Mohawk, Fun3 and Red River Rising
Whatever happened to Austin's hippest music festival?
Both born and raised in Austin, and booking venues on Red River, Charles Attal (Stubb’s) and Graham Williams (Emo’s) came at the concert promotion business of the ‘90s from different angles. Attal wanted to be a mogul. Williams, 12 years younger, wanted to make money putting on shows for himself.
They both co-founded concert businesses in 2007- Attal with C3 Presents and Williams with Transmission Entertainment. One got rich. The other had fun.
The first sign that Fun Fun Fun Fest (2006-2015) was quite different from Austin City Limits Music Festival (2002 -) was the sight of head honcho Williams peddling around Waterloo Park on a bicycle, not an executive golf cart. Rather than clear the park of the homeless who lived there, Fun Fun Fun hired them for overnight security and day labor. It was a festival with heart- and, which would be proven later, a sense of humor.
The next year, Williams teamed with James Moody, a former drug pusher (Claritin), who cashed in his 401K in 2006 to buy the Velvet Spade at 912 Red River and rename it the Mohawk. Their Transmission Entertainment booked nearly 700 shows a year at the Mohawk, Red 7, ND at 501 Studios, the Parish and Paper Tiger in San Antonio. Rose Madriz handled a lot of those shows.
Transmission also co-hosted the free, three-stage “Mess With Texas” during SXSW for a few years, rankling Southby in 2008 because headliners the Breeders and NOFX did not also play sanctioned shows.
But their big baby was “Fun Fun Fun”, named after a doubly derivative 1982 song by Big Boys (“It’s a ripoff” is the first line), in honor of recently departed singer Biscuit. Only seven when the Big Boys broke up, Graham became a punk rocker at age 11 after he saw Dead Milkmen at Liberty Lunch in 1989.
"The first time I saw a band in a club, it was like a whole other world," Williams told the Statesman’s Patrick Caldwell in 2010. "I still remember how weird that felt… You could actually be a part of it." The liberating Lunch was one of the few all-ages clubs in town after President R. Reagan extorted states to raise the legal drinking age to 21 in 1986.
Williams started booking punk shows in empty buildings and garages and even the Elks Lodge on Dawson as early as 9th grade. His older sister Celeste (Quesada) had dragged him to shows by touring hard rock and alternative bands, like Jane’s Addiction and Fishbone, but by the time he graduated from Austin High in ‘96, Graham was a hardcore punk, even going “straight edge,” which meant no drugs or alcohol or random sex. But lots of stage-diving.
Emo’s, which opened in time for SXSW 1992, was all-ages, and Williams was there three or four nights a week with big, black X’s on his hands. Red River was like the Wild West in the ‘90s, and Emo’s was the OK Corral, having problems with overzealous bouncers, who’d have a few beers and then start busting heads of anyone who mouthed off. It was a liability, so management fired its security and replaced them with a crew trained in diplomacy, including a 20-year-old Graham Williams, whose greatest strength was an encyclopedic knowledge of punk. That didn’t help diffuse fights (unless the argument was over whether Stiff Little Fingers were better than Sham 69), but it became clear this kid knew his shit and within a year he was booking the place. This was 1998.
Stubb’s had opened a year earlier and Attal, a former auctioneer, was driving up prices of touring talent all over town by outbidding everybody else. "He'll steal an act from Emo's, even though he knows he'll lose money,” Williams said of the aggressive upstart. "I was booking shows my senior year in high school. Attal was probably trying to decide which fraternity to pledge to when he was a senior," he told me, the only dissenting voice in a 2004 puff piece on Attal headlined, “The Promoter.” When I hit up Attal to comment on his frat boy past, he said “so what?” Billboard certainly didn’t care when it named Attal independent promoter of the year from 2010 until 2015, when Live Nation bought C3.
Williams, meanwhile, cultivated a scene over at Emo’s, which he booked for nine years with almost no interference from owner Frank Hendrix, a burly redhead who bought the club from his friend Eric “Emo” Hartman in 2000. Though he wore the same Emo’s bowling shirt every night, Hendrix had money, selling his shares in eight automobile dealerships to buy the club, and, eventually the lot it was on. But some long-timers didn’t like Hendrix’s aim to make Emo’s more of a concert venue- the new Liberty Lunch- than a cool hangout. Shows like New Found Glory packed the place with teenagers, but the bar did almost no business. The last of the original Emo’s bartenders, Kevin “Kumbala” Crutchfield, left in 2002 for the Longbranch- East Austin’s first hipster bar on E. 11th.
In 2003, Williams devised “Free Week” to help the club get through its dead first days of January. No one word turns on the music fans of the ATX like “free.” The next year almost every club on Red River followed suit and Free Week became a sensation that other music scenes tried, though with less success.
Emo’s was getting a national reputation- every post-punk touring band not big enough to fill the Austin Music Hall wanted to play 603 Red River. And in 2006, they all seemed to want to play there on Saturday Dec. 2. Peaches, Circle Jerks, Dead Meadow, Miss Pussycat and Quinton were all trying to get that already-filled date. So Williams went to Tim League of Alamo Drafthouse, with whom he’d collaborated on film/music events, to see if he would back a music festival at Waterloo Park. League agreed. Local heavyweights Spoon, Black Angels, Octopus Project, Riverboat Gamblers and Thomas Turner of Ghostland Observatory provided much of whatever draw the maiden Fun Fun Fun Fest could muster on a frigid Saturday in December.
The Drafthouse lost some money and was not up for Fun Fun Fun II, but by that time Williams had his Transmission partnership with Moody, Michael Terrazas of Club de Ville, and Chris Butler of Super Alright Media.
The second Fun Fun Fun, expanded to two days, felt like the way Austin really is. A tighter, hipper, alternative to the popular kids at ACL Fest, Waterloo Park not only hosted the best in indie rock, metal and hip-hop, but underground comedy. If Triple Fun had a theme it was that punk isn’t a genre, it’s an attitude.
Williams had hoped to retain booking duties at Emo’s with this new entity, but Hendrix instead hired Graham’s archrivals C3 Presents. The two haven’t spoken since. The original Emo’s closed on Dec. 31, 2011- three months short of its 20th anniversary- as Hendrix opened Emo’s East in the former Back Room locale. He sold that East Riverside club in 2013 to C3, who tore down the building and put a new one in its place. Now part of the Live Nation portfolio, Emo’s exists in name only.
With the Waller Creek Tunnel Project closing Waterloo Park until someone else named Moody could come up with a few mil, FFFFest moved in 2011 to Auditorium Shores, whose 20,000-capacity was almost three times bigger than Waterloo’s. That was the year Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara and the Terrence Malick crew used the festival as a backdrop for the unwatchable Sound to Sound film.
But 2011 is more notable, legendary actually, for the difficult diva behavior of Glenn Danzig, which almost caused a riot. The former Misfits singer arrived with a cold and demanded a Wendy’s chicken sandwich and piping hot French onion soup be delivered to his hotel. Though the temperature at Auditorium Shores was 71 that day, Danzig said it was too cold for him to perform. He demanded stage heaters and an onsite doctor. He negotiated with Transmission past his 8:15 p.m. start time, and finally took the stage 45 minutes late. There’s a hard sound curfew of 10 p.m. for shows at Auditorium Shores, and when Danzig’s set reached that point, he told the crowd, “We came to play muthafuckas and now they tell us they’re going to turn our power off. I guess they never heard of a riot.” Fun Fun Fun blasted Danzig’s behavior the next day, and someone drew a can of French onion soup with the temperamental singer’s face on the label. If any act deserved to be called out…
Watch this video of Danzig Legacy’s last five minutes at FFF 2011.
As Fun Fun got bigger and more expensive, Transmission took on an investor in Stratus Properties, which owned the W Hotel/ ACL Live/Block 21 complex until recently. At first they were partners, but by 2016, Stratus owned 100% of Transmission. Williams said at the time that no money changed hands, so assumption of debt seemed to be the deal. The final year of Fun Fun Fun Fest was 2015.
The mighty Taco Cannon, which rated a segment on Good Morning America in 2013, was brought down by a combination of financial need and philosophical incompatibility. The easy fold that brought C3 into the Live Nation stable was not going to happen with Williams and Moody, who left Transmission in 2016.
The Stratus-owned Transmission toyed with putting on their own Fun Fun in ‘16, but it would’ve been a disaster, with the curator and the visionary gone. The swan songs for Brooklyn Vegan’s favorite music fest were by 2015 headliner’s Jane’s Addiction and Wu-Tang Clan.
The Sound On Sound Festival, from Williams’ new Margin Walker company, was designed as the continuation. With Stratus holding Auditorium Shores, the three-day affaire was staged at Sherwood Forest, a 23-acre medieval park in Bastrop County. It was a hoot, but there were logistical problems, including a lightning-causing evacuation and an overwhelmed shuttle system.
Margin had a year to work out the kinks. Meanwhile, Williams was hitting with power in the bookings, bringing Yeah Yeah Yeahs back from hibernation, plus Grizzly Bear’s only Texas date, Iggy Pop, the Shins, Dinosaur Jr. and so on. But just a month before the Nov. 10-12 dates, Sound was jousted by an unnamed major sponsor dropping out. The event was cancelled and never heard from again.
The pandemic caused Margin Walker to close in Dec. 2020, but Williams is back with Resound, which rhymes with rebound- not a coinicidence.
Moody still has the Mohawk, the 700-capacity, split-level music venue that has anchored the Red River music scene since opening on Sept. 15, 2006 with Ghostland Observatory. The building at 912 Red River is still owned by the Joseph family, but Moody recently bought a co-ownership stake. It’s a building with a great history.
With Moody’s Mohawk now in it’s 16th year and going strong, there’s stability at 10th and Red River we haven’t seen since Monroe Lopez started marketing Mexican food to Anglos there as El Charro.
Very entertaining & informative. Just saying. Ketch 👍✌️😎🤠