The 22nd St Connection

Picture this. 

Picture this. 

You’re young. Your life is on a path of which your parents don’t exactly approve. That part is easy. Definitely not the law school or med school route. A disappointment to an older generation’s understanding of how the story of one’s success is written. 

Then one day you have an idea. A big idea. The kind that could change the world. These things do happen. Why not to you? So, what do you need to get this change rolling? Let’s check the list…

Number one, time. Time alone. Time to think it through. Maybe with a cup of tea and a biscuit. Maybe something stronger. Maybe not exactly legal. These things rarely happen in front of spreadsheets half awake at 8:15 in the morning in tall glass buildings designed by architects who missed key human factors questions on their final. 

I remember working once as an art director in just such a space. A creative job that relied on ideas. I went into the mount room one day and someone had pinned a note on the wall. “Every good idea I ever had came to me while milking a cow. – Grant Wood”. A couple hours later, a small scribble had been added at the bottom. “How do we get a cow in here?” I knew exactly the frustration they were feeling. I remember thinking at the time, does this building even have a freight elevator?

Look. I’m not naïve. I know 8 to 5 jobs make so much of the world run. Important things. Banks and schools and factories and hospitals. Newspapers and buses and charities and kitchens. Trash collection and tax offices and electric companies and breweries just to name a few. But I can tell you one thing that doesn’t thrive under this discipline from first-hand experience. The creative spirit. 

But back to this big idea of yours, it might end up in just such a place. Let’s just be honest. If it has any true merit, it probably will. Someday.

In the meantime, there you are alone in your quiet room. In that well rested and constructively altered head of yours, this idea is taking shape. And you’re looking for someone to try it out on. That’s number two on the list. Because that’s the way big ideas work. It’s not enough to think them. You got to sell them. Not only that, you got to sell your right to think them. And you got to find the right buyers too. Those are crucial. 

And if you are lucky enough to pull it off, if you do find like-minded visionaries with free time on their hands, what’s next? That brings us to number three on our list… a laboratory. Maybe not the test tube white coat kind. Just some place likely empty or abandoned in some city that might just allow these things to happen in a relatively unchecked space from time to time. Likely a college town.

That’s basically the story that unfolded when we sat down to talk with Patrick McGarrigle recently for an upcoming documentary film on the Vulcan Gas Company. He showed up with a well-worn snapshot from 1968 of a group on the front porch of an old Victorian on 22nd Street. He had been in and around the scene as a teenager himself and had arrived that day fifty some odd years later with something about it he felt essential to our story.

“I’ve looked for five years for this photograph,” Patrick begins. He holds the print delicately by the edges with his fingertips, as if it were the memory itself. “This is representative of many sub-culture housing locations in and around Austin of which there were many. There was Castle Hill, Baylor Street, Elm Street, 33rd Street… all places where people could live… rent rooms out for $30–$40 a month. In the case of 33rd Street, ten houses, 100 people living there.

“The state college itself afforded this to happen. It was really quite a beautiful thing. I think in a very large way it afforded a lot of bands and a lot of places like the Vulcan Gas Company to exist. These places simply wouldn’t have existed without the greater Austin scene.

“This is one of those places,” he says holding the image up for the camera. “It was kind of a famous house where people lived. In this photograph you will see Don Hyde, one of the people from the Vulcan Gas Company. My brother Michael who was a friend of his. Molly McCauley. Rick Rubottom. Marilyn Moore. It’s just a group of people that are well-known in Austin in the counter-culture movement.”

“I say counterculture … I’m not sure who was the counterculture here anymore. I think they were progressive. I’m starting to think the rest of society was the counterculture because they were just copping out on progressive tendencies. Content to go to 8 to 5 jobs every day. For why? So you could have enough gas money to get to work the next day? That’s how we all saw it. They might not have been the counterculture, but they were counter-progressive. Every day grinding, day after day, when you don’t have to do that. You could live at 33rd Street and rent a room for $40. Go see movies. Work a whole lot less. Be creative in the community.

“It’s just important to know that so much of what happened in Austin was a group effort. It really was. It was a group effort. A lot of it wouldn’t have happened on the shoulders of a single person. You had to have the majority of these characters. And this,” referring to the photograph, “is just a small little piece of it. 

“It was a gigantic scene. The parties at 33rd Street, there would be three, four hundred people that showed up at those parties. From all walks of life. Motorcyclists. Chemists. Nymphomaniacs. You name it. It was pretty wild. But it was also cultured and quite tame really, because everyone was looking out for everyone’s back.

“It was a big, broad, supportive community and they were ready to help. They had plenty of time for the most part. On any given project, you could just talk about it, if it was something people were interested in, you could get little bits of help here and there for anything. I’m sure Houston White (Vulcan co-founder) did. I’m sure the Vulcan Gas Company did. I’m sure they tapped into an enormous amount of community resource for any project like that. From the Vulcan Gas Company to Castle Creek to any of those clubs, people were ready to expand, to be free and endorse the arts.”

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I taught a college class on idea generation a few years ago. I began the first class with an announcement. “I’m starting a new civilization. What do I need?” It wasn’t such a strange question for a room full of art students. They jumped right in. “A sewer system,” one offered. I started listing them on the white board. Laws. Police. Grocery stores. Public transport. Currency. A flag. Holidays. Churches. A court system. A few parades here and there. Some taxes were inevitable all agreed. One suggested a siesta. I liked the spirit. I won’t say the list was exhaustive, but at some point they ran out of ideas. The room was quiet. That’s when I pointed out the obvious. No one mentioned art.

Perhaps it was the word “need” that had thrown them. Need to them represented the things that kept the machinery of civilization running smoothly. And while I could make the argument that art certainly plays a key role in that, perhaps the more important question is what happens when the machinery is not exactly working for you? Not only for you, but a lot of people like you? Well, you or one of the similarly inflicted are going to have to imagine a more equitable way of doing things and convince quite a few people just like your parents that the new way is progress. For that, you’re going to need art.

So back to Patrick McGarrigle and the lost photograph he spent five years in search of. Why was he so determined to find it? Perhaps for the bigger picture it represents. A spirit that defined what was a small college town at one moment in time. Maybe many similar towns as well. Places of refuge. Of invention. Places during a time when time itself was the currency of a new generation and the problems they set out to solve collectively were truly their own. 

You remember the time.

If not, don’t worry.

It was a long time ago.

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