they built this city

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MARCH 2008 AUSTIN MONTHLY 125

WHAT DO JUKE-JOINT BLUESMEN, dazed-and-confused hippies, spacey cowboys, spiky-haired new wavers, fist-pumping punks and sincere slackers have in common? Other than an abiding rebel spirit, they’ve all made Austin home at one time or another. The vibrancy and diversity of the music scene didn’t just arrive by divine decree. From the ’60s to the present, each of these groups has built upon and expanded what came before, creating a sound and energy that’s uniquely Austin and, they insist, worth fighting to preserve. “I think we have enough Home Depots, now don’t we?” says a feisty Kinky Friedman when asked about the city’s future. At the heart of this musical mecca we call home are the clubs that invited, supported and nurtured the artists and fans who built Austin’s music scene from the ground up. Some were boarded up long ago, while others continue to rock on, but they’ve all left a legacy for generations to come. And while no one can say what the future holds, it might help to look to the past, back to a time when Austin was indisputably weird and the music was right. There have always been clubs that rise above the banal. Some were dangerous and some spit in the mythical face of southern culture. Some were the forces that truly made Austin the Live Music Capital, as opposed to some self-congratulatory name given by the City Council to bolster

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At the Armadillo World Headquarters, hippies and rednecks came together in the ’70s to listen to music ranging from Willie Nelson to the Clash to Frank Zappa. Below, fans kick back on the famed beer-soaked carpet.

tourist dollars. Austin music was built by blood-on-guitar strings in dank, Lone Star-soaked clubs rarely frequented by those who named it the Live Music Capital. Pay homage to the men, women and buildings that really rocked this house—the musicians, club owners, bartenders and fans. Pay homage to people like Clifford Antone and places like the Continental Club. This is by no stretch of the imagina-tion a comprehensive list of the greats; rather, it’s more of a gourmand’s tour of delights.


126 AUSTIN MONTHLY MARCH 2008

Rock ’n’ roll has been pronounced dead and eulogized by some, but it will never really die. At its foundation were two equally important yet very separate groups: black rhythm & blues and white country. But there were those music revolutionaries who refused to keep them apart. Elvis would have been nothing if it hadn’t been for folks like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry showing him how to swing with the best of them. Austin and the Hill Country have long been home to both R&B and country. In the decades preceding the civil rights movement, however, the blues was relegated to the East Side at places like the fantastic Victory Grill, now listed in the Na-

tional Registry of Historic Places and archived by the Texas Historic Commission. It is the last holdout in what was once a vibrant rockin’ and rollin’ scene on East 11th and 12th streets. At the Grill and other Chitlin’ Circuit stops on the East Side, one could see the likes of Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King as well as local legend “Blues Boy” Hubbard. But many of these clubs, like Charlie’s Playhouse and Ernie’s Chicken Shack, suffered the common fate of juke joints in the Jim Crow South. As segregation eased, the entertainers who had been relegated to these clubs got gigs at places that until then would have been unthinkable. As a result, the clubs closed, but the spirit of the sweaty Saturday nights they hosted lives on in every kid playing the six-string and groanin’ the blues. Clifford Antone picked up the vibe, and his club has been “Austin’s Home of the Blues” since 1975. Head west, and you’ll hear the music pouring from dance halls like Luckenbach and Gruene Hall. And, of course, the original Threadgill’s in North Austin offers up the honky-tonk music that Texans love, as does the relative new kid on the block, Poodie’s Hilltop Bar & Grill. Then there was the Skyline Club. “Everybody played there,” says Cheatham Street Warehouse owner Kent Finlay, batting off names like Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and Johnny Horton. There couldn’t have been a Cosmic Cowboy without a few real cowboys here and there. In small-town Texas, the dance

halls, often “the only game in town,” give locals the chance “to be a part of something bigger than themselves,” says Luke Gilliam, author of the new book Pat Green’s Dance Halls & Dreamers. That spirit lives on at places like the Broken Spoke. “It seems like walking back in a time warp to enter the doors of the Broken Spoke,” says longtime Austin City Limits Producer Terry Lickona. “You can just pretend like you’re back in 1940-something, and you wouldn’t be that far off the mark.” Without these vastly differ-ent yet very similar influences providing a baseline for live music in Austin, it’s doubtful that what came next would have been possible.

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LEFT: A Vulcan Gas Company poster, circa 1968, featuring blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins and Austin’s own Conqueroo.

BELOW: The gang at the Victory Grill, the last holdout among the East 11th and 12th street juke joints.



It’s easy to be strange in San Francisco, a city built by gold-miners, outlaws, thieves and the general dregs of society. But to be weird in the Deep South in the ’60s—that takes commit-ment. Frisco may have the glory, but Austin has the heart. Groups like the Conqueroo, Shiva’s Headband, Bubble Puppy and the legendary and infamous 13th Floor Elevators slogged away at now long-forgotten clubs with names like the Jade Room, Club Saracen, the Eleventh Door and the New Orleans Club. These new long-hairs scared the daylights out of the local buzz-cut, Eisenhower-era Ward Cleavers and, at the same time, inspired outrage and enmity from the honky-tonkers in North Austin.

The fuzz came down hard on most of these clubs. In response, some, like The New Orleans Club, abandoned rock ‘n’ roll altogether in favor of Dixieland jazz, while others, like the Jade Room, saved the psychedelic shows for the ultra-slow mid-week. The counter-culture in Austin, pushed to the break-ing point, had to find a place to call its own. That place was the Vulcan Gas Company. The dazzling light shows and hippie-blues at the Vulcan Gas Company —formed by a consortium of the proponents of the weird, including renowned poster artist Jim Franklin—made

1 Continental Club2 Skyline Club3 Threadgill’s4 Victory Grill

5 Eleventh Door6 Ernie’s Chicken Shack7 IL Club8 Jade Room9 Split Rail 10 Vulcan Gas Company

11 Antone’s12 Armadillo World Headquarters13 Austin Opry House14 Broken Spoke 15 Cactus Cafe16 Checkered Flag 17 Soap Creek

18 The Backyard19 Emo’s20 La Zona Rosa21 Liberty Lunch22 The Parish23 Poodie’s Hilltop Bar & Grill24 Raul’s25 Red Eyed Fly26 Room 71027 Saxon Pub28 Stubb’s29 Ritz

The SceneWhen clubs in town first became popular.

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Shiva’s Head-band performs at Vulcan Gas

Company in 1968. The VGC dazzled audi-

ences with its psychedelic

light shows in the ’60s.

[ THE ’60s ]

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128 AUSTIN MONTHLY MARCH 2008

the club at 316 Congress Ave. the place to be. Austin police tried to rein in the raucous crowd of “freaks” who, in hind-sight, seem mellow compared to today’s Sixth Street mobs. The club couldn’t handle the constant scrutiny of the authori-ties and closed in July 1970. As the VGC was crumbling, a new club was rising out of the burnt ashes of its spirit. This club, more than most, cemented the perception of Austin as the outlaw home of live music.

With the VGC gone, Austin’s counterculture needed a playground. Tucked away behind a skating rink, Eddie Wilson, manager of Shiva’s Headband, found it: an old, abandoned National Guard armory. Soon after the VGC locked its doors for the last time, the Armadillo World Headquarters opened its doors for the first time.

This is the place that the Cosmic Cowboy first rode out of the stable. In the tradition of Threadgill’s, hippies and rednecks came together at the Armadillo for 12-ounce helpings of fermented barley and good music. Lickona fondly remem-bers the “smell of beer-soaked carpet” and the Armadillo’s own “Guacamole Queen holding court in the back.” Supported by magnificent poster art, shows at the Armadillo could get a bit strange. “I think the Armadillo had just about everything under one roof,” says Friedman. “I mean, I’ve done some weird shows there. I think we co-billed with Cheech and Chong one night.” But that was part of the Armadillo’s charm. Disparate and sometimes seem-ingly diametrically opposed music styles could be found there. On a U.S. tour, Eng-lish punk-rock-warlords The Clash, who made their armadillo-starring “Rock the Casbah” video in Austin, played a show with rebel brother-in-arms Joe Ely. Willie Nelson may have been one of the first to “jump in front of that parade,” as Friedman says, but the good-time rebel atmosphere at the Armadillo, and the more out-of-the-way Soap Creek Saloon, slowly became what made Austin famous. The Armadillo brought outsider

music to the mainstream. Of course, that meant it was time for a new kind of outsider music. Just as the Armadillo and the VGC gave a refreshing slap in the face to local music, by 1978, something was brewing down near the UT campus to give it a shot in the arm. That’s when Raul’s opened its doors. Originally intended to showcase a mix of Tex-Mex and rock ‘n’ roll, the small but growing punk scene of Austin quickly overtook it. At Raul’s, it was out with the long hair, fringe and paisley and in with short, spiky hair, zippers and latex. “The old Austin scene of the ‘70s—the outlaw country music—was pretty much dead by that time,” says Lickona. “Then, all of a sudden, out of the dust came Raul’s, which at-tracted a whole different kind of crowd.” Fast rock bands like the Dicks, The Huns and the Big Boys graced the stage of the venerable graffitied venue. It was at Raul’s that the Butthole Surfers, who would go on to be college radio darlings in the ’80s, saw some of their earliest perfor-mances. Punk rock poetess Patti Smith and nerdy, new-wave god Elvis Costello both surfaced there, too.

ABOVE: The concert posters at the Armadillo were nearly as legendary as the club itself.

LEFT: Kenneth Threadgill performs in April 1971 at his old filling station-turned-honky-tonk.

[ THE ’70s ]

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The Armadillo and Raul’s are gone, but the vibrancy they inspired has survived. Because of the Armadillo, Austin was on the map musically, and with a new-wave scene rivaling any city in the U.S., even the world, live music became our thing.

In 1976, a club would be born that, with time, would beas eulogized and praised as the Armadillo and the VGC combined. Liberty Lunch cemented itself in the 1980s as an Austin landmark. One could expect to hear anything at Liberty Lunch. Lickona fondly recalls seeing the old Austin crowd at a Fabulous Thun-derbirds show one night, then the Afro-pop superstar King Sunny Ade on another. “They had hard rock, they had country, ” Lickona says. “Anything goes at Liberty Lunch.” The Liberty Lunch era was complemented by the short-lived-but-significant punk scene that emerged at the Ritz building on Sixth Street. Bands like The Misfits, Megadeth and the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed at the old theater until, like at the VGC, the rowdy crowds proved too hard to handle. Sadly, like so many important live music venues in the Live Music Capital of the World, the Ritz’s punk experiment came to an end, and Liberty Lunch was sacrificed in the name of municipal expansion in 1999. The music, however, plays on. “Sixth Street is a little much,” says C3 Presents part-ner Charles Attal. But down on Red River on any night of the week, you can still hear every-thing from big-name acts at Stubb’s to 18-year-old kids playing death metal at Room 710 to God knows what at the always pleasantly surprising Emo’s. In addition to Red River, there are clubs throughout town that have stood the test of time. Whenever he walks into the Continental Club, Lickona is reminded of what makes Austin music so timeless. “The people may be a whole other genera-tion, but it still has that same kind of funky vibe to it,” he says.

It’s the diversity of Austin music that really puts us on the map, says Friedman. “You can see great performances in any genre al-most anytime.” It’s easy to take it for granted; to get, as Friedman says with regret in his voice, “lackadaisical.” But it is our duty as Austinites to visit those clubs and see those bands before they go the way of so many other of Austin’s fine venues. Go have a Pabst down at Emo’s or a Shiner at the Saxon. Go support a band unloading its own gear at Momo’s, the Cactus Café or The Parish. Go hear some blistering blues at Antone’s or two-step at the Spoke or sway under the stars at the Backyard. And shed a tear every time you pass by the office building where the Armadillo once roared or the parking lot where the Vulcan Gas Company stood. Austin’s music cannot and will not survive without you. Do it before the Home Depots and Starbucks turn Austin into Houston. “Live Music Capital” is more than a title; it’s a respon-sibility to carry on the rebel spirit that inspired Liberty Lunch and Raul’s. The music may have changed, the hirsute hippies may now be hirsute hipsters, but the heart and soul of Austin isn’t in a blue power suit in the Legislature; it’s in the blood, sweat and beer on the floor of every club with a kid onstage playing like his life depends on it.

LEFT:TheRitz,nowhometotheAlamoDrafthouse,wasoncethesiteofathrashingpunkscene.

BELOW:Emo’s,onthecornerofRedRiverandSixthstreets,istheplacetogothesedaystohearthebiggestsoundsfromAustinandaroundtheworld.Punk,hip-hop—Emo’shasitall.

[ THE ’80s, ’90s&BEYOND]

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they built this city

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