10 for 30: Hole In the Wall

Continuing our series on 10 Austin Clubs that have been open at least 30 years

On a great night, the Hole In the Wall was as good as it got. Even though the only live music club on the Drag for almost all it’s 49 years is still open, I’m using past tense because that’s where I’m at now in my mind, coming into Austin only for doctors appointments and Trader Joe’s. “Past tense” is actually a contradiction of terms. Nostalgia is calming, so please allow me to go on.

From ‘84- ‘88 I worked or lived at 2712 B Guadalupe: China Sea Tattoo in the front and Mr. Lucky T-Shirts in the back. After Rollo Banks moved his shop to South Lamar, where El Meson is now, I took over the lease ($275 a month) and slept in a loft bed in the Mr. Lucky’s portion. I rented the front to photographer Bill Leissner for his studio. My entrance was in the back next to Burger King drive-through. Steps up to the elevated delivery door were a pallet on its side. My flop was two blocks north of the Hole and two blocks south of Antone’s, plus the Austin Chronicle, which allowed me to get into those clubs free, was just a block away. Lazy Daisy 24-hour restaurant was across the street. I didn’t realize how perfect my life was.

I was making just $175 a month (and all the free shit I could scrounge) from the Chronicle, but it was the happiest time of my life- until that ho Suzee gave me the heave in ‘87. I should mention here, because she always does, that my fresh ex kindly left me use of her Chevron card so I could live off microwaved burritos across the street. Because they also sold beer, she took her card back after a month. “How could you possibly spend $300 a month on 99-cent burritos?!”

I was at the Hole or Antone’s about five times a week, and probably two of those were great nights, truth be told. Antone’s was embarrassing when it was dead, but there was always something happening at the Hole as long as Alfred was in the kitchen and the game was on TV. This bar introduced Buffalo chicken wings to Austin when it opened in 1974, but by the ‘80s it was all about Todd Greene’s creations, like the Reality chicken-fried steak sandwich and the vegetarian Elfagator melt. Greene, who also drew the framed caricatures on the walls, was Bobby Flay for day drinkers.

The Austin Outhouse (1981-1995), where Flamingo Auto Repair is now, was a bit of a hike from Mr. Lucky’s, plus it wasn’t really my scene in the ‘80s. That was the era of the drunken angel, with Blaze Foley, Jubal Clark, Calvin Russell and Rich Minus regularly playing there, in the former location of the Bentwood Tavern shuffleboard dive. Herman the German was great, but you could see him all over town.

After former Bentwood bartender Chuck Lamb bought the club and brought in bartender Ed Bradford to help with booking, the music was more to my quirky rock taste: the Horsies, Happy Family, T.I., Pocket fishRmen, etc.

Hole booker Steve Hiltz used to scout the Outhouse for bands, and one night in early ‘85 he excitedly returned to tell Hole honcho Doug Cugini about his latest discovery. It was a married couple new to town, who played a kind of bluesy folk with a jambox for a rhythm section. “I thought he’d lost his mind,” said Cugini. “He booked someone who played to a recording. At the Hole?!” A year later, Timbuk 3 was all over the radio with “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades).” The unknown band everyone scratched their head over being included on MTV’s Cutting Edge Austin was the only one to make it in heavy rotation on the channel.

Pat and Barb of Timbuk3. Photo by Karen Messerman.

The Hole In the Wall has seemingly been on the verge of closing since the ‘90s, but it’s been immune to the inevitability of the wrecking ball. My theory is that the mob buried some bodies under the building in the ‘50s, and new construction will dig up the skeletons. How else could you explain the longevity of a scruffy live music venue on prime real estate in the place Forbes named “Best City to Ruin If You Just Care About Money”?

Demise looked eminent in June 2002, when former bartender Debbie Rombach owned it. The closing was front page news and covered by all the local TV news teams. But the club came back a year later, after Austin’s Pizza’s owners bought the building, cleaned it up and recast the Hole to appeal to a broader audience than the daytime stool-flatteners and music fans who had to order over them. Added was a beer garden with a separate bar, so grad students could discuss Eastern philosophy and Vince Young over pints of ale without having to shout over the Rockland Eagles.

Previously, the Hole really wasn’t much of a hangout for UT students. Rather than be part of the Charles Bukowski story unraveling inside the door that still had a baseball bat handle from its years as a softball bar, students would pass by in droves on their way to the Texas Showdown in one direction or Cain and Abel's in the other.

When JD Torian bought Austin’s Pizza in 2005, the Hole was part of the package, but Torian didn’t know any more about how to run a live music venue than his predecessors, so he looked for a buyer. And found a savior in Will Tanner, an El Paso clubowner looking to relocate his young family to Austin.

Tanner has run the Hole with enthusiastic efficiency since February 2008, helping launch a new country music movement led by Clem N’ Clyde’s Whiskey Business, Mike and the Moonpies, Leo Rondeau, Ramsay Midwood, the Beaumonts, the Carper Family and more. Co-owned by former Hole booker Denis O’Donnell, the White Horse could be considered a spinoff club.

But the club’s musical heyday was 1985-1998, which is, coincidentally, the years I was a regular. Playing in the picture window, like some Lower East Side Esther’s Follies, bands came to embrace the Hole as a stage where the in-your-face audience is part of the show. Spoon, Kelly Willis, Buick MacKane, Fastball, Shoulders, Hundredth Monkey, Damnations, Sincola, Neptunes, Ballad Shambles, American People and about a dozen more bands featuring Bill Anderson or Jacob Schulze, are among the many who came out of the Hole.

The Hole’s proximity to “Austin City Limits” tapings made for occasional celebrity drop-ins like Emmylou Harris, shown here with Rosie Flores and McBride.

“This place was the litmus test for bands,” Schulze told me on the presumed final night in June 2002. “You couldn’t move onstage or hear yourself, and chances were pretty good there wouldn’t be much of an audience, but if you couldn’t get up there and rock out and have fun, then you had no business playing music.” Those who couldn’t pull it off onstage were often scathed in instant reviews on the men’s room wall, the closest thing Austin had to a second daily paper.

It’s been 30 years since Don Henley, hidden in a dark corner, jumped onstage to sing “Don Henley Must Die” with a stunned Mojo Nixon. And 20 since Courtney Love comandeered the men’s room for a sniffing session the night before her rambling SXSW interview. It’s been a long time since the entire crowd chased a guitar thief out the door and caught him, or since Dave Grohl had a pitcher of beer poured over his head by a female to get his attention. But the Will Tanner Hole was baptized in notoriety on Christmas night 2010 when a drunken Santa Claus fell through the big front window while doing a karaoke turn.

Doug Sahm was a regular at the Hole’s pool room.

Music was an afterthought at 2538 Guadalupe St., which had been Longhorn Cleaners cleaners for three decades, when the Cuginis- Doug and his parents Orazio and Billie- got a five-year lease on a handshake deal in 1974. They came down from Buffalo when Orazio got a job with defense contractor Tracor, the first Austin-based business to trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

“I just wanted to open a neighborhood bar like we had on every corner in downtown Buffalo,” Doug Cugini said. While Doug was finishing college in Buffalo, his parents went into business together with Cugini’s Truck City Cafes on Ben White and I-35 access road north. The Hole’s first cook came from the truck stop.

“We had the marquee built before we even thought about having music,” Doug said. “It was to advertise our food and to just basically tell everybody ‘We’re Here.’” At $2,500, the marquee was the biggest expense besides the liquor license of $5,000. But those two have paid for themselves- boy, have they ever!.

Up-and-coming painter Bob Dylan replaced the mural of him on the side of the Hole with the one of Elvis found in downtown Tupelo, MS

That first year, Drag buskers John Garza, George Ensle and Stephen Doster convinced Cugini to let them set up inside, and he moved a table from the south wall, so they played facing the bar, 10 feet away. No stage, no p.a. and no shoes, in the case of Garza.

One day an ambitious young singer-songwriter named Nanci Griffith came in and asked for a gig; Cugini gave her a Sunday, which became every Sunday for about a year. She brought her own p.a. and a bass player and demanded that the TV be turned off while she performed. “Nanci was the first act at the Hole who people came to see,” said Cugini. “She was already playing real clubs like Castle Creek and she’d bring in about 40 people, which packed the place.”

The Commandos had the songs to go with the chops.

The stage was built for the 10th anniversary in 1983, with Omar and the Howlers having first privilege. But another band from Hattiesburg, MS would soon OWN the stage.

If you moved to Austin in ‘84, your first “I’m home!” musical moment was the Commandos at the Hole. What a rockin’ scene, with singer Suzy Elkins and guitarist Phareaux Felton, our Carlene Carter and Dave Edmunds. Their originals were so good they sounded like covers, and everybody wanted them to make an album. They did, however not enough people bought it to keep them from moving back to Mississippi after a few years.

The Hole never had a door person- not with Nanci Griffith or Steve Earle or Sterling Morrison (as a member of the Bizarros)- until the Commandos packed the place, with a crowd in the window looking in. One night a sign said $3 cover and only assholes bitched. Three dollars to have major label talent kick your ass from 10 feet away?! When the drinking age went up from 19-21 on September 1, 1986, the Hole charged a cover every weekend and most weeknights.

“The bar and restaurant just barely broke even,” Cugini said. “Our profit came from the arcade in the back room. When the age went up to 21, we lost most of that (game-playing) clientele.” Admission charge became a necessity.

Like most of his oldtimers, Cugini has moved on, but a recent roadtrip to Florida with his 24-year-old daughter pulled him back. “Have you heard this band called Spoon?” she asked, cueing up a favorite new track.

"The old times are great, but we're looking to create some good ol' days of our own," Tanner told me in 2010. The cliche of the new owners of beloved clubs. But sometimes they prove true.

There’s not much to this hole in the wall, Bob Dylan painting notwithstanding, but you have to go back to the Continental Club, which also closed to much fanfare, in 1987, to find an example of a legendary Austin music venue that didn't stay dead, but instead came back strong with a new identity.

"I knew going in that when you run a live music club, you have to find some other payment besides money," said Tanner. "And I get that every night, when you see the interaction between the band and the people who come out to see them." That’s always been the Hole truth.

WATCH: Commandos cover Springsteen (via Edmunds)