live music capital my ass

i’ve talked about how austin has “gotten away from its roots” as the live music capital of the world with all the no smoking and noise ordinance shit…

…but, honestly, did it ever have those roots to begin with?

back in 2015 or so i was at a show in san antonio with the ufc (manson/pumpkins for anybody interested) when i saw what i thought was a tragedy – a vintage iron maiden jersey with the sleeves cut off. like, way vintage. like back when i first got into em kinda vintage.

anywho, turns out it was a reissue, but i noticed something while waiting in line for beer behind the guy – during their 1983 tour they played enough texas dates to issue a texas shirt, and it was a lot more dates than the three they do nowadays (although they still do a texas tour shirt). the theme back then is as it is now – ANYWHERE but austin.

corpus? el paso? you’d think maybe they weren’t “big enough” to play larger places, but dallas and houston, both larger than austin, made the cut. this year they reissued the texas tour shirt from the previous 80’s tour, the number of the beast one, and again…

fucking beaumont? what the hell? i thought this was just an iron maiden thing, like maybe they had some kind of prejudice, but then ac/dc did a collab this summer with diamond supply, and one included tour dates, and…well…here we go again!

now, this was all back when i was too young to go to shows – so what the fuck were people doing wrong back then? both of these bands have since played austin, in the case of ac/dc MULTIPLE times, but what the fuck was their issue previously? too many hippies? glad we’ve gotten past this!