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It can also be as traditional as a band of septuagenarian banjo players at the Grand Ole Opry. Nashville can be as cutting-edge as Jack White’s recently launched Third Man Records studio.
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As one local Nashville musician put it, “Austin is more stuck-up than a seventh-grade cheerleader” about its music scene, when in reality its popular 6th Street music row is just a bunch of venues filled with frat boys doing shots to the background music of tinny cover bands. People in Austin may decry Nashville as a musical backwater with “just a bunch of banjos and Jesus music,” but the wannabe hipsters sitting in their Texas wasteland don’t know what they’re missing. If you really want to find out something about music - from its history to its future, from the songwriting to production - and also experience some rocking shows of every genre, you have to come to the real Music City. There’s more to music than listening to some hack sing from a beer-soaked stool. (Photo: Marko Forsten/Flickr)Īustin boasts that it’s the Live Music Capital of the World because it has a ton of bars.
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#COUNTRY MUSIC BAR AUSTIN FULL#
The iconic Broadway strip in Downtown Nashville is full of music shops and honky-tonks. The row of bars on 6th Street has nearly constant live performances, most with no cover charge. CBoy’s Heart and Soul has eclectic music in a dive-bar setting and the Mohawk has rockin’ live shows in a midsize venue, while the Saxon Pub shows off some great local bands. The Broken Spoke is a true country-and-western dance hall, with two-steppin’ lessons from Wednesday to Saturday. A good place to start a music tour is the venerable Continental Club, with its local flavor of country, rockabilly, and swing bands (while upstairs the Gallery hosts a jazzier scene). And in Austin, people actually rock out to shows, not just sit with arms folded studying like they do in Nashville. The Frank Erwin Center on the UT campus, with a 16,000-seat capacity, holds the arena bands, and the 2,400-seat Dell Hall at the Long Center covers classical, opera, and other non-grunge-type performances.Ĭool small venues: The 250-plus live venues in Austin make the town what it is: a diverse, modern, developing scene that just feels more alive than Nashville, with its busloads of tourists from the senior center shuffling into the Opry. (Photo: Earl McGehee/Flickr)īig music venues: Austin City Limits shows began in a small performance space on the UT campus in 1974 but now run in the 2,500-seat Moody Theater behind city hall, a venue that also hosts A-list touring bands. Widespread Panic performing at the Moody Theater in 2011.
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“You’re so spooky silent out there, it’s kind of creeping me out,” said one recent Nashville performer during his show. What kind of “music city” has “shhh” signs plastered in its performance venues? If you want a poetry reading, go to the library, not a music bar. Imagine rows of live music venues filled with crowds of people, arms folded, analyzing instead of actually enjoying the music. Yes, Nashville has some live music, but most of it is performed by its legion of underemployed songwriters, for an audience of unemployed songwriters. Nashville, on the other hand, may be a great place to go if you’re a music copyright attorney looking for a job, but if your definition of a “music city” goes beyond counting the suits sitting in cubicles in a corporate label’s headquarters, then you’re best off heading to Austin. Austin’s South by Southwest festival doesn’t just showcase the latest trends - it creates them. The Austin City Limits program that helped establish the city as a musical mecca continues to bring big names to town. Austin does live music like nowhere else: It boasts more than 250 venues ranging from raucous music clubs to old honky-tonks. If you want to go to a city to enjoy music, you want to see it live, not stare at the concrete exterior of some corporate music headquarters. We’re pretty sure that the slogan t he Live Music Capital of the World says it all.