XL Cover Story: Boonie Tunes

Far from downtown Austin, music thrives in roadhouses and restaurants

» Photo Gallery: Boonie Tunes

At Poodie's: Stickers decorate the bass of the Troubadillos' B.B. Morse.

At Poodie's: Dave Orr sports a Willie T-shirt under his overalls while playing pool

Randy Williams dances to the sounds of blues band Boonetown at T.C.'s Lounge, one of Austin's last real live juke joints.

The Christmas lights stay up and the fists stay down year-round at T.C.'s.

At T.C.'s Lounge: Sam Pulley, right, lays down the beat for Boonetown.

The felt is green, the music's blue and so is he: A pool player named Blue lines up a shot at T.C.'s Lounge on Webberville Road. The club dates to the 1940s, when it was the Lincoln Drive-In.

Price Porter wails on the harmonica during a show by the resident Troubadillos at Poodie's Hilltop Bar & Grill, where you never know who might stop by to play.

Alice's Restaurant draws a crowd in Niederwald with good music and creative cooking.

At Alice's Restaurant: Server Owl Morrison, right, joins Ky Hote for a song.

Graphic by Linda Scott/AA-S 1. Alice's Restaurant, 14100 Camino Real in Niederwald, 376-2782 2. Cypress Creek Cafe, 320 Wimberley Square in Wimberley, (512) 847-2515 3. Nutty Brown Cafe, 12225 U.S. 290 W., 301-4648 4. Poodie's Hilltop, 22308 Texas 71 W. in Spicewood, 264-0318 5. T.C.'s Lounge, 1413 Webberville Road, 926-2200

In a dark, cozy, club hidden off a main downtown square, jazz mandolinist Paul Glasse and guitarist Mitch Watkins coax countless standing ovations on Glasse's first gig back after a horrid car accident.

A corrugated attachment to a fine home-cooking establishment hosts a collection of Old West/new age characters calling themselves the Slaves Of Utopia, who perform a bluegrass-flavored "Hill Hippie Heaven."

Meanwhile, in a juke joint that progress thankfully forgot, a band of white blues purists plays a Freddie King song for a predominantly black, middle-aged crowd which may have heard King sing the original version in a similar setting three decades ago.

The old Austin of Spellman's, the Split Rail, Charlie's Playhouse and emmajoe's is still alive; you just have to fill up your car, call for directions and find it. The musical spirit that moves has, in some cases, moved away.

Places to drive for

Sweet "Austalgia" lives on in Spicewood, 22 miles west of town, where Willie Nelson's stage manager Randall "Poodie" Locke opened the coolest country music beer joint in Texas seven years ago, so he and his crew would have someplace to hang out when they're not on tour. Poodie's Hilltop Bar & Grill (22308 Texas 71 W., 264-0318) is a place where there are more old guys with braided ponytails than there aren't; you wouldn't want to judge a Willie Nelson lookalike contest at Poodie's unless you want to tick off a dozen life-toughened hombres. Willie himself has played Poodie's a dozen times, once billed as "Phood" after hanging out with members of Phish.

"When we're out with Willie, we can't wait to get back to the Hilltop," Locke says, as he sits at a laptop, e-mailing equipment specifications to Australian Customs in preparation for an upcoming tour Down Under. "I'm dreaming about these cheeseburgers on the drive back. But then when we're home a couple weeks, we can't wait to get back out on the road."

Hmmm. Maybe there's a song in there somewhere.

Norman Draper, a retired school teacher and part-time lifeguard from Atlantic City, loads up his van once a year and builds his vacation around visits to Poodie's. "This is a special place," says Draper, a self-professed music freak, who rattles off the names of Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, Leon Russell and the Troubadillos as some of his favorite shows at the 200-capacity club. "But it's not just the music," he says. "The first time I stepped into this place, they didn't know me from a bag of marbles, and when they found out it was my first time here, everyone at the bar came over and introduced themselves. You won't find that in New Jersey."

We all know about Gruene Hall and John T. Floore's Country Store, the meccas of musical road trips, but the cool, pioneer vibe also lives in Niederwald, about 20 miles southeast of Austin, where 33-year-old former Black Cat Lounge regular Nina Marlow has opened Alice's Restaurant (14100 Camino Real, 376-2782), which singer Mandy Mercier likens to "a combination of East Side Cafe and the old Taco Flats."

"Our motto is good service, great food, better music," says Nina, who also raises goats. "Food is a big thing with us, but so is the music. They sorta go together -- musicians loving what they do and cooks and hosts loving what they do."

On a recent Sunday afternoon, when all-you-can-eat brunch is served from noon to 3 p.m., the restaurant's three small rooms are filled with well-dressed church goers in their 60s and 70s as well as young couples from the city and more than a few Hill Country hippies in overalls with beards down to their waists. A handwritten sign puts the price for the buffet (which includes chef Walter Schumacher's signature thick pork chops with green sauce) as $10.95, but there's a sliding scale -- $8.95 for vegetarians and $5 for "ankle-biters, liars, gypsies, tramps & thieves."

Marlow and Schumacher say they get their recipes -- such staples as pinto beans, mashed potatoes and green beans are prepared with culinary creativity -- from all over the place. "You could say our kitchen was built on the Food Network," Schumacher says with a laugh. "The shrimp skewers you're eating; that came from Wolfgang Puck on the 'Iron Chef.' "

The Cypress Creek Cafe (320 Wimberley Square, 512-847-2515) in Wimberley looks like any other upscale diner in a strip mall, with its four-page menu offering everything from steaks and chicken dishes to burgers and sandwiches. But go down a long hallway, turn right at the black curtain and you'll find a jewel of a 90-capacity folk/blues/jazz club tucked into what used to be this former hotel's banquet hall. On a recent Sunday afternoon, diners in the front room had no idea that a Dixieland jazz band was playing in the back.

Bruce Calkins, who opened the Cypress Creek Cafe in 1981, says he added the club because there was no other place around where he could hear the kind of music he likes. "Our back room is a listening room. The audience is usually so attentive that it's like church," he says. "You can hear people breathing." The room is reminiscent of a Greenwich Village folk club, with the audience seated right up to the edge of the small stage.

"This town is entirely unique because you don't have to drive through Wimberley to get to anywhere else," Calkins says. "This is a true destination, so you've got all these people from all over who want to be here." The Cypress Creek cross-section runs the gamut from laborers to lawyers, hippies to honchos, dudes in Dockers to dawdling dowagers, and the music is equally all over the map. The club's recent 13th annual Wimberley Winter Jazz Festival attracted an older, more affluent crowd than the upcoming Crawfish Festival, featuring ragin' Cajun Wayne Toups, will on April 23.

There's also been a bit of a crowd shift at T.C.'s Lounge (1413 Webberville Road, 926-2200), in far East Austin, of late. The hip art crowd, who are turning East Austin into their own private Williamsburg in small doses, have found out about T.C.'s, one of the last of Austin's real live juke joints. This place dates back to the 1940s, when it was the Lincoln Drive-In. Thomas "T.C." Perkins bought it in 1979, when it was called the Blue Flame. If these walls could talk, chile ...

Dressed in Christmas tree lights year-round, with a clientele that had been almost exclusively African American until recently, T.C.'s is a trip back to the days when Johnny Taylor and Ike and Tina Turner ruled the jukeboxes. Blues just sounds better here, like on a recent Wednesday night, when a spunky middle-aged black woman with a mouth full of gold teeth and a vest made from one-dollar bills grinded slowly by herself on the dance floor as the Leghounds played a slow blues. This is a place where the waitress, wearing a T-shirt that says "Sexy Baby" in glitter, might not come around for half an hour, but you don't mind going to the bar yourself because somewhere along the way you're going to see or hear something you won't get at Antone's.

That's far east. Go all the way to the other side of Travis County and you'll find quite a different scene at the Nutty Brown Cafe (12225 U.S. 290 W., 301-4648) halfway between Oak Hill and Dripping Springs. The Nutty Brown prides itself on the all-natural food (especially the Kobe beef chicken-fried steak), but music on the outdoor patio is where you'll find the magic. When owner Mike Farr bought the restaurant in 2002, the place was doing great business with cover bands. But with a wife and two kids, living almost 20 miles out of Austin, the 36-year-old Farr couldn't get his fill of the music scene he grew up on, so he decided to import some of his favorite bands, including W.C. Clark and the Derailers, and found that many other Travis/Hays border dwellers were also starved for quality original music.

"A band like Reckless Kelly may play to 300-400 people in Austin," says Farr. "They come out here to play our patio and they'll have 1,500 people going nuts."

During the winter, the Friday and Saturday night shows, plus the Sunday brunch sets, are indoors. Patio season kicks off with Cornell Hurd on March 18 and the Eggmen on the 19th. KGSR's wildly popular "Live At the Nut" series starts April 9 with the Gourds.

Scenes away from herds

When you're the only live music club for miles around, you become a scene unto yourself. Your customers become the cast and, in the case of Poodie's, the wait staff becomes the stars. Behind the bar are Lisa and Tara, strikingly beautiful, but even more importantly, they possess fast hands and attentive eyes. There's also day bartender Jimmy Lee Jones, whom Poodie met more than 20 years ago in San Diego, when Jones was a Marine drill sergeant who used to get up and sing fast songs ("Auctioneer's Song," "I've Been Everywhere") with local country bands.

The sign may say Poodie's, but Jones, who hosts the Wednesday night open mike, is the one who holds court nightly. On a recent Tuesday, where the resident Troubadillos play everything from "Friend Of the Devil" to Lefty Frizzell, Jones is showing a group of regulars the stitches on his finger from an earlier adventure slicing limes. "I told the doctor I had a gig tomorrow; 'Will I be able to play the piano?' " Jones says, as a few stragglers drift closer to catch the punch line. "And he said 'No problem.' I thought, well, that's cool. I never could play the piano before."

You never know who's going to show up at Poodie's. Garth Hudson of The Band flew in from Paris to play SXSW last year and felt that he'd just been getting warmed up when the 40-minute showcase was over. He ended up at Poodie's the next night and played for three hours with a pickup band. Once regulars were stunned to see Howard Stern's producer Gary "Baba Booey" Dell'Abate. Videos for Pat Green and Big & Rich were filmed here.

If you weren't looking for Poodie's, you'd drive right by, which is part of the appeal. You have to want to be there.

Poodie says his joint's "anything goes" atmosphere -- on this night there's an impromptu nine-ball pool tournament -- reminds him of the old Soap Creek, just off Bee Cave Road. "You'd have to drive way out in the country, at least back then there wudn't nothing else out there, and go up this winding dirt road, and you felt like you were invisible from the authorities," he says. "When we get people driving all the way out here from Austin, I have to laugh. I can't tell you how many times, back in the old days, when someone would say, 'Let's go to Soap Creek' and I'd go, 'Nah, it's too far.' Compared to this place, Soap Creek was downtown."

More musicians' faves

To save on gas, we canvassed several musicians to tell us where they like to play out of town or, in the case of country singer John Arthur Martinez, in his hometown of Marble Falls. "It's really an ignored scene, but there are all sorts of great places to listen to music here," he says, listing the refurbished Uptown Marble Theater (218 Main St., 888-512-SHOW) and the Old Oak Ice House (307 Main St., 830-798-0777) among his faves.

Monte Warden loves the songwriter vibe at Luckenbach's upper-scale offshoot, Hondo's On Main (312 W. Main St., 830-997-1633) in Fredericksburg. A new rustic hot spot closer to town is the Cajun-themed Evangeline Cafe (8106 Brodie Lane, 282-2586), which sports candles of some of the cooler musicians from Texas and Louisiana, and first-rate étouffée and gumbo. The joint seems partial to hot pickers, as the likes of Jesse Taylor and Redd Volkaert have played there recently. Mercier also swears by B.B. Rovers (12636 Research Blvd., 335-9504), which brings a slice of soul to a North Austin strip mall, and the new Hill Country Opry and Grill (3044 Junction Highway, 830-782-OPRY) in Kerrville. Can't forget Hanover's in Plugerville (108 E. Main St., 512-670-9617) and Cheatham Street Warehouse in San Marcos (119 Cheatham St., 512-353-3777) which have helped Austin musicians pay bills for years.

Purposely left off this overview were country music and Tejano dancehalls, which have been well-established as out-of-the-way venues. We'll save those for another roundup.