Big Boys had an enduring catchphrase: “Now go start your own band!”
Scrawled on posters and records, repeated at show after show, the DIY imperative was a way of life for the Austin act and, though their time together as a band was relatively short-lived and Texas-bound, the message spread. The proof has finally made its way to the big screen.
You Can Color Outside the Lines is a freewheeling, multimedia-spanning documentary that finds the story of the Eighties punk rockers alive and well in minds across the country and beyond. Hardcore punks and surf rockers, tastemakers like Steve Albini and multihyphenate creatives like Fred Armisen, and a whole slew of artists in between tip their hats to the genre-defying quartet in the 90-minute film.
“Big Boys are so interwoven into the DNA of Austin, even though a lot of people don’t know the story of it,” says filmmaker Andrew Leeper. Once you’ve seen their fluorescent thread in Austin’s creative double helix, its vibrant hue is hard to ignore. “The fact that they were the first skate rock band, that they had one of the first – pretty much openly – gay lead singers in punk rock, that they bridged [the] East Coast [and] West Coast DIY scene through the no-man’s-land…” Leeper trails off. There are plenty more intangible accolades to tie on.
Eschewing still-emerging hardcore genre conventions, they infused funk grooves and glam rock sensibilities into their party punk sound, led by often-costumed frontman Randy “Biscuit” Turner. Alongside the Dicks – fronted by Gary Floyd, another “pretty much openly” gay man – Big Boys encouraged casual acceptance of varying identities in a music scene then nationally dominated by white, straight, cisgender men.
They invited as much of the audience as would fit onto the stage at their performances and played all-ages shows all throughout their career in the name of encouraging youngsters to embrace their own creativity.
What started as a conversation between Big Boys guitarist and voracious artist/musician/skater Tim Kerr and fellow polymath filmmaker Joe Salinas is now playing at three sold-out screenings for friends and family at 29th Street Ballroom this weekend. After that, You Can Color Outside the Lines will surf the festival circuit and ride onto more silver screens near and far in 2027.
“It seemed like a pretty easy project,” laughs Salinas. He ultimately spent years on the road, driving from one source to another or stopping in for a chat in between other projects. The list of people with memories to share grew exponentially.
“You do an interview and the door opens for another person that wasn’t on the list,” Salinas explains.
When Leeper joined the project, there were over 10 hours of taped interviews and a lot of archival material, but very little live footage. He stitched the story together with posters, photographs, and artwork of all kinds in the image of the band’s scrappy aesthetic. “It feels like you can almost see the scenes in a good way,” he says.
Kerr and his Big Boys bandmate, bassist Chris Gates, had heard tell of their influence over the years. After breaking up in 1984, they moved on to other projects – a neverending rhythm that still guides their lives today. Together, they formed Poison 13, a proto-grunge group, as soon as their Big Boys chapter closed. Gates would go on to spend time in Los Angeles, playing in Southern rock-meets-hardcore band Junkyard, and produce and collaborate on many other projects, including Leeper’s pop-punk Nineties group, Dynamite Boy. When fellow musicians, from funk fusion acts to Americana-informed punks, thanked Gates for Big Boys’ influence, he was often surprised.
“You wouldn’t know that we were an influence,” he says. Listening closer, he found the pieces of the Big Boys that’d paved the way. “You love these five songs,” he’d realize. “Out of the 75 things we released, you love these five. These five got you started.”
“A lot of our albums sounded like compilations,” he acknowledges – all the rage these days, but rare in those times. The group’s deep entanglement with visual media, performance art, and skate culture left its fingerprints on the shape of independent music to come.
“It’s like breathing,” says Kerr of that integration. He’s seated in his colorful home studio, every inch adorned with portraits he’s made of creatives and activists, lists of traditional Irish tunes he’s working on, and skateboard decks he’s painted. “I just don’t think about coming in here and painting or playing music.”
It’s the same with skating, photography, and his many other expressive outlets – “it’s all coming from the same place.” Even through ongoing cancer treatment, Kerr is prolific, currently tiling a John Coltrane mosaic and recording with his band, Up Around the Sun.
Gates and Kerr accept the honor of becoming documentary subjects, and the band’s impact in general, with a gracious smile and something of a shrug. They were never creating with legacy in mind.
“I don’t take it lightly, I’m super honored by it, and all that stuff,” Kerr says, but, as he’s fond of putting it: “It’s not my high school touchdown pass.”
When the Big Boys were playing shows, “we didn’t think anybody was gonna be paying attention next week,” Gates echoes. Decades later, though, the ragtag group has made an undeniable impact. “[When] people who were there in the early ages talk about the Big Boys, they get this faraway look in their eye, because going to our show was a communal experience.”
Onscreen, that faraway look flickers across the faces of fellow skate punks JFA, alternative musicians like J. Robbins and Bob Forrest, and subculture historians from every artistic discipline. As their overlapping voices tell the colorful story of the band’s inside-joke-filled records, their first early-Eighties tour, and their appearance in the nascent pages of Thrasher, the group’s crowd-embracing mantra comes up again and again. Ultimately a good number of their audiences did go start their own band, and with it, a wave of DIY subculture that’s now celebrating its roots.
“The reason why a lot of things are the way they are here, in Austin and other places, is because of the people that did a lot of sacrifice – because times were different back then – to be able to get stuff done,” Salinas says of the band’s tireless push to broaden DIY scenes in town and everywhere they went.
“That’s where it starts,” he says. “Next thing you know, you have a film society, or you have an art gallery…” The list goes on, and so does the legacy of the Big Boys.
You Can Color Outside the Lines screens this Sunday, June 21, with three sold-out screenings at 29th Street Ballroom.
This article appears in June 19 • 2026.
