« Bloggers block | Main | Executive Challenge in the news »

"Joe Nick Remembers"

My pal Ed Ward blogs a great nostalgic email he got from Joe Nick Patoski, talking about the old daze in Austin, memories dredged up in the wake (double meaning there) of Leon Eagleson's death. Leon owned OK Records and an amazing record collection that included "just about everything, from the country blues down to obscure Texas and Cajun sides that were great, even if nobody'd ever heard of them but him." This got me remembering Austin in the 60s, when 6th Street was a dead run of forgotten stores and the Ritz Theatre was showing porn. Austin didn't have clubs on every corner back then. I vaguely remember going to the New Orleans club and other places whose names I've long forgot. There were blues bands (like Angela and Lewis and the Rockets and Johnny Winter's band), psychedelic music was flourishing (Shiva's Headband, The Water Brothers, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators) and the Vulcan Gas Company was a great place to see touring bands &ndash I remember seeing Moby Grape, James Cotton (with Mance Lipscomb opening), and the Velvet Underground, among others. But in my old age I look back and wish I had focused more on the local blues culture that was right under my nose.

Meanwhile Ed posts hopefully:

There's a school of thought which says that American likes to excise this sort of funk like it's a tumor instead of an essential part of its soul, and I admit I was in thrall to that when I wrote Joe Nick yesterday, but he replied that people seem to like Austin pretty well these days the way it is, and I have to admit there's still plenty of soul there if you know where to find it. After all, 6th Street was still a secret, despite being right downtown, when I first got there, and that secret has just moved. A lot of what produces the whole blues culture is stuff you wouldn't want to raise your family in, and this year when I was in Austin, I stayed on the East Side for the first time in my life, and was really jazzed by the pride the residents there -- black, brown, and white -- expressed in their neighborhood. Real estate sharks are a fact of life anywhere, and they've been particularly predatory in Austin, but there seems to be a heightened awareness of that on the East Side these days, and maybe this movie has played enough times that it'll have a different outcome this time.

Or, to put it another way, it's perfectly possible to have great barbeque and well-equipped health clinics, lovingly-restored 19th century wooden houses and minority-owned neighborhood-serving businesses, and maybe, just maybe that's what's happening there.

jon posted this at 7:19 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky