Huns bust put Austin punk scene on the map in '78

“We said on posters, ‘No Police'”- Tom Huckabee

Perhaps the most influential concert in Austin music history happened in San Antonio. Just a month after the Sex Pistols played Randy’s Rodeo in the first week of 1978, Austin’s first punk band, the Violators, convinced the owner of a Tejano dive at the end of the Drag to let them have a night. And, thus, the Raul’s scene was born. Suddenly there were all these bands: the Dicks, Terminal Mind, Big Boys, Standing Waves, Re*Cords, Sharon Tate’s Baby, the Jitters, D-Day, the Next and on and on. Anybody could be in a punk band. That was the point.

On Sept. 19, 1978, a group of RTF students, lead by flamboyant singer Phil Tolstead, debuted their band the Huns at Raul’s with great anticipation. “The stage was set for theater,” Louis Black recalled in the Austin Chronicle nearly 30 years later. The Huns certainly weren’t going to wow people with their musical ability. “We sounded like the Sex Pistols with Sid on every instrument,” Huns drummer Tom Huckabee wrote in the liner notes of a 1995 reissue of The Huns Live at the Palladium 1979.

Inner Sanctum manager Richard Dorsett allegedly threw a trash can onstage to start the chaos that became the riot of 9/19/79. It was getting crazy, with band and audience both part of the show, when beat cop Steve Bridgewater sauntered in, just to check out what was going on. Tolstead spotted him and started directing the lyrics of “Eat Death Scum” at the man in blue: “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” Tolstead pointed at the cop and the cop pointed back. Some naughty words were said and the officer took the stage to arrest the singer for obscenity. And then he kissed him: Tolstead went for the lips of the cop, as he was being handcuffed. When officer Bridgewater put in a frantic officer-in-distress call, his radio was knocked out of his hand by the Huns guitarist and a melee ensued. Within minutes there were 10 police cars outside. There had also been a couple of plainclothes cops in the audience, according to a report in the Daily Texan, and when they started shoving people, someone poured a pitcher of beer over an undercover cop’s head and all hell broke loose. SXSW co-founder Nick Barbaro said “Are you proud of yourself, asshole?” to one cop, and he was arrested. Dorsett was also singled out as an instigator and he shared a cell with Barbaro that night. In all, six Raul’s patrons spent the night in the slammer, but then were released without charges.

Tolstead went to trial and was fined $53.50, but “The Huns Bust” has become such a legend of Austin clubbie lore that the six arrested grew into the “Huns 11” and 120 people on hand have multiplied to thousands through the years. But that night put Austin on the map as a place where other types of music besides “progressive country” was played. It also established the town as a place that doesn’t take itself too seriously. “I saw a cop walk onstage and I couldn’t believe it,” Huckabee said in the Daily Texan article on the incident. “We said on posters, ‘No Police.'”

The Daily Texan article was picked up all over the country and led to stories in Rolling Stone and NME. Riots at punk shows were big news. One of those who read the Rolling Stone story was a high school kid named David Yow, who joined the growing number of Raul’s regulars after the bust. “It changed the way I thought about music,” Yow has said. There was something going on with rock and roll and lines were being drawn. Many stepped over to the Raul’s side 44 years ago and never came back. Or they went the other way.

Tolstead became a born again Christian, a soldier in Jerry Falwell’s religious right crusade, in the mid-‘80s and appeared on The 700 Club, denouncing his past as a punk rock provocateur. That’s the strangest part of the whole story.

(NOTE: Huns drummer Tom Huckabee, who became a filmmaker, passed away yesterday )1/28/22 from pancreatic cancer. He was loved by all who knew him.)