How Carnaval Became an Austin Institution: A First Person Account

In 1974 I was managing a record store in Greenwich Village when I discovered Arhoolie Records’ multi-volume exploration of Tex-Mex music called Roots of Texas-Mexican Border Music—ten LPs with musical examples dating back to the early 1920s. I played this stuff constantly in the store, and one day while reading the extensive notes, I came across a reference to the preeminent scholar researching border folklore in Texas, Américo Parédes, and learned he was still teaching at UT-Austin. That was it. As soon as humanly possible, I packed up and moved back to Texas in order to continue my then-truncated college education. I began a program of Texas border folklore study with Dr. Parédes, and simultaneously enrolled in ethnomusicology courses with internationally recognized expert Dr. Gerard Béhague, all while working part-time at Discount Records on the Drag across from UT.

Dr. Americo Paredes (left) and Dr. Gerard Béhague (right)

It was during that class with Béhague that I had an epiphany—Brazilian music of the time (1977) was far more interesting than that of the USA, and I poured myself into it big time. Ok, I was obsessed. I studied Portuguese, bought every Brazilian LP I could find, and then, one day, out of the blue, John Wheat, then host of KUT’s Horizontes Latin America music program, and a customer at the record store, asked me if I would guest host his radio show during his vacation of August 1978. During those two weeks of impersonating a DJ, I decided to dedicate the Friday afternoon editions of the program to the music of Brazil—yes, 100% Brazilian music. Immediately, the phones began ringing off the hook! So when, a few weeks later, I was asked to take over the show permanently, I made “Brazilian Friday” a weekly fixture. From then on, Fridays became the most lucrative day during pledge drives, confirming that Brazilian music had a much broader and deeper appeal than other Latin musics, at least for the KUT audience.

Ok, back up a bit. There was a student in my Music of Brazil class named Ileana Casanova, a young Cuban woman. In February of 1977, she was the organizer of a small, more or less private, Brazilian Carnaval party, a party that had been passed around from organizer to organizer over the years, probably beginning about 1972 at Austin’s Unitarian Church. In any case, for her version of the party in 1977 Ileana rented a carpeted room at Dobie Mall…forcing her to rent a dance floor! To make matters worse, she rented an atrociously bad sound system which was constantly blowing up throughout the evening. As a more than curious observer, I couldn’t stand this lack of preparedness, so I left early, in great frustration. The next week in our Brazilian music class, I approached Ileana and offered to help her improve the logistics of the 1978 party, an offer she gladly accepted. When I called her in December of ’77 to find out when work would get started on organizing the party, she told me she just didn’t want to do it again, couldn’t imagine going through all that work for nothing. She suggested that I could go it alone if I so desired. But I was a bit uneasy about taking over this party and organizing such an event on my own. But thanks to the shoving and pleading of Jim “Hawaiian Prince” Hughes, a legendary Austin figure at the time, an employee of Oat Willie’s notorious head shop, and a huge fan of the annual Carnaval festivity, I decided to forge ahead. Were it not for the Hawaiian Prince urging me on, Carnaval in Austin would have died on the vine at that point.

Before this time, I had never done anything like producing a public event, but I soon learned it ain’t brain surgery. I knew two things: 1) Rent a room that already has a dance floor; 2) Rent a room that has a sound system.

So I opened the Yellow Pages (for you youngsters, this was the business half of the printed-on-paper telephone directory we old folks used to use to find phone numbers!) to the “Nightclubs” listing and the very first name that appeared in that list was The Boondocks on East Fourth Street, just off Congress Avenue, behind the old Greyhound Bus Station. I immediately called them and proposed a $400 rental for taking over their space for an evening, with me keeping the door proceeds, The Boondocks reaping the bar proceeds. I went down to look at the place and found it to be perfect: Dance floor? Check! Sound system? Check! But the manager/owner proposed that, instead of giving them four hundred bucks, he wanted me to put that money toward advertising on KLBJ-FM, then Austin’s only decent music station, aside from KUT-FM. The Boondocks had not been paying their ad bills and were cutoff at the station for any future advertising and were desperate to get their name back on the air, especially if I was willing to underwrite their ads!

1978 Carnaval Brasileiro Poster - Boondocks

I did as requested and got FIFTY TWO 60-second spots!!!! (In 2020 those ads would cost well over $6,000 or much, much more, depending on the time slots chosen.) That radio advertising turned out to be key to the party’s success, though it was something I would have never done under normal circumstances. I had anticipated, at the most, around 400 people to attend. Instead, around 1000 showed up, two-hundred over the room’s legal capacity! Plus, we turned away at least another couple hundred! Thanks to this huge turnout, the Boondocks sold every drop of alcohol long before 2:00 a.m., so they allowed us to party until 4:00 a.m.! Later they told me they had to repaint the dance floor because our one thousand partiers had danced all the paint off the floor! Yes, it was a great party. The tickets were a walloping two bucks!

The following year we clearly needed more space, the obvious choice in those days was the legendary Austin music venue, Armadillo World Headquarters. We managed to put a little carnaval band together with the help of Dr. Béhague, so we were able to feature live music that year for the first time…I was even in that band! (The previous party was fueled solely by cassettes provided by Ms Casanova.) Attendance was close to 1900, easily filling the ‘Dillo, and nearly doubling the numbers from the first year. Tickets were the enormous sum of four bucks each!

Austin’s legendary Armadillo World Headquarters —the ‘Dillo—home of the 1979 Carnaval Brasileiro

Luckily for us, someone at the American-Statesman, I think hit was Joe Nick Patoski, wrote a feature story about Carnaval which appeared in the newspaper the morning of the show. By 11:00 a.m., just a few hours after the paper appeared, tickets were sold out—that story pushed demand over the top! In those days the press did actually have some power. Later I heard that tickets that night were being scalped out front of the club for as much as $25! Quite a hefty mark-up, and a small fortune in 1979.

In 1980, the party moved to the Austin City Coliseum and attendance continued to grow. Legal capacity at that venue, at least in the early days, was 3,800. I’m sure for at least a few years, we had 4,000 jammed into that classic venue, of course, not all at one time! Well…maybe!!!  Eventually we expanded to two nights to meet demand, but finally, in 2002 the real solution arrived in the form of a new venue, the Palmer Events Center with a capacity of 7,000. Things have changed since those days along with Austin, sadly, but in 2011, or 2012, we had at least 6,300 packed into that room. Interestingly, there has never been, in my 43 years of hosting this thing, any sort of major incident—no fights, accidents, nothing. I doubt any other kind of large event with such a long history could make that claim, especially with a very intoxicated crowd such as attend Carnaval. I’m knocking on wood as I type this.

The music has gotten much better. For many years we used Austin’s own Susanna Sharpe and Samba Police. And in 2000 we flew up 13 drummers from Rio’s legendary Carnaval group, Portela to play Carnaval Austin. They really blew the roof off the old Coliseum! Finally, in 2003, I found a great carnaval band in New York composed entirely of Brazilians, all vets of Carnaval in Rio, and they were absolutely fantastic…I think they played about 15 Carnavals in Austin.

Portela Samba School at Carnaval Brasileiro

The music has evolved with our changing audience: for a couple of years we brought in Dandara Odara, an electrifying singer from Bahia who has been referred to as “The Tina Turner of Brazil”! And most recently we featured another band of Brazilians, this time Texas-based: Gisele and the Brazilian Express featuring Austin resident Gabriel Santiago, one of Brazil’s most accomplished guitarists.

Not coincidentally, a number of other regularly performing Brazilian bands have formed in Austin playing everything from Brazilian funk to the traditional carnaval music of Recife, a town in Brazil’s NE, called maracatú. To me, all these groups help make Austin a truly unique city in the USA, and I’d like to think that I and my little party have had something to do with that. To that end, even Roland Swenson, one of the originators of SXSW recently admitted to me that the success of Carnaval was one of the inspirations that gave him and Louis Meyers the idea to crank up the very first SXSW in 1987—so in no uncertain terms, Carnaval helped give rise to Austin’s greatest music festival, SXSW!

Keep Austin weird, indeed!

Posters from Carnaval Brasileiros over the years.

Photos from Carnaval Brasileiro over the years.

Mike Quinn

Mike Quinn, producer of Carnaval Brasileiro, has a 44-year love affair with things Brazilian. His background as a drummer, music lover and journalist (he wrote the first ever published interview with rock legends ZZ Top in 1969) led him, in the mid-1970s, to the infectious rhythms of Brazil. His obsession soon evolved into a passion as took a total immersion dive into the culture of Brazil: the language, the food, the music and the literature. Through a fortuitous series of circumstances he produced his first Carnaval Brasileiro in Austin, Texas in 1978, the same year he began a 10-year stint hosting a Latin American music program on KUT-FM, Austin’s NPR station. Quinn has also been a music writer for local and national publications including JazzTimes, Austin Chronicle, Austin American Statesman, The East Bay Monthly, Hartford Courant, and others. Featured musical figures Quinn has covered in print and on radio include Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, Toninho Horta, Egberto Gismonti, Rita Lee, Raimundo Fagner, Keith Jarrett, Ron Carter, Mercedes Sosa, King Sunny Ade, Ry Cooder, Flaco Jimenez, Peter Tosh, Dennis Brown, Jimmy Cliff, George Winston, Kip Hanrahan, Esteban Jordan and just to name a few. Quinn has nurtured Austin’s version of Carnaval Brasileiro into the largest such celebration in the United States. “To me, it’s still all about the music,” Quinn insists. “Yeah, everyone goes to have a good time at the hottest party in town. But what they may not know is that they are also getting an amazing concert of authentic Brazilian carnaval music thrown in for free!”