Harold McMillan: Inspirational Commitment

AAJ: Why do you think the British groups of the '60s became so popular with their version of blues while other black musicians at the time were not able to become so commercially successful?

HM: Well, if you go back and do a chronological survey of music that's come out of the African-American community, back to the '20s, people find out that every 10 or 12 years, something that started out very specifically in the African-American community, that wasn't highly commercially popular, reaches a point where some major corporate interests figure out how to mainstream it and make a lot of money. Then when that happens, black folks kind of go back deeper into the community and come up with something else.

One of the things that is also tied to this is, a lot of times, stuff that starts out as black music has to be validated somewhere else before middle America grabs it. Europeans liked the stuff, and then Americans started to really like it and to mainstream it. That happened with the British invasion in the '60s. Again, the guys that ended up finding a home in Antone's throughout that entire time were doing summer festivals and touring in Europe. That's why Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and all of those guys knew about Stax, about the records of Atlantic and the blues sound coming out of Chicago. So it had to come back from them, and America goes crazy over this music. They think the guys in Cream wrote "Crossroads." Eric Clapton is hot, don't get me wrong. But he was mining material that had been around for 50 years.

Little Richard was a crazy, flamboyant progenitor of rock 'n' roll, but people like Pat Boone come behind him and scrub the lyrics. But Pat Boone has got major corporate connections in the major recording companies. He takes crazy Little Richard's kind of slightly naughty lyrics and scrubs them up, and he gets a number-one hit. Elvis Presley grows up in the south, going to black churches and hanging out with the guys making music. The guys don't get to be rich stars, he does. But Elvis would say, "This is where I got this from ... "

AAJ: Looking at East Austin's current situation, could cultural tourism be a part of its preservation and redevelopment without wasting its unique value?

HM: It should be. Some people, governments and businesses support projects because they're just good projects that need support. Some of those people support projects based on something that they can get out of it. The public-art funding system that is managed by the city of Austin is not actually paid by the tax dollars of people who live in Austin, it's paid by the hotel occupancy tax. So the money that our non-profit gets from the city of Austin did not come from Austin-resident taxpayers. It came because somebody came to Austin and spent a night in a hotel room and was charged a tax.

A lot of the justification for the state of the city to show support for public art, culture activities, historic districts and museums is the promise of cultural-tourism dollars. And that makes sense. Local investment in art and culture for the public does have a return that you can measure economically. So if you help my organization do high-quality performances, exhibits, publications, that blows up Central East Austin to an extent that we're able to get our word to some potential travelers from New York City or Bangkok. Then it begins to make more sense to the business community and to the government because the connection is made.

If we actually do promote this as a cultural-heritage district, there are people who, when they're making plans to travel, they wanna go to cultural and historic sites. They want to plan that, and if they can find out about it from a website before they even leave their home, all the better. Then if they get here, and they come to the historic Victory Grill because the marketing works, and the rhetorical bend of all of the writing is actually working so that people know just how cool it is to come there, they're gonna stay at a hotel down the street or downtown, and they're gonna get into taxi or take public transportation or rent a car, and they're gonna come to the neighborhood. And while they're walking to the Victory Grill, they're gonna see different places that serve whisky, catfish, Mexican food, et cetera.

Part of what we're up to is support the argument that local investment in art and culture does have a positive economic impact that begins as small as providing a job to an artist, to actually influencing someone to make a travel decision so they bring dollars to the city. I support the whole historic tours, district promotion and all of that. I think it's becoming clear that although Austin has a reputation for being really hip and cool, innovative and at the head of the curve, San Antonio does this stuff a lot better than Austin does. Even the smallest little towns in Louisiana invite people from all over the world to come to their gumbo or Cajun-music festivals. They seem to embrace their indigenous culture and promote it worldwide.

I think that Austin is identity challenged. Austin doesn't know who lives here; this is just a bland, hip and cool Texas city. The cowboys claim part of it, the alternative-rock college music claims part of it ... The truth of the matter is that we're in Northern Mexico, historically. A lot of what is here is because Mexicans built it, and a lot of what is here is because black people built it as slaves when they were here, and the cowboys, too. I think that Austin could do a lot more to pump up the indigenous cultural attributes of this geography and location rather than try to almost be ethnic-less.

AAJ: Of all the different stories you must have lived with cultural programming along the years, is there any recent experience that you remember particularly?

HM: One of the seasonal programs I do is called the Austin Blues Masters Series. The idea behind those shows is to pay attention to perhaps the older guys but definitely the more-established locally iconic blues musicians. Put them in a situation where they are the headliner and in conjunction with the performance do a screening of some of my documentary footage, maybe do a question and answer with the audience or have a moderated panel that talks about changes in the East side.

I did one of the shows with W.C. [Clark] not long ago, and one of the first stages that he performed on was the Victory Grill. One of the first people that gave him gigs as a bassist was T.D. Bell. At the time, his band was probably T.D. Bell and the Cadillacs. That's the back story. There's this connection between W.C. Clark, the Victory Grill and T.D. Bell.

So the program that I put together was a feature performance by W.C. and his band, the screening of some documentary footage that was the last thing that my project recorded live, of T.D. Bell from 1998 at Antone's, and the show happened at the Victory Grill. W.C. was to play and answer questions after the screening of T.D's performance. We got a screen set up onstage, and the lights are down. Everybody is really quiet and paying attention because it's really a great performance, and T.D. is tearin' it up.

It's getting closer to that time where the film is gonna end, and it'll be time for W.C. to take the stage, but I can't find him. I remember that earlier, W.C. was actually onstage tuning his guitar, and as I started to look around for him, I'm listening at the P.A., and I'm realizing there's a guitar part that is in the room that I know is not part of the footage-I've listened to that footage over and over again.

It turns out that while the footage from 1998 is running on the screen, and the audio is on the P.A., W.C. Clark is behind the screen playing along on guitar with T.D. W.C. was kind of emotional about it. He was playing along with his mentor in 2010 from a performance that happened in 1998. I thought it was pretty cool that I had orchestrated the chance for that to happen.

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