Music Columnist, Esquire & Host, KGSR & YNN

For the past few years, I’ve wanted to print T-shirts with a simple slogan: “Austin, Texas: It was better 10 minutes ago.” Whether they’d counter or reinforce the “Keep Austin Weird” manifesto depends on your perspective. To me, it seems like Austin is increasingly leaning more whiney and less weird. And it’s the less weird part that has become known as “Old Austin” waxing whiney. It boils down to this truth: whether you arrived last week or in 1977, whether you were drawn by education or politics, whether you were following Willie Nelson or Micheal Dell, there’s always somebody around to insist you got here too late. Somebody will tell you that you just missed Austin’s glory days.

I got to Austin in 1990 as a freshman at the University of Texas. There’s people that’ll tell you I’ve gone on to make much of my living slinging arbitrary and self-serving theories, so here’s another one: to me, particularly when it comes to nightlife, 1990 or so has always seemed like an obvious demarcation in the debate of old vs. new Austin. Folks that arrived before ‘90 lived in more of a “town” than “city.” They saw music in “clubs,” not “venues.” And where there wasn’t music, every bar felt like Cheers, although nobody yet had thought to open a bar on Sixth actually called Cheers.

The pre-Nineties, “Old Austin” crowd turns their nose up at Sandra Bullock’s restaurant or Lance Armstrong’s bike shop. And don’t think of putting a Walmart in their zip code. But these are exactly the people that helped foster an aesthetic that made people want to live here. They tried to keep it weird and now they feel left behind.

And those that arrived after 1990? They’re part of a generation that came in search of IPOs, stiff martinis and martini bars where you could impress a woman by talking about your pending IPOs without talking over live music. It was around 1992 when I helped Margaret Moser research an Austin Chronicle piece on where “New Austin” was headed at night, the thennascent Warehouse District. Until then, the only thing that ever brought me, or anyone else, west of Congress past 8pm was Liberty Lunch (now there’s a place you should’ve been!).

Even with the influx of music-free martini bars, I’ll suggest another self-serving theory, hopefully without the you-should-have-beenthere tone: there wasn’t an easier or more fruitful decade in Austin to see four or five bands a night than the Nineties. You didn’t have to leave Sixth to bounce from Mercado Caribe to Steamboat, Babe’s to Emo’s and The Black Cat to Flamingo Cantina. I don’t drink and at the time, none of my work required me to wake before noon. From 1991 to 2001, I’d do seven nights a week of live music, take a three day break at the six month point and do it all over again, year after year. Everything I know about music, and thus Austin, I learned in those 10 years of non-stop clubcrawling. There were nights I started at the Back Room, dropped by Liberty Lunch and made the proverbial last call at Antone’s on Guadalupe. Even then, bars like Lovejoy’s, or later, The Lucky Lounge, thrived on people taking temporary respite from live music by ducking into a bar they could hear themselves talk in. But make no mistake, in those days, music was at the core of any night out. Music was the rhythm fueling Austin’s zeitgeist. Now, not so much.

Or maybe that’s just tenuous whining from someone who, at 38 years old and with a radio shift to wake up for, can’t go out seven nights a week. When I’m out, I often run into Zoe Cordes Selbin — an 18-year-old, self-professed hipster so entrenched in club going and the live music business, I’m convinced we’re all one day going to work for her. She and her friends crisscross Red River and the East Side the way I used to Sixth Street. New faces. New clubs. Same nightlife.

Here’s another undeniable truth: faced with the prospect of growth, yet trying to preserve a city’s soul, Austin’s toed the line between relevant and weird in an impressive, and perhaps, unprecedented way. Austin’s last few mayors have routinely met with and advised politicians and representatives from across the country and the world, in town to study the city’s transition. They tour a downtown core that’s safe, pedestrianfriendly, and filled with locally-owned businesses, big and small. And with growth has come substantially better dining.

Look at the new ACL Live at The Moody Theater and how quickly one final piece of the puzzle has transformed a piece of downtown into exactly the vibrant, urban, sidewalk dining, music-listening corridor we’d long hoped for. I saw Willie Nelson open the venue with a Valentine’s Day show, complete with a full orchestra. It was perfection. Somewhere 10 minutes from now one Austinite will tell the other that they should have been at that show. They’ll be right, but 10 minutes later, someone else will have an only-in-Austin experience of their own. Ultimately, life here isn’t about old or new Austin, it’s about “Austin Now.” Let’s print up those t-shirts.