Ian McLagan Collection Donated to the Briscoe Center
The Ian McLagan Collection has been donated to the Briscoe Center. McLagan was best known for playing keyboards for the Small Faces (later the Faces), part of the first wave of British rock acts to break into the American mainstream in the 1960s.
“McLagan’s whirlwind career—as well as that of his contemporaries—is well documented in this fascinating collection,” said Don Carleton, executive director of the Briscoe Center. “I’m grateful to Ian’s son, Lee, for choosing the center as the home for his father’s archive.”
McLagan joined the Small Faces in 1965. Their best-known song in America was the 1968 hit “Itchycoo Park.” Later in his career he toured and recorded with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen and Lucinda Williams. In the 1990s he settled in the Austin area, performing locally with his group, the Bump Band.
The McLagan collection include photographs, promotional materials, diaries, letters, chord sheets, audio recordings and considerable documentation that details the logistics of touring. The papers also included McLagan’s personal artwork and songbooks.
“The collection speaks to a significant era in Anglo-American popular culture, and in particular helps to document how the rock bands of McLagan’s era recorded, performed and toured,” added Carleton. “The archive takes its place at the center with the Tom Wright Photographic archive, which includes an important collection of photographs documenting the career of McLagan and some of his fellow musicians.”
The Briscoe Center’s Tom Wright Photographic Collection documents the American rock scene from the 1960s to 1990. McLagan met Wright in the early 1970s. Wright photographed McLagan and other members of the Faces on tour for many years. In 2007 McLagan was a featured speaker at a celebration of the center’s Tom Wright Collection.
“He said he was going to take the best pictures and he actually did,” said McLagan in 2007 at the Briscoe Center event. “On the road, the best room after a gig was his room because his bathroom was full of the photographs being developed that he’d taken that day. So you always knew what was going on and what had gone on because it was in the bath.”
