Watch Out for the Clear Cocaine! Every once in a while I’ll be at a concert and run into someone I used to know before I became a famous columnist. After the 30 or 40 seconds it takes me to remember their name, fingers a’snappin’, they invariably eye the backstage pass taking up residence […]
We praise our pioneers who’ve found subtle new ways to play their instruments, but rare is the one who invents a new way to sing. Lefty Frizzell is up there with Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and the Carter Family as the most influential country musicians of all time and yet his name is […]
AAS 2012 by Michael Corcoran Buying and selling. Media. Conversations. Writing. Photography. Celebrity gossip. School. Is there any area of society and the workplace that the Internet hasn’t profoundly affected? Tattooing. Most tattoo businesses have nifty Web sites, yes, but you still have to go to a shop to get inked up. You have to […]
MEMPHIS – There’s almost nothing in this world cooler than driving down McLemore Avenue blasting “Green Onions,” the 1962 hit by Booker T. and the MGs that let the world know there was an imposing musical force coming from a South Memphis neighborhood. It was a time of racial upheaval in the South, but a […]
They’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame now, but in the summer of ’74, Aerosmith was known in only two places: their hometown of Boston and the Hawaiian Islands, 6,000 miles away.
VINCE YOUNG AND THE LONGHORNS’ REDEMPTION SONG This story was published two weeks before Vince Young led the first group of African-Americans to win a consensus national championship for the Texas Longhorns in Jan. 2006. Before the Big 12 championship Dec. 3 in Houston, some sports pundits were quick to remind fans that Texas had […]
Austin became known as a town of free spirits and cheap living in the ’70s and ’80s, but it took a lot of hard work from people like Rod Kennedy to build the Groover’s Paradise that became the Slacker’s Playground.
From “Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music” (TCU Press) by Michael Corcoran When Arizona Dranes, blind and broke and a little wary, took a train from Fort Worth to Chicago in June 1926 to record for OKeh Records, there was no assurance that anything would come out of the trip. “Please understand that […]
1997 Westlake High grad Drew Brees erased Dan Marino’s NFL single-season passing yardage record in 2011 by four football fields, airing it out for 5,476 yards. But the Saints QB isn’t the only Austinite to hold a major NFL record: Richard “Night Train” Lane, who graduated from all-black L.C. Anderson High in East Austin in […]
“I was done with men,” said Lola.
