This week in Texas music history: Austin punks descend on New York City

by Jason Mellard, Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University

This week in Texas music history, punk band the Skunks hit New York City. The gig rocks, but something stinks.

On August 3rd and 4th, 1979, the Austin band the Skunks played punk’s most hallowed stage, CBGB’s in New York City. They were fitting ambassadors to bring Texas punk back to one of its seedbeds, though Austin’s scene may have owed its origins more to London than Manhattan.

It had been the Sex Pistols San Antonio date at Randy’s Rodeo that lit the fuse. After attending that show, a band called the Violators—Kathy Valentine, Carla Olson, Marilyn Dean, and Jesse Sublett—lined up a February 1978 gig at the UT-area club Raul’s. Bassist Jesse Sublett had also been reconfiguring another of his bands, the glam-inflected Jellyroll, in a more punk direction, dubbing the new trio the Skunks. Joining Sublett were Eddie Muñoz on guitar and Billy Blackmon on drums.

When Muñoz left for LA in early 1979, Jon Dee Graham signed on, cementing the classic Skunks lineup. They channeled the stripped-down, sardonic urgency of the Ramones with the cool, ironic sneer of the Velvet Underground—shown to great effect in their sprawling cover of “Sister Ray.” The Skunks were stalwarts of early Texas punk, captured on the first Live at Raul’s album with the Explosives and the Next, and fitting representatives to take Texas to CBGB’s.

It felt like a big break, and it nearly broke the band. Seventies Manhattan was a forbidding place, one in which punk’s nihilistic abandon made perfect sense. The band drove cross-country in an uncharacteristic bright yellow, beat up GMC truck with a painted armadillo leaping in front of a Texas flag on the driver’s door. As Sublett wrote in his memoir, “We were going to pull into Manhattan looking like the Beverly Hillbillies.” They stormed CBGB’s with a blistering set of Skunks standards: “Out of Style,” “Desperation,” “Cheap Girl.” Afterward, the band stayed at the apartment of George Scott III, bassist for John Cale and Lydia Lunch, with the armadillo skunkmobile parked outside, all their equipment in the back. Until it wasn’t. All night, The band tried to take shifts at a window keeping watch over their precious cargo, but their instruments were stolen, cutting short their tour. The Skunks turned back around to Austin rather than onward to Boston. Unbowed, the Skunks would be back six months later to take the CBGB’s stage again, punk swagger intact.