Margaret and Me (and meth and "the meeting")

In the '80s, I was always on the lookout for talent in Austin

Within a year of moving to Austin in April 1984, Rollo Banks was married to the queen of the scene, and I had taken over her popular music gossip column in the Austin Chronicle. Margaret Moser always believed these events happened according to my devious masterplan.

Suzee, Corkee, Margaret. Photo by Martha Grenon.

I did set her up with my roommate and filled in for her when they were on their honeymoon, that’s true. But I didn’t have any designs on her column until I wrote my first one and realized, at age 29, I was finally where I was supposed to be.

Not coincidentally, it was the first time I’d ever done crystal meth, though I’d experienced the euphoria of black beauties- the real ones- when I delivered the Metroland weekly in Albany/Schenectady/Troy in 1981. Distribution director (i.e. the driver) Jim was a Vietnam veteran going through a divorce, so the job was 10 hours of listening to rants about “gooks” and “whores“ between dropping off bundles of papers. Jim also owned a smalltown pharmacy 50 miles downstate, and one week he left the route early to tend to some business. “Here,” he said, dropping a black amphetamine pill in my hand. “Good luck, and don’t leave the van running in Schenectady.”

I didn’t finish delivering until the sun was coming up, not because it was harder doing it by myself, but because I kept pulling over every mile or so, all night long, to write hilarious fake classified ads for my Albany Lark fanzine. Speed didn’t just fill a notebook, but the hole deep inside.

The day before I had to turn in my version of Margaret’s “In One Ear” column, I asked around for that performance enhancement drug, and someone knew a guy who sold “the poor man’s cocaine” for twenty bucks a quarter. That night I established a ritual for writing that I’d follow the next three years, chopping the meth into four lines. Two to start, another one after four hours, and the last one when I really started to drag. Each column took 12-15 hours to write- and I loved every second, peeing in a bucket though the bathroom was 10 feet away.

I’d been a freelance writer for 10 years, gaining a little bit of notoriety, but nothing hit like that first Chron column. Some readers were outraged (“Margaret please come home!”), but the consensus reaction was “Where the fuck did this guy come from?”- which worked for both haters and lovers. The only validation I needed was when I walked into Inner Sanctum the day the column dropped, like a bag of cement. My record store girl crush Melissa bounded around the counter and gave me a big hug. “That column was hilarious!” she said, then quoted a couple lines. “But watch out for Biscuit. He said he’s going to kick your ass.”

One of my items was that the Big Boys were breaking up, which they were, but they wanted to announce it themselves after their new album (the one about long lines at the cafeteria) had been out more than a week. Biscuit worked at The Movie Store on Guadalupe at 43rd St., so I went there to explain myself and let him unload on me, which he did. But we were cool after that. Growing up in Hawaii you learn how to disarm those who want to pummel you.

L-R Virginia Pratt, Amy Bullwinkle, narcissist with low self-esteem, K.K. and Mrs. Nick Barbaro. Photo by Martha Grenon 1984.

I was so into my own thing that I didn’t realize I’d showed up Margaret, who was outwardly supportive, yet took great delight in my first column mistake of not knowing Charlie Rich put out soulful rock n’ roll records before his schmaltzy country period. “You’ve been listening to too much Don Ho!”

There was no tattoo business in Austin in the ‘80s, so the honeymoon in Hawaii doubled as an excuse for Rollo to make money at his China Sea shop in downtown Honolulu. The chubby happy couple was gone a couple months, so I pulled a few more all-nighters filling in for M. Only now I realize that the 15 hours of work was two hours of writing and 13 hours of retyping.

I’d show up at the Chronicle office the next morning with a pristine, eight-page column and a six-pack of beer to come down. Louis Black, the editor, would read a page and pass it to publisher Nick Barbaro, who’d read it and pass it to Marge who’d give it to Kathleen to typeset. I’d sit on the couch and drink beer and listen to them laugh, even Marge, and, well, let’s just say the birth of my son was a close second.

Nuevo Laredo 1987. L-R Marge, Nick, Roland, Margaret, Me, Louis, Andy

When she got back from Hawaii, Margaret called a meeting with me, Nick and Louis. They may have forgotten those 20 minutes, but 37 years later I recall every second of discomfort. It was the meeting where Margaret got to put me in my place. And I had to take it. You can write my column, she said, then listed conditions that reduced me to a sharecropper with a Smith-Corona. I’d continue to make $25 a column, but the money would come from Margaret after the Chron paid her. Margaret would have the first-read and could cut anything she considered in bad taste. I was looking at Louis behind Margaret and he was shaking his head, ever so slightly, as if to say that’ll never happen, but just go along. And I did.

None of Margaret’s crazy demands were enforced, as Nick and Louis knew going in. I got to know Margaret a lot better and understand that the meeting was her process of letting go of her place in the scene. And to smack me around for being such a fucking showoff.

Miller and Moser at Soap Creek

Like Townsend Miller, the Statesman’s chronicler of ‘70s progressive country, Margaret saw her role as a booster of Austin music. I saw my role as ripping this self-important town a new asshole. As a history researcher these days I’m so tired of listening to old-timers inflate their prominence, but I’ll go a step further, using third person. The Austin music scene had never read anyone like Michael Corcoran. Do I have to pull out my copy of Barry Shank’s Dissonant Identities: The Rock n’ Roll Music Scene in Austin, TX and show you pages 228- 229?

The truth is that I couldn’t have happened anywhere but Austin, “the little town with the big guest list.” Coming from Albany and Hawaii, I couldn’t believe the music scene, with all the inside stories, and had to laugh at folks who called the Islands “paradise.” I went out every night, even though I didn’t have a car, and the last Cap Metro bus to South Austin left downtown at 7:30 p.m. My two modes of transportation were walking and “plus one.”

Will, Ty, Corky, Grissom, the original Booze Weasals. Photo by Martha Grenon

My Chronicle column “Don’t You Start Me Talking,” which debuted in June ‘85, took a machete to the sacred cows- Joe Ely, Fabulous Thunderbirds, Eric Johnson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jerry Jeff Walker, Nanci Griffith, Charlie Sexton- figuring they’d been getting their asses kissed nonstop for years. I was voted “The Worst Thing to Happen To Austin Music” in 1986, a dunce cap I wore as a crown. Eric Johnson’s manager Park Street started a class action suit, signed by hundreds, to have me removed on the grounds of slander. I embraced the negativity as Corky, because pro wrestling taught me the heels were more interesting and brought the bigger crowds. Life I’ve chosen and all that, but the truth is that I never try to piss anybody off. It just happens.

Back then, the Austin Chronicle (est. 1981) came out every two weeks, but that made little difference to me. I always wrote my column- MY column- the night before it was due, which was the night before they put the paper to bed. Of the 75 or so “Don’t You Start Me”s from June ‘85 to June ‘88, I wrote two or three, at the most, without “talent,” which is what Rollo called speed. That became the Chronicle code word on the phone: “Do you know where I can get some talent?” It was only funny the first time.

Crank was everywhere in the Austin music scene of the ‘80s. There were always four or five people chewing their lips at the afterparty. Not me. I only used it to write and rewrite. But after awhile, I’d need a bump to make a “to do” list. The first piece I did for Texas Monthly was written with natural talent, and when the editor sent it back with a couple minor notes, I did a line and rewrote the whole thing.

When I heard that Billy Lee Brammer, who penned Austin classic The Gay Place, died relatively young of a stroke after doing speed, that was pretty much the end of that road for me. Every time I’d do meth after that I would think I was dying, and take myself to Brackenridge. After the third or fourth time of that, a doctor diagnosed me with “cardiac neurosis,” with drugs giving my mind the power to create symptoms of a stroke or heart attack. That was in June 1988, when I decided to move away from Austin’s temptations to San Francisco, the only city in America with more speed.

But I was done with that shit. Wouldn’t trade those three years, ‘85-’88, but wouldn’t want to live ‘em again either. (Who am I fucking kidding?)

READ: “Don’t You Start Me Talking” sampler