by Jason Mellard, Center for Texas Music History at Texas State
This Week in Texas Music History, we enter the Inner Sanctum.
On August 28, 1970, Joe Bryson opened Inner Sanctum Records in Austin near the University of Texas. Debuting in the same month as the venue the Armadillo World Headquarters, the store would be an epicenter of the city’s vibrant 1970s scene. Bryson, a UT student and KUT sound engineer, had jumped at the chance to buy the store Phil’s Records in the West Campus neighborhood. He renamed it Inner Sanctum and moved the business to its classic home on 24th just off Guadalupe.
In addition to Bryson, the store’s managers and workers—James Cooper, Neil Ruttenberg, Linda Nozik, Richard Dorsett, Stephen Goodwin, and Cowboy Cooper, among others—became esteemed tastemakers as the city’s musicians-turned-recording artists put Austin on the map. Inner Sanctum enthusiastically stocked local artists’ records, a practice that would become a point of pride in town with Inner Sanctum’s descendants like Waterloo Records, Sound Exchange, and End of an Ear.
Like the new wave of indie record stores nationwide, Inner Sanctum was not just a retail outlet but a social nerve center with ticket sales and in-store performances by everyone from Uncle Walt’s Band to the Big Boys, a keg party every Friday, and a community growing around its base in Bluebonnet Plaza, a student oasis bounded by the café Les Amis and the burger joint Mad Dog and Beans. As Bryson recalled, “We would open, and it would immediately be packed. [It’s like people heard] the door unlock, and people would flood in until we closed, and we would have to get people out!” Doug Sahm was a regular. Staff advised local venues on bookings. All that and a one-dollar LP rental policy—you could tape it and bring it back—made the spot wildly popular. Bryson sold Inner Sanctum in 1982, and the new partners held down its key place in the scene until it closed its doors in 1997, securing its role in establishing a Central Texas vinyl culture.
Sources:
Michael Corcoran. Austin Music Is a Scene not a Sound. Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2025.
Barry Shank. Dissonant Identities: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Chloe de Uijl. “In the Grooves: Record Stores as Community Spaces in Central Texas.” MA Thesis. Texas State University, 2025.
Media: Inner Sanctum Documentary at Austin History Center El Vez In-Store in Inner Sanctum, 1993
