers, a charter member of the American Football League, in 1960. The Oilers won the upstart league’s championship the first two years, beating the San Diego Chargers both times, largely on the passing and kicking of Houston’s first home-team hero, George Blanda. But a third title eluded them after the AFL merged with the NFL in 1970.
While that doesn’t detract from the glorious feats of crowd favorites such as Blanda, Charlie (the Human Bowling Ball) Tolar, Billy (White Shoes) Johnson, Kenny (The Snake) Stabler, Dan Pastorini, and Earl Campbell, or colorful coaches such as Bum Phillips, Jerry Glanville, and Jack Pardee, it speaks volumes in explaining why few tears were shed when the Oilers left town.
Out of the Spotlight
While the Dallas Cowboys won Super Bowls. the Oilers were lucky to advance out of their division in the playoffs. Dallas was America’s Team. Oilers Coach Bum Phillips, still a folk hero in Houston, allowed that Houston was Texas’s team. After losing an AFC championship game to the Pittsburgh Steelers, Phillips apologized for the defeat, noting that while the Oilers had gotten their foot in the door, they’d kick it down the next season and go to the Super Bowl. It was a promise Phillips couldn’t keep.
Extreme-gear fans such as these expansion draft attendees will whoop it up in the stadium’s Bull Pen. Photograph by Jerry Gallegos
Where the Oilers played also figured into their second-class status. Throughout the team’s history, each and every home venue was a borrowed one, from the Jeppesen Stadium on the campus of the University of Houston to Rice University stadium to the Astrodome, which was built for Major League Baseball’s Astros.
That’s the clearest difference between the old Houston Oilers and the new Houston Texans. When the Texans tee it up this August, it will mark the first time a Houston pro football team has played in a facility designed specifically for its needs. The 69,500-seat Reliant Stadium has already established a new standard for spectator sports facilities, just like the Astrodome did back in 1965, when it was touted as the Eighth Wonder of the World.
The The Ninth Wonder?
The tricked-out Reliant is the first NFL stadium with both a retractable roof (the translucent fabric covers a frame that can open or close in about 10 minutes) and real grass, returning the field of play in Houston to a natural state for the first time in nearly four decades. (AstroTurf was invented just in time to replace real grass inside the ‘Dome when its 4,500-plus skylights, which let in the sun, were painted over to pacify baseball players who complained they were losing track of fly balls.) To appease longtime fans still stewing over the removal of the Astrodome’s old exploding scoreboard in 1988, Reliant Stadium has two giant scoreboards, jammed with more information than a website and enough pyrotechnics to light up half the state.
In the tradition of the luxury suite, a staple of every pro stadium, Reliant’s high-dollar seats will be closer to the field than those managed by every other NFL team. Meanwhile, Texans players have been spreading the word about the four training fields across the street from the stadium, including one all-weather, covered field. Once football season ends, Reliant will be transformed into a whole other kind of arena as the new home of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, the biggest rodeo in the world.
The stadium’s reputation is spreading like wildfire. The NFL has committed to staging the biggest game of all, the Super Bowl, at Reliant in 2004. And the powerhouse Big 12 college athletic conference–which includes the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor–will hold its 2002 championship football game there in early December.
But those events aren’t anticipated nearly as eagerly as the upcoming season, when the Texans meet the Cowboys, who rarely played the Oilers, on opening day of the regular season and later host AFC South Conference division foes the Tennessee Titans (formerly known as the Houston Oilers). Those games, fans hope, are where the difference between old Houston football and new Houston football will be most evident, especially on the scoreboard at the end of the game. But regardless of the outcome, one thing’s for sure: Houston, we have a football team. Finally.
Austin Chronicle BY JOE NICK PATOSKI June 11, 2004
H-town’s Chingo Bling, hip-hop’s Tamale King.
The oversized football jersey, diamond-studded braces on his teeth, and hubcap-sized medallion around his neck with his name emblazoned in silver are straight outta south side Houston, the H-town underground, hip-hop epicenter of the Dirty South. So are the tracks full of chopped beats, hot DJ mixes, and improvised freestyles about supersized egos, insatiable sexual prowess, nasty ho’s, name-brand labels, and hustling on the street.
By contrast, the black cowboy hat, aviator mirror shades, leather duster jacket, rodeo belt buckle, and full quill ostrich botas are not. These icons belong to the northern Mexico vaquero and the Culiacán narcotraficante, not the gangstas on the bloque. In lieu of Hummers and pit bulls, his status symbols are pickup troques and fighting cocks (Cleto’s the name, fighting’s his game, and he drinks from a bowl with his name spelled out in diamonds). Mainstream MCs rap about slanging crack while doing the hustle, but this vato raps about slanging tamales, like his parents did, to get ahead. Cocaine, pork – it’s all the same.
Chingo Bling is multiculti Texas in full 21st-century glory. The Mexicanismo edge instantly makes him one of the most intriguing, original, and hilarious hip-hop acts ever to blow up out of the Lone Star State. In Chingo Bling’s mundo, shit is chit, shout-outs are chout-outs, DVDs are DBDs, and videos are bideos. Under the clowning and cussing, boasting and toasting, there’s a message that bears contemplation, even if beats aren’t your thing. Even when he’s shilling, urging fans visiting his Web site to call their favorite radio stations to request “Walk Like Cleto,” Chingo Bling’s voicing hard truths:
“Fact: Latinos are the largest minority in the United States.
“Fact: Radio stations target Latinos for their advertising dollars.
“Fact: What you request doesn’t always get played.
“Latinos are being: targeted, overlooked, exploited, undervalued.”
The weathered ranch-style tract house on a busy thoroughfare near Gulfgate in southeast Houston hardly looks like a media empire in the making. Burglar bars cover the windows. A pickup is parked on the front lawn. Vendors push their carts in the streets. A grill at a nearby bus terminal advertises hamburguesas estilo Monterrey – hamburgers made the authentic Nuevo Leon way, just like home.
Inside this unassuming residence it’s all business. Somebody’s laying down tracks with Pro Tools in the small studio. The webmaster (www.chingobling.com) monitors traffic on the fan forum, which is getting 30,000 hits a week. Three guys stuff mailers with CDs, T-shirts (T-churts), posters, and merchandise. Sister Dalila is working the phones, doing her part to make Chingo Bling the biggest Tex-Mex hip-hop star on the planet.
Not that there’s lots of competition. South Park Mexican, the biggest Tejano/Mexicano MC to date, is still cooling his heels in the can after being convicted of having sex with a minor. Kumbia Kings, the Corpus Christi act headed by A.B. Quintanilla III, the brother of the late Tejano superstar Selena, have boy band aspirations, not rap dreams. Cali Latino hip-hoppers Akwid don’t resonate with Texicans.
Plopping down in the captain’s chair in front of the studio mixing board, Chingo Bling removes his shades and reveals Pedro Herrera III, a twentysomething with a degree in business administration from Trinity University in San Antonio, which produced the Butthole Surfers.
“Pedro – that’s my business side,” he explains. “As Chingo, I say what the fuck I want. Pedro’s in charge of the career. Chingo pays the bills. Chingo’s out of hand sometimes.”
The schtick comes honestly. His father and mother emigrated from Valle Hermosa in northern Tamaulipas to Houston. At 13, he was declared a youth at risk and sent on scholarship to a prestigious prep school in New Jersey. At Trinity, he focused on marketing and pulled a shift at the college radio station, KRTU.
“I was just a regular jock, but I’d say, ‘My cousin Chingo’s in town,’ and all the phones would light up.”
He started making mix tapes, rhyming and burning CDs a couple years ago, selling them out of the trunk of his car at flea markets and mom-and-pop record shops.
“I had no expectations, no pressure. It was me in my apartment thinking, ‘I’m going to pay my phone bill with these 12 mix tapes I’m trying to sell.’ You never know.”
Since then, he’s returned to his hood, releasing two CDs and three Mañosas bideos, a Chicano version of Girls Gone Wild. On May 5, ‘Chingo’ de Mayo, he dropped his latest CD, The Tamale Kingpin. He’s also done bideos on making tamales with a tamale queen, and put out The Adventures of Chingo & Bash, a smoke-out road trip in the tradition of Cheech & Chong with his partner in rhyme Baby Bash. If nothing else, he’s representing in a novel way.
“In rap, everybody’s shouting out their name, shouting out their neighborhood, their part of town,” he explains, “but nobody’s representing the town their parents are from. That’s what I did. I’m proud of Valle Hermosa, Tamaulipas. You hear me saying, ‘North Tamaulipas, raise up!’ Kids tell me no one’s done that before. I’m telling our story.”
Since the collapse of Southwest Wholesale, the distributor that nurtured the indie scene in Houston, acts like Chingo Bling have had no choice but to work outside the box. He makes being independent a point of pride, bragging on the cover of an earlier CD that “Bootleggers Avoid Him, Labels Can’t Afford Him, Women All Adore Him.” He tours (Boise, Phoenix, Portland, and Albuquerque), gets ink in publications like Lowrider and Murder Dog, and settles for radio play where he can find it.
“I’m stuck [being played] on Sunday nights. It’s our curse, the Latino curse. Sunday is the day we barbecue, the day we picnic, the day we cruise, the day we get airplay. But don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the play.”
He’s done the math.
“We’re rabbits,” he laughs. “The DNA of America is changing daily. Places where there weren’t many Mexicans, where there weren’t many oranges to pick, are full of Mexicans now. I feel like we’re on the brink of what hip-hop was when it first started. What’s the word I’m looking for? Exponential growth!
“With so many of us here, so many multiplying, and still my cousins coming over, somebody’s got to make movies for us, somebody’s got to make DVDs, somebody’s got to entertain us. I doubt it’s going to be the old fat guy in New York who works for NBC. I think I’m going to beat him to the punch.”
He cites New Orleans cottage industry Master P and Austin’s cinematic big dog Robert Rodriguez as role models.
“I learned the independent route from Master P. His movie I’m Bout It started the whole direct-to-video B-film black-action urban-drama explosion that’s taking up all the shelf space at Blockbuster. They’re cutting checks to whoever will bring them the next cholo movie, Barrio Weekend, Lowrider Summer, or gangster flick with two brothers going across.
“Rodriguez is a player. The studios, which are like record labels, want to own him and get what they can out of him, so he can produce and become part of the machine. But he won’t play by the rules. ‘You guys in Hollywood are too traditional; you overspend. Your movies aren’t profitable. I’m going to set up shop out of my house in Austin and cut out so many middlemen.’ That’s slowly what we’re doing here.
“There’s so much more to being independent than just getting $8 a CD instead of 75 cents. When you’re with a major, they tell you, ‘This is your release date.’ They’re going to walk me down the hallway. ‘This is Susie, she’s going to be doing your artwork. This is Josh, Michael, and William – they’re your marketing team.’ They’re going to misspend money, and I’m going to have to pay for it.”
He prefers working the tamale angle.
“My dad sold tamales at his job for 30 years. He would take my mom’s tamales to work and sell them. I know people who’ve been able to quit their construction jobs and set up shop, selling tamales. That’s the spirit of hip-hop – the hustler. ‘I’m cooking this, wrapping that, selling this.’ That’s a hustler and a half.
“People don’t think selling tamales is an honest living. Why do they look up to drug dealers? Because they’re entrepreneurs and independent and they’re living lives? Hey, if that’s the case, I’ll sell tamales and I ain’t got no permit. I’m on the corner, too. I got my Igloo.”
Finally, there’s the music. On Aug. 4, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings releases Playing For the Man At Door, a 66-song box set of field recordings made by McCormick between the 1950s and ’70s, along with 128-page liner notes that include essays from producers Jeff Place and John W. Troutman on McCormick’s life, the musician’s daughter Susannah Nix on growing up with the massive collection, and musicians and scholars Mark Puryear and Dom Flemons on the marginalized communities to which McCormick devoted his life’s work.
