I?m sure everyone?s heard about how great the Austin music scene was in the 80s until they want to throw up. And in writing about musicians when they?re dead, they?re always saints. Well, brace yourselves because I?m about to wax sappy.

But? Biscuit is dead! I?m a sad fan girl. Imagine me in 1986 as a little pink-haired kidlet newly hatched into the world, and bopping around Austin with my neurotic performance artist junkie girlfriend. We?d dress up in lime-green pantsuits, carry clipboards, and demand of everyone we met to let us draw mustaches on them in charcoal. Fu Manchu? Hitler? Walrus? Dastardly Dan? Which mustache would you like? In the 100-degree heat at some party or at Liberty Lunch or something. And there was Biscuit. He was cheerful! He was never serious, never pretentious! I feel like I?m praising the family dog from 20 years ago, like Karen Finley?s essay on Dead Pets in Shock Treatment. ?She was a bad dog, she peed on everything, but that?s Lady. Yup, she barfed on everything, but she was Lady.? Biscuit was Lady! Up with a microphone telling everyone to get on up, and he meant it, and everyone would do it. ?Go start your own band, now, y?all hear?? Dressed in something strange and fluffy with plastic dinosaurs epoxied to his head and an enormous grin. Biscuit was about infectious artistic empowerment. And I totally worshipped him! His art was good? I remember him doing an elvis shrine for the huge Dia de los Muertos exhibit one year. He made people feel like anything was possible in life, art, whatever.

And all I have is some 20 year old audio mix tapes. I got to get downloading! There do seem to be CDs? The Fat Elvis & the Skinny Elvis are definitely available.

I loved how they could play anything and mixed everything up. The happy funk of ?We Got Soul", ?Funk Off", ?What?s the Word?"— witty pop of ?Influence", ?Self Contortion", or ?Identity Crisis? like the happier moments of Glass Eye or the Dead Milkmen — glorious punkosity with a velvet underground/MDC/Ramones beauty to the driven guitar in songs like ?Authority? ? thrashing rhythms but with velvety textural complexity. Or just plain silly a-la-Ed-Hall? ?Frat Cars! Frat Cars! I can?t stand those Frat Cars! Fucking with the freaks!? & the later psychedelifunkpunk discoqueer weirdness of Cargo Cult?.

I was thinking of this just last night because of something Pandagon said in her blog about an Austin-American Chronicle article on Biscuit. And remembering him fondly, and thinking of his band?s swirling legacy in the late 80s in Austin where he would come into a party and the party would suddenly reconfigure. Because ? BISCUIT!!! In little reality-warping ripples all around the room. And then I woke up this morning to final_girl?s lj and ? he?s dead.

As for the mixing-up of the music, it was beyond genre-crossover. The Big Boys just had fun and didn?t give a fuck what genre people expected. Again like Glass Eye, who refused to market themselves as one slick thing. That in itself is admirable even without Biscuit?s larger than life glowing saintlihood.