Austin Notes

(Extracts from Dogger Gatsby's "Austin Notes")

Austin At Night

Dogger Gatsby remembered cars full of pot-smoking young people careening toward Mt. Bonnell for the view at midnight, or out toward Eastwoods Park on a school-day afternoon for beer and cake at Eeyore's Birthday Party. He got there too late for the beer, but there was still some cake!

Jefferson Airplane In Amerika

When Jefferson Airplane intoned, 'We are all outlaws in the eyes of Amerika,' it had stirred Dogger's friends. It had stirred him, he couldn't deny it. They were young enough to believe in things deeply then, more than they ever would again, and the song had seemed like a fairly sage anthem for the long dark night of their souls in the early seventies. By the time he was forty, the song made Dogger Gatsby cringe with embarrassment. Those days were gone.

March 1989

"Rumor of Jefferson Airplane reuniting! Ha! As you see, that really held my interest."

The Airplane Done it

September 20, 1990: "And, by now, the Airplane's put out an album that one barely hears about. One song, about airplanes, is not very impressive. So much for nostalgia, I suppose."

DYLAN

When Dylan crept in, cryptically yowling that 'To live outside the law, you must be honest,' it had made perfect sense to Dogger Gatsby. Sometimes it still seemed to be true, though he was no longer certain that it made anything more than marginal sense.

Dogger still liked Dylan's music, including some of his new music, but mostly the old rock n roll songs.

"Real" Austinites

Were not much in evidence. Though Austin might have been viewed elsewhere in Texas as some sort of bastion of liberalism or personal freedom, many of it's adult citizens paid little attention to any of the young people or hippies at or around the university; they had long been indifferent to the standard college claptrap and were equally, perhaps increasingly, hostile to the present counter-culture hysteria. If you went far enough south or far enough north, there was the Austin with shiny pickup trucks and beer guts hanging over sweaty belts.

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