Goodbye Old Friend: Ian McLagan 1945- 2014
McLagan didn’t come to Austin to retire on his laurels. He came here to thump that piano and sing like he and his mates were up to no good.
McLagan didn’t come to Austin to retire on his laurels. He came here to thump that piano and sing like he and his mates were up to no good.
About twenty years ago, old black gospel music started being where I went when I wanted to lose the last bits of my mind each night. Where’s the notch up in intensity after Al Green? I found it in the SS groups- Soul Stirrers, Swan Silvertones and Staple Singers. It was there in that little […]
Call the Guinness Book: we may have a world record sound man in South Austin.
Story originally published March 2014 on Arts & Labor blog. I sometimes refer to the Austin Music Awards as the Austin Moser Awards and it wasn’t a jab so much as the truth. Margaret Moser’s Olympic-sized personality dominates every aspect of the proceedings. Her graciousness is reflected by the vast number of categories and her […]
By Michael Corcoran It’s the latest in a series of dead Friday nights on Beale St., and if 11-year-old “Little Momo” Tabron appears any more bored, you’ll be tempted to snap your fingers in front of his face. This kid – who’s spent half his life playing drums for tips on Beale – looks as […]
By Michael Corcoran One Saturday, every Saturday, in Fort Worth, 1960: A pair of 12-year-olds in the T.H. Conn music store messing around with the various stringed instruments hanging from the walls. The shorter of the kids always went back to his favorite guitar, a beat-up Epiphone Texan acoustic, which had the sweetest tone he’d […]
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the soul of a man.
Complain all you want about the traffic, the rising cost of living, the rash of condos, the second weekend of ACL Fest and how this once-sleepy college town has gone to hell in a pedicab. But the luckiest residents of Austin are the ones who just moved here. Huh? “You must also love those assholes […]