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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 13, 1988)
Uncovering A&M counterculture ^ Wayne Granzin, a local skateboard enthusiast, demonstrates an other use for a swimming pool as he rides along the vertical eight- foot wall at the Aggieland Apartments. Battalion file photo Counterculture. Underground clubs. The very words conjure up images of weirdly dressed punk rockers smoking all sorts of substances in poorly lit. poorly constructed, hard- to-find clubs. This description may be true in the movie “The Decline of Western Civilization,” and may reflect underground culture in many larger cities, but if you go out looking for this type of scene in Bryan-College Station, you will probably be disappointed. Before you throw away your non conformist feelings and head for the Dixie Chicken or Zephyr’s, however, you might need to know exactly what counterculture is, especially in College Station, where the idea of anything not mainstream is relatively new. If you ask someone how much of a counterculture exists in College Station, you are more than likely to get a response of “ what counterculture!” And it’s true that College Station’s brand of counterculture is probably a little more tame than the scene in London or New York, but it is possible to find people and places that are a little off the beaten path. For instance, there used to be the Weird As S-t fraternity (WAS). Self- termed Wazoos, the group lived and threw lots of crazy parties in a house, decorated with store mannequins, located south of town. There also was the Hoser house. Located in the area behind La Taqueria, residents had some crazy signs out front and crazy parties inside, but everyone there always had a good time. These groups are pretty much defunct, and few, if any, of the original members remain, but others have taken their place. Now there is the Palace. If you’ve never partied at the Palace, you have missed out. The occupants of the house at the comer of Dominik Drive and Munson Street may come and go, but the Palace is always the party place to be. If you walk inside the Palace, you will notice that the walls are decorated with pictures of people harfing. For those of you not up on Palace lingo, that means throwing up, losing your cookies, barfing, etc. Probably not everyone’s idea of high culture for wallpaper, but everyone has his own way of decorating a room. And there’s more than pictures on the walls. Countless partiers have left their own mark in rainbow colors of spray-painted graffiti. (Rumor has it Tony Cornett stands at the Palace entr that partiers also spray paint each other, but that probably has to be seen to be believed). Of course, spray painting is one of the milder of the crazy antics that makes the Palace famous, as members of the Lambda Sigma Delta (LSD) fraternity can tell you. Aside from the walls, little else is decorated in the main rooms of the Palace. That’s because several of the occupants have had an affinity for skateboarding through the house at one time or another, and a lot of furniture gets in the way. A big part of any counterculture scene is underground music, and Bryan-College Station makes it’s own contribution with some punk metal bands that probably wouldn’t go over well in the more conservative areas of town. Street Pizza, known for it’s satirical and often vicious attack on subjects like sororities, country music, drinking and homosexual behavior, is probably the best-known thrash band in town. A Street Pizza show always involves a lot of moshing and slam dancing, and audience members often bear scars after a show. And there are other thrash bands in town, like Mentally Deficient, a group of guys with a loud sound, that have a good following, proving that musical counterculture, even if it’s not truly underground, exists. At the other end of the musical spectrum is the Parthenon. If you want to hear the latest import that you won’t find on the radio or in a record store, the Parthenon is the place to go The club’s reputation for playing the most progressive new wave music may not go over with people who would rather scoot a boot at the Texas Hall of Fame, but there are some who wouldn’t go anywhere else. And there’s even counterculture to be found on the Texas A&M campus. Page 8/At Ease/Thursday, Oct. 13,1988
