Matt McGough’s first day on the job as a Yankee bat boy.
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April 9, 2026
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Shotgun Willie
Last year, Texas Monthly ran a terrific oral history on the outlaw country music scene in Austin during the 1970s. John Spong did the work. And it’s well-worth your time for sure:
Halfway between the coasts sat Texas, where hundreds of honky-tonks functioned as Nashville’s farm system. But that music belonged to the old guard. Texas kids were more interested in the state’s thriving folkie circuit. The hub was a Dallas listening room called the Rubaiyat, from which young singer-songwriters like Steve Fromholz and B. W. Stevenson sallied forth to coffeehouses around the state. The music they played was distinct from the protest songs of Greenwich Village. Texas folk was rooted in cowboy, Tejano, and Cajun songs, in Czech dance halls and East Texas blues joints. It was dance music. And when the Texas folkies started gigging with their rock-minded peers, they found a truer sound than the L.A. country rockers. There was nothing ironic about the fiddle on Fromholz’s epic “Texas Trilogy.”
It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when that sound and scene coalesced into something cohesive enough to merit a name, but then again none of the labels people came up with—cosmic cowboy, progressive country, redneck rock, and, ultimately, outlaw country—made everyone happy. Still, the pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin. Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning their music into something you drank to. Songwriters moved to town, like Michael Murphey, a good-looking Dallas kid who’d written for performers such as the Monkees and Kenny Rogers in L.A. He was soon joined by Jerry Jeff Walker, a folkie from New York who’d had a radio hit when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band covered his song “Mr. Bojangles.” In March, Willie played a three-day country festival outside town, the Dripping Springs Reunion, that would grow into his Fourth of July Picnics. Then he too moved to Austin and started building an audience that didn’t look like or care about any Nashville ideal. By the time the scene started to wind down, in 1976, Willie and Austin were known worldwide.
New York Minute
Here’s more on Grand Central Station’s birthday over at Kottke.
[Photo Credit: Adrees Latif/Reuters]
Morning Art
[Drawing Via: Chillwalker]
“There’ Nothing You Can Do That Can Justify a $20 Million Contract.”
Nice piece on Mark Teixeria by Daniel Barbarisi the other day in the Wall Street Journal:
“I looked at the first six or seven years of my career, I was in my 20s, it was easy. I wasn’t searching for the right formula. To think that I’m going to get remarkably better, as I get older and breaking down a little bit more, it’s not going to happen,” Teixeira said.
That makes sense. It’s the way it’s supposed to work: The years affect us all, and that is starkest for those who age in front of our eyes. But in baseball, where every player arrives at spring training having found the panacea that will make this the best year of their career, to hear a star player acknowledge the obvious sounds downright alien.
“Maybe I’m slowing down a tick. Look, I’m not going to play forever. Eventually you start, I don’t want to say declining, but it gets harder and harder to put up 30 [homers] and 100 [RBI],” Teixeira said.
This winter, Teixeira is accepting his new normal. After three seasons that for him would be considered down years, Teixeira is done tinkering with new ideas, done chasing a perpetual peak. If he is a .250 hitter, so be it. He is embracing his strengths—30-homer power, 90-walk patience, Gold Glove defense—and forgetting his weaknesses, on what he openly calls the backside of his career.
“This is my 11th year,” Teixeira said. “I’m not going to play 10 more years. I want 5 or 6 good ones. So that would say I’m on the backside of my career. And instead of trying to do things differently on the backside of my career, why not focus on the things I do well, and try to be very good at that?”
There’s more, too. Check out the entire piece.
[Photo Credit: John Munson/The Star-Ledger]
Lights Out: Nevermore
The Ravens were beating the snot out of the 49ners tonight and then a power outage stopped the game and the Ravens dead in their tracks. San Francisco came back, the Ravens buckled, palms got sweaty, asses itched, hearts pounded, and it came down to the final minutes, a fourth down play, a call that the officials didn’t make–though they’ll argue forever in San Francisco that they wuz robbed–a safety with less than ten seconds left, and when the clock struck 0:00 and the season ended it was big brother Harbaugh and the Ravens standing tall.
New York Minute
Hizzoner…
Afternoon Art
Painting by Malcolm Liepke.
Hizzoner
Ed Koch, the former mayor of our city, and a bona fide character–among other things–passed away this morning. He was 88.
Afternoon Art
Walker Evans. Self-portrait.
Dogs and Cats Sleeping Together…Mass Hysteria!
More on Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees from: Selena Roberts, Jay Jaffe, Craig Calcaterra and David Roth.
Song of the South
It’s a little late for “Best Of 2012” lists but heck, this Garden & Gun photo gallery is fun.
Fail Better
Over at Salon, here’s the most gifted Jennifer Egan:
One of my strengths as a writer is that I’m a good problem-solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.
I want all the flights of fancy, and I can only get them in a thoughtless way. So I allow myself that. Which means that my next step has to be all about problem-solving. My attitude cannot be, Gee, I wrote it, it’s good. I’d never get anywhere. It’s all about seeing what’s wrong from a very analytical place. It’s a dialectic.
Once I have a draft I make the plans, edit on hard copy, and make an extensive outline for the revision. The revision notes I wrote for “Look at Me” were 80 pages long.
This essay appears in a new book: Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and WhyThey Do What They Do.
"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver
--Earl Weaver