Becoming Corky (1985- 1988)
How to have a great time living and dying in Austin
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 laugh dies as soon as it stops. I’ve got a bunch of tattoos because they’re the only things that are permanent in my life. Everything else only lasts for the moment, then dies like I am now. I don’t care. I think I must want to die because in the past two weeks I’ve had three or four episodes like I’m having now. I can’t take speed any more. I know that and I still do. Stupidity is grounds for death and I’m guilty. I just don’t give a fuck anymore. I’m tired of coming down from the high and being let down from the straight. I’m tired of depression that starts a minute after ecstacy. I’ve had enough of all the bullshit that follows any sliver of success. I’m sick of the way I can be an asshole even when I’m aware that I am. I’m tired of bills that need to be paid now and checks that come whenever they damn well feel like it. I don’t want to be a character anymore. I want to be alone. I died a junkie, a drug addict, a person who didn’t have what it takes biologically. I died a lazy son-of-a-bitch, but while I lived I was a good brother, a good friend. I cried at sad movies and loved to read trashy magazines. I was proud of what I had written on speed. I’d rather die than be a boring writer, and so I have. My friends and family won’t understand. They’ll say what a waste- he had so much going for him. They just don’t know. Ever since I was 12 years old I dreamed it would be like it is now. I’m finally becoming a successful writer, but I hate to write. Speed is what did it for me. It made me reach my potential which is all I ever wanted out of life.
May 4, 1988
I didn’t die. I quit doing speed. I decided to start over, far away from Austin, which had been such a brilliant move only four years earlier. I was headed to New Orleans in June ‘88, but instead went the other direction with friends Brent Grulke and Scott Anderson to San Francisco. My farewell “Don’t You Start Me Talking” column was a bitch to write without “talent,” which is what Rollo called crank, so as a closer I ran the little death notice I had typed out a month earlier for when they found my body. I had to bury Corky in order to move on.
Those three years writing high as fuck for the Austin Chronicle were the most fun I’ve ever had. Everybody read that music gossip column. I’d see them all get up at the coffee shop when the paper was delivered. And I’d watch them thumb their way to me. Thursday mornings were always pretty good, but Monday nights were the best. Allowing for any late-breaking dirt, “Don’t You Start Me Talking” was usually the last piece turned in. I dropped off the column Tuesday morning- six to eight typewritten pages representing 15 hours of work- and sat and drank beer while my pages went down the assembly line, from Louis to Nick to Kathleen the typesetter. Sometimes Marge (“in charge”) Baumgarten was in that readers row. Louis Black was the editor, so he read it for clarity. Nick Barbaro was the publisher, so he read it for libel. Hearing Louis laugh at some of my lines is the closest I’ve ever come to understanding the allure of standup comedy.
In my time covering the Austin music scene- 40 years in 2024- I’ve seen some major success stories up close. South by Southwest was born in the Austin Chronicle office way in the back, where we used to smoke pot. C3 Presents was started by a guy, Charles Attal, who was so green in ‘96 that he pronounced the Fugees, “the Fudgies.” These are not geniuses. They became successful because they did it in Austin. I can relate.
This incestuous music scene was perfect for my style of inside digs and broad satire. Folks here were just so passionate about bands. And they had a good sense of humor about themselves living in, what Rollo called “the little town with the big head.” I paraphrased, “the little town with the big guest list.” I fed off Rollo’s rants, which he considered stealing. “You got that from me,” he’d say. I thought we were a team when we wrote the Honolulu Babylon fanzine together, but Rollo called me his typist. That’s just how he was. It didn’t bother me. Well, not much anyway.
The scene was supposedly dead when we arrived in the mid-’80s, but there was something to do every night. Liberty Lunch, Continental Club, Hole in the Wall, Antone’s, Cave Club, Back Room, the Beach, Chances, Black Cat, Cactus Cafe and Steamboat were all hoppin’ nightly. Sometimes we’d just drink on a couch on the front porch and listen to records and talk about bands. Those were some of the best nights.
If you had a daredevil streak you went to Voltaire’s- a basement club with about 400 punks and one exit, up creaky wooden stairs. This exhilarating deathtrap was open less than a year in ‘84, but we saw such shows as Husker Du with the Butthole Surfers. On the final night, Gretchen Phillips’ band Meat Joy, which included the great actor John Hawkes, performed naked (with extreme backlighting). In my Texas Tower mimeograph-zine I wrote that the club closed due to safety concerns, not for being a fire hazard, but because Earl Campbell had taken up moshing.
I created “Corky,” which no one had ever called me, as a negative creep very full of himself, but also self-deprecating. A narcissist with low self esteem. I saw how the heels of pro wrestling filled the arenas, so I turned music journalism into kind of a performance art. The scathing letters section was part of the act. Being confronted with, “Corcoran, you fucking SUCK!” in public was not.
I didn’t know how to react, at first. I’d usually brush it off- “another happy subscriber!”- and get the hell outta there. But one time, I thought about what was being said and where it was coming from. “You’re the worst writer who ever lived!” was in my face, at a backyard barbecue full of people. “Well, you know, I’m trying as hard as I can,” I said, calmly. “I can’t do any more.” That stopped him for a few seconds, as I refilled my beer at the keg. “You should quit, man, do us all a favor.” Are you gonna pay my rent? My bills? “Hell, no.” Then shut the fuck up!
Like I was making money at the Chronicle, which paid $1 per column inch. I never asked for a raise because the paper was barely keeping afloat, but by the end I was making “the superstar rate” of $87.50 a column, twice a month, which covered rent and meth. I bought beer with my ex-girlfriend’s Chevron card, justifying that she was the reason I had to get drunk every night. Life was good!
Louis Black has described the Austin Chronicle as a card game that’s been going on for 40 years. I don’t think he’s talking about the gambling aspect, as much as the social. To me, it was a place where I could just drop in anytime and something interesting was going on. Writers were encouraged to come by at lunchtime, when there was always at least a barter-spread of cold cuts, bread and cheese from Wheatsville. The Chronicle operated on the model that money is not the only way to get paid. Especially when there’s no money.
The Chronicle staff would attend, en masse, any party that had free food. God, we were a motley collection of freeloaders. For the fifth anniversary of Sugar’s Uptown Cabaret, that rare paid advertiser, the invitation touted prime rib, so off we went. Whenever gratis chow was involved the setting didn’t matter (“Fajita Flats is catering the Klan rally, let’s go!”), so we were unprepared, to put it mildly, for the titty bar experience circa 1986. This was the advent of the table dance, when the rules of contact weren’t so finely drawn, and there were about 15 male crotches being humped and grinded- at 5 in the afternoon! We all seemed to remember we left something in the car and made an exit. Except Nick, whose brown shorts and black socks have never been able to walk away from food. He just fixed himself a plate and sat there eating, and watching that real-life movie, while we waited outside, comforting the traumatized.
Founded by film buffs getting too old to hang around UT, the Austin Chronicle management style was built on The Godfather. If we sold promo albums, we were expected to kick up a few dollars to Louis “to wet his beak.” The Austin Music Awards were brought to you by “keep your enemies closer.”
The adage I took from my time with the Austin Corleone is “this is the life I have chosen.” I didn’t want to be some safe writer. I wanted to stir things up. And sometimes that comes back at you, hard. “You’re just trying to piss people off.” I get that alot, but I’m just trying to get their attention.
Besides gangster movies, Joan Micklin Silver’s Between the Lines (1977) set in the offices of an alternative newspaper in Boston, was a big Chron reference point. They’d pop in a VHS at every staff party, and name each correlating character in Chronworld. Robert Draper was easy. Sylvia Bravo, too. Louis Black was not just one scripted character (too unbelievable) but a series of moments. The Jeff Goldblum pretentious rock critic was assigned to Jeff Whittington, but I thought it was me. In my mind, the Austin Chronicle started in June 1984, not September ‘81.
The star rock critic in Austin from the Daily Texan, Whittington gave the Chron status as a writers’ paper when he joined forces with Joe Dishner, Ed Lowry and Sarah Whistler- along with Nick and Louis- to give birth to the Chronicle two years after the Austin Sun folded. By the time I started writing for them, it was the Nick and Louis show. Whittington wasn’t writing much and the other three co-founders were gone.
They discovered that between the lines was a lot of work, even before the paper went weekly in Sept. ‘88. Luckily, Nick seemed to enjoy 70-hour weeks. He had family money, though you’d never know it. Nick had the worst piece-of-shit car, filled with old copies of the Chronicle. Nobody got more for their money on jumper cables.
Barbaro’s an easygoing guy, hard to upset or make angry, but when rankin’ Rollo discovered an Achilles heel…oh, boy! Once a group of us were seated at a new Italian restaurant on Sixth Street, and while waiting on Nick with the trade voucher, somebody filled us newcomers in on Nick’s family history. When he walked in, Rollo announced, with much fanfare, the arrival of “The Son of Miss America!” Nick just turned around and walked out, leaving with the piece of paper that would let us eat for free. That was cold-blooded!
Nick was protective of his mother Marilyn Stevens (nee’ Buferd, Miss America 1946), who put up about $100,000 in seed money ($24,000 for a typesetting machine) for the Chronicle, without any expectation of a return. She’d divorced Nick’s father Franco, an Italian count who commanded a submarine during WWII, when the child was about 2. Marilyn used her Miss A prize money to move to Rome, where she studied languages, modeled bathing suits and acted in about 15 movies. She reportedly had a fling with director Roberto Rossellini, and when Suzee heard that, she gushed, “so, does Nick know Isabella Rosselini?” We had just seen Blue Velvet, and she was obsessed with the actress. Louis answered, “Nick almost was Isabella Rossellini.” The director hooked up with Ingrid Bergman right after Marilyn.
Nick came back to the restaurant, like we knew he would. He was the ringleader of the “bartering daily circus,” after all. Without Marilyn’s “investment” there’d be no Austin Chronicle, so there’d be no South by Southwest, Barbaro’s annual softball tournament with an attendant music and media conference. More significantly, without Marilyn there’d be no Nick.
I now remember the occasion at the Italian restaurant because Louis also stormed out, when we started singing “Happy Birthday” even after he warned us not to. What a couple of nuts- Nick and Louis! Also, brilliant eccentrics who made a lot of cool things happen in this town.
Thank you for this. Your column was hilarious and I loved/hated it. Why Austin Music Sucks and the redux column were classics.
I have huge respect and love for Nick. I also love Louis. What a team!
Love this stuff! I was part of the scene, but love to hear Corky's side of everything. Well done!