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Austin Confidential
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Austin Confidential

Especially the rock & roll critics. Especially the boys. So I found that ego was really important. With girls it was always really different because they never stuck around long enough for me to get any kind of ... hooks into -- I mean, er ... I mean they just require a different kind of companionship and nurturing than the boys do, you know.

S- How did you get involved in writing when you were running around going to rock shows?

M- Well, I was going out with this guy who was the head of advertising for the local underground paper then which was the Austin Sun. And I had taken a real interest in the Sun and I loved it. Every two weeks I would run out and just pore over it, it was my lifeline to the scene and let me tell you, we thought the scene was rockin' back then, but you look back at that and it's hilarious. "Oh, there's seven clubs," you know?

Pic insert: Margaret and Jennifer

S- Yeah, but there were only, like, a thousand people in Austin then, right?

M- Exactly, and the same 25 went out every night! Anyway, I was reading the Sun one day and I was at the end of a rather unpleasant real-world career that I knew I never wanted to work in the real world again and two things happened: it was my birthday and the Rolling Thunder Revue came to town and that was Bob Dylan's huge ass tour, and everybody was on the tour. Joan Baez. Joni Mitchell. Roger McGuinn. Mick Ronson. Bob Newark. And they were staying down at the Driskill and the old Antones was right across the street from

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Last edit over 5 years ago by terriertle17
Austin Confidential
Complete

Austin Confidential

there, and I went down there that night and met up with them and I just left my job. I never went back. It was basically one of those true Subgenius kind of tacks, you know, "Quit your job for Bob." I just new that I never wanted to work in the real world again, so I quit and I found myself without anything to do and I picked up the Sun the next Monday and I was looking through their, like, five classified ads and one of them said they they were looking for someone to come clean the office and I thought, "That's me!," so I presented myself to the editor and I said, "I'll clean the office and answer the phones," because I noticed there wasn't anybody doing that. And the editor was Jeff Nightbyrd and he hired me to do that and I immediately made myself an office by the music editor who was Bill Bentley who is now one of the vice presidents at Warner Brothers and [laughts] he hated me. So there was this little column in the paper called "Backstage" and it had only been run, like, three or four times before I started working there and one day I heard them say that they didn't have anything for the column and so I sort of sauntered into the editor's office and said, "By the way, um, I know Randy California from Spirit and they're playing at the Armadillo tonight, would you like an interview for 'Backstage'?" Well, I didn't just know Randy California. But the editor said sure, so I went and saw Randy again, spent the night with him at the Driskill and got an interview. And I took it back to them and they printed it and it was terrible! There was a great photo that went along with it, but the interview was hideous!

Pic insert of: Margaret Moser

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Last edit over 5 years ago by terriertle17
Austin Confidential
Complete

Austin Confidential

S- So do you find that it impairs you interviewing abilities to have slept with the person that you're interviewing?

M- No. No not at all, if anything it offers a, well ...

J- Unique perspective?

M- Yes, yes in the sense that I actually did not combine those two very often, because right after that got printed I took on a new sense of self-importance, "I've been printed, I better clean up my act." And also because it became important to me to have at least a veneer of respectability in that I didn't want the girlfriends and wives of these musicians resenting me.

S- I've always found it uniquely hinding to try to interview anybody I've seen naked, you know, it's just well nigh impossible.

M- Well, I think that at the time I didn't think very much about it and when I started thinking about it, yeah, it became more important to me to develop a little more respectability, but nnow having years and years between me and some of these people I can just sit there an think, "Oh really?" [wiggles pinkie finger derisively].

S- So what was it like trying to sneak backstage, because whenever I wanted to meet a band, they were usually playing at, like, Emo's and you can't really hide there.

M- My method, my MO, that I learned really early on was sound check. Sound check is it. For one thing, there is almost nobody hanging around at sound check. And they see you And once you get them in the afternoon, you've probably got them through the evening. And let's face it, most musicians know that when the girls are smiling that way.... But really Austin was pretty open back then, you didn't have the phalanx of security guys that you have these days which make it that much harder to get backstage. There was a lot of that "No head, no backstage pass" kind of thing, but we never fooled with those guys anyway. Those were the roadies, the sound people, the guys who sold t-shirts, for heaven's sake!

J- Was there a rival group of groupies, or were y'all it?

M- Actually, yeah, there were a couple of girls who were for a while sort of like rivals but I have this philosophy, "Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer." So I made friends with them, and although it was a calculated effort at first it actually became pretty genuine and once they were aligned with us we didn't have any competition and whatever strings they had that I didn't have.

S- Were they the Texas Brunettes?

M- Well, actually, we weren't all blondes. That was just a name that was hung upon us by John Cale's backup singer. We had all been out in LAwhen he was playing the Whiskey, he played, like, six shows there and we'd driven out to LA. That was so much fun because those were the last days of this really wild rock & roll hotel there called the Tropicana that was right on Santa Monica, not on the Strip, but down from the Strip. That was the hotel, I think, where Keith Moon had driven the Rolls Royce into the swimming pool. It was a really wild

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Last edit over 5 years ago by terriertle17
Austin Confidential
Complete

Austin Confidential

place. It would be gone the next year, but we were all there and it was really wild ... why was I telling that story?

J- What was the wild rock & roll hotel here?

M- Really there wasn't one. In the old days the Austin Motel -- before it got this hip/retro/new look -- was really kind of run down and it was the place where people who couldn't afford to stay anywhere else stayed. And then there used to be another little motel that was across the street from it -- there's just an empty lot there now -- on South Congress. It was the Imperial 400. I remember the Fleshtones stayed there, we had a lot of fun. But I would say that the Driskill has probably seen its share of high-dollar rock & roll riotry. I can remember we were there one time with Peter Framptom and he marched out on the balcony that faces Sixth Street in just my girlfriend's underwear. On a bet. I forget what we had to do in return.

S- So once you got started on your legit career with the Sun, did you just keep working for them?

M- Yeah I did. I think one of my better personality traits is I'm real loyal to stuff like that and I was really loyal to the Sun. And eventually Bill Bentley stopped hating me so much. But the Sun folded in the late seventies and I had just gotten married to a photographer that I had met on the staff and we were a good little team together and I'm still good friends with him. But them sometime in 1981, one of the guys that I had known from Raoul's and who had worked at the Texan came to me and he said, "You know Nick Barbero and Louis Black?" And I said, "Oh yeah, yeah." And he says, "Well, they're going to start a newspaper pretty soon and I think you should come work for it and be the rock & roll columnist." And I was like, "Oh yeah, this sounds great!" So I said yeah, and they didn't even make me... audition or anything, they just hired me. So then I was thinking, "Well, gee, this isn't bad, but it isn't very much money," -- it was, like $25 a column -- "How can I make this into something else?" So they were about to open an office on 16th Street, so I said, "Well, you need a receptionist and I'll do it for $50 a week." But you had to be really resourceful. You got free records and you went out and sold those. The idea back them was you tried to get as many free things as you could that you could go sell and that was how you survived. And plus, I didn't need that much back then -- drugs and a house, you know, and that was fine. Back then the Chronicle was house above a dry cleaner's on Sixteenth Street with no air conditioning. It was hideously hot up there! And we had two rooms that we were in. And, like, three phones and four desks and one trash can.

J- And no computers.

M- We didn't even have a typewriter! So, like, when people look at the Chronicle these days and say, "Oh, you guys are so successful." Well, yeah, we are. We're very successful, thanks to a lot of hard work on the part of a lot of people for many years. They don't know that we started out with less resources than your average fanzine probably, seriously.

Last edit over 5 years ago by terriertle17
Austin Confidential
Complete

Austin Confidential

S- What did the scene turn into around then?

M- I was really disillusioned with the scene at the time. I felt like there was a lot of end-of-era stuff happening around then because right in that short period of time, the Armadillo closed and Raoul's closed. Duke's opened up and Club Foot opened up, so it was very much like the changing of the guard. It wasn't just the scene that was schisming out, but there was a lot of frat-punk violence going on. The frats were, like, roaming around the Raoul's area and they'd wait for the punks to come out and they'd literally jump 'em and beat 'em. But we'd get our revenge in all kinds of way because, I mean, you know how stupid they are as a rule. They thought it was really kind of cool in a way, so they'd hire the punk bands to come and play the frat houses, so then the punk bands would invite us, the regulars, in there, so we'd just rip 'em off like mad, you know? I mean, I remember getting away with bottles of liquor and stuff like that, deli trays, all kinds of stuff. A frat party meant everybody could eat for the weekend. And drink for a month!

J- I knew a guy who used to sneak into frat parties and call people long distance, talk for hours. They didn't even know he was there, he was in a closet somewhere. Sneaky.

M- I know one of the thrills in my life was when Andy Langer took me to his frat house one time...

S- What frat was Andy Langer in?

M- I don't know which one it was, but it was a Jewish frat. And he did tell me some very funny stories about it including one which involved having a drunk girl do jumping jacks naked. [We break for drinks]

M- I was out on a cruise in January and it was so nice, it was just luxury.

S- Was this the blues cruise?

J- (to Susan) What are you talking about?

S- (to Jennifer) Remember we saw Chris Gray and he had his hair all in cornrows?

M- Yes! He was my roommate.

S- I saw him and I was like, "Chris, what the fuck did you do to your hair?!" And he was like, "Oh, I was on a cruise."

J- Oh, naturally. That explains it!

M- Yeah, I got back from Cozumel, I had gone down to Chichen Itza to the pyramids on this all-day trip, and I got home that night and he's sitting in the room with the book in front of his face and he pulls it down and he looked like Bo Derek!

J- Sort of.

M- Yeah, right. Sort of. we are interrupted as Brent Grulke stops by our table to say hi

S- It is such a small town and such a small bar.

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Last edit over 5 years ago by terriertle17
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