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C H A P T E R S I X The Performance of Signifying Practice Toward the Production of the Scene Music scenes develop in Austin out of a confluence of factors. For decades, the university served as the sole tolerated center of negotiated difference. The expansion of the student population during the late sixties increased the numbers of alienated yet motivated young people in Austin. The university still guarantees a large population of young people, a potential pool of musicians and fans eager to investigate the possibilities of musical performance. Honky-tonk culture, Austin's "tendency to group the waythey do," provides an historical context and a traditional setting for musical practice.The city's celebrated tradition of live music performance ensures a high profile for musical practice, both in terms of entertainment opportunities and for the explorations of identity through signifying practice. As we have already seen, popular musicians have historically played an important social role in the ongoing cultural construction of the social Symbolic inTexas. Austin's reputation as a liberal oasis in a conservativestate, as a refuge for those Texans different enough to consider themselves artists, continues to attract individuals who are not wholly comfortable with the dominant enunciative positions in Texan culture.Once in Austin, many of these individuals haveentered into a musicaldialogue with the dominant construction of identity in Texas.A consistent refrain in my interviews has been statements like, "The group of people I was hanging out with in Port Arthur, I guess we considered ourselves beatniks, and we were getting a little too far out for the Beaumont-Port Arthur area.We heard that Austin was a lot freer atmosphere and we moved to Austin, quite a few of us at the same time, in 1962.."' Many talented individuals now come to Austin simply because so many others already have; an atmosphere of toleration has been institutionalized to a certain extent . Often young people move to town simply "Because it is where D I S S O N A N T I D E N T I T I E S / Il8 music is. 2 The national commercial success of the progressive country scene attracted both media attention and recording industry interest that together stimulated local entrepreneurs to develop booking agencies, recording studios, and management firms. The do-it-yourself ethic of the punk movement syncretized with the already dominant roll-up-yoursleeves entrepreneur mentality to create wholly new institutions of musical and cultural production. But all of this activitywas centered on the public performance of popular music in the honky-tonk arena.And one of the most critical results of this situating condition continued to be the regular production of scenes. In the years following the closing of Raul's, Club Foot provided the home for the more mainstream bands (bands that attracted slam dancers were at first restricted to Sunday nights and later banished from the club); the Continental Club hired neo-rockabilly musicians like the LeRoi Brothers; the Soap Creek employed the Big Boys on an experimental basis; and the majority of those bands who might be called punk were performing at nonclubs. Voltaire's Basement was the basement of a used bookstore, hired out to musicians by the punk fan who wasliving there. Scratch Acid, the Butthole Surfers, Meat Joy, Not for Sale, and other loud bands smashed their amplified midnight against the concrete walls of this underground cavern. Some punk bands played at a downtown warehouse that had been rented as rehearsal space by an allwomen band called the Buffalo Gals. Many novice musicians lived in an apartment complex near campus called the Colony. Some nights they would open their doors and begin to play, creating impromptu parties as their friends came over, attracted by the sound and carrying cases of beer. Each of these sites provided venues where commercial pressures were lessened, where newly constituted musicians, inspired by the local dispersal of the punk ethic and its effects on the local musical aesthetic, engaged in a flirtatious identification with the abject and began to play their own music, thereby initiating that exchangeof signs and sweat that creates a scene. This was the part of the Austin music scene that I began learning about and working my way into after I moved there in the summer of I98z. I had been living in Los Angeles, where I had watched the west coast punk scene develop and had performed with a group of musicians who were being referred...

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