By Michael Corcoran
It’s been going around in various comments sections (the enemy of culture) that I was fired from the Austin Chronicle because I wrote a review of a show I didn’t attend. That’s untrue. I wasn’t fired. (And the other part’s not true, either. I did write a review of Hootie and the Blowfish after three songs once, but it was raining.)
Secondly, I never said I hated Austin or that I’m sick of it and want to live elsewhere. Everybody’s gotta twist everything around.
And advancing age (I’m 56) has nothing to do with “Welcome To Mediocre, Texas.” I felt the same way about Austin when I arrived in 1984. It’s paradise. And to most people here that’s enough.
“The little town with the big head,” is how my roommate, the tattoo artist Michael Malone, summed up the attitude. “The little town with the big guest list” is what I added when I did a big seven-page spread on Austin music for Spin in 1986. “The New Sincerity” was the headline, after the indie rock scene based in such clubs as the Beach and the (Mark and J-Net) Continental.
“The New Sincerity” was meant as a gentle slap at such bands as Zeitgeist, the Wild Seeds and True Believers, but rather than slap back, the scene embraced the insult. Austin had a good sense of humor about itself.
I grew up in Vidor through ’76. Moved there from Beaumont. Given the choice, it was a good move. Great place for a boy to grow up. Business takes me many places now. Telling someone you grew up in Vidor insures that they will never forget the one person that they met from Vidor. Being from Vidor is a door opener. Everybody has heard about Vidor. It is up to you to make sure that when they tell the story of meeting someone from Vidor that they end the story with, “And he was a real nice guy, nothing like I had been led to believe a person from Vidor would be”.