« * "i can hear your voice in the wind..." | Main | * Show Log Mania, Part II of IV: 1989 »

* Show Log Mania, Pt. I of IV: 1988

You may recall a few weeks back I wrote at length about David Halley and mentioned some specifics about having seen him play at a portentous "Hoot Night" in an Austin nightclub in January 1989. No, my memory wasn't actually that sharp as to the specific chronological details; I had help from my now nearly 20-year-old show logs.

Back in the fall of 1988, just after returning from a summer internship on Long Island at the daily paper Newsday, I started keeping a list of all the acts I went out to see every night. Little did I know at the time how valuable a historical tool those logs would become many years later. (In retrospect, I sure wish I'd started keeping the logs in 1985, the year I first started going out to see live music on a very regular basis; I often find myself digging for info about a show I saw in the mid-'80s, but I've no way to look it up.)

When I started writing that Halley blog entry, I had a pretty clear memory of his Hoot Night performance, but wasn't really sure of the date. The hitch was that my lists from 1988-1991 were sequestered away somewhere on a massive dot-matrix feeder-paper printout -- I used to keep the log on my day-job computer back then (this was before the era of desktop Macs, at least for me). I finally dug through a few boxes and found it, and was reminded how I'd often thought about just typing all that old info into a current text file to allow for much easier access and searchability in the future.

Being between ND deadlines at the moment, and frankly scratching my head slightly as to what to blog about this week, I figured, what the heck, why not go ahead and do it now. My plan is to type in one year each day for the rest of the week -- i.e. 1988 Tuesday, 1989 Wednesday, 1990 Thursday, and 1991 Friday. (From September 1991 on, after my move from Austin to Seattle with a good ol' Mac SE newly in tow, the logs are already on my hard-drive.) I won't post the full list here, for fear of overloading even the supposedly endless bandwidth of blogospheres, but I'll make some general observations each day about what I've unearthed.

We'll start, then, with 1988, which I just finished transcribing. This one was relatively painless, as I didn't begin the logs until my return from Long Island in mid-August of that year (thus it's only four months worth). Still, there are plenty of entries that raised eyebrows as I revisited the tail end of that year. Among them:

* I believe I can identify Alejandro Escovedo's first-ever solo performance in this time-frame. Late 1988 was in fact a key juncture in Escovedo's career evolution. There are True Believers shows on August 27, September 3, November 25, and December 2 -- the last of those being, as I recall, the final True Believers gig (until reunions much later). Javier Escovedo had already left by this point, but the rest of the guys still played for awhile after his departure -- including a select few acoustic gigs billed as the Make Believers (October 4 opening for Harry Dean Stanton at the Cactus Cafe, November 19 headlining at Liberty Lunch).

Escovedo's name -- solo -- appears in my listings for November 8 at another of those informal "Hoot Night" outings at Club Cairo; this might well have been the first time he took the stage on his own. (Interestingly, my list also suggests there was a collaborative performance that night between Wammo and Frank Orrall, now leaders of Asylum Street Spankers and Poi Dog Pondering, repsectively.) The first formal Escovedo show in my logs -- not necessarily the first he played as such, but the first I witnessed, at least -- was November 20 at the Cactus Cafe, an opening slot for Joe Ely.

* It's easy to spot when the Reivers, Austin's top alternative-rock band at that time (and my favorite for many years), were on tour. There'll be a stretch where I've seen them play probably every week...and then there'll be a gap of a month or so without any Reivers entries at all. No, I didn't stop going to see them, they were just on the road. (As they must have been between September 24 and November 17 in 1988.)

* The band I saw the most during the latter part of 1988 was not the oft-touring Reivers (7 times) or the splintering True/Make Believers (6 times) or the fast-rising Poi Dog Pondering (8 times) ... but rather, the long-forgotten folk-pop ensemble Grains Of Faith (9 times). For a brief period in the late '80s they were quite possibly Austin's best band, before violinist Susan Voelz moved on to the Poi Dog camp (which changed the band's chemistry). Sadly, they've been lost to documented history; there were a couple of cassette releases that, to my knowledge, have never made it to CD (though there was an effort afoot awhile back toward that end).

* A Christmas-themed on-air "Hoot Night" on December 20 hosted by Jody Denberg at KLBJ's studios (before Denberg moved on to KGSR a couple years later) still stands out quite prominently, in part because for ages I had a cassette tape of the show (and still do, somewhere, I suppose) that received many repeated listens over the years. The lineup included the aforementioned Make Believers, the Ronnie Lane Band, the Flatlanders, Timbuk 3, the Wild Seeds, Darden Smith, and an upstart trio called the Barnburners which featured future Bad Livers frontman Danny Barnes, future Robert Earl Keen guitarist Rich Brotherton, and future producer extraordinaire J.D. Foster. The song that still burns bright in my mind from that night was "Barcelona", a song Lane performed that he co-wrote with Eric Clapton. "So we said goodbye to Barcelona...."

* I was puzzled as to why the name of one of my old roommates, Hunter Darby, kept appearing in the logs. He was the bass player for a punk-pop band called the Wannabes that I went to see frequently (6 times during this stretch), but Hunter never played any solo shows, far as I could recall. Then suddenly I remembered there was actually a short-lived BAND that had christened itself Hunter Darby around that time. Exactly why, I've forgotten; some in-jokes are buried with the artifacts of yore.

* Finally, I keep looking at this one list from October 15 and scratching my head as to how I managed to see all these things on the same night. It's almost modern-day SXSW-ish, except SXSW was in its infancy back then, and anyway has never operated in the fall. Here's how the entry for that day reads, anyhow:

sat oct 15
Bonnie Raitt, Austin Opera House
Chuck Jackson, Austin Opera House
Ruth Brown, Austin Opera House
Clovers, Austin Opera House
Lucinda Williams, Cactus Cafe
Grains Of Faith, Texas Tavern
Doctors' Mob, Club Cairo
Wild Seeds, Club Cairo

OK, then, onward to 1989 in tomorrow's blog....

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on April 17, 2007 8:58 AM | Permalink