“The funny thing is, I remember [around] ’92 being like, ‘Why are these people always talking about the Armadillo World Headquarters?'” Greg Beets laughs. “‘That place has been gone for 11 years now.’ And here we are writing a book about Liberty Lunch and the Cavity.”
Co-written with Richard Whymark, it’s not just about beloved, since-shuttered local music venues. A Curious Mix of People: The Underground Scene of ’90s Austin, recently released by UT Press, immortalizes key music players across all parts of the decade, from the Sound Exchange record store to Sweatbox Studio to the Trance Syndicate label to, yes, the Chronicle. Multigenerational influences King Coffey, Conrad Keely, and Britt Daniel recall the glory days alongside members of cult favorites like Sincola, FuckEmos, and Stretford. As does Miss Laura, the founder of lost punk/LGBTQIA club Blue Flamingo (now Chess Club) who coined the oral history’s titular phrase.
The project began over a decade ago, when Gomez/Sincola musician Chepo Peña tapped KVRX DJ-turned-Austin Music Network producer Whymark to film interviews for a Nineties Austin documentary. When subjects began donating old tapes, fliers, posters, and other memorabilia, the process quickly grew too big to handle, prompting Whymark to pivot to a written oral history – something akin to Please Kill Me, he remarks.
Writing started in earnest right before the pandemic. Filmmaker Whymark transcribed and edited the interviews into a narrative, while co-author Beets – former vocalist of Cheezus, Noodle, and the Peenbeets and a longtime Chronicle contributor – wrote the historical passages that contextualize each chapter. Beets conducted additional interviews over Zoom, thanks to a “woodwork effect” of stories that only came to light as artists took notice of the project.
“It was a healthy, sane thing to do during COVID,” Beets says. “Getting to talk with all these folks, during that time especially, made it that much more poignant.”
As any local could guess, many of the scene fixtures detailed in the book don’t stay in Austin through the end of the decade, when the ever-growing tech industry sank its fangs into the city. Still, Beets and Whymark are too plugged in to claim modern Austin is a lost cause. “The city hasn’t stopped producing art. It’s just a little more difficult to find parking,” Whymark quips, pointing to rising punks Die Spitz as a modern act who’s caught his interest.
To that end, the co-authors plan two launch events that toe the line between scene reunion and present-day celebration. On Saturday, Oct. 21, 7-8pm, they’ll discuss the project at the Austin Central Library alongside KUTX’s Laurie Gallardo and Carrie Clark, singer of Nineties noise-poppers Sixteen Deluxe. The following Saturday, Oct. 28, starting early at 3pm, Clark’s current band the Living Pins joins an Austin underground music showcase at the Parlor. The bill is a who’s who of Nineties artists, though many are in new projects these days: anti-folk poet Ed Hammell, Peña’s Gomez, Motards/Slum City/Jesus Christ Superfly supergroup Yard Work, and indie rockers the John-Pauls, headlined by beloved art-punks Glorium.
The concert mirrors the authors’ purpose for A Curious Mix of People: less nostalgic revelry, more documentation. With the book as just one entry in an ongoing archival project, the two have distributed 11 zines with graphic design from Peña, who also created the oral history’s collage cover. Whymark has edited the on-camera interviews into two episodes of a documentary series he plans to submit to South by Southwest, and Beets is eyeing a podcast.
While Austin looks very different than it did in ’92, Beets thinks the independent artistic spirit remains. “We tried to write in such a way that people would recognize it as a story that might have been specific to this particular time and place, but also had some, hopefully, universal thread to it – about being young and growing up in a music scene,” he says.
This article appears in October 20 • 2023 and October 13 • 2023.
