1985 Austin punk music festival gets grungy in Dripping Springs

This Week in Texas Music History, a rowdy Texas riff on an iconic 60s festival takes shape.

Austin’s punk rock scene collided with hippie utopianism on June 30, 1985, at the Woodshock Festival. The 1985 iteration of the festival was located at Hurlbut Ranch in Dripping Springs, the site of two festivals in the early 1970s that served as cultural turning points in Texas Music: the 1972 Dripping Springs Reunion and Willie Nelson’s very first Fourth of July picnic in 1973.

Woodshock’s 1985 lineup featured a laundry list of Austin’s post-punk noise wranglers such as Glass Eye, Cargo Cult, The Offenders, Poison 13, Larry Seaman, and the Hickoids. Influential Seattle outfit the U-Men, who were in the middle of an extended stay in Austin, also appeared, as well as an emerging young singer-songwriter named Daniel Johnston. Austin filmmakers Richard Linklater and Lee Daniel shot the proceedings on super 8, and the short, influential film features a brief interview with Johnston, who was eager to promote his newly released cassette tape Hi, How Are You? Fittingly, Johnston had kicked off the 1985 festival stage with his ode to the Austin scene, “The Marching Guitars.”

Scratch Acid frontman David Yow designed the festival’s logo, a parody of the original Woodstock poster that refigured the dove of peace into a hunter’s tagged prize. The festival ran off and on from 1981 (when it debuted as a free show at Waterloo Park) to the early 1990s, but Woodshock’s 1985 iteration is one that looms large in public memory, immortalized by two renowned Austin filmmakers and arguably its most heavy-duty lineup. Writing of it in his book Austin Music Is a Scene Not a Sound, writer Michael Corcoran went so far as to connect the dots between the presence of Seattle’s U-Men and the sludgy post-punk of these 1985 Austin bands to suggest that Hulburt Ranch was one of the spots on the map where grunge rock started to form. It’s a big claim, but Woodshock wasn’t in the business of keeping quiet or being modest.

Written by Alan Schaefer and voiced by Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.

Edit: Trina Quinn

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