Austin, What Did We Do to Deserve You?
If everything cool happened before you got here, that's your fault
Four high schools in four years and then released into a world I felt like I had no part in. Tried to find a home in Los Angeles and then upstate New York, but I kept coming back to Honolulu, a city where a tan meant more than ideas. No place else to go.
And then, at age 28, I found Austin, and for many years after that had to laugh when someone called Hawaii paradise.
I arrived, as we all did, with the energy of exploration and the determination of making this fresh start count. This is a city that people have moved to since the ‘60s for the quality of stimulation. The best icebreaker question in Austin is “what oppressive shithole are you from?”
Gary Clark Jr. would answer the far South Austin suburbs, where he grew up unaware of the live music scene. When Eve Monsees, his friend since third grade, showed him the downtown clubs where blues, reggae, rock and jazz pushed out from doorways onto the streets, he snapped at her. “Why did you keep all this from me?” The 14-year-old Clark was reborn.
Then things started changing on the music scene, when the condos went up downtown and the cops started showing up with meters that measure music as noise. It doesn’t matter anymore who was there first.
The ambitious idea behind the 2014 TV docu-series Sonic Highways, was that the Foo Fighters would write and record one song each in eight different American cities for an album also called Sonic Highways. The Austin song (“What Did I Do?/ God Is My Witness”) is about falling in love with something that’s slipping away. “What did I do to deserve you?” Dave Grohl sings at one point, setting up a marrow-melting solo from Clark Jr., who showed up at the session without a guitar and left with a brand new Gibson SG (“Take it,” Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear said to Clark. “It’ll never sound that way again.”) Later in the Beatle-like song Grohl asked “What can I do to preserve you?”
Complain all you want about the traffic, the cost of living, the condo jungle, the ACL Fest lineup, Joe Rogan, and how this once-sleepy college town has gone to hell in a Yeti cooler. But the luckiest residents of Austin are the ones who just moved here.
Huh? “You must also love those assholes who try to squeeze into a full elevator.”
Recent arrivals take a lot of organic crapola. But imagine how cool it is to live in an Austin where everything’s new. You know how you hear somebody talking about how they just started watching The Wire and you get a little jealous because that’s something you’ll never get to do again for the first time? It’s like that.
I moved to Austin 37 years ago and it’s hard for me to get excited about, say, going to the honky tonk preservation scene at the Broken Spoke. But the last time I went there, pre-pandemic, it was a fun place full of glowing newbies. Ain’t got nothing like this in Brooklyn, yeehaw!
Yes, it used to be so much better here, but those days are gone. Living in Austin is like sex in that what happened in the past has only sentimental value, which when it comes to sex is no value. Who would you rather be, the old guy hunched over his cereal who used to do Victoria Principal or the insufferable hipster in the trucker hat who goes home to that barista with only the one tattoo?
The only Austin any of us know is the one we got. Some moved here for jobs. They’re called Round Rock residents. But most of us came because we loved the party, you know, the vibe. It started as a room full of conversations on Goodwill couches and someone pulled out a guitar and everyone sang “Blister In the Sun.” But the bash now rages with a D.J. and drink tickets. Who invited all these bubblebutts?
But they have every right to be at the party as you do. Legally, at least. You just got there early. And you’re free to leave. With the million dollars your teardown sells for.
What I did recently, and recommend to all, is look at Austin through new eyes. Pretend you’d just driven a U-Haul through Texarkana last week. See all the happy, colorful people hanging out on South First? That’s something you’d never see when Austin was cool.
But you’ll also see signs for $10 parking on street corners where you used to be able to buy a stereo for $10. Things change because paradise can never keep it’s trap shut.
Yellow lights on South Lamar, capital punishment, “Don’t Move Here” t-shirts: these are things that don’t deter. About 580,000 people have moved to the Austin metro area in the past 10 years and they all love Black Pumas! They couldn’t wait to push “play” on season one of life in the ATX.
Couldn't agree with you more, Michael.
"... And you're free to leave..." Awesome. Awesome writing.
Damn, you nailed it! Blister in the Sun? Oh hell yeah. “I got here as soon as I could”! On July 3 1988 and went directly to Freedom Fest the next day! Yep I was in paradise to stay. Created a new generation Austinite who’s 24 now and trying to figure out how to live in Tesla Town.