Pogo Across Texas: Photographer Pat Blashill talks new book about Lone Star State punk

Photographer Pat Blashill’s work has been published in Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Spin and the Village Voice. It’s even been featured on album covers for Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Scratch Acid, Nick Cave and others. 

But when Blashill was just starting to explore photography, he was living in Austin, where he stumbled into its first punk club, Raul’s. He likens his early days as a punk photographer to the subculture’s musicians, whose enthusiasm sometimes outpaced their aptitude.

That fearless approach made Blashill an important chronicler of a scene alive with raw energy and defiance, which flourished in response to an environment that was especially conservative — Reagan-era Texas.

Texas’ pressurized environment produced diamonds in the rough such as Dallas’ Stick Men With Ray Guns, Austin’s Big Boys, Houston’s Mydolls and Killeen’s The Offenders along with San Antonio-born groups such as Hickoids, Fearless Iranians From Hell, Butthole Surfers and Heather Leather.

Blashill’s new book Someday All The Adults Will Die! The Birth of Texas Punk, published by UT Press, explores that explosive musical uprising.

Though he now lives in Vienna, Austria, Blashill will be at Southtown art bookstore Embarrassing Shoes to celebrate the book and host a punk storytelling hour at 3 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 24.

Blashill expects special guests at the storytelling event, including The Next’s Ty Gavin, Marching Plague’s Brad Perkins and Scott Stevens, first bass player for the Butthole Surfers.

Tell me about the book.

I did a photo book a few years ago, and in the process of putting that one together, I had made some contacts at UT Press who said they were interested in something more text-based. I always thought this scene that I was a part of in Austin was really full of life and it was a wild, cool thing to experience, but it took 30 to 45 years to get it down on paper.

And what about the scene was so wild and wonderful to you?

I actually hadn’t really been to very much live music at all when I started going to the first punk club in Austin. I had seen concerts and arena shows, but this was totally different. Like a typical sort of ’70s thing, I went to the auditorium in Austin and saw Journey, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Doobie Brothers and that was great, but you were pretty separate from the band and they were rock stars. I went to Raul’s and started going to punk clubs in Austin and elsewhere, and you’re right there on top of the band. They get offstage and you can go over and talk to them, and that made a big difference. It was more real. And on top of that, people in the bands were doing crazy stuff like dressing in drag, wearing makeup, using props and crazy stuff and singing really terrible, funny things — you know really sometimes shocking, usually hilarious. And in the case of somebody like the Butthole Surfers really introducing this kind of absurdist, strange theater element to a performance. Some rock stars were doing stuff like that — I suppose David Bowie did — but with the punk bands, you never knew what was going to happen. You go see the Big Boys, and you just never knew what the singer Biscuit or anybody else in the group was going to do, and that was pretty exciting.

I know that the Butthole Surfers had people fucking on stage. What are some of the most extreme examples of this?

Well, that actually I think may have happened only once with the Buttholes, but there was plenty of stuff besides actual sex going on that was crazy with them. The Buttholes were very theatrical and sort of surreal, and they used really great low-tech tricks like setting a cymbal on fire or fighting with a mannequin that was stuffed with newspaper — you know, a homemade mannequin. Gibby, the singer, would throw out hundreds of these small Xerox copies of roaches. He found a picture of a roach and then made a hundred very small copies of it, or more, and just threw them out into the audience. A San Antonio band that came to Austin a lot was Marching Plague, and the singer would put on a mask and he’d say that he was Reagan Man, and then they’d do a Led Zeppelin song and say they’d written it. Of course, there was the dancing, and the audience was wild and you always had to be careful. I was knocked over while I was trying to take a picture and there was at least one time where I lost half of my flash to a stage diver. He just jumped off stage and took the bottom half of my flash with him.

So, when were you active in the scene photographing it?

I started […] going to Raul’s in ’79. That very first night I photographed, but I wasn’t a very good photographer until about ’83 or so.

Did you look easily identifiable as a punk at that time, and did you get messed with?

I did get messed with, but really it was because I wore bright colors or stripes. I’m not sure what it’s like in San Antonio, but in Austin, at UT, the fraternities and the sororities are just awful, and the fraternity brothers would pretty much hunt punk rockers for sport. So, I got stuff thrown at me from moving cars and people you know bumping into me and pushing me.

What can you tell me about the San Antonio bands specifically?

The cities are so close that there were several groups that sort of started in San Antonio and then moved over to Austin. Ty Gavin was not originally from San Antonio, but he formed The Next in San Antonio and then moved to Austin, and The Next were super important. They put out a single that’s a good document of how powerful they could be, but then they didn’t really record too much more than that. They may have been one of the bands that played on the very first night that I went to Raul’s, so in a way it was a San Antonio band that was one of the first punk bands I saw in Texas.

A friend from San Antonio told me the San Antonio bands were especially funny, and I think that kind of fits, because Marching Plague just had a great sense of humor. One of their EPs, the cover is a hand drawing of a giant bat swooping down and biting off Ozzy Osbourne’s head. While I was doing the book I talked to Brad Perkins the drummer and I asked, “Was that because Marching Plague was mad that Ozzy peed on the Alamo?” and he said, “No we thought that was funny, but we also thought, you know, a bat biting him back would be funny as well.”

The Hickoids were pretty important in Austin and started in San Antonio. They also really fit that idea of San Antonio bands as being the punk jokers in the pack, because Hickoids were hilarious too. And Jeff [Smith, the frontman] has just got one of the best slow, clever smiles. You have to kind of wait a beat and let him get to the punchline out but when he does, it’s going to kill you. And he was typical of a lot of my friends in that scene. We would play with the idea of us as hillbillies, you know inbred-looking, country boys, but it was all smart, creative people, and we were just playing with that shtick.

What do you think makes Texas punk unique from other hotbeds of the movement?

Well, I’ve always thought that a lot of elements came together in Texas to make it happen. You had a lot of smart people, you had cheap rent in some of the cities and you had connections to culture and music that was coming from Los Angeles or New York and other parts of the world [like] England. But I think, really, in Texas the thing that helps to make the music wild is just — it’s so conservative. The state was so conservative then at the dawn of the Reagan era, and there’s so much pressure to conform […] and to be blonde and Christian and heterosexual. I think in punk rock, people were just reacting against all these very conservative forces with the craziest stuff they could come up with, the most sort of extreme performative art response that they could imagine.

A lot of people tell me the Butthole Surfers’ hit with “Pepper” was a surprise. When you first saw them, did you think, “These guys are gonna be big?”

No, absolutely not. I was as surprised as everybody when they had a hit. I left Austin in 1987 to move to New York. I’d been seeing punk bands in Austin for about seven or eight years, and when I left, I was pretty sure the Butthole Surfers were the best band on the planet. Their musicianship, their melodies, their craziness. A lot of people saw them as a joke and I didn’t. I thought that their songs were catchy, you could hum them […] and there was also just so much weirdness and Salvador Dalí and also a lot of Texas in what they were doing. But I never would have thought that they’d get signed to a major label, let alone have a hit. And, incidentally, I mean I hope I don’t hurt anybody’s feelings with this, but I think “Pepper” is just their worst song. I don’t think it’s very interesting at all. I think it sounds like Beck.

Did you spend time with them outside of the clubs?

Yeah, and actually, that’s from one sort of extended period of time that I was in San Antonio, because that one summer — I think it was in 1984 — I kind of invited myself into their lives because they were in San Antonio at this place called Boss Studios recording their second full-length album, Rembrandt Pussyhorse. And I don’t know if they actually invited me, but they wanted to get Rey Washam from the Big Boys to come in and record with them, and I said I’d give him a ride — and then I just wouldn’t leave. I showed up at the studio and just, like, hung out with them for a couple of days and photographed them, and we went to eat at Taco Cabana, and we slept I think on Paul’s family home’s floor — me and Teresa and King. We all slept for a couple of nights there. So, I was really close to them, and that was pretty interesting, because then you could really see the serious side of them and just how attentive they were to the recording process and very hard workers.

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This article appears in Aug 7-20, 2025.