The Story of ’80s Texas Punk in 9 Photographs

Including classic shots of Lone Star State greats like Butthole Surfers, the Dicks, and Daniel Johnston.
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All photos by Pat Blashill from his book Texas Is the Reason: The Mavericks of Lone Star Punk

Teeming with subversive bands, cheap beer, and slam dancing, the Texas punk scene of the 1980s could be pure chaos. Photographer Pat Blashill often found himself in the center of the era’s most raucous mosh pits, and the Austin native’s new photo book, Texas Is the Reason: The Mavericks of Lone Star Punk, collects the sweaty moments he caught on camera, as people smashed themselves to pulp around him. Frozen in time are shots of stage divers, ironic cowboy hats, and beloved local bands like Butthole Surfers, Big Boys, and the Dicks. Across hundreds of black-and-white pictures, Blashill also captures the music scene’s intimacy and camaraderie: kids picking each other up off the floor, hanging in a squat, diving arm-in-arm into Texan springs. Here, he offers insight into some of his most vivid shots, detailing a bygone era of underground Texas rock.

Flag bearers at the Republican National Convention (1984)

Pitchfork: Why did you choose to begin the book with a series of photos, including this shot, that show Texas’ conservative nature?

Pat Blashill: I wanted to make sure that people understood that punk didn’t come out of nowhere in Texas. We were responding to these local conditions of racist cops, the KKK, Reagan America conservatism, and the born-again Christian wackos. A lot of the bands didn’t sing about this directly in their songs, but most of us were pissed off about it and really hated the conformity that we grew up with, these Barbie-and-Ken people who have so much hate in their hearts. One of the reasons that music is so wild and unhinged is because we were responding to a lot of that oppressive stuff.

In 1984, the Republicans held their little convention in Dallas. I was a photojournalism student, and my professor hooked me up with a gig to work for the Associated Press. So I was running film and doing errands and sneaking pictures inside the convention during the day and then photographing the protests of it at night. One evening the Beach Boys played a party for all the Republican white people inside, and outside it was the Big Boys and the Dead Kennedys.

The mosh pit at a Big Boys show protesting the Republican National Convention (1984)

This photo was from a protest show at this infamous club in Dallas called the Twilight Room. The Big Boys were the moms of the scene in a way, because they encouraged and supported everybody and projected togetherness. The funny thing about this shot to me is the way that these young men are moving in a circle, like they watched a stereotypical, old, racist movie about Native Americans. They either look like they were doing sort of a rain dance or were in a kindergarten class. U.S. hardcore punk had this reputation of being all about straight white men that were mad at their mothers, and it really was that a lot of the time! So there’s this combination of young male anger in an infantile formation. But whether you were a big, beefy boy or a tiny, little, tattooed woman, if you fell down in the mosh pit, people would pick you up right away—unless, of course, you were a Nazi skinhead.

Gary Floyd of the Dicks onstage at Voltaire’s Basement (1984)

The Dicks, along with the Big Boys, were the patron saints of Austin punk rock’s golden era. Both bands were led by these large, angry gay men who did not suffer fools gladly. We loved these bands so much and never really knew what was going to happen when they played. We watched them do these amazing shows and pour their hearts out; underneath their anger, there was a lot of pain at the unfairness of homophobia and racism. All of that set the tone for the extraordinary bands that would compose the second wave of Austin punk.

Butthole Surfers (1987)

The Butthole Surfers are the most infamous band to come out of the scene, which is justifiable because they were super hardworking. They were conceptually brilliant with how they blended trashy ’70s classic rock with punk and noise. The Buttholes played with this real tension of Texas identity. The band’s drummer, King Coffey, calls it “Texas drag,” meaning that they would play themselves as Texas stereotypes, like the cross-eyed yokel, when in fact they were very articulate and smart art students. We were proud of being Texans but also disgusted by a lot of the things that constitute Texanness. You might say that we had a cow chip on our shoulder.

Everybody was exploring that in their own way, but the Buttholes were the most artistic about it in their performances. In this picture, it’s there in the way that King is dressed in a Western shirt with little shiny Pearl buttons. There was a very strong Latino presence in the scene, from poster artists and bands to people in the mosh pit. [Drummer] Teresa [Taylor] wearing pigtails and a school girl’s outfit recalls the local Catholic school and the community’s strong Mexican-American presence. That’s a nice layer within what they were doing.

Punk rock den mother Adriane “Ash” Shown (1984)

The photos changed when I started photographing people at their homes and not just going to shows. Ash was living in a house right behind the funeral home with some of the guys from Big Boys and their offshoot, Poison 13. She was so fierce and tough that I really didn’t want to cross her or say anything wrong; she has an authority that makes you step back a little bit. But I screwed up my courage and asked if I could photograph her at home. In the picture, she has an almost Siouxsie Sioux look. It’s a little dark because of the shadows, but she just presented such a sense of self and I wanted to try to capture that. When I was just finishing up the book, I went to Austin, and Ash happened to be in town at the time, and we met up. She spoke to me about the harassment and even assault that some of the women on the scene suffered, and I thought that perspective should definitely be in the book in the form of an essay she wrote.

Punk fans Lynda Stuart and Rene Miller (1984)

Lynda and Rene were these righteous teenagers that I saw at a show slamming arm-in-arm together, totally uninterested in much else except being with each other. I asked if I could photograph them and ended up going over to their house. They had a more old-school London look with the spiked hair.

Some people have said that the Austin scene was very female-centered, and others have said that women actually ran the scene, though not necessarily from onstage. In looking back on this time, I’ve come to the understanding that everybody in the room played a part, and anybody that did something really cool with style or persona was playing a role. Part of what made the scene special was that everyone was doing this creative labor.

Sonic Youth at Continental Club (1986)

One of the things that helped the Austin scene catch fire was that a lot of touring bands came through on their way to Los Angeles or New Orleans. Sonic Youth played two different shows in 1985 and 1986 around Bad Moon Rising. Steve Shelley, their new drummer at that time, had befriended this criminally underheard queer punk band in Austin called Meat Joy. So when Sonic Youth arrived with Steve, they immediately felt like insiders. It was like what they say about the first Velvet Underground record—everybody that bought it formed a band after that. They just blew our minds. Both shows were brain-melting, we had never seen music like that. At that time a lot of people were sick of the 180-miles-an-hour hardcore and wanted something different. The impact of those shows on Austin was really notable and made everybody hit reset.

A moment of consolation inside a punk house on East 12th St. in Austin (1985)

By this point in the scene, there were a few flop houses where a lot of really young kids would hang out and congregate. Around ’85, there was another wave of real young people, in some cases like 12-year-old runaways, coming through. I wasn’t close with any of the people at that house, but I thought it was part of the larger story, so I started hanging out there. Some of the people passing through these houses were skinheads or Nazis, just violent, dangerous people. These were not safe spaces, especially for young women. It wasn’t where I wanted to spend my time.

Here you have the kid in the middle who is being consoled by someone who, later that night, grabbed my flash unit and was going to smash it against the wall because they didn’t know me. When I went back and looked at these pictures, I realized they are some of the most soulful pictures in the book but also the most lost.

Daniel Johnston with his Yip/Jump Music cassette at Austin’s Sound Exchange record store (1986)

Daniel got to Austin in the early ’80s and started handing out his cassettes. I walked into a record store, and Daniel was there, trying to network his way into the scene. He saw me and asked if I wanted to take his picture. He held up the cassette and said he would try to make his face look like the baby on the cover. He was a sweet guy. I don’t think the reception that he got in Austin was so random, and I don’t think it was so unusual that he ended up there. Texas, and especially Austin, has a longstanding tradition of embracing these people that I would call the radical primitives. In the ’60s, there was a group called Red Krayola who made this crazy noisy music and all the way up to the punk years with Reversible Cords and the Buffalo Gals. Maybe Austin ended up embracing him so much because people there may have already been conditioned to being able to hear what’s good about his music.


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