Thax Douglas moved to Austin and doesn't miss us at all
And what was up with that whole death hoax?
J. Longstreet
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Can a city maintain its cultural integrity in the face of encroaching commercialism? That's the question raised by Echotone, a new documentary about Austin, Texas—the "live music capital of the world"—which gets its regional première at the Talking Pictures Film Festival on May 8 at the Next Theatre. The film bills itself as “a cultural portrait of the modern American city,” which got The A.V. Club thinking: Can you really base any conclusions about “the modern American city” strictly by focusing on a place like Austin? To see how Austin measures up against Chicago, The A.V. Club talked to ubiquitous "rock poet" Thax Douglas—who moved to the Texas indie mecca late last year—about his impressions of the two cities.
On the food
Thax Douglas: I'm not into Texas food all that much, like barbecue and all of that. People get really excited about it, and I don't particularly care for it. I do like breakfast tacos, but Chicago has better taquerias, believe it or not. In Chicago, I would go to the Hollywood Diner, because you could stay for two or three hours and talk. Here I come to the IHOP, and the food's not so good. I do like their Swedish crepes, though.
On the music scenes
TD: I hated the music community in Chicago. One thing about Austin is—well, there's so many great bands, and the bands all know each other. The Chicago scene is very atomized. Atomization is a term they use in a totalitarian society where you can't trust anybody, and yeah—Chicago. It's very difficult for bands to be creative there. There are good bands in Chicago, definitely, but it took me years and years to find them. And here, immediately, there's a dizzying array of great bands. There are very few bands who actually suck here, and they're hungry. In Chicago, there aren't too many hungry bands. A lot of them are hobby bands—people who have good jobs and get together to sing songs about zombies once a month or something like that.
On the in-crowd
TD: There's some really bad in-crowd-ism going on in Chicago. I name-drop Gerard Cosloy a lot, but just the difference between the record-label people in Chicago and Gerard [who runs Matador Records out of Austin]—it's such a big difference. Matador is a bigger label than any of those Chicago labels, and Gerard has a band, which is one of my favorite bands, called Air Traffic Controllers. Somebody like that in Chicago would just be so different. He'd have a trail of a couple dozen sycophants always clouding around him. But when Air Traffic Controllers plays, nobody comes to the shows. In Chicago, it'd either be full of sycophants, or he'd only play when his famous friends came to town, or something like that. He would never admit a band was good until they were a buzz band, and then he'd act like, "Oh, I liked them all along."
On the better city to fake your death
TD: That was kind of an in-joke that blew up. I had a friend who said that I'd died online, and people picked up on it. I was surprised—there was a policy of marginalization about me in the press in Chicago, so I didn't expect anyone to care. But I've had discussions over the years with people about doing it. If I'd done it, I'd have done it differently—I wouldn't have done it so people would be unsure about it. I would have called my dad and said, "Don't answer the phone for a couple days." But I think my friend just went and did it on his own as a joke. And it just went off from there. It happened the first day of Pitchfork Festival, and I guess it was a big deal there. I just did what was a normal day there, and I got home about midnight and there were all these messages. I had to call some people who were really upset and let them know. That's what kept me from stretching it out.
The A.V. Club: How did it feel to be eulogized?
TD: I really enjoyed it. It was gratifying. I really liked disturbing the Pitchfork Festival. I was shocked at how nice the comments were—there weren't a lot of "good riddance" comments. Some people, like Jim DeRogatis, it was obvious their editors said, "You have to write something about this." You could see how reluctant they were to give me a lot of press. It would have been a lot of fun, if a few days had passed, if they'd actually written something that was in the paper—what they would have said. I was treated with such disrespect in Chicago, and I knew the average concertgoer liked me, and that bands liked me, but it helped validate some things. It's actually what helped me move out of Chicago, because it convinced me—it wasn't me that was fucked up, it was Chicago that was fucked up.
See our interview with Douglas just before he moved to New York—for the same reasons—in 2006.
