At Continental Club, hot rod 'n' roll

A fixture of Austin music scene before SoCo, club thrives under music-nurturing owner.

By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, April 04, 2008

Just past two decades into his running the Continental Club, which is in its 51st year, owner Steve Wertheimer sometimes pages through old papers, looking at the ads and listings, most of them for music clubs long gone. The number of A-list clubs still going is pretty short, among them Antone's, the Hole in the Wall and the Continental.

In such a volatile and capricious business — with sometimes-volatile and capricious owners — clubs come and go quicker than "American Idol" castoffs, but Wertheimer's club has remained a constant on South Congress Avenue, where painfully hip boutiques and restaurants have replaced car lots, a gun shop and working girls.

One thing that keeps him going, Wertheimer says, is "all the people from all over the world that wind up making this pilgrimage to Austin for music and their first stop right out of the airport is the club."

Wertheimer's reign started somewhat shakily, but as the 49-year-old has cemented his hold on the club, his reach has expanded: There's a sister club in Houston. He owns real estate and is involved in what he hopes is the benevolent stewardship of the neighborhood.

And this weekend, the Travis County Exposition Center will host the seventh Lonestar Round Up, with some 700 or so sweet machines rumbling into town to showcase Wertheimer's other passion: hot rods and custom cars. (He has six, with "a couple more projects in the works."

In less than a decade, the show has enjoyed a more than a little praise in the hot rod and custom press. The Jalopy Journal, an online forum for enthusiasts (jalopyjournal.com), has called it "the best damned car show in America. Period."

Expect a heavy hot rod presence outside the club and on South Congress, too, beginning today if it hasn't earlier.

Inside, meanwhile, many of Wertheimer's staff have worked at the club for a decade or more, as have local musicians, legions of whom have benefited from the University of Texas graduate and former certified public accountant's patience as they develop a following by performing at the club.

They describe a family-like atmosphere, with Wertheimer a capable and somewhat laid-back presence. His patience in nurturing talent, in fact, has sometimes exceeded the artists'. He does good, often quietly. He might not bring it up, but he helped relocate musician friends who were washed out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

"He's the greatest, the coolest, the best, and that's why his club is, too," said Toni Price, whose 17-year happy hour residency became a phenomenon. "He's the reason the club is so wonderful."

And there he is, with his mound of white hair and a sort of modified goatee, running the place that's still the hub of all things SoCo cool, simply because he loved music and thought it would be fun to run a club and contribute to a scene that had already, in many respects, transformed him.

In turn, the club is at once a bastion of hip and a reminder of how funky the street used to be. And there's Wertheimer, often in the crowd, watching the music with the paying customers.

Not a bad life, especially when a lot of observers, including his parents, thought he'd lost his mind when he announced his desire to run a nightclub.

He grew up in Rosenberg, which is now part of Houston's insatiable sprawl, but at the time, he recalls, it was a small town, a place that had only one AM radio station. (Because of the substantial Czech population, he heard a good deal of polka on his transistor radio.)

Coming to UT in the bicentennial year was a revelation. The Rome Inn at 29th and Rio Grande streets was his and his pals' hangout. Paul Ray was in the Cobras with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Wertheimer's 'professor.' (These days Ray is a familiar presence on KUT, playing blues, R&B and jazz.)

The place had cheap beer, low cover and great music. (There are, in fact, recordings of Vaughan at the place.) The Fabulous Thunderbirds, with Vaughan's brother Jimmie, were there every night. Doug Sahm. W.C. Clark. Omar & the Howlers were a fixture on the scene, all part of Wertheimer's "regular diet of music."

"The music was incredible," he says. "I kind of cut my teeth (there). The whole time I was at UT I was hitting the clubs."

And, he says, "I was plotting, 'How do I stay in Austin?' "

After graduating and getting his CPA, he was comptroller for a major real estate company, "doing what I was supposed to be doing for about eight years." He was also one of the owners of Ski Shores Waterfront Cafe on Lake Austin where, as it happened, relatives of the owner of the Continental Club at 1315 S. Congress were regulars.

They told Wertheimer the place was for sale.

"South Congress was so undeveloped, and it was really seedy," Wertheimer recalls. At first he put in a kitchen, but "people were scared to come down South Congress, much less eat on South Congress."

The first musician to play Wertheimer's Continental Club was Roosevelt "Grey Ghost" Williams, who played on New Year's Eve 1987 and later played Wednesday happy hour shows until his death in 1996.

Well before that, in 1957, the club began as a place for swing and doo-wop with a steakhouse next door. For part of the '60s, it was a working class joint. It was also a topless burlesque.

Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Ely and the Butthole Surfers played, and Charlie and Will Sexton practically grew up there. By the mid- to late-'80s, it was on the cutting edge of alternative rock, hosting bands such as Social Distortion and the Replacements.

When Wertheimer took over, he set about to restoring the club's full retro glory, including original murals on the walls and the red velvet curtain behind the stage. But making payroll at first was a challenge.

It took him 10 years to buy the building — ahead of the South Congress boom that might well have priced him out of the area, as it has a number of other businesses on the street. (Rest in peace, Just Guns.)

"We were a little ahead of our time," he says. "We had our fans, just not enough."

As the club gained a national reputation as a hub for rootsy music, Wertheimer gained a reputation for nurturing local talent: Junior Brown held down Sunday nights "forever," Wertheimer recalls.

He wasn't even charging cover, and still the crowds were thin. Then the "guitar-steel" picker started drawing a crowd, someone from Curb Records caught a set, and Brown's career was set.

Jon Dee Graham, ex of the Skunks and the True Believers, enjoyed Wertheimer's benevolence when Graham returned to Austin after a while living in Los Angeles and trying to start his solo career.

"Being everybody's guitar player didn't translate into a solo career," Graham says. "No one would give me a gig. Steve said, 'Man, why don't you start playing every Wednesday and we'll see how it goes?' He was the first guy in town who gave me a gig. At the end of the month, I said, 'Steve, thank you.' He said, 'Let's give it another month.' What is it now, 10 years later, nine? He saw that there was going to be something happening. He knew what I was doing even when I didn't."

Graham and James McMurtry still hold down many a Wednesday night. And the club hosted a benefit in 2005 for Graham's son, Willie, who has chronic health problems.

"It would be easy to mistake him for a scenester or a hipster, because, let's face it, he's really cool," Graham says of Wertheimer. "But he's a really super sweet, solid guy."

Then there was the aforementioned Toni Price happy hour phenomenon.

As Wertheimer puts it, a lot of people in the club business don't realize there's a substantial block of music fans who'd rather be coming home by 10 p.m. rather than just leaving the house.

For those fans, happy hour sets with the likes of Price and others — including Saturday matinees with Redd Volkaert — are a way to get people in the club before the evening headliner, and to give musicians a regular gig.

"He's in business to make a profit," Price says. "But the things he does to help, that's why he's happy and healthy and prosperous."

Such as? Such as giving Price a car for her 40th birthday. True story. Price didn't have a car, so Wertheimer bought her a 1990 Volvo.

"And I'm still driving it," says Price, who's since relocated to the San Diego area but returns to Austin frequently. "That was seven years ago."

Another area musician who's gained a following thanks to a regular presence is bluesman Gary Clark Jr., who starred in John Sayles' "Honeydripper."

"It's like going and playing someone's living room, that's how comfortable it is," Clark says. "Everybody's been going there for years."

With a club to run and a 2-year-old daughter, Lulu, at home in Rollingwood with wife Gabrielle, having a car show might be the last thing on a typical saloon owner's mind.

But Wertheimer and friends had been driving to a hot rod show in Paso Robles, in California's central wine country, for years and thought about launching a similar event here.

The Lonestar Rod & Kustom Round Up launched at House Park Stadium in 2002 before moving to Fiesta Gardens and Fiesta Beach and now the Expo Center.

The first show broke even, and the event has grown by some 80 percent each year, according to longtime friend and business partner Will Muntz.

You can expect chopped Mercs and Caddys Friday and Saturday, lots of flames and blustery tailpipes, both at the Expo Center and on South Congress, where music and other events are scheduled at the Continental, Jo's Coffee and Trophy's bar.

Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame inductee James Burton, late of Elvis Presley's TCB band, headlines at the Expo Center at 4:30 p.m. Saturday.

At 11 a.m. Sunday, car nuts will gather at Jo's for a cruise out to Ski Shores where, come to think, if Wertheimer hadn't been working more than 20 years ago, none of this would have happened.

And it happened because he loved the music, wanted to stay in Austin and thought it would be fun — even though a lot of people, including his parents, thought he was crazy. Now when his mother travels and sees someone wearing a Continental Club T-shirt, she tells them, "That's my son's place."

"I don't play a lick, but I thought it could be my contribution to the music community," he says. "It's perseverance and persistence, and it's wound up working. A lot of the fun for me, even to this day, is walking in there and seeing a guy like Gary Clark Jr. develop over the years and become the star that he's becoming.

"I feel very much like a father figure to a lot of these people. I was able to stick with these people and watch them realize their success from this thing we created."

Lonestar Rod and Kustom Round Up

When: Friday through Sunday

Where: Travis County Exposition Center, 7311 Decker Lane, as well as locations along South Congress Avenue (including Jo's Coffee, the Continental Club and Trophy's Bar).

Tickets: $10 general admission wristbands (good for all weekend); kids younger than 12 get in free.

What: Swap meet, vendors, cruise to Ski Shores and music.

More info: Go to www.lonestar

roundup.com for a complete schedule and information.

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603