Thursday, March 28, 2024

The Swan Song of the Austin Moser Awards

Margaret Moser recognized by SIMS Foundation director Heather Alden at the Austin Music Awards during SXSW on March 12, 2014.

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 almost cornball sense of family carries over to her loyal crew – hippies in tuxedos, barmaids in bouffants, old friends in sparkled gowns. I’ve long called the AMAs the prom for the Austin Music Scene and have been quick to mock its smalltown nature in the midst of the music industry’s biggest week. But to tell you the truth, it’s the one thing during SXSW I have almost never missed.

There’s just no atmosphere anywhere quite like the Austin Music Awards. The awards show used to be the Austin music scene’s biggest night until SXSW started five years in and slowly began to tower over Moser’s event like the condos around the Broken Spoke.

But SXSW didn’t change much, if anything, about the AMAs, except that superstars like Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend, in town to keynote, took the stage in surprise appearances. Certain bookings, like Okkervil River backing Roky Erickson in 2009 or Moser’s old beau John Cale joining Alejandro Escovedo, would bring in the badgeholders, but the AMAs have remained a mainly local event. This is the traditional last chance for everyone who kept Austin music going for 361 days of the year to have one last hug before the invasion.

Moser’s broad musical taste – she’s both a careful historian and a giddy booster for kiddie bands – is manifested by her bookings. At the March 12 awards show, for instance, the stage of the Convention Center’s Austin Ballroom will hold everyone from the Texas Tornados to the Young Bloods Choir of musicians’ kids like William Harries Graham and Marlon Sexton.

And, as always, there will be a beaming Margaret, with her hair piled high, making everybody feel special.

This is the last year the Austin Music Awards will feel like it has for the past 31, as Margaret Moser is stepping down as director/queen. And in May, she’ll retire as staff writer at the Austin Chronicle, a position she’s held since the paper’s inception in 1981. Margaret was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer in February last year and began chemo the week after last year’s awards show. She needs to concentrate full time on her health.

Next year there needs to be a new category at the AMAs, the Margaret Moser Award for music community service. It’s hard to specify just what Margaret has given to the musicians and the fans of this town, but when you meet her you know Austin is a special place.

She’s flawed – who isn’t? – but she’s managed to turn a negative, caring too much about stuff that doesn’t mean shit (celebrity, gossip), into a positive by crafting ways to make it interesting. In this regard, Margaret and I have always been kindred spirits. But we’re sometimes an estranged brother and sister; after all, I took over her popular column at the Austin Chronicle in 1984 and she took my best friend.

When I started to work at the Statesman in 1995, coming from the Dallas Morning News, certain folks at the Austin Chronicle saw it as a betrayal. The Statesman’s new Thursday entertainment tab XL was in direct competition with the Chron. We spent a couple years messing with each other, sometimes in good-natured kidding and sometimes in all-out war. Once I left a notebook behind somewhere and Margaret went through it and found my idea to start a column at the Statesman called “Austin Confidential.” I didn’t know this until months later. But I ditched the idea when I was watching Moser’s access TV show “Check This Action” and she introduced a new segment called “Austin Confidential.” It was something we laughed about later.

In 1996, things heated up and got a little mean. I had written a piece about “The SXSW Keynote Jinx,” which was in the wake of maiden keynoter, producer Huey Meaux’s, arrest for having sex with a slew of underage females. It was a low blow on my part. Someone at the Chronicle, either Margaret or one of the young writers she controlled, dug up some quotes from an old Chron where I proclaimed Meaux as my new idol, marveling that such an elder was always accompanied by young women. My cheeks were on fire. They got me good.

But that same night, I struck back. I was covering the awards show for the newspaper and on the way out to make my deadline, I encountered a young musician carrying a couple of winner plaques. He was known for his cynicism and when we joked about the awards, he noted an incident at the most recent Grammys when Eddie Vedder’s acceptance speech was about how little the arbitrary recognition really means in the whole scheme of things. “After he said that, Pearl Jam probably sold a million records,” said the musician. “But these awards,” holding out his AMAs, “really don’t mean anything.”

I used that quote to end the article and the next time I ran into the musician he said Moser had called him that morning in tears.

Hell of a thing to do to the person that helped get you started in this town, but competition makes me a little crazy. When Margaret and I went at it, it was kinda like a brother and a sister unloading on each other at the Thanksgiving dinner table. There was love at the bottom of all the pettiness.

The first thing I wrote for the Chronicle, two months after moving here in 1984, was a mostly-negative review of Joe Ely (backed by the jazz band Passenger) at the T-Bird Riverfest, which was then the biggest annual concert in town. I sent it in, completely unsolicited, and it sat on editor Louis Black’s desk for a couple days. He had no intention of running it. But Margaret read it and insisted. I was pleasantly shocked when the Chron came out the next week and there was my review. And a couple days later came a letter telling me off. I still remember the first paragraph: “HORSESHIT!”

I introduced Margaret to my roommate Rollo Banks, figuring there might be a love connection, and five months later they were married. While on their extended honeymoon in Hawaii, where Rollo still had a tattoo shop, I subbed on Margaret’s “In One Ear” column and basically became the opposite of her. She wrote nice things about the bands, I made fun of them. And my approach became instantly popular. “Margaret’s column says ‘fuck me,’,” I’d tell people. ‘My column says ‘fuck you’.” I talked about myself a lot back then.

Margaret still thinks that I orchestrated the whole thing to take over her column, but that’s not true. Only because I didn’t think of it. It just so happened that Margaret now had a husband (they stayed together a few years) and didn’t want to go out anymore. I was new to town and didn’t want to stay home. I called my column “Don’t You Start Me Talking.”

The day Margaret was going to move into Rollo’s apartment, we got a truck and went to her dilapidated duplex on Red River near First at about 9 in the morning. When me and Rollo got there, we heard laughter from outside. Margaret and her friend E.A. were sitting in the middle of the living room, around a pile of posters, letters, postcards and all sorts of rock flotsam and jetsam. There was not a box packed. The girls had stayed up all night, their last as sister groupies, reminiscing.

Rollo was livid and slammed the door behind him. “Call me when you’re ready!” We came back around 4 hours later and the whole place was packed up and ready to go. Margaret was apologetic. She just got carried away by all the memories.

That’s how this year’s Austin Music Awards will be for many. A hundred awards will be given out, but the night will be about the one person who kept the show going on these years. For Margaret it’ll be a time to recollect all the memories, but for the rest of us it’ll be a thanks for those she’s created.

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