Austin Confidential

place. It would be gone the next year, but we were all there and it was really wild ... why was I telling that story?

J- What was the wild rock & roll hotel here?

M- Really there wasn't one. In the old days the Austin Motel -- before it got this hip/retro/new look -- was really kind of run down and it was the place where people who couldn't afford to stay anywhere else stayed. And then there used to be another little motel that was across the street from it -- there's just an empty lot there now -- on South Congress. It was the Imperial 400. I remember the Fleshtones stayed there, we had a lot of fun. But I would say that the Driskill has probably seen its share of high-dollar rock & roll riotry. I can remember we were there one time with Peter Framptom and he marched out on the balcony that faces Sixth Street in just my girlfriend's underwear. On a bet. I forget what we had to do in return.

S- So once you got started on your legit career with the Sun, did you just keep working for them?

M- Yeah I did. I think one of my better personality traits is I'm real loyal to stuff like that and I was really loyal to the Sun. And eventually Bill Bentley stopped hating me so much. But the Sun folded in the late seventies and I had just gotten married to a photographer that I had met on the staff and we were a good little team together and I'm still good friends with him. But them sometime in 1981, one of the guys that I had known from Raoul's and who had worked at the Texan came to me and he said, "You know Nick Barbero and Louis Black?" And I said, "Oh yeah, yeah." And he says, "Well, they're going to start a newspaper pretty soon and I think you should come work for it and be the rock & roll columnist." And I was like, "Oh yeah, this sounds great!" So I said yeah, and they didn't even make me... audition or anything, they just hired me. So then I was thinking, "Well, gee, this isn't bad, but it isn't very much money," -- it was, like $25 a column -- "How can I make this into something else?" So they were about to open an office on 16th Street, so I said, "Well, you need a receptionist and I'll do it for $50 a week." But you had to be really resourceful. You got free records and you went out and sold those. The idea back them was you tried to get as many free things as you could that you could go sell and that was how you survived. And plus, I didn't need that much back then -- drugs and a house, you know, and that was fine. Back then the Chronicle was house above a dry cleaner's on Sixteenth Street with no air conditioning. It was hideously hot up there! And we had two rooms that we were in. And, like, three phones and four desks and one trash can.

J- And no computers.

M- We didn't even have a typewriter! So, like, when people look at the Chronicle these days and say, "Oh, you guys are so successful." Well, yeah, we are. We're very successful, thanks to a lot of hard work on the part of a lot of people for many years. They don't know that we started out with less resources than your average fanzine probably, seriously.