The varied shades of Antone's
The club has moved beyond the blues, but founder Clifford Antone is still true to the music that made his club
AMERICAN-STATESMAN MUSIC CRITIC
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
It's Tuesday night at Antone's, and the blues are nowhere within earshot.
Oh, there's evidence of the club's blues heritage. Replica flyers hang behind the counter near the entrance: Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Shirts proclaim "Austin's Home of the Blues."
Kelly West
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Clifford Antone, holding LPs at the record store he founded, says there are fewer and fewer blues greats around to play at his namesake club in the Warehouse District.
Stories
- City stages star-studded send-off to blues godfather
- The man who gave Austin the blues
- Kelso: Icon? Nah, Antone was even better
- Musicians, fans bid farewell to Antone
- Remembering Clifford Antone
- 'Heart of Austin music' had blues in his blood
- The man who helped make the musicians
- Memories of the blues
Multimedia
- Video: The city says goodbye to Clifford Antone
- Photo gallery: Public memorial for Clifford Antone
- Photo gallery: Clifford Antone
- Photo gallery: Clifford Antone memorial
- Audio slideshow - W.C. Clark remembers Antone
- Send your Clifford Antone photos | Reader photos
- Pinetop Perkins plays hymns for Antone
- Antone's memorial celebration
- Friends remember Clifford Antone
- Sign the guestbook
Past coverage
But the blues ain't here tonight.
Instead, a songwriter named Johnny Dowd is mangling "Johnny B. Goode," turning the primal rock song into some sort of Tom Waits thing that eventually fades into the riff from Black Sabbath's "Iron Man."
The critically acclaimed Dowd is opening for Neko Case, the alternative country singer. The crowd is made up of Case fans, who know the artist from her albums and from the excellent Canadian power pop band New Pornographers.
It's a crowd that's feeling good about the music, that laughs when the 57-year old Dowd calls Case "the devil's next of kin" as she joins him for a song.
But this isn't Robert Johnson's devil music.
Looking back
Mike Dickinson owns and operates the local Chicken Ranch Records label. He's a big Neko fan. Does he consider Antone's a blues club?
He doesn't even blink. "No, not at all," Dickinson says. "It's a great venue, but it's got mostly across-the-map stuff now."
July 1 marks the commencement of Antone's 30th anniversary celebration, 30 years to the month after rabid blues fan and Port Arthur native Clifford Antone opened the club (originally at Sixth and Brazos streets), essentially to showcase the bluesmakers he adored.
For three weeks, the legendary club, located at 213 W. Fifth St. since March 1997, will honor its past with sets from each previous era.
There were the salad days of the early 1970s at Sixth and Brazos streets, when greats like Hubert Sumlin jammed with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Paul Ray. Then there was that brief Babylonian captivity way out on Anderson Lane. There was the long stretch at 2915 Guadalupe St., starting in '82, and represented by sets from Storyville, Marcia Ball and Angela Lou Ann Barton. And there's the warehouse district location of today, home to the Scabs, Breedlove and Soulhat.
Since 2003, when founder Antone was serving time for a 1999 conviction on drug and money-laundering charges, the club has been managed and booked by Direct Events, an Austin production company, but the next three weeks are an ode to the club's past.
The blues clearly will not dominate Antone's future. Approximately 30 patrons turned out at 9 p.m. on a recent Blue Monday. Meanwhile, there were at least twice as many folks at the Parlor's punk rock show.
So, is Neko Case the future of Antone's? Well, yeah. The future of Antone's isn't as a blues club. It's just as a club. For most clubgoers, that's fine.
'A different spin'
This multimusical future is Chris Thies' mandate. The 34-year-old Direct Events booker formerly oversaw two large Chicago clubs, the Metro and the Doubledoor, and calls Antone's "his baby." He books music that appeals to a wide range of tastes: plenty of KGSR-type stuff for the older crowd, plenty of jammy rock that appeals to undergrads and the undergrad-at-heart. There's even some hip-hop now and then; the recent free shows by the now-defunct Urban Assault Collective packed the house.
"I have made a conscious effort to put a different spin on Antone's," he says. "And you know, the way it's laid out, the artist to audience connection is easily attainable."
Just because it sounds like corporate-speak doesn't make it any less true. Antone's fan-friendly layout is weirdly intimate, and makes the club a key piece of Direct Events' Austin empire. But that's all it is, ultimately: a piece of a much bigger business.
Thies agrees that hip-hop works well there. Austin up-and-comer Bavu Blakes plays the 600-capacity club in mid-September, and Thies says they might bring back old-school hip-hop icon KRS-One. "The afternoon after KRS-One's last show, he turned Antone's into a classroom," Thies says. "He just hung out with some folks from the hip-hop scene, talking about the future of hip-hop; even our staff got into the discussion."
So what happened to club namesake Clifford Antone?
Antone might not be doing the heavy lifting anymore, but he and Thies still talk every week. "He's kind of like the reference point for me," Thies says. Antone can put together benefits at the drop of a dime. "The guy can just pick up the phone and get who he needs."
But most of those benefits focus on older artists, and these are different times. "We still do a lot of blues stuff and I don't ever want to get away from it," Thies says. "But it's hard to make money on it.
"And frankly, a lot of the blues greats aren't with us anymore."
A blues scholar
Nobody knows this better than Antone. As you might expect, his condo on Town Lake is littered with blues ephemera. Paintings of blues greats lean against a wall. There's a case filled with DVDs of live shows.
Antone, dressed in a button-down shirt and suit pants, sits down at his kitchen table. A photo of Muddy Waters grins from the wall. A shadow box of Robert Johnson rests on the table. The rest is covered with a laptop, books and papers, all research for two books on the blues and the class in blues history he teaches at the University of Texas.
"Before B.B. King came to Bass (Concert Hall)," he says with pride about the UT performance, "I did a class on him. Those kids told me they got so much more out of the show afterward."
Blues is what he does. This is all he thinks about, or has ever really wanted to think about. It's what he is.
Antone was 25 when he founded the club. "It's when they made 2 a.m. drinking and my friends and I in Port Arthur just wanted to hear the blues," he says. "We figured the only way we could hear it is if we bring it to us. It was like that movie 'Field of Dreams.' "
His face lights up and he pulls out a piece of paper. It's a copy of a historical marker plaque. "Finally, after all these years, the City of Austin is going to put a plaque where we stood on Sixth and Brazos. That place was $600 a month for 6,000 square feet." (Cue depressed sighs at cost of real estate on Sixth now.)
Much of the Antone's story has been well documented, not least in the documentary movie "Antone's: Home of the Blues." How he named the club after his family's grocery stores and put Little Walter on the logo. How he booked bands from Tuesdays to Saturdays.
"What you have to remember is that these blues guys could hardly get jobs in Chicago," he says. "Here we are in Texas, building a shrine to the Chicago blues. This is a time when Austin was all progressive country and rock. It was a battle."
He speaks of the Stevie Ray Vaughan years, when the young 'n' hungry guitarist started the Cobras. He speaks of the Fabulous Thunderbirds years, when they were the house band. The Marcia Ball, Doug Sahm and Angela Strehli years.
"Blues acts wouldn't bother to bring their bands," Antone says. "Between '75 and '85, I don't think there's any question we were the best blues club in the world."
Perhaps most importantly, the club became what sociologist Ray Oldenburg famously called a "great good place," where fans, local musicians and the legends both worshipped could mingle.
"Stevie Vaughan and Albert King got to meet," Antone says. "These crucial relationships were built here. You know, Muddy gets the Thunderbirds a tour after he plays with them, that sort of thing. I think we changed the course of blues history."
Gone, or too big
'Course, no one here gets out alive, and most of the guys that made Antone who he is are dead or dying. (Pinetop Perkins is turning 92, for Muddy's sake.) But the man is cool with this.
"You know, I didn't get in this as a business," Antone says. "I got in it to bring the blues here, that's it. Almost all of my great friends are dead: Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker. Some of the others, Buddy Guy, B.B., are too big to play there. So there's just not a whole lot left. There are some really great young players, but they can't draw enough.
"I learned we had to open up the club to different types of music. We loved Soulhat, Breedlove, the Scabs on Tuesdays when they sold out shows week after week; Vallejo, Reckless Kelly, the Gourds, Los Lonely Boys. Some of the more unknowns, it's not too interesting to me."
Are you there on Blue Mondays?
Antone smiles. "Sometimes, but you know, you don't usually start at the top," he says. "I started at the top. I had Eddie Taylor, Luther Tucker, Hubert Sumlin living here. I'd jam with those guys 3, 4 in the morning."
Hang out for the anniversary shows? Yes. Book the occasional benefit? Absolutely. He's even doing a version of his class at the One World Theatre this summer. He does his work with Austin Youthworks and Help Clifford Help Kids. But he's content to leave the future to others.
"I love the art form of the blues," he says. "I got to be with those people. I've been to the mountaintop."
jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926.
