#2 All Ages Shows.
Or, how Molly McClurg and I went from Warped Tour to Academia
Molly Mcclurg is an Austin, TX based designer and educator. After stints on both coasts and time spent on the production side of the music industry, Molly returned to central Texas and pivoted to a career in web and UX design. She’s now a faculty member at Austin Community College. Molly and I met on Warped Tour in 2006, a period I thought my time in the music industry was coming to an end while hers was just starting to begin. I wanted to talk with / write about Molly in part because of how our individual paths carried us from DIY all ages space to working within academia, but also because the city of Austin has been central to much of my time within the music industry.
With all of this in mind, this month’s playlist is heavy on music from or that reminds me of Austin and late 90s / early 2000s pop punk and indie, with the usual peppering of new music that forms a connection to me
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A Mixtape Left Behind #2: All Ages Shows.
Listen to the playlist on Spotify or Youtube Music (with videos!).
Artist - Track
American Tomahawk - Our Knife Song
Damien Jurado - Throwing Your Voice
Ra Ra Riot - Do You Remember
Man Man - Gold Teeth
The National - Conversation 16
Bruce Springsteen - Growin’ Up
Reba McEntire - The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
John Mayer - Shot In The Dark
Stevie Ray Vaughan - Rude Mood
Against Me! - Don’t Lose Touch
Bane - Some Came Running
Fiddlehead - Eternal You
Cartel - Burn This City
Sherwood - Bottle It Up
Motion City Soundtrack - Make Out Kids
Saves The Day - Firefly
Valient Thorr - Heatseeker
Guy Clark - Anyhow, I Love You
The Smashing Pumpkins - Age Of Innocence
Starflyer 59 - No New Kinda Story
The Mr T Experience - At Gilman Street
Face To Face - Its Not Over (live)
ALL - Until I Say So
RX Bandits - Falling Down The Mountain
Midtown - Such A Person
Sicko - An Indie Rock Daydream
A Great Big Pile Of Leaves - Kitchen Concert
Katy Kirby - Peppermint
Eli Young Band - Even If It Breaks Your Heart
Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris - The Pain Of Loving You
Madi Diaz - New Person, Old Place
Mitski - Your Best American Girl
Interpol - All Fired Up
Fire When Ready - They Call Her Echo
David Ramirez - Eliza James
The Snake The Cross The Crown - On The Threshold Of Eternity
Explosions In The Sky - So Long, Lonesome
Austin is a city synonymous with live music. Austin serves as host to South By Southwest (SXSW), Austin City Limits (ACL), and generations of countless live music venues. It is the type of city any bar or restaurant you walk in to will likely have a band performing every night of the week. Live music in Austin provides a much more diverse range of genres than similar cities known for live music like Nashville and New Orleans, and It’s core identity as a college town gives it a more youthful spirit than New York or Los Angeles — cities where the wheels of the music industry grind.
My wife and I lived in Austin in the fall of 2010 for her work. This was the period before streaming services existed but the storage on your iphone only had enough space for a playlist or two. Every morning around 5:30 I would drive Melissa to work, listening to the same playlist, which started just like this one. American Tomahawk, Damien Jurado, and Ra Ra Riot will forever be the soundtrack to moving effortlessly through a city run by night life before the sun has a chance to come up.
My first time in Austin was for SXSW while I was still in college. My friends’ band had just signed to a larger national label and was set to play for the first time. A week before the festival, their bass player broke his wrist and I had only a few days to attempt to learn the bass lines he tried to teach me while on significant pain killers. We drove all night to arrive at Emo’s on Austin’s storied 6th street, a venue which itself no longer exists, at least not in this incarnation, but carried a reputation of hallowed ground.
The first bands of the festival had already started as we stepped into Emo’s. Man Man was playing, a band consisting of six men dressed in all white who somehow shoved themselves and about 17 instruments onto a tiny corner stage. Even the drummer had two extra keyboards. We would play on this same stage later in the afternoon and it should be noted, I would later join my friends’ band for most of my touring career, but my performance at this event would not be the reason. All the same, for that week, I belonged. I didn’t know it yet, but this was the beginning of what would be nearly a decade working in and around the music industry, and for one week a year, this is where all of my friends would be. By poetic coincidence, my last paid gig in this world would also be in Austin, managing one of the merchandise tents at ACL. That final night, I counted out tour managers one last time while The National closed out the festival in the distance.
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Molly grew up in Austin. Her first record, unsurprisingly for a Texas woman of a certain generation, was Reba Mcentire’s Read My Mind. She was raised by parents who rode their bikes to see Bruce Springsteen perform in a couple hundred capacity room in 1974, took her to Willie Nelson's 4th of July Picnic, and listened to Stevie Ray Vaughn.
We met on Warped Tour as bunkmates on Bus 16, which I ended up on the tour rather unintentionally. I was living in New York and had planned to move upstate to work for the label the band I had toured with was on, Equal Vision Records. It began as a hardcore label that had branched out to a wider range of music by this time, but was still synonymous with the band Bane and their ubiquitous college lettering style hoodies almost everyone in the scene seemed to own. Two weeks before the tour was set to begin, after the usual representative canceled I was asked to go out in his place.
Molly, and her touring partner Vic, had found her way onto the tour in a similar fashion, working for The Militia Group. The label was in the middle of promoting what would be their most successful release, Cartel’s debut album Chroma. Their friend Mason was supposed to work for the label, but ended up getting hired to stage manage the Ernie Ball stage, a stage where smaller touring bands like Sherwood shared time with up and coming local bands. At the last minute, Molly slid into Mason’s original slot.
It’s difficult to describe what being on Warped Tour is actually like. It was regularly described as “Punk Rock Summer Camp”, which isn’t exactly wrong, just in place of cabins, your bunk beds are on busses, if you are lucky. Instead of spending your summer in the woods, you awaken most mornings in nondescript fields or parking lots on the edge of the city your laminate says you are in. It’s easily the most grueling touring experience imaginable, especially for the 100’s of support staff and crew who work 10+ hour days in the summer heat for two and a half months straight. It’s honestly miserable, but as is usually the case in such scenarios, comradery is fostered and lasting friendships are formed.
I do not remember when Molly and I became friends. I vaguely remember her bunk being below mine and I assume I realized early on that setting my tent up next to theirs meant I could easily ask one of them to watch my stuff if I needed to step away. But what is etched into my memory is watching Saves The Day together seemingly every day, shot gunning cans of water, and scheming who had friends in upcoming towns that could bring us food from the outside world. We spent our off days together, once cramming into a truck to drive to Alabama? After long days of handing out free samplers and selling label merchandise in the sun, the entire tour would unwind and bands like Valient Thorr would play bus lot concerts for the crew until bus call. One of these nights, Molly and Vic organized a flip cup tournament the entire tour showed up for, only to then get in trouble. As bus captain, it was probably my job to yell at them. We had totally different individual paths that brought us to become Top 8 friends that summer, but they could easily be summarized by saying we both grew up within communities in which all ages music flourished.
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Back in Austin, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Machina tour may have been Molly’s first live music she experienced by choice, but it was countless nights at clubs like the aforementioned Emo’s that formed the connection she made to live music. I had a similar experience. While Denver had plenty of 21+ venues, the only band that ever made me consider getting a fake ID just so I could see them live was Starflyer 59, a band on a Christian label coincidentally.
The Bay Area is home to one of the most storied all ages venues in the country, Gilman Street, a room that fostered the careers of bands like the Mr T Experience and even giant acts like Rancid and Green Day. But that was just one of the theaters, record stores, pizza parlors, Christian youth centers, and basements that provided safe spaces for young people to form relationships and be loud. They were more than places to see music, they were the center of our social lives; places you could go after school and have bands like Face to Face decide it would be fun to help you with your math homework while they smoked after sound check, which actually happened to Molly. They were also the haunts for local bands who had been around long enough every touring band wanted them to open the show, such as ALL, who, I do not exaggerate, I saw at least 40 times growing up, much to my own chagrin. For reasons such as age, I’ve since come around to whatever all of those bands saw in them.
These were the types of venues that allowed a group of high schoolers who could barely play their instruments to get on stage for 30 minutes and feel a sense of accomplishment and validation they weren’t finding somewhere else, fueling a drive to pursue creative outlets and expression. Possibly more importantly, they were spaces that served as tour stops for bands just slightly older and more accomplished than the kids they were performing for that had only heard of them because of free or cheap label sampler compilations like the ones Molly and I gave out on warped tour. For Molly, it was a Drive Thru Records sampler that featured ska and pop punk bands like The RX Bandits and Midtown that sent her to independent record stores.
These spaces and performers provided examples that following your passion was possible, albeit improbable. If you didn’t play music yourself, they provided the opportunities to learn production and management, giving plenty of young people their first jobs and positions of responsibility. There were zines always in need of amatuer writers willing to be paid in cds and guest list spots. Every band needed merch, even if it was spray painted stencils on thrift store tshirts. If you wanted to be included, there was a niche for you. Of course, in retrospect, it does need to be recognized that in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, for all the positive impacts and relationships formed, it was by no means utopian. The overwhelming majority of the bands were male and predatory actions by some of these men were not unheard of. I’m hopeful that as the music coming out today from young folks suggests, it’s being fostered through spaces with greater gender parity and respect.
A handful of kids who grow up in these communities get lucky and they get to follow their dreams, at least for a little while. There are the rare occasions a band skyrockets to a level of success they become household names, but even most of those spend years working to get there. For most touring musicians, you can be on the road as many as 300 days a year, sleeping in vans and busses, making just enough to get you from town to town. There is no health insurance or savings plans and plenty of bad habits to pick up on the way. Even once you’ve “made it”, the next level of success is often up to chance; a label may not know exactly how to sell your music, you may be an opener on a tour that ends up a flop, in the worst case scenarios, all those miles driving across the country could meet another vehicle head on out on the open road. All the while, life at home keeps moving without you. For those that pursue more traditional roles in music, the pay is nominal with a push towards contract roles as the industry still grapples with how to pivot to our new economic and consumption realities in our streaming age. Of those handful of kids who get to follow their dream, the vast majority move on themselves eventually.
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For both Molly and I, when we decided to call it quits, we turned towards the visual arts. Molly leaned into her Graphic Design studies, spending long nights in the studio screen printing and learning to code while listening to Interpol, attempting to still be music adjacent. Eventually deciding that was not sustainable, she took a job that allowed her to return home to Austin. She hung out with skaters and bike enthusiasts and eventually joined the tech class that is becoming more and more an identity of Austin, until four years ago when she found herself drawn to teach. I found my way into higher ed fairly quickly after leaving music, falling into a job as an Academic Advisor until going to grad school for my MFA, now finding one of the roles I inhabit being a member of the adjunct faculty hustle.
While there are the Greg Graffins of the world, Bad Religion singer turned Zoology PHD and college professor, the number of folks who find themselves in the music industry to educator pipeline is not exactly overflowing. I assume this is due largely to the reality that plenty of kids who pursue music do so instead of attending college and getting degrees. But it turns out, it’s exactly the values that Molly and I gleaned from the ethos of those small venues and clubs we spent our adolescence in that ultimately drew us towards academia. Through our classrooms we’re able to instill DIY values and encourage students to question systems and always be on the lookout for something unexpected that may end up having meaning to them. The time we spent trying to make one dream work gave us the insight to encourage young people to find and follow their own passions. At our best, we’re hopefully able to share with students the values of building meaningful community that is inclusive and rejects gate keeping, just like those rooms we grew up in could at their best.
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I met The Snake The Cross The Crown at that first SXSW. They had just signed to that same hard core record my friend’s band had. They played keyboard heavy Indie rock but had just relocated to Southern California and were working on new music that reflected more of the music they grew up with back in Alabama. When I moved to LA a few months later they invited me up to the house they all lived in together off the beach in Santa Barbara. They got me incredibly stoned and we watched The Last Waltz before they played me the masters for their new record; it was a modern take on some kind of psychedelic southern folk that didn’t sound like anything else I was listening to at the time. Everyone involved absolutely loved the record, including the label, but with a roster made up largely of bands that screamed for a living, they could only do so much. The band toured like crazy, worked on a follow up record, and then toured some more. But nothing stuck, and they eventually broke up. I think they were just ahead of their time. They will forever be the band I think most personifies how cruel and unfair the music industry can be, and no matter how much you love music and how hard you work, sometimes it just doesn't. But thankfully, the work still exists.
At the last SXSW I attended, in an upstairs club off 6th street, I’d see The Snake The Cross The Crown for the last time. They always closed their sets with On The Threshold Of Eternity, which would usually drag out several extra minutes. On it’s way, each musician would one by one stop playing their instrument to join in on a rhythmic drum beat, singing loudly along the way, until the song would reach its primarily percussion and vocal end. I played drums with them on that song that night and it's of a small collection of moments in my touring career I knew to be present, to appreciate that something special was happening. I hold it as one of my most cherished memories from that time in my life.
I close with this story as an admittedly clunky metaphor. It stands out to me as an example of the impact artistic communities can have and how they transcend our common concepts of success. It’s a memory that reminds me how making things and the moments we share them matter, how encouraging and fostering sites that can hold space for meaningful connection is important, even if we don’t always get to see it.
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I hope you’ve enjoyed this second installment of A Mixtape Left Behind.
I’d love to hear what you think
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