It’s All Balcones Fault!

Plutopia News Network

On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, the hosts revisit Austin’s formative 1970s music scene through Scoop’s archival 1977 interview with Fletcher Clark and Jack Jacobs, co-founders of the eclectic show band Balcones Fault. The conversation traces their unlikely journey from academia and banking into Austin’s burgeoning countercultural soundscape, where the band became known for wild, genre-blending performances and theatrical full-moon shows at the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters. Mixing satire, spectacle, and musical virtuosity, Balcones Fault embodied Austin’s spirit of creativity and weirdness, helping lay the foundation for the city’s later reputation as the “Live Music Capital of the World.”

Fletcher Clark:

Jack was living down in Austin. I was living up in Boston, getting kind of fed up with doing the banking business. And I was coming down to Austin on my way to California, and I stopped in, and Jack had been hyping me about what a nice place it was. You know, come on down, it’s a nice place. And the good music scene happened, and he was hanging out and picking a lot with the Greezy Wheels and some of the local bands that were happening down there. And he jammed a few times with this drummer and bass player and this other guy. And I came down to visit, and it became clear that my plans to go to California ought not to go through, and I just ought to stay there. So we had this jam session in the afternoon. We worked up — it was me and Jack and a bass player and a drummer, and this other fellow who, by the way, now runs Armadillo World Headquarters, Hank Aldrich — sat on the original jam session. We worked up about 20 tunes.

Jack Jacobs:

Yeah, and thing that really kept him there though was you know those double wide papers? Well, Fletcher came down from Boston where uh I started turning on when I was in college and I always thought that pot was something that was sort of like allspice or paprika that came in a little plastic bag and it was some kind of green powder. And I didn’t really discover that it was an agricultural commodity until I moved much closer to the border.

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