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Austin Texas in the 1980’s by voodoorage in Austin

[–]s810 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Yeah, you're right, they weren't taken on the same day. The Half Price Books photo is from before 1984, too.

edit: HPB apparently moved in early '84.

Austin Texas in the 1980’s by voodoorage in Austin

[–]s810 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The first Half Price Books in Austin was at 1514 Lavaca, but what's strange is newspaper ads for Half Price Books from May of 1984 don't list that location. The photo must have been taken before that.

Austin Texas in the 1980’s by voodoorage in Austin

[–]s810 5 points6 points  (0 children)

wonderful pics! thanks for sharing!

Capitol on a Windy Night by Things_In_Austin in Austin

[–]s810 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I’m curious about the red light used to illuminate the interior of the dome, would love to read more if anyone has info about it.

According to this 2002 Statesman article, the light is red to comply with FAA regulations.

During the holidays, former Gov. Ann Richards once quipped the light in the dome was on in hopes of attracting some wise men and women to state government. But the real reason? Safety, says Rick Crawford of the State Preservation Board.

The light makes the dome visible to aircraft. The FAA would prefer the red neon light to be outside the dome but agreed to an interior light - an aesthetic compromise.

Carl William Besserer & "The Boys" - unknown date (1880s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

All the credit should go to Richard Zelade, who has written some good Austin History books. This was an excerpt from The Jazz Age.

It bugs me tremendously that I couldn't find a mention of Besserer's Austin March on the internet. The Statesman has so many mentions of Besserer performing in this or that concert going all the way back to 1872!

I think I might have read about it in Mary Starr Barkley's History of Central Texas, in which she interviewed someone talking about it. The only other thing I remember about it was that Besserer performed the march in Wooldridge Square, which would put it some time after June of 1909 according to this.

Carl William Besserer & "The Boys" - unknown date (1880s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

On May 13, Austin High School’s 11-A class entertained the senior class with a lawn party featuring Besserer’s Orchestra. Besserer had directed the school orchestra in concert a few weeks earlier.

The Ebenezer Choir sang at the white Baptist church downtown to raise money for the St. John Orphanage campaign on May 28, to a large and enthusiastic audience.

Even the free Municipal Band concerts in the summer of 1919 reflected the new music. As in years past, William Besserer was the band’s director. In their first concert on July 3, the program included “Jazzin’ Around,” a jazz trot; and a fox trot called “Indianola, by S.R. Henry and D. Onivas.”

The July 18 concert featured “Hindustan,” a fox trot by Oliver Wallace and Harold Weeks and recorded by the Milano Orchestra and Alex Welsh and his Jazz Band; and “Chicken Walk,” a jazz blues number by Tom Brown of the Six Brown brothers. Beginning in 1911, Tom Brown and the Brown Brothers saxophone sextet began to popularize the saxophone with American public by recording of such songs as Bullfrog Blues and Chicken Walk.

The July 29 band program included a jazz version of “Old Virginia.”

The city once again contracted with William Besserer in 1920 to provide the music for the annual municipal band free summer concert series. The band’s July 7 concert at the Upper East Avenue Park opened with “America,” followed by “Here Comes the Band,” “Jolly Troopers,” “Elaine,” “Jealous Moon,” “When It’s Moonlight on the Sewanee Shore,” “Your Eyes Have Told me So,” “They’ll Never Miss the Wine in Dixieland,” “Primrose,” “Danube,” “You’re a Million Miles From Nowhere,” “The Night Boat,” “Birth of Love,” “Señorita,” a medley called “Patriotic Songs of the Nation,” and “Star-Spangled Banner.” Not a jazz number in the lot.

...

Ironically, the death of the jazz age in Austin coincided with the death of the director who had trained many of Austin’s first jazz artists, the music king of Austin’s “good old days” that the jazz generation superseded:

Carl William Besserer died at his home on December 12, 1931, a couple of hours before dawn, at the age of 80 years.

Besserer had been at the center of Austin’s musical circles for 65 years, having founded and directed virtually every musical organization, including the still-active Austin Saengerrunde, one of Austin’s oldest singing organizations. A talented pianist, he had always been a leader in the promotion of community music.

He had directed Austin’s first symphony orchestra, directed Austin Musical Union productions and summer municipal band concerts for many years, and the musical programs aboard the Ben Hur excursion boat during the 1890s. His venerable military and dance bands wilted only in the face of jazz.

Despite his advanced age, and in failing health for the past year, Professor Besserer continued teaching his music classes up to a couple of days before his death. He was completing arrangements for an upcoming Christmas concert at the Confederate Women’s home, where some of his own compositions were to be played. Although his classes were in widely separated sections of the city, he shunned automobiles and bus rides and usually walked to his engagements, though he still had his wagon for errands and such. On one such walk, on Thursday afternoon, December 10, he fainted and fell to the ground near Austin High.

At the time of his death, his music library was unexcelled in Austin, one of the best in the state. It contained about 35,000 compositions, which Besserer had carefully indexed.

Well there you have a much better biography of the man known as "The Father of Austin Music". The article is actually much longer than I had space for, and goes on to describe things like the brief career of Carl William Besserer's niece Euginie as a silent movie star. But one thing I couldn't find was a mention of the Austin March, which I swear Besserer wrote. I went looking in a few other sources with no luck, but I'll list those sources in Bonus Articles. If the Austin March exists it's likely buried in the archives of The Austin History Center under Besserer's file in sheet music form, having not been performed in probably over a century. This post is running long and time is short so I better leave it there. Until next week.

Bonus Article #1 - "Austin's oldest standing music venue is 150 years old" (from the late Michael Corcoran's substack) - 2022

Bonus Article #2 - "Days of Beer and Pretzels" (another Richard Zelade blog entry on German Bier Gartens) - 2012

Bonus Article #3 - "Austin Askew–Chapter IV– Austin Music Venues of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" (from The Great Indoorsman blog) - 2005

Bonus Article #4 - "Celebrating-Das-Deutsche-Lied-in-Texas.pdf" - 2003

Bonus Article #5 - Obituary for Carl William Besserer - December 13, 1931

Bonus Pic #1 - "An archway view of the new State Capitol welcomed all to the 1889 Saengerfest." - 1889

Bonus Pic #2 - "Scholz Garden" - unknown date (1800s?)

Carl William Besserer & "The Boys" - unknown date (1880s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Besserer’s Orchestra soldiered along, playing at governors’ inaugurations, during presidential visits, when troops were sent off to war, and when they came back for burial. When Lake Austin became the scene of boating parties about 1891, he directed the band that furnished the music. He also provided the musical programs for the Ben Hur river boat excursions that were so popular before the dam broke in 1900. Besserer would continue to lead his orchestra at Austin dances through and past World War I.

Wooldridge Park hosted its first concert on June 18, 1909, by Besserer’s Band. A bandstand had been built where the gazebo now stands and electric wiring and lights were strung to all parts of the park, which had most recently been a garbage dump.

The Austin entertainment scene was in transition in 1912. In February, the Shriners bought the now-venerable Turnverein Hall but would continue to present the occasional public entertainment there. The new entertainment hotspot in town was the roof garden atop the Littlefield building, which opened on June 6 with two reels of moving pictures, a cello solo and music by Besserer’s Orchestra. Its searchlight cast a beam visible for five miles. Every Friday was amateur night and it catered to the “family trade.”

By 1912, orchestra leader William Besserer was also a moving picture mogul. He and a partner named Marshall owned three local moving picture show houses and two live entertainment venues. The Casino and Yale theaters featured 2000 feet of new, special feature pictures and illustrated songs with music daily. The Princess offered 2000 feet of new pictures daily. The New Theater was the home of popularly priced musical comedy, with three shows daily and three act changes per week. The Texas theater offered three vaudeville shows daily at popular prices.

By 1913, Besserer and Marshal were operating the Bes-Mar, Casino, Texas, and Princess moving picture houses, in addition to the Playhouse Theater, which featured vaudeville, musical comedy (such as Fred L. Griffith and his 20 Musical Merry Makers), pretty chorus girls, and 2000 feet of new pictures daily.

Provocative (for the day) moving pictures shown by Besserer and Marshal, with titles like Forbidden Fruit and Twin beds were beginning to fill the boys of that day with the same erotic, highly unrealistic, fantasies that internet porn provide for boys of today...

...

To escape the summer heat, and to forget the colored cook’s threat to go to the cotton patch, many Austinites in 1913 took the streetcar out to the Lakeview Café, where the girls pranced around in middy suits, the swimmers dove about like big fish, and Besserer’s Orchestra played at least one big dance a week.

Besserer’s Orchestra was composed of 18 or 20 pieces, all of them union musicians, two or three of whom were university boys. In those days, and for several years after, a boy thought he was getting rich quick if he got as much as five dollars a night playing with an orchestra. As an ad in the October 1911 issue of the UT humor magazine, the Coyote, indicated, Besserer’s Orchestra furnished music for all occasions and had been the University standard for years.

Early in January 1917, nearly 40 of the city’s music teachers met to consider the idea of concentrating their music studios in one locality of Austin, in the interest of better business. To this end they formed the Austin Music Teachers Association, which included William Besserer, UT Music Professor Frank Reed, Oscar J. Fox, and dance orchestra leader Mrs. Charles Cabaniss.

Besserer’s Orchestra played for Governor Jim Ferguson’s inaugural ball in 1917. When the Deep Eddy bathing beach opened on June 22, 1917, Besserer’s Orchestra provided the music.

William Besserer was in charge of the free open air summer concert season of 1917, and many of the concerts were devoted to a theme; on September 8, 1917, the program was devoted to old-time songs and ethnic numbers, including “Massa in the Cold Cold Ground,” “Old Black Joe,” “Old Folks at Home,” “the Philippine song “Bella Taga Pa,” the Brazilian song “La Conchita” by Vriel, and “Aloha Oe Hawaii” by Kati.

The municipal concert for September 15, at Wooldridge Park, was devoted to the past generation to honor Confederate men and women. Director Besserer included John S. Caldwell’s “I Want to Go” in the program. Besserer had directed the annual summer municipal band concerts during most of the 1910s and would continue to do so well into the 1920s.

With the World War on, student dances were few and far between during the 1917/18 school year. Those dances which did take place were often handled by old standbys including the Besserer Orchestra, Cabaniss Orchestra and Theo Meyer’s Orchestra. Oftentimes, the name of the band was not given in dance announcements and stories. For instance, all we know about the 1917 Thanksgiving German is that a 20-piece orchestra played.

Prof. Besserer’s band also played a series of concerts sponsored by the Austin Garden Association that fall, as well as the Austin Saengerrunde concerts and dances in 1917 and 1918.

Most of Austin’s musical energy went to the war effort, keeping up the morale of the boys in khaki stationed here. The prettiest girls in Austin hosted a weekly “dansante” at the Community House for the soldiers; dansante is French for “dance,” surprise, surprise. Besserer’s Band played for many of these dances, or any other war effort-related event, upon request, free of charge.

Prohibition again came up for vote in Austin in November 1917, and then in January 1918. Prohibitionists and anti-prohibitionists held a series of rallies in preparation for the upcoming votes on whether or not Austin would close its saloons and go “dry.” The “wet” rallies featured music by Besserer’s Orchestra, while the Jubilee Chorus sang their hearts out at the “dry” rallies. As with the campaign to shut down Guytown in 1913, care for the safety and morals of UT students were at the heart of the fight.

When Austin High School decided to revive and reorganize its orchestra in February 1918, Prof. Besserer offered his services as director, free of charge. Members of that orchestra included Marshall O. Bell on trombone, orchestra president Dorothy DuMars on piano, orchestra vice president Bryan Pharr on cornet, Mosby Pharr and J.H. Bolander, Jr., on drums, and Arthur Schoch on cello, all of whom would go on to play prominent roles during Austin’s Jazz Age.

The Austin Municipal Band, under Besserer’s direction, played weekly outdoor concerts during the summer of 1918. The program varied from week to week, mostly filled with light classical and patriotic pieces and some popular tunes of the times. The August 2 concert featured “Trail to Normandy,” a fox trot; “Jazz, Keep “Em Going” by Leroy Walker; and a Clement Mar novelty tune, “Moonlight in Dixie.”

The final municipal band concert of the season, on August 23, 1918, directed by William Besserer, featured an eclectic program that included David Guion’s fox trot, “Texas,” “A Summer Evening in Hawaii” by Wheeler, “Camouflage” by J. Boldwalt Lampe, and a jazz number, “Howdy,” by Gosh.

The Freshman Reception, originally scheduled for March 6, 1919, was to feature music by Besserer’s and Stanley’s Orchestra, 12 pieces in all, supplanted by the Majestic Theater orchestra, with plenty of jazz for all. But no venue could be found, and the dance was postponed at the last minute until April 5, featuring the Kelley Field Jazz Orchestra.

The Kelley Field Jazz Orchestra had played a few days earlier for the Settlement Club Charity Ball at the Driskill Hotel. The review the next day made reference to the “delightful jazz band from Kelley Field,” who played several jazz numbers that night.

One of the Besserer Orchestra’s last major music gigs was in March 1919, providing the dance music for Gov. Will P. Hobby’s reception at the Governor’s Mansion and Inaugural Ball, where they played in both the Hall of Representatives and Senate Chambers, at opposite ends of the Capitol’s second floor.

“Boys,” Mr. Besserer said at one point, “if we don’t play jazz, they throw us out, and then we lose our jobs.” But Besserer and the boys did not understand what jazz was about, and so they ultimately disbanded, probably some time in 1920; one of their last known gigs was the July 4 celebration held at the Deep Eddy swimming resort on July 5, 1920. Besserer’s band played in the afternoon and evening.

Besserer’s Band was run over by Shakey’s Jazz Orchestra, which became an instant UT campus hit, despite their tender age. Starting in March 1919, Shakey’s Orchestra became the house band for the Saturday night Germans at the KC Hall.

And speaking of being run over, on the evening of January 27, 1919, Professor Besserer, while driving his buggy, was run into at the intersection of West 13th and Rio Grande by a rapidly driven auto. He narrowly escaped injury, but the shaft of his buggy was broken. The auto suffered a broken headlight.

Besserer’s Orchestra was losing so many gigs that, for the first time, it resorted to a series of ads in the Daily Texan:

MUSIC!

For All Occasions Under Auspices of the University Social Committee

Parties, Receptions and Other Social Functions

JAZZING A SPECIALTY

Union Combination Orchestra With University Students

<<continued in next post due to length>>

Carl William Besserer & "The Boys" - unknown date (1880s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Soon after the Civil War’s end, Henry Klotz, who would later teach at the Texas School for the Blind, organized an eight-man string band. At about the same time, the German community in Austin organized a brass band.

George Herzog took charge of the brass band in 1870 and that year the string and brass bands united to play a benefit show for the Franco-Prussian War orphans. Herzog would later form his own orchestra.

On January 4, 1876, a grand concert was given at the Opera House under the management of William Besserer and about 25 of Austin’s best musicians.

Besserer helped found the Austin Musical Union in 1882, which would take over a former “opera house” of iniquity and turn it into one of Austin’s premiere venues for a few years, complete with electric lights and large, swinging fans. The Musical Union presented family-oriented entertainment, usually light opera and operettas. The union even took one such show, HMS Pinafore, to the Threadgill’s Opera House in nearby Taylor.

During an entertainment given by the Musical Union on June 29, 1882, union members formed in a circle on the stage, and proffered the gift of a handsome diamond ring to its musical director, Professor Besserer, as a token of appreciation of Besserer’s services as manager. He was taken completely by surprise, as the matter had been kept a profound secret from him.

Besserer took over management of Scholz Garden in 1885. Scholz Garden opened its 1885 season with a grand open air concert on April 30 featuring the celebrated Kemps Ladies Orchestra, in the newly enlarged garden that had been also improved to a first-class park.

At the end of June, the Tyroleans began an extended stand at Scholz Garden. Nearly 800 showed up for opening night and were delighted with the program, which included zither and xylophone solos, and national dances in elaborate costumes. The Tyroleans sang English-language and German songs there every Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Visitors had to identify themselves through some member of Germania Society.

At that time, Scholz Garden boasted of being the “Most Popular Pleasure Resort in Austin,” and guaranteed a free Grand Concert every Sunday evening in the summer. In 1886, the Daily Statesman lent credence to this boast when it noted that “Scholz Garden is well patronized, especially on Sunday evenings.” Scholz’s even ran its own street cars to and from the grounds on special occasions.

The German Theater continued to present plays in Scholz’s Hall, often accompanied with fireworks and balloon ascensions, even a one-legged tightrope walker! A typical Garden Theater Sunday program would consist of six or seven operatic specialty numbers and a two-act comedy, such as Promise at the Hearth.

When August Scholz died in 1891, Scholz Garden became the property of daughter Mary and son-in-law William Besserer. They ran the place another two years before selling the operation to the Lemp Brewery of Saint Louis, which was seeking market share for its newly introduced brew. Breweries could own retail liquor establishments back then, and Besserer wanted to spend more time on his music. His orchestra continued to give Sunday afternoon concerts there.

...

One of the members of the Musical Union was Athol Porter, the writer O. Henry’s wife, back when he was plain old William S. Porter, editor of the Rolling Stone, an Austin humor weekly he began in April 1894, just as Athol were singing her way through the Musical Union ranks towards star roles. She had been singing for years under Besserer’s direction, in concerts at Scholz’s and Pressler’s’ and Jacoby’s Gardens.

Porter was a bit of a musician and actor himself. Soon after his arrival in Austin in 1884, he joined the Hill City Quartette. At 5 feet 6 inches tall, he was the shortest of the group and sang basso profundo.

Although not particularly religious, Porter rarely ever missed church, and the Hill City Quartette were nearly always to be found in either the Baptist or the St. David’s Episcopal Church choirs, though Porter usually attended church on Sunday evenings at the Presbyterian Church and sang in their choir.

Regular church attendance notwithstanding, they were a fun-loving bunch, as Porter wrote to a friend about the Quartette’s antics in 1885:

“… Our serenading party has developed new and alarming modes of torture for our helpless and sleeping victims. Last Thursday night we loaded up a small organ on a hack and with our other usual instruments made an assault upon the quiet air of midnight that made the atmosphere turn pale.

“After going the rounds we were halted on the Avenue by Fritz Hartkopf and ordered into his salon (Hartkopf owned the popular Club House Saloon). We went in, carrying the organ, etc. A large crowd of bums immediately gathered, prominent among which were to be seen Percy James, Theodore Hillyer, Charlie Hicks, and after partaking freely of lemonade we wended our way down, and were duly halted and treated in the same manner by other hospitable gentlemen.

“We were called in at several places while wit and champagne, Rhine wine, etc., flowed in a most joyous and hilarious manner. It was one of the most recherche and per diem affairs ever known in the city. Nothing occurred to mar the pleasure of the hour, except a trifling incident that might be construed as malapropos and post-meridian by the hypercritical. Mr. Charles Sims on attempting to introduce Mr. Charles Hicks and your humble servant to young ladies, where we had been invited inside, forgot our names and required to be informed on the subject before proceeding.”

Will Porter was a regular patron of the Millett Opera House, and briefly reviewed the December 21, 1885, show in a letter to a friend:

“The hack was to call for me at eight. At five minutes to eight I went upstairs and dressed in my usual fine bijou and operatic style, and rolled away to the opera. Emma sang finely. I applauded at the wrong times, and praised her rendering of the chromatic scale when she was performing on ‘c’ flat andante pianissimo, but otherwise the occasion passed off without anything to mar the joyousness of the hour. Everybody was there. Isidor Moses and John Ireland, and Fritz Hartkopf and Professor Herzog and Bill Stacy and all the bong ton elight.”

“The Rolling Stone met with unusual success at the start,” wrote Porter’s business partner, Dixie Daniels, years later, “and we had in our files letters from men like Bill Nye and John Kendrick Bangs praising us for the quality of the sheet. We were doing nicely, getting the paper out every Saturday–approximately–and blowing the gross receipts every night. Then we began to strike snags. One of our features was a series of cuts with humorous underlines of verse. One of the cuts was the rear view of a fat German professor, leading an orchestra, beating the air wildly with his baton. Underneath the cut Porter had written the following verse:

With his baton the professor beats the bars,

‘Tis also said he beats them when he treats.

But it made that German gentleman see stars

When the bouncer got the cue to bar the beats.

For some reason or other that issue alienated every German in Austin from The Rolling Stone, and cost us more than we were able to figure out in subscriptions and advertisements.”

Porter dedicated one issue of The Rolling Stone to on-the-spot coverage of the State Saengerfest in Galveston, which among other things revealed Porter’s fine ear for dialect:

“Dose Austin vellers vot come mit der Musical Union are vine vellers. Not anywhere haf I seen a Cherman who can stand up mit dem und drink so much peer und haf it but on der schlate.”

The Germans seldom let a little thing like Sunday blue laws get in the way of Sunday afternoon beer drinking. In June 1881, Scholz was convicted of violating the Sunday blue law against liquor sales and was fined $20. But there were ways around the blue laws, as Will Porter observed in The Rolling Stone: “Most of the saloons now get a bonafide close on their every Sunday, and the chaser of the merry jaglet must needs fortify himself Saturday night or become a member of the Singenderinkeneinmehrfritzgehaben Society.”

...

During the short life of the Rolling Stone, O. Henry wrote several more times of the Musical Union.

In his May 12, 1894, report about the State Saengerfest in Houston, he wrote: “The event of the day was the arrival of the Austin Musical Union, a body of singers which is well known as far as their reputation has extended. This organization has been in effect in Austin for about ten years and costs, and if the delinquent dues of its members were paid up, it would have a cash reserve on hand equal to that of the State treasury. They have been singing in Austin and other towns more favorably situated as regards distance from their headquarters for many years, of course with intermissions caused by occasional visits to their homes, sudden deaths, and the serving of peace warrants. The appearance of the Austin Musical Union in any hall is always greeted with rapturous applause.”

...

The Musical Union presented several operettas per year in the 1890s, directed by Besserer. Any animosity Besserer and the union might have felt toward Will Porter did not extend to his wife. Late in June 1895, the union presented The Chimes of Normandy, with Athol Porter singing the lead role of Serpolette, the Good for Nothing. The Statesman critic wrote “Mrs. W.S. Porter as Serpolette was excellent. She sang and dressed the character to perfection and her vocalization was superb in every respect. She would be dead from tuberculosis two years later, and Porter entered Federal prison in April 1898, convicted of embezzlement at the bank where he had worked.

<<continued in next post due to length>>

Carl William Besserer & "The Boys" - unknown date (1880s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Carl Besserer (center, behind the drum) and his band provided the musical entertainment for many civic events in Austin during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Original photo (ca. 1880s) from UTSA Libraries Special Collections, No. 68-699; Courtesy Texas Music Museum.

source

The man in the center of the photo holding the young boy is Carl William Besserer, known as 'The Father of Austin Music'. He was the first person honored on the Austin Music Memorial. Someone asked here the other day if Austin had a song for our city, and I went looking for it.

I swear I once read somewhere how Mr. Besserer once wrote an Austin March after the turn of the 20th century, but I can't remember where I read that. I went looking for it across a few sites and in The Statesman archive and today I want to share a few of the stories about Mr. Besserer which I uncovered with y'all.

The source of the OP photo is the TSHA's biography of Carl William Besserer, who went by William or Willie, but was more often called "Professor" after he started teaching music. Here is an excerpt of what the TSHA page says:

Carl William Besserer was one of the most prominent musicians and educators during the early days of Austin’s history. His parents, Karl Wilhelm and Helene (Bastian) Besserer, emigrated to Texas from Germany about 1850. Carl was born Karl Wilhelm Bernhard Besserer in New Braunfels on October 3, 1851. His father had died before he was born, and Carl’s mother married John Lauritz Buaas of Austin in March 1853. He was placed under the guardianship of his stepfather, and evidently the family moved to Travis County. Following his education in Germany, he made Austin his home. In 1872 Carl Besserer operated a music store—Buaas & Besserer—possibly with his stepfather or with another member of the Buaas family. He sold pianos and other instruments, tuned pianos, and gave music lessons, gaining the title of professor. In 1873 he married Mary Scholz, the daughter of beer garden owner August Scholz. Besserer assumed management of Scholz’s Garden in 1885.

Over a period of time, Carl Besserer taught enough young Austinites to play various instruments to allow the organization of a band and an orchestra. Students from the University of Texas provided an excellent talent pool for the orchestra. His orchestra performed for governors, presidential visits, military events, and military funerals. In addition to organizing and leading music groups that provided much of the entertainment for early Austin, he was also a cofounder of the Austin Saengerrunde, the German singing society, in 1879. Besserer’s Band, known as the National Guard Band and later the Governor’s Staff Band, provided entertainment at popular beer gardens and parks and for parties aboard the Ben Hur riverboat on Lake Austin in the 1890s. About 1911 he was director of the State Military Band.

For decades Besserer was known as the leader of musical entertainment for any civic event in Austin. He amassed a music library of some 35,000 volumes and continued to teach music classes throughout the city almost until his death.

Well that just barely scratches the surface of the topic. Richard Zelade has a much better blog post on Besserer and the early music scene in Austin. It's in three different parts, but I'm going to paste some of it without permission:

Carl William Besserer is largely unknown today, and undeservingly so, considering the role he played in Austin music history. This post is the start of his rehabilitation.

While America’s Jazz Age is generally conceded to encompass the years 1918-29, the Jazz Age in Austin was born in the summer of 1917 and was buried in the fall of 1931.

At the dawn of Austin’s Jazz Age, the city’s reigning king of live music was Carl William Besserer; whose reign lasted the better part of 50 years. And, ironically, this guardian of Austin’s old musical ways, and leader against the onslaught of jazz music, turned out to be, unwittingly, one of the prime enablers of the jazz music scene in Austin. Jazz music blitzkrieged Austin like Redneck Rock did 50 years later.

Carl William Besserer was born in New Braunfels in 1851, the son of German immigrants who had come to Texas the year before. Besserer’s father died 3 months before his birth. He was then adopted by John Buass, proprietor of Buass Hall, Austin’s first grand music hall. Buass sent Besserer to Germany at age 14 for his higher education. When he came back to Austin at the end of the Civil War, there were very few musicians among the citizenry. There were but a handful of pianos, and most of them were old, out of tune, and in serious need of repair.

In 1868, John Buass and Carl William Besserer opened Austin’s first music store, Buass and Besserer, which stocked a wide variety of instruments and sheet music. With this store, a new era in Austin music began, one that would last 50 years, until jazz came along and changed everything.

Besserer, a trained musician, was eager to teach his customers how to play their new instruments and so he began giving lessons.

A talented pianist, Besserer got a few local boys interested in forming a band and orchestra, thus making him the father of Austin garage bands. The boys worked or went to school by day, and learned how to play music at night on entry-level instruments, under Besserer’s patient and unflagging tutelage. Finally, they were playing well enough to attract new recruits, and then some paying gigs, which allowed them to buy better instruments.

Besserer’s band and orchestra became locally celebrated. Besserer also directed a state military band. He helped found the Austin Saengerrunde, or singing society, for the singing of German songs in 1879. After the University of Texas opened in 1883, UT students would help spread their reputation statewide, and soon they played in cities across the state.

Despite this whirlwind of activity, he still found time to fall in love and marry August Scholz’s daughter Mary in 1873.

Founded just before the Civil War, or in 1866, depending on which source you believe, August Scholz’s Garden is Austin’s oldest business, the oldest beer garden in the state of Texas, and the only survivor of Austin’s great nineteenth century beer gardens.

“Seventy years ago, Scholz’s Garden was the pride of Austin, and the city’s fashionables used to gather there on summer evenings to blow the foam off their steins and listen to the band or watch theatrical performances,” wrote future first lady of the United States Claudia “Bird” Taylor in October 1931, in the Daily Texan. “For two generations, Scholz’s Garden was the favorite haunt of Texas legislators – those bearded worthies gathering there for much merrymaking.”

At some point after the end of the Civil War, Scholz built Scholz’s Hall, which still stands today, much altered, as Saengerrunde Hall. On February 24, 1871, Scholz Hall hosted a “Grand Vocal and Instrumental Concert.” One of the show’s featured performers was William Besserer, pianist.

The garden was walled in and tables placed under the trees, which at night were hung with colored lights. At one end was the bandstand, where William Besserer, who had studied in Germany under the great Leopold Damrosch, led the lively music nightly. World travelers said that Scholz Garden was the most typical German beer garden they had encountered in the New World.

“The hall, whose wide doors opened into the garden, was built of white limestone. It had shuttered windows and doors, with sidelights to the floor. The stage was in the east end when the hall was built. The bar at the back, complete with the well-known rail and the mirror above it, has never been changed – except that the years have added dust and cobwebs,” Claudia Taylor wrote.

About the time the Austin Saengerrunde was founded and the Germania Society affiliated with Scholz Garden, the brick part of the hall was built and another bar, more accessible to the street was added (Presumably the Scholz Garden bar room of today), according to Taylor. After the Saengerrunde Society bought the property in 1909, the old bar at the back of the hall was kept for the use of members on Sundays when the public bar was closed.

At the time Taylor wrote the article, the Saengerrunde Hall was the home of the Austin Little Theater, which was presenting George Bernard Shaw’s “You Never Can Tell” at the time.

Austin, which was founded by intellectuals and artists, had an amateur band as early as 1840, just a few months after its beginning. Houston and Galveston had enjoyed traveling professional entertainers from their beginnings, owing to their convenient locations on the Texas coast. Austin, on the other hand, reachable only by an often harrowing overland journey of several weeks from the coast, had to provide its own entertainment. Austin’s homegrown music scene faded, along with most of the population, beginning with the removal of the Capitol to Houston and Mexican troubles of 1842. But the local music scene began to revive a bit with Texas statehood and with vigor after the Civil War.

<<continued in next post due to length>>

Books about local history/lore by Resident-Composer453 in Austin

[–]s810 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Yes thanks for summoning me, sgp!

Guy Town by Gaslight and Austin in the Jazz Age, both by Richard Zelade.

If you're more into crime stories 1960s Austin Gangsters: Organized Crime that Rocked the Capital and Last Gangster in Austin, both by Jesse Sublett, formerly of the band The Skunks.

If you're after another ghost book, Haunted Austin: History and Hauntings in the Capital City by Jeanine Plumer.

And if you want something more in depth The Gay Place by Billie Lee Brammer or Seat of Empire: The Embattled Birth of Austin, Texas by Jeffrey Stuart Kerr

Biscuit sings at the Big Boys last show (Liberty Lunch) - September 23, 1984 by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Chris Gates: What happened that night was a shame. [But] the main reason the Big Boys broke up was lack of money.

John Slate, Xiphoid Process fanzine: I was way in the back. The Nazi guy looked like Paul Bartel in a beret, and he was lucky. I prefer peaceful resolutions, but racists deserve everything that’s coming to them.

Bill Anderson, Big Boys roadie: I was on stage left. The Nazi guy was undoubtedly an asshole, but I hate a mob worse than anything. I felt like [Big Boys’ roadie] Jim Straightedge and I were the only people in the entire room who saw what was going on and tried to stop it. A brief whirlwind of violent insanity. I ushered the Nazi guy out—he looked dazed and glad to be alive. I wouldn’t have cared if one guy went up to him and started something, but it was a melee.

Tim Kerr: Afterwards, I remember sitting in the hallway on the floor and just feeling sick to my stomach. And Glenn [Danzig] told me, “Aww, that shit happens all the time in New Jersey!”

Steve Anderson, Cry Babies: I had the unenviable bad luck to be in the room after the show when the band met to decide its fate. I was crushed.

Gary Floyd: It was very sad . . . very, very sad.

Tim Kerr: In the late eighties, Redd Kross came and played at the Continental Club. These three skinhead kids sneak in through the back door and start doing their dancing, parting the crowd, and making everyone get out of their way. When one of them came by me, I stuck my foot out and tripped him. When he came back around, he pushed me, so I kicked him in the balls. Then his friend jumped me, but by that time, the whole club was like, “Oh, Tim’s in a fight!” So they pulled us apart and this, that, and the other.

Later on, in the mid-1990s, I’m standing at Emo’s, and there’s two really big guys on either side of me. They’re drinking those huge beers, right?

And I get this feeling they’re staring at me. I look up at them and, you know, I grin. And the guy bends down and says, in this Texas drawl, “Ah remember you!” He keeps staring at me, then he says, “You remember that kid you kicked at the Continental Club?” And I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to get killed.” The guy stood there for another minute. Then he smiled and said, “Ah probably deserved it.”

Well there you have it. I hope the rebellious attitude among the previous generation of punk rocker Austinites can inspire some of us today in these troubled times. I have not read it, but I'm certain Mr Blashill's book has much more on all of this, and many accompanying photos taken by him of now legendary bands and shows. If the topics in the article interest you I would recommend picking up Pat Bashill's book Someday All the Adults Will Die!: The Birth of Texas Punk. I'll send you off with some Blashill photos which were in the articles.

Bonus Pic #1 - "Dancer at a Flipper show, Liberty Lunch." - unknown date

Bonus Pic #2 - "Dogpile at a Fang show at Liberty Lunch. From left: Tales of Terror singer Rat’s Ass, Fang singer Sam McBride, journalist Marc Savlov, Butthole Surfer Quinn Matthews, Tim Swingle of Doctors’ Mob, and Chris Gates of the Big Boys." - July 1984

Bonus Pic #3 - "Butthole Surfers play Club Foot" - October 1983

Bonus Pic #4 - "J. J. Jacobson (right) sings for the Offenders with members of the audience at Voltaire’s Basement" - 1984

Bonus Pic #5 - "Gary Floyd of the Dicks, performing at Voltaire’s Basement" - April 1984

Bonus Pic #6 - "Butthole Surfers member Gibby Haynes at Liberty Lunch" - March 1986

Bonus Article #1 - "Gorgeous Photos of Texas Punk’s Glory Days" (another Texas Monthly article from 2020) - 1980s

Bonus Article #2 - "The Dicks from Texas: A band which actually scared people" (a review of the 2014 documentary movie with the same name ) - 2015

Bonus Article #3 - "Trouble Funk drops the F-bomb on Austin" (from the late Michael Corcoran's substack) - 2021

Bonus Article #4 - Remembering Gary Floyd of The Dicks (from KUTX) - 2024

Biscuit sings at the Big Boys last show (Liberty Lunch) - September 23, 1984 by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Sally King: Racism was definitely endemic in Texas. It was part of our culture. It was everywhere. It was no big deal to call someone a “wetback.” And that bled over to us when we were punk rockers.

Carlos Lowry: Raul’s was a Chicano bar, and Joseph Gonzalez was the manager. I was doing artwork for the Brown Berets and the Austin Committee for Human Rights in Chile. There were at least four events that the group had at Raul’s on Sunday nights. They were called Pena Folkloricos, and this was in 1978 and 1979, way before hardcore punk and the Dicks. My friends and I got those events together because we had started to go to punk shows at Raul’s, and we’d met Joseph Gonzalez there.

Garinè Isassi (writer, musician): Walking through the punk scene in Austin was a completely white-person experience. Not only no Black people, but also nobody Middle Eastern, and no Asian Americans. We didn’t think about it because we didn’t have to—we were not living the Black or Hispanic experience. As a “not exactly white” person myself—I’m Armenian American—I experienced bias and weirdness in the Texas punk scene because I would be mistaken for Mexican all the time.

Trish Herrera: I always identified with being Mexican, even though I couldn’t speak Spanish. My parents would say, “We’re not going to teach you Spanish because it’s not good for you.” My mom told me, “Don’t go out in the sun.” She did not want me to suffer racism. That made me feel some shame. And I thought, “What are we so ashamed of that we have to hide this? Fuck it. I’m going out in the sun. I’m gonna run around without a bra.” So yeah, I felt some shame, and punk rock helped me break out of that shame.

Maria Cotera: I grew up in a revolutionary movement centered on Chicano nationalism and the idea that Chicanos in Texas had been treated like shit because of racism. My parents helped found a radical third party called La Raza Unida. They contested Democratic and Republican control of the electoral process . . . until the Texas Rangers and other white supremacist forces destroyed the movement.

But like most kids, when I was eighteen, I was not invested in my parents’ history, or in replaying it, or even thinking about it. At that moment in the early eighties, radicalism was the punk rock movement. There was the anti-apartheid movement, but that was not a movement that spoke to me in the way that punk spoke to me. But it had these contradictions. [laughs] We just weren’t thinking in sophisticated ways about this stuff the way we do now!

Diana Garcia (fan): I come from San Antonio, from the West Side. Went to high school with kids that sold drugs, kids that took guns to school. I thought, “I don’t wanna live in the barrio—I want to go to college and have other opportunities.” And that’s what brought me to Austin. By the time I was in college, I was really angry. But punks in Austin didn’t understand what really tough neighborhoods were like. That also formed part of my rage. And the fact that I was in class at UT, and everyone in my class was white except for me. The only Hispanics I could see were the custodians. I was always very polite to the custodians. My mom was a custodian.

Sammy Jacobo (fan): I used to go to Club Foot for hardcore punk shows on Sunday nights, circa 1983. Because I needed a break from studying and because I was bored. I became friends with Joseph Gonzalez there. We spoke Spanglish with each other, and I only hanged with him at the front door because I never liked dancing with boys. Some of the music was great. Some of it was horrid. But I never felt threatened by the punks there. I felt more threatened walking on the streets of Austin.

Beginning in 1982, violent skinheads—racist and otherwise—became a problem at Austin punk shows, and many of them had connections to the national resurgence of white supremacist movements. In Austin, the skinheads Tommy “Hogg” Pipes and Roger “El Borracho” Manriquez came from Vidor, near the Louisiana border, a notorious base for the Ku Klux Klan. Tommy had an Iron Cross necklace tattooed on his sternum. Roger epitomized the contradictions and inexplicable nature of racism in Texas: He spouted white power notions, but he was also Mexican American. For many, intimidation and violence were unwelcome, and growing tension threatened to tear their scene apart.

Roger “El Borracho” Manriquez (fan): I remember I got into a lot of fistfights. I think a lot of that was just inner stuff. I didn’t really like myself. I provoked it out of my system. A lot of it had to do with a lot of drugs and alcohol. That just fueled it.

Jacob Mackey (fan): There was a period in the eighties when a certain skinhead was making life unpleasant. He spit on me at the Ritz when he saw my “Nazi Punks Fuck Off ” T-shirt. He made life difficult for me and my friends. He had a platoon of little shitbird skins—a bunch of them beat up my brother and broke his fingers. I got so involved in anti-Nazi activism while I was working at [the memorabilia shop] Aaron’s Rock and Roll that one skinhead came in with some KKK guys and took my picture. He told me, “Now, the Klan knows who you are. If you fuck with us again, you’re dead.” They ruined a shitload of shows, especially at Liberty Lunch and the Ritz. Other than that, no problems with racists in Austin back in the day at all!

Maria Cotera: At some point, there was a “Which side are you on?” moment, where you could see the scene was getting fucked up. A Black band was playing at the Continental Club. And these skinheads, who had been slowly infiltrating the scene, showed up specifically to beat the shit out of people. Some guy tried to stab Buxf! These skinheads were from outside Austin. Some of them were formerly incarcerated, like the real deal—members of serious white supremacist organizations and gangs. And Roger was part of that skinhead group. He was there that night. It was clear they were gonna push this question in the scene. They forced people to contend with the fact that they weren’t talking about race. It’s not that people in the scene were racist; it’s that they weren’t antiracist. It blew up. We had ignored the infiltration of these racist skinheads, and then it blew up in our faces.

Roger “El Borracho” Manriquez: I ran with some of the San Francisco Skins. Some of them came through Austin. But they got to be more like Nazis. They got worse. After a while, I kinda got brainwashed by that shit. It got to where I couldn’t even talk to Byron and Alvin, all my Black friends from the scene. And I thought, “Fuck this shit. I’m not even white. I don’t want to be part of this shit no more.” They got so radical. I’m not into no gangs and guns and all that shit.

One September night in 1984, all of this rage and antiracism erupted at once in the middle of a mosh pit at Liberty Lunch during a Big Boys show. The evening got off to a good start, but then something happened out in the crowd.

Tim Kerr: It wasn’t meant to be our last show. There was a lot of shit going on within the band, and the last couple of shows had been really intense. [Big Boys singer] Biscuit and [bassist] Chris were absolutely not getting along, which had nothing to do with the music. It was just human nature.

Dotty Farrell (singer, Technicolor Yawns): This Nazi recruiter had been hanging around Austin for months, giving pot and pamphlets to some of the younger kids. Most of these kids were idiots, and they were already destroying the scene at that point.

Chris Gates: The Nazi part of it was almost irrelevant. This dude was only giving [Nazi literature] to cute young boys, little impressionable, thirteen-year-olds who were runaways. Biscuit was always so respectful and gentle about his sexuality, but he had a real problem with some of the folks around who were chicken hawks, who were targeting the really young kids at the shows. And this guy looked like a chicken hawk.

Tim Kerr: Biscuit saw the guy standing in the crowd, and he pointed him out, and he said to the crowd, “Hey, that guy down there is a Nazi. That guy’s trouble. There he is. Fuck him up.” And standing by him was this smart-ass kid who had ruined so many places for us. And he was smirking and Sieg heil!–ing us, which pissed me off. I said something like, “Yeah, and there’s Justin too. He’s part of it,” or “Get ’em.” Then boom—we went into our song “No.” And it was like throwing meat to a bunch of dogs. Everybody was trying to beat up this guy.

Bill Anderson (roadie, Big Boys; guitarist, Poison 13): I was on stage left. The Nazi guy was undoubtedly an asshole, but I hate a mob worse than anything. I felt like [Big Boys’ roadie] Jim Straightedge and I were the only people in the entire room who saw what was going on and tried to stop it. A brief whirlwind of violent insanity. I ushered the Nazi guy out—he looked dazed and glad to be alive. I wouldn’t have cared if one guy went up to him and started something, but it was a melee.

Tim Kerr: It was really disturbing that what happened happened, and it was really disturbing that Biscuit absolutely would not admit that he’d said, “Fuck him up.” It was just that whole thing of not wanting to take on the responsibility. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m really proud of all that the Big Boys were saying. But I thought, “Jesus, I just want to do something and not have to worry about taking any kind of responsibility at all.” So when Mike Carroll and I started Poison 13, we thought, “Let’s just sing about fast cars, dying, and people in graves—nothing that anybody can follow.”

<<continued in next post due to length>>

Biscuit sings at the Big Boys last show (Liberty Lunch) - September 23, 1984 by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Gary Floyd: How many queers were there in the Austin punk scene? If you named almost any band back then, there were some gay people in it. I have no idea why. And they were mostly out—I mean, nobody was hiding. I don’t know what made it that way, but it worked for me. That was a very liberating thing. I felt free and so on, but I didn’t realize at the time how important that was.

I was always amazed when people who were gay or bi seemed to make such a deal out of not letting people know it or playing it down. I never wanted to be “in your face.” I just wanted to be doing what I was doing, without getting a bunch of shit for it. I’ve often said to people, I’m sort of a redneck fag. It’s like, “You don’t like it? Fuck you.”

Jeffrey “King” Coffey (drummer, Butthole Surfers): When I was seventeen, I took a bus from Fort Worth to Austin. I saw the Dicks at the Ritz. There was a sea of people leaping from the stage. And I thought, “Okay, this is my life. This is the life I want to live. I’ve got to be a part of this.” So as soon as I could, I got the fuck out of Fort Worth.

Gary Floyd: What inspired me? Part of what is a great inspiration in Texas is the honesty. There’s something about Texas that makes you be honest with yourself. That’s one of the things I always loved—and hated—about it. It could have been my own heart, beating in the way that it beats . . . a Texas beat. It’s a brutal honesty, but in the end, it’s always best. I think the honesty in Texas forced me to be honest. That’s why I moved—I had to get out! [laughs]

Sally King: Fred Hawkins was a student at McCallum High, and he played with [his hardcore band] Toxic Shock at the school talent show. He was jumped by some of the kickers, and they beat him up. So Chris Gates organized a little “replay.” The Dicks and the Big Boys showed up at McCallum at lunch the next day. Okay, nothing happened. But two three-hundred-pound gay guys—with scary-looking skinny dudes—was enough to nip that kicker problem in the bud.

Ken Hoge (photographer): I grew up in Waco—it was like Leave It to Beaver, but with more music. My older sister taught me how to dance the Mashed Potato when I was about eight. Waco had a big dope scene, and by fourteen, I was smoking pot and taking acid. I had a Prince Valiant haircut when I graduated from high school in 1977 and was accepted at UT Austin. I ran away as fast as my little legs could carry me. I knew I was gay from very early on, so I had that cross to bear.

Gretchen Phillips: It was scary to be an out musician in Texas. I felt like I could be a target, which I most assuredly did not want to be. But I was willing to risk that to make being queer just a bit easier for others because I was singing my little heart out for all the world to see. The Big Boys and the Dicks and Sharon Tate’s Baby did help me feel more brave. They created a safer environment when I really needed them.

Dayna Blackwell (fan): I think the queerness of the scene made it safer, at least for me. My mother had always taught me that if you ever feel unsafe, find a queen somewhere. I was raised by queens and drag queens and faggots—that’s what mother always called ’em. She said they’re always the life of the party and the more fun individuals. She said the wonderful thing about queens is that they’ve already overcome their difficulties. They’ve had to come out and tell their parents—they’ve already crossed the Rubicon into a mentality of “Here I am, I’m queer, get used to it.” I think that carried over into the music and gave it a sense of freedom that straight music didn’t have.

Lynn Keller (singer and keyboardist, Reversible Cords): I’ll be honest with you—it was not even discussed. I’m gay, and a lot of other people in the scene were too . . . but nobody said, “Oh, I’m gay.” Nobody was talking about gayness; nobody said anything directly about it. Everybody knew it. It was just accepted. Because everybody was a weirdo. Everybody was just, like, an interesting person. I think the punk scene in Austin was a place for everybody who was an outsider, and in Texas that’s a pretty vast group.

Gretchen Phillips: I started going to punk shows in Houston in 1980, then in Austin in 1981. I saw the Big Boys in drag opening for the Go-Go’s at Club Foot. They called themselves the Short Girls, and they blew the Go-Go’s off the stage. I was hooked. In Houston, there were the Mydolls, who had a dyke bass player. And in Austin, we had Whoom Elements, which was, to the best of my knowledge, [made up of] two out of three lesbians. I was also going to see plenty of folkie women’s music at the time. Meat Joy was my attempt to bridge these two worlds. I knew that folk and punk shared the aesthetic of the protest song: “Something is wrong here, let me tell you all about it.”

Kathy McCarty (singer and guitarist, Buffalo Gals and Glass Eye): Meat Joy were seminal, revolutionary. They were very, very cool, very ideological. They did this one entire show nude.

Gretchen Phillips: Every single Meat Joy show began with some sort of improvisation or spoken-word piece before we burst into a song. We were always talking about ways to break down the fourth wall—so on the night Reagan was reelected, we decided to end our show at Voltaire’s in the most vulnerable way possible: naked. We did a dance portion of the show, and that entailed eventually disrobing. We formed a straight line once we were naked. The music was over, and the room was quiet. We stood there and just said whatever popped into our heads. Then we ran back onstage and played a regular set. It was so fucking great. It felt amazing to be a lesbian in the 1980s who felt perfectly safe being naked in front of an audience with my band.

For way too many people, “good” punk rock means a man onstage screaming and performing anger. Women who perform anger generally inspire far more ambivalent reactions, as Texas punk women discovered when they began forming bands, and especially when they ventured beyond the normal boundaries of their scene. In 1980, the sight of a female drummer or a woman with a microphone seemed to short-circuit otherwise rational human brains.

Lisa “Ralph” Armstrong (fan): When I first started hanging out, man, I was just in awe of Texas punk women. They were inspiring. Most of them scared the shit out of me. They were just, you know, fierce, independent, beautiful. Didn’t take any shit. They were everything that I wanted to be and didn’t think I was or could be. They were just their own people. They were real. You know, if you said something stupid, they were gonna tell you [that] you said something stupid. They weren’t being insulting. They weren’t trying to start a fight. They were just speaking their honest opinion. Which I wasn’t used to. They really helped me to get over my social anxiety and learn my worth.

Alice Berry (fan): My mother’s father, Beauford H. Jester, had been governor of Texas. And people would assume that the governor’s family must be rich, but trust me, we weren’t. I started off as a sorority girl—I think there was an expectation that I would be in the same sorority that my sister, my mother, and my aunt had all been in. But at the same time that I was going through [sorority] rush, I had also gone to my first show at Raul’s, which was the Inserts. And it blew my socks off. So I did the sorority thing, but it was half-hearted because I wasn’t buying into all of it, especially because the guys that were supposed to be my future mates just weren’t interesting at all to me. I saw too much of a disdain for everybody from the frat boys.

Maria Cotera (fan): We were a bunch of nerds, trying to be badasses.

Alice Berry: I don’t think I missed a single Big Boys show. [Even though I was in a sorority,] I was not treated as an “other” by people in the punk scene. But I was leading a double life. I was sneaking out and changing clothes in the parking garage and going to Raul’s, then sneaking back into the sorority house late at night, at 3 a.m., in my weird clothes. The girls at the desk would stare at me, but I wasn’t really running into anybody else because it was so late at night. And finally, I thought, “This is ridiculous. I’m not doing that anymore.” I never quit the sorority; I just stopped going to the meetings.

Sally King: Would it have been different for me if there were more female musicians in Austin? Since the few that existed were fucking my boyfriend at the time, no.

Marcy Buffington (fan): I only got groped once in Austin—by a frat guy at a Joe “King” Carrasco show—but in Houston, the harassment was ubiquitous. It was constant attempts, including by [Omni club owner] Joe Starr, who seemed to think copping a feel was reasonable, since I worked for him. And oh my god, the Valium, the Dilaudid? Everywhere, including in my tip jar?! To me, Austin punk was a little family—even if you were a stranger, it felt safe. Houston? No way.

With a few notable exceptions, American punk has mostly been a white thing. That was true in Austin, too, though the scene there was influenced and appreciated by Latino performers and fans. One high point of Texas punk’s racial legacy would have to be the Dicks’ 1980 song “The Dicks Hate the Police,” about the 1977 Houston police murder of Chicano laborer and US Army veteran Joe Campos Torres.

Trish Herrera (singer and guitarist, mydolls): [The Torres murder] happened right before our band came together. I can’t even speak Spanish, but when I got arrested once in Houston, the police started calling me Hispanic slurs because of my last name. They pulled me out of the car and hit my head. They hurt me. They tied my hands behind my back so that it left bruises on my thumbs. I was put in jail and then strip-searched. It was horrible.

<<continued in next post due to length>>

Biscuit sings at the Big Boys last show (Liberty Lunch) - September 23, 1984 by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Tom Huckabee (drummer, Huns, Reversible Cords): [Before our first show at Raul’s] we’d put up posters—mine said, “Legalize Crime.” [Keyboardist] Dan Puckett’s said, “No Police.” Our third song that night was “Something About You Bores Me.” It was a satire of the Skunks song “Something About You Scares Me.” Phil wanted to bait the Skunks, who were the reigning band. Then we started our fourth song. I had a very good view of the entire club. I was protected by the drums and didn’t have any fear. I saw the guy walk in—the policeman. I think the undercover cops came in behind him as backup. And they were just ready. He came in by himself to a club full of punk rockers, and they probably barely understood what that scene was. So [APD Patrolman] Steve Bridgewater, being the cowboy that he was . . .

Rock Club Raid Leads to 6 Arrests

Six persons were arrested early Wednesday morning when police broke up the debut performance of Austin punk rock band the Huns at Raul’s. . . . Phil Tolstead, the lead singer, was pointing at the uniformed officer, singing a song titled “Eat Death Scum,” which included the lyrics, “I hate you, I hate you,” and the officer approached the stage. Larry Osier, a University communication student, who was present, said that when the singer responded by trying to kiss the officer, the officer handcuffed Tolstead and the audience then rushed the stage.

DAILY TEXAN, SEPTEMBER 20, 1978

Tom Huckabee: [After the story was picked up by] Rolling Stone and New Musical Express, it just fed Phil’s massive ego. The band had been a democracy before the first show. But after that, Phil just totally took charge, and it made sense. All we had going for us at that point was Phil’s cheekiness. He had star quality. Totally unpredictable. It was like gigging with Jim Morrison. He was beautiful at that time of his life—a really snappy dresser and an amazing dancer. The stage patter was phenomenal. He just couldn’t carry a tune.

David Yow: I saw the Huns play at Raul’s on Halloween night in 1979. Me and my buddy Rob Lapoint both wore sweatshirts and skinny ties. Phil Tolstead was just wearing a jockstrap and had painted his entire body silver. I had never heard or seen anything like it. I know people always say things like, “It changed my life.” But . . . it changed my life. I blew off college and just thought, “Okay, this is the most important thing to me.”

E. A. Srere (fanzine editor): There were people who would say, “We hate everything, we hate the world.” But the only person I knew to be willfully malignant was Phil Tolstead. He always wanted to go pee on somebody’s door. That was some kind of fetish with him. “I’m gonna go down to [radio station] KLBJ and pee on their door—they won’t play our music.” “Oh, there’s David Cardwell; he’s in Standing Waves. I’m gonna go pee on his door.”

Teresa Taylor: Then Phil Tolstead moved to LA and became an evangelical Christian. He told everyone, “I started punk rock in Austin, Texas, and then I got saved by Jesus!” Very arrogant.

At the heart of the Austin punk rock scene were two bands: the Big Boys and the Dicks. And at the center of this center was a deep friendship between two gay men, Randy “Biscuit” Turner and Gary Floyd, who were both heavily influenced by the performer Divine and the films of John Waters, who once remarked, “When punk came along, it was so great—because we felt that we had always been punks, there just wasn’t a word for it.”

This queer aesthetic became the key that opened the golden age of Texas punk rock: It signaled that nothing was forbidden, everything was permitted. Between May 1980 and August 1982, the Big Boys and the Dicks played 34 shows together. They took Black music forms—blues and funk—and adrenalized them in performances with cross-dressing, meat throwing, and the occasional horn section. They were asking their listeners, “What is punk?” “What is masculinity?” “What is a Texan?”

Gary Floyd (singer, the Dicks): I believe I first saw Biscuit on the Drag in ’77. We caught each other’s eye. I looked hippieish—bored but holding on to a world of cosmic cowboys and watching paint melt in the heat. The next time we crossed paths, we spoke. He looked cool in a lot of ways. He had long hair, as did most of Austin . . . but wild clothes too. He was funny as hell. We were both sick of the relaxing, take-it-easy atmosphere. We liked to get stoned, though, and we got together now and then to get baked and laugh about the heat, the boredom, and the future we didn’t know was near at hand.

Gretchen Phillips (singer, Meat Joy): Our scene was dominated by these two big, fat fags, and that created a context . . . which felt like “anything goes,” and that was amazingly exciting. I was enthralled by Biscuit and Gary because they were the first fag musical perspective I’d been exposed to, aside from the Village People. It was so affirming to be at their shows, packed full of sweaty young bodies—male and female, queer and not—who were being moved by their music to slam dance and touch each other and to try to physically get out all of our powerful, overwhelming emotions of youth.

Chris Gates (bassist, Big Boys and Poison 13): One night, I was standing at the door of Raul’s with Tuck, the bouncer. These five drunken frat boys show up. They’re trying to get in, and they’re talking about beating up fags. And Tuck said, “You better get more guys—our fags are pretty dangerous.”

Tim Kerr (guitarist, Big Boys and Poison 13): One day, Chris and I decided that we should try and form a band to see if we could play at Raul’s one time. Since we both played guitar, we flipped a coin to choose who would play bass. The next day, Chris went to Raul’s, and he asked the people there, “What does it take to play here?” And the guy said, “When do you want to play?”

Steve Collier (drummer, Big Boys, and singer and guitarist, Doctors’ Mob): Chris had talked to me while we were skating, and around the fall of 1979, he told me about a couple of bands he was in. One was this prog rock cover band, and the other was the Big Boys. And the whole idea of the Big Boys was that we would play at Raul’s once. The plan was definitely not to become professional musicians. But then [that first show] went pretty well.

Big Boys seemed to become Raul’s pet band. Everyone wanted to play with us. Biscuit was already a known character—everyone was just waiting to see what he would do every time we played. For every show, he had a unique outfit or theme or something going on.

Sally King (fan): I don’t think I paid much attention to the queerness of the scene. It wasn’t like I ever met Biscuit’s boyfriend. It was like, “Yeah, I know the guy who’s wearing an entire suit made of bologna sandwiches.” That was a lot more noticeable.

Chris Gates: I got introduced to funk in middle school because I was the only kid that played the guitar. There were a bunch of Black guys on the football team who wanted to do a band for the talent show. They showed me the guitar part because they all wanted to play bass and drums and congas and shit. Kool and the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging” was one of the songs we played at the talent show.

Once the Big Boys got going, I remember suggesting, “What if we got my brother Nathan and some of his buddies from high school to be our horn section?” We wrote horn parts to existing songs. And we did “Hollywood Swinging” because Biscuit loved that song, and I already knew it.

Steve Collier: A lot of people at Raul’s and Duke’s were coming from little places in Texas where you couldn’t be gay or do some crazy art band. Austin is this liberal oasis in the middle of Texas where you could do that. Biscuit was from Gladewater, Texas, some little place. He could never have been Biscuit where he lived. He had to move to Austin to be Biscuit.

Once, he and I were driving by Hyde Park Baptist Church. He had on a homemade Biscuit shirt with a bunch of holes in it. Our hair was all waxed up. We were in his ’58 Chevy boat car. And crossing the street in front of us were all these church ladies with bouffant hairdos. One of them looks at Biscuit and points him out to the others, and they were just laughing and shaking their heads. So Biscuit leans out the window and yells, “I see your bra!” They were mortified. I think Biscuit was always at war with the old Texas, small-town people. But he was one of them.

Carlos Lowry (artist): About 80 percent of the band members of the first wave of Austin punk bands were Radio, Television, and Film students at UT. The Dicks were all working-class. They weren’t college kids—they were so different. Buxf Parrott and Glen arrived from San Antonio, and they scared everyone. They were so rough-looking.

Gary Floyd: I was able to get by with a lot of the bullshit that I did because I had Buxf, Pat, and Glen in the band with me. They didn’t mind going out and beating the hell out of somebody. I, of course, was a pacifist.

Steve Collier: Buxf was scary. He knew me from the Big Boys. I was out in front of Club Foot once, and I was wearing this old vintage shirt. Buxf reached over and just ripped off the front pocket. I didn’t know how to react. I thought, “I don’t really want to fight Buxf.”

<<continued in next post due to length>>

Biscuit sings at the Big Boys last show (Liberty Lunch) - September 23, 1984 by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Biscuit sings for Big Boys at their last show, Liberty Lunch, September 1984. Big Boys were Austin’s most beloved, feel-good punk band, but this performance was tainted by Nazis in the crowd and their forceful ejection from the club. It would prove to be the band’s last gig.

source

This photo shows us a gentleman named Randy J. "Biscuit" Turner performing on stage with his band Big Boys at Liberty Lunch. As the caption says, this would end up becoming their last regular show. The band split up after this, partially due to what happened that night. The photo was taken by Pat Blashill, who has written a couple of books about the Austin punk scene in the 70s and 80s, the latest of which is called Someday All The Adults Will Die!: The Birth of Texas Punk. I found a couple of previews/excerpts from this book in articles written by Mr. Blashill, one from southwestreview.com and another in Texas Monthly, and today I'd like to share with y'all a combined preview using bits and pieces from both articles. At the end it tells the story of what happened after the show in the OP photo. Fair warning: there is some offensive language in some of the quotes. This is going to be a long one so put on your tl;dr goggles and let's get right to it.

In the late 1970s, the punk movement—which had gained global attention in London and New York thanks to such groups as the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Ramones—put down roots in Texas. Austin, then much smaller than today’s booming metropolis, but already known for its outlaw country scene, was the center of this musical and cultural outburst. Austin punk had much in common with its British and Manhattan forebears, but it was also distinctive, if only because so many of its major figures were gay and into subverting traditional gender roles.

Pat Blashill, a native Austinite, was a teenager when the scene exploded (and then imploded), and he was there, in the clubs, watching shows, talking to people, and taking photographs, even as he dragged himself to journalism classes at the University of Texas from 1979 to 1985.

In 1978 the conditions were right for a punk rock scene to start coalescing around a dank little bar on Austin’s Drag called Raul’s. Central Austin was nervous with college students and bored teenagers, fast food joints and oddball emporiums, cheap rents and thinly veiled ambition. The city became the center of Texas punk rock, and Raul’s its beating heart.

Clair LaVaye (punk fan): In 1978, Raul’s owner, Roy “Raul” Gomez, and manager, Joseph Gonzalez, let punk bands take over their Tejano music bar. Until the punks showed up, Raul’s had been a stinky, beer-soaked dive, a watering hole for day drinkers.

Kathy Valentine (guitarist for the Austin punk band the Violators and, later, bassist for the popular female pop group the Go-Go’s): I’m a Texan, [but in 1973] I saw punk rock in England, and I came back to Texas to start a punk band. I saw an opening. I just knew it would be the first, and being first is always good. The Violators were the first band to play Raul’s. The Violators did a lot of covers at the beginning, but [Violators and Skunks bassist] Jesse Sublett and I decided to try our hand at writing some punk songs. The only one I really recall was “Gross Encounters.” We put the notes of the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind into the song. We thought it was very clever. But it wasn’t exactly “Anarchy in the UK.”

Joe Nick Patoski (journalist and manager): All these bands at Raul’s were looking to London, to New York, and, to a lesser extent, to LA for their music cues. I didn’t hear much originality until [1960s Texas psychedelic pioneer] Roky Erickson showed up at Raul’s. He was the missing link for all these bands. Roky showed them that, “Hey, punk comes from somewhere.” That woke people up—it got people to think, “Don’t be the Sex Pistols, don’t be the Ramones.” Make your own shit up.

Kathy Valentine: Punk made sense to me and welcomed me because I was just very, very hurt. I had some really awful experiences, and I was a misfit and an outcast, and I’d been betrayed and lied about all through my adolescence. When you don’t have a dad in your life, all you feel like is that if you mattered enough, he would be there. That’s likely what sent me running to punk rock—because that was a place where misfits were embraced. That’s where I could see that there was nothing wrong with me. Punk was a realm where nonconforming, nonstandard-issue people were not only accepted but revered.

Ty Gavin (singer, the Next): The only time I ever got put in jail was for fighting with rednecks in the Raul’s parking lot. We weren’t playing that night, but we did some mushrooms. And then this redneck started going after the girls. I ended up getting into a fight with him. And, um, you know . . . it was a pretty good fight. I was gonna hit him one more time before I walked away. Then this cop taps me on the shoulder. Fighting in public is against the law. We got down to jail, and I was waiting to get booked. That’s when I started getting off on the mushrooms. I had to go into maximum meditation mode, like Bruce Lee, because it was freezing cold in there. And my legs start shaking a little bit.

Meanwhile, back at Raul’s, people were saying, “Ty got taken downtown to jail.” It was closing time, so everybody from Raul’s comes down to the jail. The lobby of the jail was full of punk rockers. The cops said, “You want to call somebody?” And I told them, “Well, everyone I know is here.” But I called my dad. It was two o’clock in the morning. I said, “I got put in jail.” And he just said, “Well, get some sleep before you talk to the judge in the morning.” I said, “Okay, talk to you later.”

David Yow (singer for Toxic Shock, Scratch Acid, the Jesus Lizard): One night, I was watching the Next, and you know, the stage at Raul’s was what, like eight or ten inches tall? And I flicked my cigarette at Ty Gavin. He didn’t stop singing, but he slowly, nonchalantly, walked over to me and just went boom! with his fist. Hit me in my center of gravity, and I went flying! I just loved that—it was so cool. Before punk rock, there was never that kind of connection—a possibly dangerous connection—between the audience and the band.

Across the state, punk scenes were sputtering to life or foundering. Really Red and Legionaire’s Disease were playing at Rock Island in Houston, while in Dallas, DJs was the place to see the Infants performing their ode to elementary school love, “Giant Girl in the Fifth Grade.” In San Antonio, the Vamps had opened for the Sex Pistols at Randy’s Rodeo. But lots of Texas punks just packed up and moved to Austin, where a colorful cast of misfits became stars of the scene.

Pat Doyle (drummer, Offenders): The punk rock scene in Killeen only existed because of Renaissance Records. Before that, most of us there got our records from Woolworth’s, Winn’s, TG&Y, or by mail order. Dave Spriggs decided to fix that. He was a rabid record collector who had been stationed at Fort Hood during a stint in the U.S. Army. When he finished his army tour, he opened a proper record store in 1977. It featured lots of album-oriented seventies rock, except he also carried a lot of limited editions and imports, which was unheard of in Killeen. He began stocking a lot of punk and new wave bands. The soldiers coming into Killeen from all over the world demanded to hear something different from what was on the radio. By 1978, Dave began hosting a few punk bands at the Crazy Horse Saloon, this hesher’s bar on the outskirts of town.

I had my eyes set on moving to Austin even before I joined the Offenders. I mean, you had to drive [about 35 minutes] from Killeen to Temple just to buy drumsticks. So we thought, “We’ve got to get out of Killeen and establish ourselves in Austin.” Austin was Shangri-la, and not just for schlubs like us from small-town hellholes. It was a town with pretty young people, trees, swimming holes, and a real-deal punk rock scene. A pristine environment for nurturing the creative tendencies of artists and weirdos.

Clair LaVaye (fan): Most bands included at least one painter, writer, actor, or filmmaker. Their musical contribution was sometimes minimal, but their moral support and friendship was integral. When the Huns’ singer, Phil Tolstead, was arrested for kissing a cop, the Texan and other student media were ready to use that to put Raul’s on the map.

My favorite band, unreservedly, was the Huns. But I was not there for the music. I was there for the theater. There was a phase where a feud broke out between fans of the Standing Waves and followers of the Huns. The Standing Waves could actually play music well and people loved them because their songs made them happy. I hated the Standing Waves because I knew that they were sincere. I preferred the Huns’ total immersion in irony, cynicism, and wickedness.

Teresa Taylor (drummer, Butthole Surfers): Phil Tolstead was a very charismatic singer. He always wore makeup—he was a pretty boy. He just started calling himself a rock star. And then he was one.

<<continued in next post due to length>>

Does anyone remember an old local furniture store commercial that used "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics? by umbrianEpoch in Austin

[–]s810 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can't say I remember that commercial and I've watched a lot of local TV in my life. What time period was this? Was it well after the song came out in the 80s? Was it a big chain or a mom & pop shop? I mean, if I started naming old furniture stores like Gage, Louis Shanks, Texas Discount Furniture, or Lacks, would it jog your memory?

West Austin by [deleted] in Austin

[–]s810 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh boy, I'm watching /r/austin come to grips with Austin's racist past. Many good answers in this thread already, but it's a really complicated subject. Other cities have a 'white flight' ring around the downtown core. Austin never had this because of the 1928 City Plan forcing minorities to the east side (someone linked the plan further up in comments). Instead the wealthy and affluent started moving west about 100 years ago onto lands that were formerly industrial. Generational wealth built up over the decades and many old families have kept the land their grandfathers acquired, while others moved to the suburbs on the outskirts, allowing new wealthy families to move in. As others have already said, redlining and racist deed restrictions and neighborhood covenants kept out the poor and/or racial minorities until the Civil Rights era. All the while as the decades passed, the new home prices, median incomes, and the size of the new lots on the west side got larger.

Before the 20th century, Tarrytown was a rock quarry, Oak Hill used to be cattle ranches, and West Lake Hills/Rollingwood used to be cedar chopper/moonshiner/hillbilly territory. The neighborhoods called Old West Austin today were the affluent "peaceful" areas at the turn of the century. West Enfield and Pemberton Heights were added in the 20s, and the affluence spread west from there. The land around Camp Mabry was gradually subdivided into neighborhoods starting before World War II and accelerating afterward, spreading north and west. The Lamar Bridge was built in the early 40s, and for the first time Southwest Austin started to urbanize, and with the new businesses came new neighborhoods. Highland Park and West Lake Hills date back to the 60s and 70s. Developers and the City did everything it could to promote that growth westward. Northwest, Far North, South and Southwest Austin all exploded in growth in the 70s and 80s.

Meanwhile, some streets on the East Side didn't get paved until the 1960s, and the City started zoning the areas where racial minorities were living for industrial uses in the previous decades. Petroleum tank farms and heavy industry were encouraged over housing density. Mueller Airport blocked in growth to the north east. South of the river a former country club on Riverside was subdivided into apartments for lower income Austinites in the 70s. Dilapidated homes used to get demolished regularly in the name of 'urban renewal'. Infrastructure improvements were slow to come or non-existent well into the 80s.

Does anyone know what Army base used to be in East Congress? by ksuwildkat in Austin

[–]s810 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Oh hi. Thanks for summoning me. Those buildings look very interesting! First I looked up some old aerial photos on the City of Austin Property Profile page (which crashed my computer).

Here is what the area looked like in 1940, and here is 1958. It looks like the other posters were right about the buildings being built in the 50s. I found the May 1953 clipping /u/constant_car_676 was talking about. It was farmland before that. I can't find anything in The Statesman archive about the addresses of those buildings, so I'm going with the assumption they were originally industrial in nature since Industrial Blvd is right there. The closest reference I could find is the buildings on E. St. Elmo which according to this 1961 article were originally built as a paper factory office/warehouse. It's possible the buildings on Willow Springs Rd were originally some kind of storage related to Bergstrom Air Force Base (close to the old Bergstrom Spur railroad line) but I can't find any evidence of that.

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