Stephen Bruton – The Pleasurecraft

March 25, 2008

There is so much money in Austin. It’s crazy, isn’t it? All those penthouse condominiums, lakeside estates, and hillside mansions that stretch all the way to the horizon and beyond have to be owned by someone, right? Who are these people? Where do they come from? And most importantly, where did they get all that goddamned money? Austin is the Live Music Capital of the World, so naturally you would think that the majority of Austin’s high-dollar real estate is owned by scruffy, tattooed, coke-snorting rock stars who sleep past lunch and spend their afternoons wallowing in coconut oil greased kiddie pools filled with Girls Gone Wild. The ugly truth of the matter is that there aren’t any musicians in Austin who fit that bill. In fact, only Billy Gibbons could make that type of thing happen (OK, maybe Britt Daniel, but he doesn’t really seem like he’s into that scene). Sadly, Billy Gibbons doesn’t even live in Austin unless you count his occasional sojourns at the Four Seasons – swank digs, to be sure, but lounging poolside with a mangorita while a dude in a white coat brings you treys of cold washcloths and spritzes you with a mist bottle full of Evian doesn’t really rank as a double-devil-horns-type, rock & roll experience, even if you’re chilling in a colorful knit cap and sporting the beard of Methuselah. At some point you have to get amped up enough to defenestrate a TV set or something. Just saying. In reality, the working musician in that scenario is probably the guy in the white coat pulling the trigger on the spritzer. Life is full of vicious ironies isn’t it? Maybe “Live Music Capital” should be amended to the more appropriate “Live Music Capital (Loss) of the World.” Let’s not pull anyone’s chain. Musicians in this town are cheap whores – at least the successful ones – the rest are just sluts trying to work their way up to being whores. Sounds a trifle insulting on the surface, but at least a slut does it for love, and isn’t that the best reason to make music? Of course it is, but the payments on those new high rise condos aren’t going to be built from the tip-jar cash at the Mean Eyed Cat – at least not until the inevitable real estate bust. Until then, artistic types will have to depend on the monetary largesse of the people who enjoy the benefits of their artistic largesse. After all, those Downtown condos didn’t spring up so people could enjoy the pretty office buildings and corporate culture, did they? Nuh unh. So, Austin, how do you afford your rock & roll lifestyle? Here’s how: By supporting organizations who support the musicians who make Austin such an interesting and desirable place to live. For instance, this Sunday you can attend Nancy Coplin’s Big 6-0 Benefit for HAAM at Antone’s on Fifth Street. Coplin, whose primary job of recent years has been supporting Austin music by booking bands into actual paying gigs at Bergstrom Airport, is celebrating her 60th birthday with a benefit for the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians, which provides low cost primary health care services for uninsured professional musicians in the Austin area. Even if you’re not overwhelmed with gratitude, the lineup for this gig is well worth the $15 cover. Acts scheduled to perform include Marcia Ball, Delbert McClinton, Wendy Colonna, Shelly King, Sunny Sweeny, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Ricky Trevino, Ruben Ramos, and Stephen Bruton. It’s not a kiddie pool full of GGW, but it should be a great show since they’re all doing it for love.

JULY 17, 2007

Really, the question is, who wouldn’t want to live in $500,000 condo in a 44-story high rise on the breathtaking shores of Shoal Creek? Imagine leaning over your balcony railing on the 42nd floor and squinting downward at that tiny fissure of green space below and knowing that, just a few miles upstream under a bridge in Pease Park, a homeless man just dropped trow and is squeezing out a three-coiler on the dry creekbed – a pungent pâté of digested pizza rinds and cinnamon sticks from the Mr. Gattis Dumpster. Don’t worry, there’s not enough line in your Pocket Fisherman to get your lure below the 20th floor anyway, much less hit top water, so you don’t have to worry about reeling in a big batch of E. coli. Besides, it’s not like you really want to fish, it’s the idea that you could fish if you wanted to. You like to be close to the water, even if that water is a fetid drainage ditch for Downtown developers. Sign here … and here … and here. After all, you didn’t just spend half a mil on a condo, you bought a lifestyle. You wanted to be able to roll out of bed at 10am, take a quick four minute elevator ride to the ground floor and hire a pedicab to pump you up to Starbuck’s for a Vende Latteccino and a copy of The New York Times. Maybe afterward you could strap on your heavy hands and take your (circle one) Shih Tzu/Pomeranian/Chihuahua/Pekingese for a brisk power walk around Town Lake … but wait … some asshole put a 26-story condo right in the middle of the hike and bike trail. Worse yet, the City Council signed off on the deal. Now, just like the rest of Austin, you’re getting the runaround. Enraged, you shake your fist at the cranes and construction workers and without a trace of irony yell, “Damn you, developers! Damn you!” What kind of livable city is it when you can only enjoy Town Lake from behind the plate glass of an expensive condo? Well sure, it’s livable all right. So is the riverwalk in San Antonio. C’mon, they turned their drainage ditch into a tourism gold mine. With some knee-jerk urban planning and lack of foresight, Austin can turn Town Lake into a similar cement moat – maybe even with flatboats full of fat Midwestern conventioneers. Dare we dream? Maybe. If you want to have a voice in whether Austin will go from River City to Moat Metropolis, show up down at Stubb’s (nestled on the beautiful shores of Waller Creek) for the Concert to Save Town Lake, a fundraiser for Austinites for the Responsible Development of the Town Lake Corridor, an organization with a tough job and even tougher name from which to draw an anagram. Local musicians Bob Schneider, Dale Watson, Stephen Bruton, Jimmy Lafave, and Kinky Friedman will join forces to rock block the potential riverwalk.