by Michael Corcoran AAS 2008 There are really two Airport Boulevards. There is the one that’s a good way to get from East Austin to North Austin or vice versa. But then there’s the Airport Boulevard that’s a destination from the 4900 block to the 5600 block. With the Travis County Tax Office smack dab […]
The party was far from over in a room across the courtyard of the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center in March 2011, but the namesake of this Darrell K Royal Songwriters Homecoming sat in an otherwise empty amphitheater with his wife, Edith. Everyone at the party wanted to say hi to the iconic Texas […]
It’s 2 a.m. and I’m dying. My heart is pounding like an offbeat engine and my arms and legs are numb. I would go to the emergency room, but I did that last week. Just tired of it all. The problem is not methamphetamine. That’s not what killed me. It was the realization that a […]
This is a chapter in “Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music by Michael Corcoran Trumpet players blew so hard to produce the slightest spit of sound that they almost passed out. Drummers snapped their sticks with all the rhythmic sense of a pair of tennis shoes in the dryer. The honks of confusion rang […]
So many memories of anarchy tamed by nature, when punks turned into hippies if only for the longest day.
In the nine years between the end of World War II and the big bang of rock ‘n’ roll, the Austin music scene was dominated by Western Swing and country bands with such names as Jesse James and All the Boys, Jimmy Heap and the Melody Masters, Doug and the Falstaff Swing Boys, Grouchy and […]
You might as well pay for that hand stamp since it’s gonna last three days.
Remember when I had Old Austin’s good ear from 1998-2000? I tried to make my three-dot column in the Statesman fun, but some of the bigwigs in town just wanted to see their names in bold type and didn’t care for the sarcasm. My editors got tired of the phone calls, but I think it’s […]
Paul Sessums loved the sound of loud electric guitars. When he’d stand on the Sixth Street sidewalk and rail about this and that, using a parking meter as his pulpit, everything was all right in his universe as long as the guitars were ringing through the doors of his Black Cat Lounge. He’d hire any […]
by Michael Corcoran AAS As much as I try to come off as a party animal, fueled by that saying about that which doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger, I’m really more a creature of habit. When I go out to see bands, I follow a certain circuit — Hole in the Wall, Continental, […]
