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C H A P T E R O N E The Imaginary Tourist An Introduction to Austin's Rock'n'Roll Scene There are nights in Austin when the air grows hotter once the sun goes down. When you no longer sec the heat rising in waves from the pavement but you feel it, you walk through it, you breathe it. The heat holds your clothes against your skin. And the sweat that drips from you has nowhere to go. It is one of those nights during the summer of 1991. I am standing at the corner of 2,6th and Guadalupe, looking down the drag toward the university.The rusting hulk of the studios for the radiotelevision -film school leans over the street from the left. On the right, the marquee for the Hole in the Wall lists tonight's show of Teddy and the Tall-Tops and last night's show of some two-month-old band that only got the gig because they whined for it three days in a row while eating Reality Sandwiches, extra-real.1 The bartender, who is also the booking agent and the cook, was impressed by their ability to consume jalapenos and grease and figured they had the makings of a real band, someday. So the Post Stompers got to play their guitars in the corner of the Hole in the Wall on a Thursday night. The cover charge isusually small at the Hole in the Wall and the beer is always cold, but we're not going in there. I want to walk up the drag one more block, to zyth Street, and show you where Raul's used to be. Some will say that Raul's is sort of a sacred space. They mean the memory of the place, not the actual building. The building now holds a dump called the Showdown. The front of the building by the street is covered with brown shingles that splinter off into your back if you lean up against it. But no one leansup against it. No longer arc there crowds waiting around outside. The Showdown's only attraction seems to be a remarkable ability to think new ways around whatever no-happy-hour rules the state legislature can invent. At 4:30 every afternoon, the bar The Imaginary Tourist I i fills up with those good of boys who no longer can drink while they drive home from work. So they throw back about half a dozen Shiner Bocks atfiftycents a pop while they curse the white collarsin the capitol. Of course, Raul's was a dump, too. Ten years ago, the inside walls were caked with graffiti and sweat so that when you leaned up against them on nights like this, splinters didn't pierce your skin but instead band names—like the Offenders, and the Huns, and the Re*Cords— would be imprinted backward on your shirt. Raul's began as a Mexican bar, featuring bands like Salaman and the Mexican Revolution. But one night in January 1978, Joseph Gonzalez, Jr., agreed to let the Violators play punk rock for their trendy friends at his club. Quickly, Raul's became the CBGB's and Joseph Gonzalez became the Hilly Kristal of Austin punk.2 For a couple of years, this club was the center of the music scene. It is not a coincidence that punk rock received its first home in Texas at a Mexican bar. In this other place,young (mostly white) people who had read about the SexPistols and listened to the Ramones could gather to explore the relations between a musical and theatricalperformance style and the social and industrial context within which it was produced and which it directly confronted. The special significance of Raul's was confirmed on September 19,1978, when a particularlyclear confrontation between divergent cultural practicestook place. Phil Tolstead, the lead singer of the Huns, was not very different from the hundreds of other Johnny Rotten imitators leaning into microphones all over the United States and Great Britain, but that night his performance of antidisciplinary logic ran into an equally compelling performance of state power. During the Huns' set, Steve Bridgewater and several other plainclothed and uniformed officers of the Austin police department entered the club and shut down the show, arresting Tolstead and five others. The punk scene in Austin was instantly legitimized. Before this confrontation, punk was another passing trend that amused a few disaffected college students. Likethe Tex-Mexmusic...

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