Antone: The man who gave Austin the blues

Clifford Antone wanted us to share in his appreciation of music

Friday, May 26, 2006

Clifford Antone delivered the Blues Sermon to me for the first time more than 30 years ago — where it all began, at the original Antone's, on Sixth Street across from the Driskill Hotel. I was a teenager, ignorant in a thousand ways, sent by The Daily Texan (the University of Texas student newspaper) to write some words about the man's whimsical blues experiment.

Antone greeted me warmly enough — a guy who seemed older than his 25 years, I thought. It was daytime. We sat alone in the middle of his new club, a sparkling and stylish place with a beautiful mahogany bar on the west wall and a little postage stamp of a stage in the corner. Right away, he asked about my musical tastes. When I muttered something about the Allman Brothers Band, Antone responded like this:

The Allman Brothers? Those guys are real fine musicians, don't get me wrong. But they don't have nothin' to do with it, man! You need to be listening to guys like Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon and Elmore James — the real heroes of American music. People talk about Cream, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones. But those guys owe everything to people like Sonny Boy Williamson. Have you HEARD of Sonny Boy Williamson? Oh, man . . . .

Antone did most of the talking for the next two hours — passionately, patiently stating his case for the blues and the importance of honoring the originals who played it. He didn't talk so much about his new club, or his dreams, or his prospects of financial success. Antone was into the music — and more than that, the heart and soul of the people who created it.

Clifford Antone never tired of that sermon — and he delivered it thousands of times, to friends and strangers, through four different incarnations of Antone's, to the very last days of his life. (At only 56, he died Tuesday, at home, unexpectedly, apparently of natural causes.) Antone thought of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf the way some Americans think of Lincoln, or Whitman, or the Wright Brothers. This conviction defined him. It's as if I can feel the fire of it in the memorial votive candles that flicker yet inside the current Antone's on Fifth Street. That, and the ache that comes with the growing realization that the father of Austin blues is really, truly gone.

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From the very beginning, Clifford Antone offered us Muddy Waters and Clifton Chenier and Willie Dixon and B.B. King — certain that we would love it, certain that the sheer integrity of the music would knock Austin off its feet. It took years. We were slow learners. How many times he almost lost the club. . . .

"When we started the club on Sixth Street, I honestly thought to myself, 'How am I going to fit all the people who want to hear Sunnyland Slim into this place?' I swear to God, I thought they'd be lined up and down Congress Avenue," he said to me in the summer of 1990. "I thought you could do afternoon shows! I thought people would show up at 4 o'clock in the the afternoon to hear Sunnyland Slim play.

"It never crossed my mind that people wouldn't come, or they'd squabble over a $2 cover charge. And when they didn't come to see these important people, it hurt me. It made me very bitter for a long time."

There were hard times always — even in the 1980s, when the club finally began to find its stride on Guadalupe Street. Rachel Ferguson, who helped book the club in its early days, once recalled, "If the door was short, Clifford would reach into his pocket and pay the difference himself." The man couldn't stand to see people who gave from the heart come up short.

Antone's enjoyed a golden age in the 1980s — when blues gave soul to what had once been an old Shakey's Pizza Parlor on Guadalupe Street. It was a frumpy building, always choked with smoke, full of rot and bad plumbing. Yet Antone's was the Barton Springs of the music scene, pure and clear — even though Clifford missed a good 14 months of it serving his first federal prison sentence. And after midnight, when the music really kicked in, the building honked and howled like some happy blues freight train chugging deep into the night.

It was the golden age of Jimmie Vaughan and Stevie Vaughan, regular visits by Albert Collins and Johnny Copeland and Otis Rush, a jammed dance floor, so many young women dancing without partners, spinning in slow circles with their eyes closed and their arms floating free, feeling the sting in their toes from some Kim Wilson harmonica solo. It was glorious.

And forever there is a memory of Clifford Antone locking up the empty club at 4 o'clock in the morning. He pauses on his way out, touching a photo of Robert Johnson near the door. "Gotta keep moving," he says. "There's a hell hound on my trail."

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Clifford Antone had a lot of child in him. He had a child's passion, a child's appetites, a child's insistence, a child's failings. He wore a man's clothes, a good suit — but usually with gym shoes, and a ball cap, and always with his shirttail out. Antone always had this world-weary look about him. His eyes were slate blue.

He was a complex man, and no angel — there is the matter of his prison record, after all. But the man was unfailingly kind.

Richard Halpin, founder of American Youthworks, remembers meeting the young Clifford Antone in 1975 or 1976. Halpin came to him with this idea: blues players, connecting with musicians at the Travis County Jail, with the aim of raising prisoners' self-esteem and motivating them to consider self-improvement in education.

"Every other club owner in town said no thanks," recalls Halpin. "Clifford said, 'Sure, I'll help. What can I do?' "

As a child dreams, so did Clifford Antone. In the 1990s, I met him downtown, in front of a hulky, shabby warehouse — the building that would one day become the Austin Children's Museum. Antone knew, even in good times, that he would have to vacate the Guadalupe Street building and find a new location. It was inevitable. They were having trouble making ends meet.

Antone said this warehouse — this monster of a renovation project — would become Antone's new home. As we walked through the guts of it, he imagined a club of sliding walls. Open it wide for B.B. King. Make it small and intimate for the local shows. Hey: If the House of Blues could make it happen, why not Clifford Antone? The new Antone's would be massive and fun — but like many dreams, it remained just that. The fourth and last Antone's eventually opened on West Fifth Street.

Clifford Antone was generous, yet constantly in need of money — a precarious combination. He bought guitars for budding musicians, kept up with the families of deceased bluesmen, even helped pay funeral expenses. He loved baseball, more a White Sox kind of guy than a Cubs fan. Antone loved being a host, making women feel safe, escorting them to their cars at the club. He was a great dancer. The guitarist Bill Campbell nicknamed him "Abdul the Dancing Bear."

"He was the quintessential gentleman," recalls Diana Ray, a lifelong friend who helped book the club in its 1980s glory days. "And there are a lot of women who will tell you the same thing. No matter how scrubby you looked, he would always tell you how beautiful you were, ask if you needed anything, made you feel good about yourself. He truly loved women in the most beautiful way, in a way few men in this world can really understand."

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Last year, I shared an evening with Clifford Antone at a dinner party. It wasn't a music function; we were surprised to run into each other. Some of the guests didn't know the man or his story. He was achingly polite that night, made jokes at his own expense, drank water, only water. We laughed about that day on Sixth Street in 1975, how I still hadn't learned the lesson of the blues, but that I was still listening to the sermon.

Clifford starting talking about guitars — the depth of his passion and knowledge was, once again, over my head — but I remember how fondly he talked about the lines of those cool, stylish Gibsons, the big ones. He remarked that he once had a huge guitar collection, more than a hundred in all, but they were gone now. Had to sell 'em. Money issues, you know. "I still have one or two of 'em," he said.

Antone shrugged it all off with a smile — but I couldn't get past it. How sad, I remember thinking, that a man who loves music so much had to part with all these guitars. But in truth, Clifford Antone's life was all about embracing and celebrating treasure — and then learning how to let it go. He'd already said goodbye to Muddy Waters and Clifton Chenier and Albert Collins. And Stevie Ray Vaughan. What were a few guitars?

"He kept the blues alive for us," says Diana Ray. "Now it's our job to carry it on."

"Clifford carried a lot of blues — other people's blues, and he held them close to his chest," says Threadgill's owner Eddie Wilson, who was running the Armadillo World Headquarters when Antone opened his club on Sixth Street. "But the main thing he perfected was in looking for the very best thing to say about folks. It's going to take a whole lot of people to pick up that slack."

In the spirit of duty, I visited Antone's for a few minutes on Thursday night, read the memorial cards, listened to the beat of the band. I took the long way home — making sure to stop by the Guadalupe site on the way.

It's a video store now, and the old entrance has been closed off with cinder blocks and painted white. I saw a scrap of paper in the weeds by the door, thought it was a note. But it was only a credit card receipt.

Standing under the hazy night sky — the scent of barbecue in the distance — I remembered so many heavenly nights in the company of Jimmie and Stevie, Clifton Chenier, Buddy Guy, Jimmy Rogers, Otis Rush, Kim Wilson, James Cotton, Albert Collins, Albert King, and how Clifford Antone and his sermon made it all possible. It was a lonesome night, and I left feeling kind of blue.