Trouble Funk drops the f-bomb on Austin

Double bill with Big Boys reverberates back to D.C. and funk-punk is born!

Trouble Funk at Club Foot, er, rather Nightlife. August 1983.

A year before the Red Hot Chili Peppers released their first album, punk rock and funk rhythm gloriously collided in Austin when the Big Boys, thrashers who had added a horn section, opened for Washington D.C. “go-go” powerhouse Trouble Funk. This August 1983 triumph at the Club Foot location at 4th and Brazos which had just changed names to Nightlife, was four months before the beloved club closed.

Although the genres sounded nothing alike, go-go and punk came from the same mindset of jumping off the pedestal and onto the dancefloor/moshpit. Both are people’s music. In an era when top R&B acts like the Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire dressed like pimp spacemen, the members of Trouble Funk wore cut-offs and tank tops, “dropping the bomb” on pompousness in order to connect deeper. Using “call and response” from the church, TF roamed the soundscape in search of the deepest groove and once they found it, they didn’t let go. Repetition became hypnotic, with no breaks between songs. The most self-conscious people during the Trouble Funk set at Nightlife were the handful not dancing.

I hadn’t yet moved to Austin in ‘83, but I saw Trouble Funk at Liberty Lunch a couple years later and it was the most danceable headrush I ever experienced there. The Neville Brothers and Burning Spear could’ve opened.

The monumental show at Nightlife came about because a critic for the Village Voice, reviewing 1983’s Lullabies Help the Brain Grow, called the Big Boys a cross between ZZ Top and Trouble Funk. No punk band had ever released a track like “Funk Off,” which was often met with a smattering of middle fingers from the punks. Roland Swenson, now director of SXSW, then a partner with Patrick Keel in Big Boys label Moment Productions, had a booth at New Music Seminar in NYC and met a couple members of Trouble Funk and their manager. Swenson showed them the Voice review and said, “You should play a show in Austin with the Big Boys.” The next month, the “Don’t Touch That Stereo” tour was routed through Texas, and the manager remembered the Austin connection.

Big Boys last show was at Liberty Lunch in September 1984. Photo by Pat Blashill from his book “Texas Is the Reason.”

A call to Nightlife (which everyone still called by its previous name) brought the opinion that such a double bill- hardcore punk and urban dance music- was preposterous. The club called the Big Boys, who said they were big fans and could see the bill working, so the show was booked. The Big Boys had been turned onto D.C. go-go, which never really caught on nationally, by Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, who stayed at Tim Kerr of the Big Boys’ house whenever he came through on tour.

Opening for Trouble Funk, the Big Boys brought the horns out more than usual and debuted their raucous version of HBCU marching band fave “The Horse,” which brilliantly set up Trouble Funk’s seamless feet-jack. “There were definitely people there to see Trouble Funk, not us, but the crowd was more than half Big Boys fans and Club Foot regulars,” Kerr says. After the show, members of the two divergent bands toasted the triumph.

“We told them there was a great scene in their hometown that loved go-go and when Trouble Funk got back to DC, they should get a hold of Ian at Dischord and do a show together,” Tim Kerr says. The next month, Trouble Funk played a sold-out concert with Minor Threat, and the Big Boys, who instigated the whole thing, were brought in to open. (Note: Big Boys sounded nothing like ZZ Top.)

“It was a pretty big deal because it was the first time they had ever mixed the mostly white DC hardcore scene with the mostly black DC go-go scene,” Kerr says. “We were pretty honored to be asked, and it also turned out to be Minor Threat’s last show.” Folks in D.C. still talk about that historic night. But the pioneer performance happened in Austin a month earlier.

Kerr went on to form the funk band Bad Mutha Goose and the Brothers Grim, with Billy Pringle and Alvin Dedeaux as the B.G.’s. How popular was BMG in May of 1989? Ian MacKaye’s next band Fugazi opened for them at Liberty Lunch their first time through Austin.