We recently connected with Pat Buchta and have shared our conversation below.
Pat, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
For much of my life, taking a risk was just about the last thing on my mind. As a lifelong sufferer of liver disease, I was doing my best for many years to simply hold down a job and maintain a somewhat normal life. After I finally received my gift of life in 2012, a whole world of possibility opened up to me. With the knowledge that somewhat chose to donate their organs when they died so that I may continue to live, I felt a heavy responsibility to pay this grace forward in every way possible. I poured myself into my work at KVUE-TV, and eventually landed the role of Community Services Manager, in which I was able to use the station’s resources to lift service nonprofits and causes in the community, ranging from Make-A-Wish, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, United Way, American Heart Association, Coats for Kids, and dozens more. During nationwide affiliate service days, we were able to flood-proof the Katherine Anne Porter School and build a playground for kids in residence at the SAFE Alliance campus, and finally, in response to Hurricane Harvey in 2017, I was able to work with Texas Music Office and the City of Austin to put on “Harvey Can’t Mess with Texas”, a benefit concert featuring Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Matthew McConaughey, Bonnie Raitt, Leon Bridges, and more.
Having reaching the ceiling of what was possible during my tenure, I felt the urge to do even more, and after the safety of eleven years at KVUE I took the leap to a new position as the State of Texas Programs Director for a very large nationwide nonprofit. Within weeks in the new job, I knew I had made the wrong move, surrounded by toxicity, greed, and poor management. I held my breath as I watched nine professionals get hired and fired within my department alone within the space of as many month, and I wondered how much longer my mental and physical health would withstand the intense pressure I was under.
With only a little bit of money in the bank to sustain me, I took a leap of faith in January of 2019 and walked away, and within two weeks a new opportunity presented itself: A small working group of professional musicians, hosted by Austin artist Nakia Reynoso, commenced meeting in effort to solve some of the problems facing Austin area musicians. As a lifelong musician myself, I felt it appropriate to apply my professional experience toward helping my own tribe for once. We soon received funding from Music Makes Austin, secured 501(c)4 status, and Austin Texas Musicians was born.
Right out of the gate, we lobbied the City of Austin to dedicate a portion of Hotel Occupancy Taxes to our music industry, and the first-ever sustainable public funding for music, now called the Live Music Fund, was born. When we rallied musicians to vote on the issue in the fall of 2019, we realized that we make up perhaps the most powerful voting block in the city, and began to formulate a strategy for 2020. As we know, that year had different plans for all of us, and within weeks of the pandemic hitting Austin, musicians were unemployed and facing a dire crisis for survival. We quickly stepped into action and formed crucial partnerships with Texas Workforce Commission in order to help hundreds of our members obtain benefits, with Workforce Solutions to offer tailored jobs lists and job fairs to our members, and with other community partners and businesses to provide paid virtual performance opportunities. As well, we rallied the city to provide a total of $6M in relief grants to musicians, and $5M to the venues that employ us.
As much as musicians get, we give. Just as we were starting to find our footing at the beginning of 2021, an unprecedented Winter Storm hit Texas, devastating citizens across the state with power and water outages for several weeks. As the snow and ice began to melt, I got a late night call from Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison to let me know that the city had hundreds upon hundreds of boxes of food and water coming in early the next morning, and no volunteers to help. We immediately got to work, and the next morning, over 100 unemployed musicians, venue and event workers showed up at the Millennium Youth Entertainment Complex to get to work. Over the course of a week, 500 of our rank served food and water to over 10,000 Central Texans in need, forming what is now considered the largest volunteer emergency response team this city has ever seen.
Showing up and speaking up is what we encourage musicians to do, as we represent their interests within city, state and federal policy decisions. Key to this is voting, and in 2020 we registered over 700 new voters in Travis County. This year, as we looked across the state to survey voter registration rates, we found the lowest numbers in El Paso, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley. Thus began perhaps our biggest project to date: “Músicos Unidos Para Votar”, a series of free concerts in each of these cities, with the only caveat for entry being that attendees must either provide proof of voter registration, or register onsite with our team of volunteer deputy registrars. We know these efforts will most certainly make a real impact in November elections.
With a solid foundation of success forged through the fire of these past years, Austin Texas Musicians looks forward to projects centered around affordable housing and creative spaces for musicians, and to spreading our mission to other music cities around the state, and eventually the rest of the country. This is by far the most rewarding work I’ve ever been a part of, and it’s all because I chose to take a leap of faith, trust in my own ability, and stay true to my heart. As a very wise friend told me, you may not land immediately where you want to be… there may be stepping stones that one must walk along that path before you arrive at your destination. But taking that first step is the most important step of all, for if your let your heart lead, you will always find your way.
Pat, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My very first memories as a child were of surgery. Being hospitalized was a daily reality for me, and as I was not able to do many of the things other kids did, I turned inward to find ways to entertain myself from my hospital bed. Music and visual arts became my immediate companions, and as my own health was failing, my inner world began to flourish.
I watched in awe as my grandfather, a humble farmer who only spoke Czech, played guitar and accordion and sang polka and country songs at family reunions and Knights of Columbus gatherings. During a weeklong visit as my mother learned the proper way to bake Kolaches from my Grandmother, I found a way to communicate with my grandfather through music, as he placed in my hands the very guitar that I still play today. I began writing my first songs at age 15, played in my first college grunge band at age 21, and moved to Austin in 1991 to play music professional around town, working with dozens of amazing musicians and venues.
As I grew sicker with Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis, I eventually stopped performing and writing. I simply could not process what was happening to me, and I hung up my rock & roll shoes for over a decade as my health declined. In rapid suit, my father lost his battle with early onset Alzheimer’s, my marriage fell apart, and I received my liver transplant. Healthy and now along for the first time in my life, the floodgates broke open and I began to write again – first, silly R&B dance numbers and musical comedy songs that soon opened the doorway for me to begin writing about the things that had happened to me. I began playing gigs again, joined several songwriting groups with some of Austin’s best and brightest, and focused on building out my home studio and learning how to self-produce. Last year, I released my first EP of new music in two decades, which was soon followed by another EP this past spring, released the same day that I was going in for another round of surgery on my new liver. Taking musical cues from Nick Drake, Scott Walker, Teddy Pendergrass, and Michel Legrande, I have found my own voice as a composer, and have written almost two hundred new songs in the past decade that document our journeys through love, death, transformation, survival and s*x. Nurturing my own artistic output has served as the perfect compliment to my service of other musicians.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
As I look back on my journey, I have only recently been able to acknowledge the amount of strength it took to survive the challenges I’ve faced. Perhaps the most apparent story of resilience that comes to mind is that of my final month before liver transplantation. I was bloated beyond belief, yellow in color from head to toe, bleeding internally as my veins began to collapse, and unable to sleep even for a moment from February 26th to March 23rd of 2012. Being far too sick to accept my first offer of a donor liver, I waited until a second offer presented itself on St. Patrick’s Day, but just as the docs were wheeling me into the OR they found cancer in the donor liver.
With my liver shut down, kidneys following suit, and no time left, I made peace with the fact that I would soon die, and found myself in a place quite new to me, and equally profound: At this point I was paralyzed, and could barely see beyond the fact that my field of vision was superimposed with a very visually apparent, living and breathing spiderweb of life, to which I was attached as merely a small part of in its eternal omnipresence. I could quite literally see what lie ahead for me, and it was warm, beautiful, and endless. I had let go of this world, and was prepared to meet my death unafraid.
A dear friend who was visiting and I spoke earnestly about these final hours, and of my contextualization of the situation through the lens of mythology: as in the tale of the Fisher King, I lay dying, pierced through the side with a mortal wound that took decades to finally kill me, hoping, just hoping, that the holy grail of liver transplantation would somehow be found in time to bring me back to life.
Just as we were speaking, my doctors rushed in frantically, with my third offer for a donor liver. Moments later, I was hurried down, far down, into the subterranean chambers of the hospital, into a dark, vacant, sterile wing of the building where I was to be disassembled, guts taken out and set upon the table, and replaced with the new liver that would save me.
Since that time, I’ve regained the use of my legs to become a runner, I’ve continued to grow in strength every year to now be able to lift more weight than I’ve ever been able to, and I’ve been able to build a business from the ground up while staying true to my cores values of gratitude, humility and service. It’s not often that I give myself a break to pat myself on the back, but I can say with a true heart that my own inner strength delivered me to this moment today.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Just like any other productive member of society, musicians make up a valid workforce, and should be seen as such. It’s an easy argument to make that Austin enjoy such a robust economy because of the “Live Music Capital of the World” Brand that has been built on the backs of musicians, and yet musicians are often the last in line to benefit from the city’s rapid financial growth. While uniquely Austin services such as the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians and SIMS Foundation bridge the gap in benefits that other workforces enjoy through employers, musicians who work as independent contractors have to provide these services for themselves, utilizing the little amount of pay they make from gigs that has essentially remained the same since the 1980’s. With rising rental and real estate costs, musicians are leaving the area for more financially viable opportunities in other areas. It’s not hard to look down the road and see that if this trend continues, Austin will soon become like every other place in the U.S., and our economy will soon follow.
Music is fundamental to who we are and integral to the journey of our lives, and yet we often don’t think about the struggles it takes along the way to deliver music to our ears. We can all help to write the next verse by going out to see live music, paying cover charges, tipping bands, purchasing and downloading music, and donating to the nonprofits that work so hard to serve musicians. For women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ artists, making music is harder than ever, and they especially need to be heard so that we can continue to enjoy the music that makes our lives whole.
Contact Info:
- Website: austintexasmusicians.org
- Instagram: @atxmusicians
- Facebook: @atxmusicians
- Linkedin: Austin Texas Musicians
- Twitter: @atxmusicians
- Youtube: Austin Texas Musicians