Discography of Texas Punk 1977-1983

A wise man once said, "...since time began, Texas has poured out great bands the way that Chicopee, Mass pours out kielbasas. The ocean o' great Six-Oh Punk from the Lone Star State has only been partly charted a full 15 yrs after that decade shut down. No other area was so fertile. Maybe it was somethin' in the soil. Whatever, the collective sound o' seventies/eighties Texas p-rock has also been a cut above. Indeed, it might well prove t'be (fifteen years from now) the consistently best o' breed" (Byron Coley 1985)

The fullness of time brought a mostly killer compilation called Bloodstains Across Texas which opened my eyes wide to the truth of Coley's statement. Since 1983 when I got my International Discography Of The New Wave (Volume II) I had wondered what a song called The Badge Means You Suck by AK47 might sound like (I thought it might be an anti-New Wave tirade against badge wearers until I found out Americans call them buttons). Bloodstains had that track and it was worth the 10 year wait. It also contained a heap of amazing fucking music (plus a couple of duds). It was time to find out exactly what exists from the Lone Star state's punk period. I asked another devotee, Paul, what he knew about and here is what we have found. The music on this list runs the gamut from awesome punk through generic hardcore to shitty New Wave. We'd be happy to unlist the last category (actually we'll probably leave it in since we enjoy putting it down) but we haven't heard all the records so don't know which ones are terrible. So please send any comments and corrections to one of us. I'm sure there is still stuff we don't know about and haven't listed. Again, please tell us. This is a guide to punk records so we take the attitude that all post-punk genres pretty much suck. New Wave sucks, ska sucks etc. This means that even if a record is good within its (non-punk) genre, we're not necessarily going to say nice things about it. OK? For the purpose of this discography we also don't care too much about what the bands were like live, just what they left in the grooves. We want to buy or trade for these records and other punk records from the Americas, Australia, Japan and Europe, so get in touch if you've got them and you don't want them anymore. The discography is broken into the following hopefully self-explanatory sections: A to K L to Z Compilations Label listings The House UnPunk Activities Committee recently met in El Paso. Several TX punks defended themselves against accusations of New Wave activity. Check out the new HUPAC page. Latest update - April 2004. The full US punk discography is now up and running. It's not as pretty as this here Texas listing yet, but there's plenty of detail for you to peruse. Links Check out Idle Time for some great photos from Austin in the early 80s. Ex-Stick Men With Ray Guns member Clarke has done a really fine site dedicated to the Nervebreakers, Bag Of Wire, Teenage Queers and the Stick Men. Set aside a half hour and check it out. Check out the Big Boys website - well worth a visit. Check out Ryan from EV's latest effort. And Texas Punk Junk.

Henry Weld	Paul Routenburg
PO Box A1055
Sydney South 1235
Australia

Thank you to:

Extra special thanks to the Austin mafia, Steve Dilley [SD] and Ryan Richardson [RR] who made lots of phone calls and shared the information at their fingertips. Ryan also runs EV (reissuing lost TX punk stuff) and can be reached at EV World Headquarters, P.O. Box 49984, Austin, TX, 78765, USA. Brian Devereux [BD], when asked just how "Cringe envy" manifests itself, couldn't help adding his two cents worth. Chuck Warner [CW] has an irregular sale/trade list full of obscure records (including a separate Texas section in each list), we used some of his descriptions in here. To find out exactly what "riffpoppunk" means, send a couple of stamps or IRCs to Chuck at PO Box 8154, St Louis MO 63156, USA. Thanks to everyone who sent in comments on earlier versions of this discography, especially Julie Grob [JG] of Houston, for comments and reminiscence and George Gimarc whose Texas database helped fill in some question marks, Bradley Beatoff who corrected some errors and Dot Dean. Thanks to Sound Exchange records in Houston for the pics at the bottom of this page.

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