Meanwhile, out in the northern suburbs, the rise of Dell helped kick-start the tech boom. "That brought in a lot of people who just thought Austin was a pretty place, or they came on a visit and liked what they saw, so then they wanted to make it exactly like the place they had just come from," says Ellis. "They wanted to turn it into the fuckin' East Bay. And it wasn't like that at all."
At the same time the Californians poured in, the surrounding suburbs filled in with typically Republican Texans, delineating a bright red ring around Austin's island of blue. "Nowadays you can't give a party in your own fuckin' home without suddenly realizin' that your house is full of fuckin' Republicans," Wilson grumbles. "Man! It's a disgusting state of affairs."
Photos by John Anderson
Eddie Wilson helped shepherd Austin cool from the hippie era to the dawn of punk...
Photos by John Anderson
...and his Armadillo World Headquarters was the epicenter of cosmic cowboy redneck rock. Now a sterile office building stands where the 'Dillo once was, and Wilson is wondering where his legacy still lives on.
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All those forces, all those tens of thousands of people who moved to Austin because it wasn't "like Texas" (as if people like Molly Ivins, Lady Bird Johnson and John Henry Faulk were not Texan) have conspired to erode Austin's unique sense of place. Eddie Wilson's Austin was like Texas, only it was Texas at its most laid-back, and it was proud of its provincialism and reveled in its native music.
Today, save for the old-timers, there's no Austin music that "sounds like Austin" the way the cosmic cowboys, retro-blues folks, and even the Austin punks and new-wavers did. The bands that have created national buzz out of Austin in the last five or ten years — Ghostland Observatory, Spoon, Okkervil River, the Octopus Project — could just as easily be from Portland, Brooklyn, Toronto or San Francisco. Likewise, today's Austin City Limits could as easily be called Indie City Limits. But that's a national trend: music everywhere is starting to sound like music anywhere.
And there's nothing unique going on in Austin. "Tell me what the cool venue is in Austin right now," says Ellis. "There's not one. There's nothing like Liberty Lunch or the Beach or anything like that anymore. You've got the Red Eyed Fly, which is okay, but it's a hellhole, really. And then you've got...um...Stubb's I guess is the coolest thing that you've got. And that's controlled by [corporate concert promoters] C3, and there you go. You wanna go see Primus at Stubb's? Well, that'll be $45. Lauryn Hill? $63. That's not Austin."
Given that there's no special sound to the rock bands there, and given that rents are so high, and given that there are so many musicians there that club owners feel free to pay starvation wages, it's worth wondering why bands continue to move there.
And maybe they don't. While it's impossible to take a direct count, it has seemed as if the trend has slowed in recent years in both Houston and Dallas. And Wilson thinks it just might start moving in the other direction.
"Because of the economics of the situation, we're gonna send a huge number of creative people in every direction just lookin' for a place to live," he says. "Hell," he says, "If I was pushin' 40 instead of 70, I'd probably be tryin' to find a piece in Fort Worth," he says.
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Jeff Liles made the move back to his native Dallas from Austin in the early '80s and hasn't looked back since. A mover and shaker in the glory days of Deep Ellum, Liles has since helped establish an arts colony of sorts in a neighborhood called X-Plus, in the northern part of Dallas's Oak Cliff area.
Oak Cliff is different from the rest of Dallas, Liles says. (Hell, not too terribly long ago, it attempted to secede from Dallas.) It's across the Trinity from the rest of town, and the river clearly marks a delineation between the two. "There's a different mind-set. Most of the people who live in X-Plus hung out in Deep Ellum in the late '80s and early '90s and now they are married with kids," Liles says. "They still have creative inclinations, but family is the first priority, a day job is the second, but they still play music and they want to live in the midst of an arts community."
The epicenter of that community is the Kessler Theater, a listening room/arts space managed by Liles. While Liles is an interested party and can come across as a (very confident) booster, Joe Nick Patoski vouches for Liles's claims. Patoski says that the Kessler is one of the best listening rooms he's ever been in, and he was shocked by the hipness of its environs. "Oak Cliff is now hipper, edgier and more affordable than east Austin is," he says.
Liles radiates pride when he talks about X-Plus. He says his neighbors are not "hippy-dippy people," but instead are just "really smart, intuitive people and they are trying to change things for the better." Such changes include more bike lanes and dog parks, created from scratch. "They really care about their surroundings, and they are really trying to preserve X-Plus and Oak Cliff as it always has been, trying to keep that snapshot in time, so it doesn't become like the rest of Dallas: overrun by empty buildings and development that's not even real," says Liles. The neighborhood recently scored big when it turfed out a bidness-friendly city councilman and replaced him with a liberal who managed to stop a Walmart from going in.
