This issue’s cover is a bit of an inside joke. Fifteen years ago this past summer a small group of us got
together and put out a prototype issue for a paper we planned to start
publishing that fall. We had decided to call it The Austin Chronicle, though we had considered dozens of names, passing on The Austin Reader, The
Austin Eye, The Austin Voice. I don’t think anyone at that time realized
that we would be still afloat and thriving 15 years later. This is because none
of us thought that much about the future. To celebrate this anniversary, we
sent the cover boy of that ancient prototype, Nick Barbaro, back to roughly the
same spot to take a more contemporary picture (on the cover, he holds the
original photo in his hand).
There were a group of us then — writers, filmmakers, musicians… students,
mostly — who hung out together. Many of this group were writers, and most of
them wrote for The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at UT; in some
cases they had been writing at the Texan for years. The idea behind a
student newspaper, of course, is not to develop a staff who refuses to
leave, even when they had left school, graduating or dropping out. We needed a
new place to write, and there was plenty to write about. There was an exciting
cultural community, bands, performers, artists, writers, and filmmakers who
were attracting national press but not really being covered in Austin. There
was a political mission, not just a dedication to ongoing political coverage
but an idea that taking the culture seriously was a political act. But the real
driving force behind starting the Chronicle was that it would be a new
place to write, a place where we — the writers — would be in charge.
The story of how this came about is almost mundane: Joe Dishner was a special
education teacher in San Antonio who decided he really wanted to make films. He
came to Austin to go to film school at UT. After a semester, he decided that
school was not the way to get into making movies, so he dropped out.
Having nothing better to do, Dishner decided he should start a bi-weekly
newspaper. He recruited Nick Barbaro because 1) he thought Nick had access to
lots of money, 2) having dropped out of graduate school, Nick was working at a
convenience store and had nothing better to do, and 3) Nick is a brilliant
writer and a brilliant person, seemingly capable of almost anything. At least
the latter two points turned out to be true. Together, they went to the library
and checked out books published in the Fifties on running a community paper.
The books really didn’t have any useful information but, to prove how serious
they were, they carried the books with them everywhere they went for months (I
should mention here that trusting my memory on any detail, large or small, is
an act of faith on all our parts). Then they recruited me. I thought it would
be a good way to meet new women. It wasn’t.
There were three overlapping communities at this point, the various circles in
which our friends traveled: CinemaTexas — a graduate student-run film society
at UT, The Daily Texan, and Raul’s, the punk/new wave club on the Drag
where the Texas Showdown is located now. The two of them recruited people from
all these groups (although most belonged to more than one) including Ed Lowry,
the intellectual and spiritual leader of the CinemaTexas group, Sarah Whistler,
and Jeff Whittington, as the original editorial board. In the summer of 1981
we put out the prototype. The cover featured the Chronicle‘s leader —
the charming, brilliant, infuriating, talented, irresistible, and obstinate
Nick Barbaro, looking impossibly young, afloat on a tube. The prototype seemed
a giant step in the right direction and ad sales manager Rhett Beard threw a
great party with terrific barbecue chicken to celebrate. We all thought it was
going to be so easy.
September 4, 1981, we published our first issue. Inside this week’s issue, we
include a reduced copy of it. (Elsewhere, Barbaro will give instructions on how
to bend and fold the issue correctly.)
The cover was a disaster. It was conceived as the face of Richard O’Brien,
half from his character from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and
half from his new release Shock Treatment. Micael Priest, our cover
artist, decided to put a touch of purple in each eyeball to emphasize O’Brien’s
madness. The printer misread the instructions and drenched the whole cover in
purple, leaving white spots in each of the eyes. Shock Treatment never
opened.
The cover was symbolic of what was to come. None of us had any real idea how
to publish a bi-weekly newspaper. We were writers, and we could edit and write,
but we were not prepared for the jobs a weekly involved: personnel, management,
distribution, ad sales, diplomacy, classified, finances and so on. We
especially weren’t prepared for the consistency of the work; every two weeks we
had to come out with another issue.
We plunged into several years of hellish education as we learned how to put a
paper out. The original editorial board didn’t make it through the first year
and neither did Joe Dishner. Somewhere in there, Nick and I evolved our strange
publisher/editor responsibility split. Seven years later, we went weekly.
I could — and I may still — tell stories from the first few years of the Chronicle endlessly. It was
an amazing time, it was a brutal time, it was a costly time, it was a wonderful
time.
But instead of more words, we offer instead the first issue. The
Chronicle cannot be about the past alone, it must be about the present
and the future. This paper has always been about something. It started with an
idea of what the Austin community was and how to cover it, and, 15 years later,
though it has grown and changed, the focus of the paper has remained the same.
The attitude has changed, the people who produce the paper have changed. Their
commitment hasn’t, but perhaps they are no longer so deranged about it (though
if we hadn’t been that passionate as to be almost nuts I doubt this paper would
have survived). We used to live in crappy apartments by UT and spend most of
our waking hours either hanging out at the Chronicle office or going out
to gather information and experiences to return to the Chronicle offices
and relate. For a long time, we did everything together, but back then there
were 10 or 12 of us, not 40 or 50. Now we do it to earn a living and not just
as a way of life. Some of us have husbands, wives, children, cars and homes. We
have, in other words, lives. The paper has undoubtedly reflected that
evolution.
Times certainly have changed — Austin has changed — but look at this first
issue. Margaret Moser is still here, though she’s a senior editor now, not a
music gossip columnist, and Chris Walters still writes for us. Beloved friends
have died, Bejou Merry was killed in a bizarre train accident, and Ed Lowry and
George Coleman both died of AIDS. Joe Dishner is off making movies; the last
time I spoke to him he was hanging out with Robert Redford, getting ready to
work on The Horse Whisperer. Scott Bowles is in Japan, and it looks like
our long tradition of multiple mentions of John Sayles began with our first
issue (as Moser points out, there are no references to Richard
Linklater in that issue; of course, we hadn’t met him yet), and Nick and I
hardly write anymore. Hondo’s Saloon, Angles, and Xalapeno Charlie’s are
closed, but the Continental Club, Liberty Lunch, and Hut’s are still going
strong. Rusty Wier still plays every week (I’m not going to cover every writer
nor every advertiser, so I apologize to those I am leaving out).
To celebrate our 15th year we offer this first issue — ads and all. This is
to show where we’ve come from, to try and get at who we are, because despite
all the changes, we’ve always been the same. Otherwise, no special features or
reminisces. After our 200th issue we offered quotes from the preceding 200
issues (we were late getting it together and published a special 201st issue
rather than a 200th issue). For our 10th anniversary, we included letters and
covers from the previous ten years (this also proved to be a monstrous task, so
we didn’t celebrate our 10th anniversary until Vol. XI, No. 2 instead of No.
1). But as the paper keeps growing, getting the focus and the concentration to
celebrate our own past becomes harder and harder.
What drove the last 15 years is that there is always another Chronicle to do and there is always more of Austin’s story to tell. As much as we are
focused on this issue, everyone is already thinking about the next one. And the
next one. And the next one, and the next one — on and on. Look at this not as
a new volume or an anniversary but a work in progress about all our lives and
the community we live in and the one we are not embarrassed to say we love.
Happy anniversary, enjoy the first issue, enjoy this latest issue. Next week,
there will be yet another one.
Special thanks and appre-
ciation to the literally hundreds of people who have worked on the
Chronicle over the years and to our advertisers that make this all
possible.n
This article appears in September 6 • 1996 and September 6 • 1996 (Cover).