Cover Story: Embracing the Cactus

For 25 years, audiences at this intimate venue have been all ears for the like of Robert Earl Keen, Lyle Lovett and Townes Van Zandt

By Brad Buchholz
January 29, 2004

The Cactus Café is the ghost of Townes Van Zandt, haggard and thin, maybe sober, probably not, slouched on a tall stool in the middle of the stage, somehow tangled in the strap of his guitar. He is fighting demons and summoning angels, explaining to us how songs can fly to you through open windows ... and at last singing that transcendent line about the sound of raindrops on a conga drum.

The Cactus Café is Scottish folk singer Ed Miller standing on the same stage, musing about bodies of water as metaphors for separation — and an audience who thinks it the most pertinent banter in the world. The Cactus is the memory of a young Lyle Lovett and cellist John Hagen finishing another free show with "Closing Time." The Cactus is gypsy-flamenco ensemble Rajamani inviting the audience to dance. It is Austin singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson leading it in a singalong for peace. It is bluegrass icon Bill Monroe leading it in prayer.

Click here to see a collection of posters from the Cactus Café.

See a show at the Cactus Café. The Cactus Café is Alejandro Escovedo at the end of a midnight set — leaving the stage and leading his band, violin and cello and all, into the audience to serenade us with a goodnight song. It is Butch Hancock singing "Leo and Leona" and "Pancho and Lefty" and "Split and Slide," and "Own and Own," considering the sacred and the profane, mixing existential tongue twisters with some very bad jokes. What do you call a bear that's proficient at using the Internet? A virtual-oso, of course. What a planet ...

The Cactus Café is a live music club, warm and welcoming, the most intimate listening room you will find in Texas. In a town renowned for its funky and audacious music venues — The Armadillo! Liberty Lunch! Stubb's! The Broken Spoke! The Continental Club! — this public café on the ground floor of the University of Texas student union is as understated as a whisper. Yet the Cactus stands out as the place to savor acoustic music, an Austin institution that in February celebrates its 25th anniversary with a month of all-star shows featuring everyone from Shawn Colvin to Robert Earl Keen to Loudon Wainwright III.

"The Cactus is a sacred place for a singer-songwriter," says Ray Wylie Hubbard, one of the Cactus' most popular draws during the past year. "But it's not folk church, either. It's friendly. From the moment you walk in, you feel history in there. You feel a bond with the audience, something that says, 'We're all on the same side. We feel the music.' It's like that line from the old Van Zandt tune: We're all here for the sake of the song."

To know the Cactus is to love it, provided you can get past some of its prickly little ground rules. The Cactus means no smoking, no easy parking, no credit cards, no talking over the music (a big one), no reserved seats, no trendy drinks at the bar. They'll happily draw you a pint of Guinness at the Cactus. But don't even ask the bartender for a Red Bull-and-vodka or the latest low-carb beer.

The Cactus Café is a spare and simple room, concrete walls and sublime acoustics, burgundy stage curtain and round wooden tables, small cactus plants set against wooden window shutters. There are 150 chairs, maximum. So if you want a prime seat for show that may sell out, you'd better show up an hour before the show — and wait in line, outside the door.

It can seem like work, going to the Cactus Café. But investment is central to its aura. The people who come out for a show want to be there, and they really come to listen — which makes the shows all the more special. Music is golden at the Cactus, and so is the atmosphere. If a patron orders a margarita during a set of music, the bartender will actually shake the drink in another room as a gesture of respect for the musicians on stage.

"The customers. I think they're the real story of the Cactus," says Susan Svedeman, who has worked behind the bar for 12 years, adding it's a rare night when she doesn't recognize at least half the people in the audience. "The people who come here are intelligent, cultured and well-mannered, and the fact that they are willing to seek out something different means a lot to me. They're not about Top 40 or watching TV. They want to come out and see something unique, something real.


Photo by Amber Novak for AA-S

After more than 20 years at the Cactus, Griff Luneburg has left his imprint -- literally and figuratively -- on the club. "At the Cactus, you're right there. You sit close to the performer. You can feel the emotion in the songs. This is no chain restaurant. You didn't choose to come to some place that's all shiny and plastic-y. You came to feel something, and that's what you get at the Cactus."

Living a dream

Griff Luneburg is the 46-year-old caretaker of the Cactus Café: its manager, its booking agent and its creative conscience for more than 22 years. Griff's wavy blond mane gives him a faintly leonine aura. But he's a gentle soul, self-effacing to a fault, forever devoted to the beauty of poetry in song.

We meet him now in the magnificent shamble that is his backstage office. He's sitting at his desk, talking on the phone, tilting backward in his chair in such a way that he's able to prop his foot against the wall. Look closely to where his boot rests. Griff has been at the Cactus for so many years that he's scuffed all the way through the Sheetrock and rubbed his footprint down to wood support beam.

"I can truly say I've lived my dream," says Griff, whose destiny was forged at age 17 when he bought an eight-track tape of Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" — just something to play in the car on the way to the beach. "I used to say, 'You know what I want to do with my life? I want to run a singer-songwriter's club just like Gertie's Folk City, where Dylan came out of in his old Greenwich Village days.' And here I am!"

The walls of Griff's office — and the Cactus itself — are jammed with posters that celebrate the glory of the Cactus. Ralph Stanley. Richard Thompson. Gillian Welch. Iris DeMent. Patty Griffin. A lot of the posters are pieces of art. But some of the vintage ones with hand-scratched block letters tell a bigger story: "Lucinda Williams, solo. Her guitar. Her songs." Griff points to a Nanci Griffith poster. "She was the first artist to ever play for a cover charge here." October 1982. Students got in for a buck, the public paid $2.

Although the Cactus Café is celebrating a 25-year anniversary, the room is as old as the student union, which was built in the 1930s. In those early days, it was known as the Chuckwagon — a student diner with stainless steel bar stools encircling a U-shaped chrome counter. Eventually it became a student lounge; some Austin music fans remember seeing a very young Willis Alan Ramsey playing the room several years before the union renovation of 1974.

Griff started working behind the bar in 1981, when the Cactus was a night venue for cover bands. But in '82, he took over the booking and began showcasing singer-songwriters. And while Nanci Griffith and Lucinda Williams and Townes Van Zandt were its early staples, the Cactus became a training ground for a new wave of Texas singer-songwriters — Lyle Lovett, Darden Smith, Jimmy LaFave, Robert Earl Keen — all of whom started out playing for free on weekday nights.





Cactus Cafe photos

This Cactus calendar from March 1984 exemplifies the range of esteemed Austin singer-songwriters who played at the club, from Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams to Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett. Keen says that the photo below -- which he believes captures one of the first nights he set foot on the Cactus stage -- is among his most cherished possessions. From left, that's Keen, James Gilmer, Denise Franke, Lovett, Brian Wood and John Hagen. 'My guess is that we're singing "Ain't No Cane Left on the Brazos," ' says Keen. In the beginning, Lovett would play for no charge, three sets a night, before a handful of friends. "I'd pay him $90," recalls Griff, who graduated from UT with a degree in government but never really left campus. "He was a gracious, Southern gentleman with an urban flair. He never really drew anybody at first, but he was so good, you know? By the time we first charged a cover for him, I think he was drawing 50 or 60 people, on a regular basis, without a cover. So we decided, OK." The charge: $3.

"If you were trying to get the word out that you had something to say as a singer-songwriter, you had to play the Cactus Café," recalls Keen, who will play three Cactus shows in February, his first visit to the club in a decade. "It's no exaggeration to say there was a family atmosphere in there. My sister and I shared a house with Griff's girlfriend, Mary, in those days. We'd go down to the Cactus together all the time on our nights off, just to shoot the breeze."

The Cactus' reputation as a listening room grew as quickly as its reputation for staging top talent. Griff never put up a "No Talking" sign, like you might find at the famous Birchmere in Virginia. The Cactus audience just seemed to pick up on it.

"I like artists. I understand what's important to them," says Griff. "I try to put myself in an empathetic place and accommodate an environment where they can do music from their heart on stage. And people do leave their heart up there, man."

Keen, who matured as a songwriter and performer on the Cactus stage, says the audience there taught him to write songs for real people — as opposed to worrying about which Nashville superstar might want to record them. The Cactus taught him it was safe to take a risk, to sing from his heart, to breathe, even to eat a hamburger on stage for a laugh if the spirit moved him.

"More than any other place, the Cactus taught me about songs and how songs work," he says. "Because it was such a listening audience, I would play a new song and know from the reaction if the song was gonna fly or just be a flash in the pan. It got me thinking, 'Will these songs work for this audience?' It shaped the way I think today. It shaped the way I still write today."

"Whenever I write a new song, I totally imagine the Cactus," adds singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson, picking up on Keen's thought. "I see the faces in the audience — supportive, psyched, ready to go down every avenue you might take them. I totally imagine that song, and how will that present to those people. 'Will they love it? Will they get it?' The visualization helps me in the writing. The Cactus is absolutely
the room that I imagine a song being played for the first time."

On to Part II