Image: MichaelCorcoran.net
After 40 years documenting the past and present of Austin’s music scene in publications like the Austin Chronicle, local journalist Michael Corcoran died last week at the age of 68. The passage of “Corky” into the pages of local history marks the end of an era in a city that never seems to stop ending eras — but as longtime admirers of his work, we believe Corcoran’s written legacy across a number of publications in print and online should serve as a guide for Austinites on how to love this place without accidentally taking yourself too seriously.
There are two cities in the U.S. that truly matter: New York and L.A. Everywhere else is bullshit. Austin is cool and fun and artistic and- most importantly, easy– but that doesn’t mean this is a great city. The things that make a town a city- rapid transit, a great art museum, Chinatown, pro sports- Austin is without. We’ve got L.A.’s traffic, but no one who can greenlight a project bigger than a Chili’s commercial.
Corcoran, despite his documentation of a cultural era many would describe as the good old days of live music in Austin during the 1980s and ’90s, never allowed himself to succumb to the toxic form of nostalgia that consumes the joy of so many longtime residents in the face of the city’s rapid growth and change. A humorist as much as a journalist, his healthy sense of irony and willingness to satirize Austin’s cultural milieu mere years after moving here himself seemed to insulate his work from any sort of weepy sentimentality — even as his writing shifted towards chronicling the history of the city’s countless long-gone clubs and venues rather than its current happenings. “The only Austin any of us know is the one we got,” he wrote in 2017.
And I think right now we have to get something straight. If you were born and raised in Austin and still live here, you’re rare, but not special. So please stop bragging in Facebook comments. You’re annoying the 99% of us who moved here because where we lived before wasn’t so hot. Or, even worse, it was Lubbock.
A view of Sixth Street in the 1970s. Image: Texas Historical Commission
But the crown jewel of Corcoran’s most recent blogging on Substack is his advocacy for Sixth Street. In 2021, he published what might be the definitive historical narrative of East Sixth — its early days as an unusually diverse commercial district, its transformation into a live music mecca and the home of the nascent South by Southwest festival in the ’80s and ’90s, and its struggles with increasing violence and decay over the last two decades.
Austin’s most famous street has earned the nickname “Dirty Sixth” over the past few years, with an unruly Bourbon Street-like atmosphere and a YouTube driven reputation for violence. It’s where teens from Killeen beef with bullets on weekends, and sometimes the scent of danger makes you forget the history of the street whose majority of buildings, even those housing tattoo parlors and frat bars, were erected in the late 1800s. East Sixth, from Brazos to Red River Streets, has the greatest concentration of limestone Victorian commercial buildings west of the Mississippi.
The close proximity of nightclubs on Sixth, many of which change to live music venues for a week to catch a whiff of the windfall, was a key to the appeal of South by Southwest in the early years. Modeled after Manhattan’s New Music Seminar, SXSW had a big logistical advantage in that music industry attendees could see bands in clubs a few steps from each other all the way down Sixth and up Red River Streets. It was possible to sample 10 acts in a couple hours. Equal exposure in NYC would require several cab rides and all night.
Despite acknowledging that the current situation on Sixth was unsustainable, Corcoran never gave up on the potential of the street as the heart of Austin, describing its dense concentration of significant architecture and rich cultural history as a perfect backdrop for something better to arrive, someday. It’s a shame that Corky didn’t live to see the realization of the scheme by Dallas-based firm Stream Realty Partners to clean up the street, with plans now in progress for more active daytime commercial uses and new cultural spaces in a number of restored historic buildings along what the developers are now pointedly calling “Old 6th,” rather than “Dirty Sixth.”
Let’s be honest, Corcoran would likely have poked some fun at the initiative’s slick branding and firmly corporate backing — but his years of advocacy for the street as a landmark of the city’s music scene, rather than simply a district of largely insipid shot bars avoided by most mature adults, has often inspired us to imagine a better future on Sixth as well. Like him, we believe there are brighter days to come here:
Let’s ignore how things are now, until they get better. And they will on that resilient strip. So much of our foundation as a city, as a people, is built on six blocks from Congress Avenue east to Waller Creek. Six blocks “with just enough danger to make it interesting,” as the Sun reported in ’78.
Six blocks that have represented all of Austin since 1839.
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