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* Show Log Mania, Part IV of IV: 1991

Part The Last, in which this silly nostalgic exercise finally reaches its transcribed conclusion. The printout logs end at August of '91; all those past that (corresponding with my move from Austin to Seattle) were already on my hard-drive and didn't need to be typed in from the old feeder-paper source. A few final notes, then:

* The Austin Music Awards on March 20, featuring the likes of the ill-fated Arc Angels and the long-forgotten E.R. Shorts, musically paled in comparison to the previous year's fete -- yet the night still looms large in my memory because that's when I took the stage in front of a couple thousand Austinites (to accept the award for Best Music Critic) and announced I would soon be moving to Seattle.

A couple weeks earlier, I'd spent a few days in Seattle, visiting a friend who'd moved there and also working on a long article about Will T. Massey, a young singer-songwriter who'd risen to prominence in Austin over the past couple years and had recently relocated to the Northwest. While there, I saw a terrific show by Brit folk-rockers June Tabor & the Oyster Band at a really cool basement venue called the Backstage on March 4; I attended a rather bizarre Seattle music awards show on March 3 that included performances by Massey, Kenny G, and Sir Mix-A-Lot; I caught a rather intriguing group called the Walkabouts on March 3 at a university-area bar; and on March 2, I checked out (on the advice of friend-of-a-friend Charles Cross) a new group called Mookie Blaylock at a small club called the Off Ramp.

Apparently the Mookie Blaylock guys had just been in the studio recording their debut album, and they took the Off Ramp by storm, their singer a fiery flash of furor soaring above music that was incredibly intense yet still very melodic. A couple months later, shortly before their record came out, they changed their name to Pearl Jam.

* I'd forgotten that, as part of my decision to move to Seattle, I apparently decided I should try to soak up as much Austin music as possible before my departure. According to my logs, I went out to see live music every single day in the month of June except for the 20th. From May 24 through June 19, I had a string of 27 nights out to see music. Another short string immediately thereafter resulted in a stretch tallying 39 of 40 nights from May 24 through July 1. Some of that adventure seems to have led me to try some things I'd probably not have heard otherwise; whereas I mostly went to see alt-rock bands and country-folk singer-songwriters back then, the 27-nights-in-a-row stretch included such curveballs as D'Jalma Garnier's French Band, jazz great Joe Pass, Tex-Mex accordion whiz Steve Jordan, latin dance outfit Susanna Sharpe & the Samba Police, and Indian beat-poet John Trudell.

* Another name in the logs during that marathon stretch was an artist from Buffalo who was doing a sort of extended residency of solo scoustic performances, having been championed by local booker and music fan Sylvia Benini. I believe it was Sylvia (and/or perhaps upstate New York journalist Dale Anderson) who sent me a copy of the artist's debut cassette, Not So Soft, and urged me to go see one of her shows. I did, and ended up catching her twice more over the next couple weeks, playing to a dozen or so people at small clubs around town. That was my initial exposure to Ani DiFranco.

* I'm not sure whether it was the "Austin Does Austin Hoot Night" on April 23, or the "True Believers vs. Zeitgeist" Hoot Night on February 5 (both at the Cannibal Club), but at one of those, my friend Mike Lyttle and I performed a little Alejandro spoof we came up with called, "The Train Won't Help You When You're Run Over." (Sample verse: "I put a penny down on the tracks/I tripped and fell, now I can't go back/Lost my arms, when I got run over/Lost my legs, when I got run over...")

* I took a road trip out west in late July for one last chance to see a handful of Reivers shows -- July 21 at Club Congress in Tucson, July 22 at the Mason Jar in Phoenix, July 23 at Bogart's In Long Beach, July 24 at Club Lingerie in Los Angeles, July 26 at the Starry Plough in Berkeley, and July 27 at the I-Beam in San Francisco. (I'd very nearly gone out with the Reivers as a guitar tech a couple years prior, but journalism intervened and I missed out on the glamour of life as a roadie.)

I didn't know it at the time, but that trip was essentially saying goodbye to my favorite band, the one that had always been the anchor of my musical experiences in Austin. I moved to Seattle the first week of October 1991; a week later, the Reivers played their final show ever at the Cannibal Club. A major life chapter was fittingly closed...just as a new one was fixing to burst wide open.

But that's another story....

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on April 20, 2007 12:12 PM | Permalink