The persistence of Austin punk

As the Chaos in Tejas fest turns 5, the local hardcore community soldiers on

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Anything can happen on summer nights. Humid, sticky, these are moments that feel anthemic. If you're lucky, that feeling never leaves you.

And if punk rock is a music of possibility, then summer nights are perfect for punk shows, perfect for the hang, to see your friends and bands soon to be your friends get on stage and be free for minutes at a time at top speed.

May 8 is one of those evenings. It's about a week before Chaos in Tejas, Austin's annual hardcore punk festival. Chaos organizer and local punk booker Timmy Hefner — a small guy with close-cropped hair and a cell phone often stuck to his ear in the manner of music promoters of any genre — has put together an early evening show at Trailer Space, the east side record store that opened this year. A huge chunk of the Austin hardcore scene is here, milling about in front. People run back and forth between the store and the convenience store on the corner, mostly for cigarettes, sometimes with cans in bags.

Austin Latino punk band Deskonocidos plays a set, followed by Fy Fan, a Swedish act — both will play sets at Chaos in Tejas, but this is a great teaser.

Hefner started the show early so everyone could head on over to Emo's afterward for a set from another band. Two excellent punk shows in one night, both packed? On one of those gloriously humid nights? God bless Austin.

And this being Austin, we have about nine months of summer nights. No wonder punk has flourished in this town, as crucial a part of the musical fabric as Willie Nelson and outlaw country or as roots rock and the Continental Club, as songwriters at Cactus Cafe or Flipnotics.

No wonder Chaos in Tejas is in its fifth year of bringing veteran acts and tomorrow's punk legends to Austin over three sweaty, slightly smelly nights. Fans will fly in from out of town; retailers and activists will set up booths around Emo's. For a few days, Austin becomes America's hardcore punk capital.

Once limited to Emo's, the fest now has additional shows at Red 7 and Beerland, not to mention the last-minute gigs that may or may not break out at houses or large public bridges.

This year's fest includes the requisite old band reuniting for one night only ('90s hardcore legends Los Crudos), a foreign band doing a bare handful of gigs (the Japanese band Crude), a couple of under-known bands (Brain Handle, Fy Fan) and a host of local acts (Sacred Shock, Deskonocidos).

And oh, yeah, Roky Erickson is playing tonight as part of the fest, though it is a separate ticket. It's Erickson's first time at Emo's, which seems bizarre until you remember that he was not in good shape for much of the '90s, when Emo's was born.

Hefner says he knows that hardcore kids, especially those from out of town, will be interested in Erickson, who all but invented psychedelic garage rock back in the '60s (without which punk rock is almost impossible to imagine).

"I hope that folks who comes to Roky might check out what's happening in the other room," Hefner says. "But we'll see."

'What we do is secret.'

— Darby Crash, the Germs

And this, of course, has been the wonderful and terrible thing about punk since ol' Darby spit out those words back in the late '70s.

Punk wanted to change the world, or at least destroy rock 'n' roll (oops), but settled for changing individual lives, one at a time (and turning into rock 'n' roll, more or less).

Punk has never been able to resolve the tension between reaching a mass audience through large record labels and keeping everything do-it-yourself (or, in more contemporary parlance, do-it-together) and making the audience come to it.

The latter is certainly more satisfying for everyone involved, but it doesn't effect mass social change. Lots of kids who want socially cutting-edge music that annoys their parents, engages the mass market and speaks to youth around the world turn to hip-hop. Or at least they have for the past 10 or 15 years.

Yet, punk persists. Hardcore persists. The supply of hacked-off kids who want to hurl themselves around a stage seems infinite, especially once you include punk scenes in other countries.

And it's not just kids. There was a time when hardcore was considered a stage, a music one passed through. The bands who started hardcore in America — Minor Threat, Black Flag, Austin's own Big Boys — moved on to different music over time. Members of Minor Threat went everywhere from hair metal to progressive punk. Black Flag singer Henry Rollins turned to hard rock and book publishing. Big Boys guitarist Tim Kerr has moved into blues-punk and largely improvised music.

"I think that hardcore has gone from being a knee-jerk reaction to social economics and politics, to a real art form," says Max Dropout, Beerland's omnipresent doorman and booker. "I think it's just something that perplexes and fascinates people. Raw emotion compels people."

Looking back to punk's past

Jack Control, a 35-year-old musician whose band World Burns to Death is at the cutting edge of hardcore punk at its fiercest and most musically violent, has been compelled by hardcore for years. He's been in the Austin scene for well over a decade, playing in bands, running a small record label, booking shows. As with people involved in hardcore the longest, he sounds the most pessimistic.

"I think the people who have shaped the Austin punk scene over the last 10 years have grown older and wiser," Control says. "At the same time, the fanbase has been shrinking, and fewer kids are 'choosing' punk as a lifestyle. Attention spans have grown shorter, while options for entertainment and expression have grown exponentially wider.

"With this, I think we have lost the relevance of punk culture. This relevance has been replaced by the lust for nostalgia. I just feel each subsequent generation of kids who become a part of this are looking for wholly different things. The focus has shifted toward imitation, rather than innovation. It's become a nostalgia act."

Jay Harris doesn't think it's gotten that bad. He runs Hardcore Holocaust, an online retailer specializing in hardcore punk from around the world. His South Austin warehouse is packed with albums, CDs and singles. He recently had a flood, so there are boxes on top of boxes, but it still looks like a hardcore kid's idea of heaven.

And there's no question that he sells some absolutely brilliant music and no question that he sells stuff that comes off as pretty derivative. But that's the nature of genre, any genre — 10 percent is forward-thinking, 90 percent is not. But nobody can ever agree which is the forward-thinking 10 percent.

"I think there are still so many different styles; it's enough to stay interesting for me," Harris says. And even though the Internet has enabled Harris to make his living, he says the Internet has made it much easier to know more faster, which is both good and bad.

"There are 15-year-olds who know the most obscure international hardcore bands," Harris said. "It's no longer a rite of passage to learn this stuff (over time). Now, you can instantly download collections of bands."

This is good for Harris' business (lots of punks are also incurable vinyl collectors) but gets to the root of hardcore's sound-alike tendencies. When the music was blooming 30 years ago, Austin bands sounded different from Detroit bands who sounded different from D.C. bands who sounded different from L.A. bands. Now, if everyone has everything at their fingertips, nobody sounds from anywhere anymore. That is, bands want to sound like Finnish hardcore from the early '80s because they can, something they couldn't do in the '80s without actually being from Finland.

Harris hails from Richmond, Va., and he could probably do Hardcore Holocaust anywhere, but he moved here after coming to Chaos in Tejas (and working with World Burns to Death) and was impressed with the scene's organization.

"Austin has multiple clubs that are kind of dedicated to it — Red 7, 710, Emo's," Harris said. "There's either a punk or hardcore show or a show connected in some way almost every night."

Wide-ranging scene and sound

These days, punk shows can be found all over Austin, from the east side bar 1808 Club to the warehouse space the Broken Neck (the latter comes complete with a skate ramp).

Jason Costanzo is also a retailer, the old-school, brick-and-mortar kind. His East North Loop store Sound on Sound has become a staple of the Austin punk scene — selling records, hosting in-store performances, acting as a hub. He wasn't all that interested in music in high school, crashing into underground rock when he went to school at the University of Texas, thanks to the now-defunct store Sound Exchange. His recently departed hardcore punk band Storm the Tower was the first band he was ever in.

"I have always tended to view punk in the larger context of a broad range of creative expression, and I think when it is done right it embodies precisely what all great art in any medium does," Costanzo says. "It's a total rejection of convention, aesthetic, political, or otherwise, and a unique, personal and honest view of the world, however ugly or chaotic. It is NOT about nostalgia, regurgitating or replicating any particular sound or style, despite what popular contemporary 'punk' taste-makers are busy propping up in their podcasts."

Anyone who went to the Sound on Sound in-store during South by Southwest knows Costanzo's personal tastes run more to gritty, avant-garde noise than orthodox punk rock. (In fact, he's playing bass for the mopey, underground rock band Pink Reason when that act opens for Roky Erickson at Chaos in Tejas.) He's not entirely comfortable with being the "punk store," but it has its advantages.

"I realized from the very beginning that we would be the default 'punk' store in town out of convenience more than anything. It's a starting point, a foundation to build on, and for me personally it is still really exciting because it's a way to share new stuff with open-minded people," be it kids who have never heard punk or punks who have never heard jazz or blues.

Hefner says he's tried to introduce some sonic diversity into the Chaos in Tejas line-ups. (And he has — previous years have featured such somewhat-left-field acts as garage rockers Dead Moon and noise punks Clockcleaner.)

"I would love to diversify the sound as much as possible, and I think having Roky play is part of that," he says. "But a lot of the (non-hardcore, underground) bands are in Europe for festival season. And there are a lot of bands who were just here for SXSW. I would have loved to have No Age play, but they just played here five times eight weeks ago during SXSW." Yes, you read that right — Austin has so much rock, rock is prevented from coming here.

Community at the core

This is the town that birthed outlaw country, which Nashville sure saw as anti-establishment. This is the town that gave us the Dicks and the Big Boys, hardcore punk bands fronted by out gay guys at a time when that was fairly rare. Good punk rock is Austin's birthright.

It's hard to find a bigger scene booster than Sacred Shock bassist Logan Worrell.

The 25-year-old grew up in the affluent Dallas suburb of Plano, and he got into punk the way thousands of kids do. "My friend gave me a Minor Threat tape and that was it." For him, Austin is a punk promised land. "Shows all the time, great bands, everyone hung out," Worrell says. "I live in a punk house, pay $200 rent, work half the year, tour the other half."

Worrell is clearly one of the people hardcore will always have an endless supply of: "People will want to play fast and hard, have a good time, have the same politics and be part of the community."

And it does come back to community. In January, Worrell was touring with the McAllen punk band Bastard Sons of Apocalypse when the van caught fire while the band was driving home from their last show. They lost everything — cash from the gigs, instruments, T-shirts, passports, wallets. "I lost all my clothes," Worrell says. "When I was in trouble, when BSA was in trouble, the community helped me out."

That's what you want from your scene, from any scene. Those are the values that embody what's best about this town. As much as the bat bridge or the university or our endless summer, the community that birthed Chaos in Tejas is Austin.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926