Do you remember Austin in 1985? Or have you wondered what the city, and its music scene, were like back then?Here’s an ideal way to relive those days, or see them for the first time. MTV came to town that summer to film an episode of “The Cutting Edge,” a program produced by I.R.S. Records that explored emerging music communities around the nation. The full episode was just added to Vimeo this week by Carlos Grasso, who produced the program.The hourlong show captured around a dozen acts who were all the rage in the local clubs at the time. There’s footage of the True Believers, Zeitgeist (later known as the Reivers), Timbuk3, Joe King Carrasco & the Crowns, Doctors’ Mob, Glass Eye, Tail Gators, Poison 13, Dharma Bums, Wild Seeds, Toshio Hirano, Dino Lee’s White Trash Revue — and, making his national TV debut, Daniel Johnston.Host Peter Zaremba cruises around town with a camera crew, riding shotgun with Carrasco (who waxes rhapsodic about a long-gone Rainey Street district car lot called Red River Motors) and feasting on fajitas at a backyard barbecue. Many of the bands are briefly interviewed atop a building under construction downtown, with cranes looming in every direction as the city’s…
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A snapshot of Austin and its skyline in 1985: Watch footage from MTV's 'Cutting Edge' – Austin360
