This is the 400th post of 'Overserved'

Started this Substack newsletter in Sept. 2021

History Too Big for One Book

True Believers at Lone Star Cafe NYC 1986. Photo Theresa DiMenno.

During the pandemic, I stayed relatively sane and busy after discovering an online newsbank, offered free by the Austin Public Library, which gave me all the access I needed to write a history of the Austin music scene without once touching a spool of microfilm. Faded memories had backup. Lockdown became liveable. Insomnia made a friend.

The Statesman archives, which go back to the late 1800s German singing societies, was primary source material. I could also call up the reporting I had done when I covered Austin music for that paper from 1995- 2013. I’d rewrite those newspaper articles as magazine-worthy, with more research.

My goal was to build an Austin music history book from the best of my posts on Substack, an easy-to-use format delivered by email. The title “Overserved” refers as much to the incredible volume of music the citizens of Austin have been treated to/ bombarded with over the past 150 years, as to the author’s nightly destination for much of his time here. With 400 articles in two years and four months, “Overserved” could also describe my subscribers. The only complaint I’ve heard is that I post too much.

When I finished the first draft of the book it was over 200,000 words, and I thought about calling it big wonderful scene to get it all in one tome, but eventually decided to split it into two volumes. The first one would be more of a straightforward history of the first 100 years, 1880s through 1980s, with great archival photos. Part II is more first person, picking up with my 1984 arrival through the next 40 years. There’s more about brown bathtub speed and less about Dolores and the Blue Bonnet Boys.

“Overserved,” the sequel, focuses on the ‘90s, when I came back to cover music for the Austin American-Statesman after seven years away. It was a pivotal decade for an Austin that was no longer a sleepy college town full of the overeducated and underemployed. If Richard Linklater were to make a sequel to Slacker set in the present, it would be called Influencer.

Lucinda Williams at Kerrville by John Carrico.

For me, the ‘90s were a time to evolve from gadfly critic to journalist, while still keeping an edge. My J-school was three years at the Dallas Morning News, which I left in ’95 to come back to “the little city with the big guest list” that was built for me. Music was a lifestyle here, so there was more to write about. Plus, I was going through a pretty nasty divorce/custody thing that turned Big D into a diaper that needed changing.

The first part of the second book is about me me me. After establishing the crazy mindset that drove the process, I get back into the history-telling of the Austin music scene I’ve been covering for four decades. I’m also including some of my favorite profiles of Austin musicians- Junior Brown, Poi Dog Pondering, Ruthie Foster, James Hand- and I can’t seem to write a book without Alejandro Escovedo turning up. Weaving through the later chapters are an apology to Lyle Lovett, and a flashback to the time I was arrested at a concert I was reviewing, but most of the second two-thirds of the book are a true sequel to Austin Music Is a Scene Not a Sound (TCU Press 2024). It wasn’t always easy to meld memoir and history, so I didn’t if it seemed forced.

I’m leaving on a cruise Sunday through Saturday, and I’m not taking my laptop. I need a real vacation. A lot of Austin acts, past and current, are playing on the Norwegian Pearl, including Lucinda Williams, Shinyribs, Jesse Dayton, Jaime Harris, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Rosie Flores, Dale Watson and so on, but I’m not writing a word about the Outlaw Country Cruise VIII until I get back. Misanthrope on a boat, what a hoot!

Thank you for supporting this project. And feel free to check out the archives if you’re relatively new. A lot of that material was posted when I had only 30 or 40 subscribers, and now I’m nearing 5,000, which is why I think it’s OK to occasionally recycle the old pieces. In case you’re wondering which was my first Austin music history post, it was this one, from September 2021:

Sarah Brown comes to grips over ‘disturbing’ family legacy