Austin Confidential

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S- So do you find that it impairs you interviewing abilities to have slept with the person that you're interviewing?

M- No. No not at all, if anything it offers a, well ...

J- Unique perspective?

M- Yes, yes in the sense that I actually did not combine those two very often, because right after that got printed I took on a new sense of self-importance, "I've been printed, I better clean up my act." And also because it became important to me to have at least a veneer of respectability in that I didn't want the girlfriends and wives of these musicians resenting me.

S- I've always found it uniquely hinding to try to interview anybody I've seen naked, you know, it's just well nigh impossible.

M- Well, I think that at the time I didn't think very much about it and when I started thinking about it, yeah, it became more important to me to develop a little more respectability, but nnow having years and years between me and some of these people I can just sit there an think, "Oh really?" [wiggles pinkie finger derisively].

S- So what was it like trying to sneak backstage, because whenever I wanted to meet a band, they were usually playing at, like, Emo's and you can't really hide there.

M- My method, my MO, that I learned really early on was sound check. Sound check is it. For one thing, there is almost nobody hanging around at sound check. And they see you And once you get them in the afternoon, you've probably got them through the evening. And let's face it, most musicians know that when the girls are smiling that way.... But really Austin was pretty open back then, you didn't have the phalanx of security guys that you have these days which make it that much harder to get backstage. There was a lot of that "No head, no backstage pass" kind of thing, but we never fooled with those guys anyway. Those were the roadies, the sound people, the guys who sold t-shirts, for heaven's sake!

J- Was there a rival group of groupies, or were y'all it?

M- Actually, yeah, there were a couple of girls who were for a while sort of like rivals but I have this philosophy, "Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer." So I made friends with them, and although it was a calculated effort at first it actually became pretty genuine and once they were aligned with us we didn't have any competition and whatever strings they had that I didn't have.

S- Were they the Texas Brunettes?

M- Well, actually, we weren't all blondes. That was just a name that was hung upon us by John Cale's backup singer. We had all been out in LAwhen he was playing the Whiskey, he played, like, six shows there and we'd driven out to LA. That was so much fun because those were the last days of this really wild rock & roll hotel there called the Tropicana that was right on Santa Monica, not on the Strip, but down from the Strip. That was the hotel, I think, where Keith Moon had driven the Rolls Royce into the swimming pool. It was a really wild

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