25 Sidebar: More Notorious Than Significant
An addendum to the 25 Most Significant and/or Notorious Nights in Austin Music History.
JFS: The Bay City Holy Rollers
**** September 2005: Hurricane Rita is threatening to postpone the fourth annual Austin City Limits Music Festival. At the last minute, the 180 mph winds uprooting trees near the Gulf Coast take a turn before Central Texas, and, instead of a storm, Austin gets a heat wave, with temps reaching 108 degrees. Just past noon […]
Meet Houston lawyer Tony “the Shark” Buzbee
(originally published in Texas Super Lawyers Magazine 2014) by Michael Corcoran Tony Buzbee was a 22-year-old lieutenant just out of the ROTC at Texas A&M when he faced his Marine squad for the first time during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. If his men had any thoughts of testing the new “kid” commander in […]
This New York City does something to a person, Pt. 1
Last week, I came out of the Trader Joe’s on Bee Cave Road and as I started to drive away, a man next to a car with the front door open was waving for me to stop. He had a story. His wife (in the front seat) had just gotten out of the hospital and […]
End of the Century: Liberty Lunch July 31, 1999
By Michael Corcoran 7/15/99 Austin American Statesman IT’S ONLY A BUILDING, and an ugly one at that, with bathrooms that would’ve been an issue at the Geneva Convention and a hippy dippy mural dominated by a pouring coconut. It’s just a building, yes, but for the last 20-plus years it’s been a structure where musicians […]
Austin 1996: “Is the Boom a Bust for Austin Music?”
Clubs by Michael Corcoran, Musicians by Chris Riemenschneider, Additional writing by Don McLeese Published in Austin American-Statesman October 17, 1996 Sometimes it’s still like it was Friday night at Liberty Lunch. About 500 people have paid $7 to see two local bands and as the couples break off into little dance circles during 8 1/2 […]
Band of Brothers
originally published in 2004, with quotes added following the death of Tommy Ramone. The singer was an Olympic-sized geek with obsessive-compulsive disorder who found his escape in grandiose pop songs. The guitarist was a sullen, right-wing former street tough turned control freak. The bassist was a bottom-feeding junkie who used to rent his body on […]
Austin music sitdown #2- Bobby Doyle
He gave Kenny Rogers a gig in 1959 and replaced David Clayton-Thomas in Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1972, but piano player Bobby Doyle made the most impact locally by establishing Ego’s, a dark apartment complex lounge on South Congress Avenue, as a live music venue in the early ’90s. A musician’s musician, Doyle succumbed […]
Austin music sitdown: Robert “Fud” Shaw
The boogie woogie was born in East Texas, pioneered by George and Hersal Thomas (the older brothers of blues singer Sippie Wallace), who heard music in the choogle of steam locomotives. On such pre-1920 Thomas brother numbers as “The Fives” and “The Rocks,” the percussive left hand aped the rhythm of trains carrying lumber from […]
Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan. You changed the world, Sir.
Going back in the archives to find something on Bob Dylan to post on his 73rd birthday. This was written in advance of the best Dylan show I will ever see- Nov. 1995 at the Austin Music Hall- when he called up such Austinites as Doug Sahm, Ray Benson, Charlie Sexton and, maybe, opening act […]