1969: Lou Reed shows Austin how to rock on the wild side
Three-night Velvet Underground stand at Vulcan led to One Knite of notoriety
In 1969, the Velvet Underground played three nights (Oct. 23-25) at the Vulcan Gas Company on Congress Avenue. The booking was between shows at End of Cole in Dallas the previous week, and the Matrix in San Francisco a month later, that supplied the tracks to 1969: The Velvet Underground Live. We know the band and audiences had a real good time together because it’s one of the alltime greatest live albums. And Austin got three nights of that, for $2 a ticket.
Having replaced John Cale with Doug Yule on bass, this was Lou Reed’s coming-out tour as frontman, leading the band on several as-yet-unreleased songs as “Rock and Roll,” “Sweet Jane” and “Lisa Says,” and turning the latest LP’s title track “White Light/ White Heat” into an eight-minute guitar freakout.
On an afternoon in the middle of the Vulcan run, Reed spoke to students of forward-thinking English professor Joe Kruppa, who would go on to become dean of the department. Kruppa put together a multimedia presentation to go with the Q&A; pretty out there for a Texas college whose top-ranked football team at the time was still all-white.
But the biggest impact that the Velvets had on Austin did not come at a lecture hall or from the stage; rather it was at a dive bar on Red River that the band and their freak followers took over after the Saturday show. The East Village People apparently went all out to show Austin a thing about decadence, and stories circulated about drag queens, and needles in the bathroom, and rock stars falling down drunk at a bar with a coffin-shaped front door called the One Knite.
Austin’s most eccentric bar was opened in March 1967 by four UT law students: Jerry Loftin, Joe Mermis, Ernie Johnson and Byron Kirby. They kept all the things hanging from the ceiling from when 801 Red River was a junk shop. There was no stage and they very rarely had live music.
After hearing about the VU takeover, UT student Gary Oliver, a budding cartoonist though legally blind, started hanging out at the One Knite, eventually tending bar. When one of the law students graduated and moved on, Oliver bought his share for $600. Two other newly-minted lawyers also sold their shares- to Oliver’s friends, fellow UT students Roddy Howard and Roger Collins, who met through a psilocybin mushroom transaction circa 1968. Still known as Roger Oneknite, even after a career as a drug counselor, Collins figured it would be cheaper to buy a third of the bar than all of his drinks.
The One Knite was already cool, but in late 1970 this new trio made it legendary, by emphasizing live music, and outlaw revelry. They’d lock the doors after last call, and keep the party going. Then, once an hour, they’d pick up all the bottles and unlock the door so anyone who wanted could leave. But most folks stayed for the Hot Knives Party, where they’d put a bunch of marijuana between two sizzling, sputtering, red hot blades and the whole joint would get high on second-hand smoke.
The new One Knite had solo acts in the beginning- Cody Hubach, Bill Neely, Blind George, etc.- on a stage that was four tabletops nailed together. But after Jimmie Vaughan and Doyle Bramhall’s band Storm started playing there in ‘71, everything changed. A stage was built, and “Stormy Monday” packed the joint every Monday night for five years. It was the first time W.C. Clark, then a guitarist for Joe Tex, had ever seen a white blues band- and they sounded authentic. W.C. started Southern Feeling with girlfriend Angela Strehli on vocals to play the One Knite, which paid a lot less than Joe Tex but was way more fun. .
There was a lot of jamming going on, which led to the births of Freda and the Firedogs, Greezy Wheels, and the Cobras- essential Austin acts in the early ‘70s. Ray Hennig would drop off Stevie Ray Vaughan every night after the kid spent all day playing guitars at Hennig’s Heart of Texas Music. This was long before Clifford Antone opened his first blues club on Sixth in 1975.
“No club west of I-35 had such a funky East Austin feel like the One Knite,” said Cleve Hattersley of Greezy Wheels. “People didn’t care who was playing,” said Marcia “Freda” Ball. “They’d come to the One Knite to hang out.” You get turned on to a lot of good music that way.
“It was just so wide open, with a real cast of characters,” recalled Wayne Nagel, a local booking agent and band manager. With a craps game often breaking out on the pool table, “anything goes” was anything but an empty cliche at the One Knite- a fitting name this many years later because remembrances almost always begin with the words, “One night . . .” One night the Banditos decided to have a little fun with the band Dirty Leg, requiring each member to allow a gnarly, teeth-missing, biker mama to give them a big wet kiss if they wanted to get back in after a break. One night a touring British band came in during a Storm set and asked if they could jam, but when they said they weren’t a blues band, the members of Pink Floyd were denied the stage and sulked off to the dark side of the club.
One night, well almost every night, the men in blue were waiting to corral the OK gang, once hauling 14 employees and customers off to jail in a paddy wagon. It was a one-block drive to police headquarters. “They were trying to run us out of business,” said Collins. Sometimes the cops would barge in two or three times a night, checking IDs and looking for drugs. They couldn’t stand those hippies flaunting their radical lifestyle right across the street. Collins kept a log in 1973 that showed his club was raided 150 times over a three-month period. That was after the One Knite put on the blowout “Last Bash on the Hill” off City Park Road, which infuriated authorities when 15,000 showed up for the free show, many ditching their cars on the side of 2222 to see the 13th Floor Elevators, Storm, Freda and the Firedogs, and surprise guest Willie Nelson.
It would be the IRS that finally put out the joint. “We spent all our money on partying,” Collins said. Well behind on back taxes, the club held a benefit in December ’75 starring a red hot Willie Nelson (whose first Picnic was inspired by “Last Bash.”) Tickets were $2.50 - the first time the One Knite ever charged cover- but even though the club was jammed more than triple the legal capacity of 120 people, proceeds were limited because nobody could get to the bar. The One Knite closed for good on July 4, 1976, with the owners bringing live music back to the Continental Club in 1979. People often forget that the Continental, which had Stevie Ray Vaughan every Wednesday, was rockin’ before Mark Pratz took it over.
Would the One Knite have happened the way it did if Lou Reed and company didn’t get the town buzzin’? Would Gary Oliver, Roddy Howard and Roger Collins have even known about the place? Yeah, they probably would’ve eventually stumbled on in. Or found somewhere else to open a wild-ass bar.
Jimmie Vaughan credits piano thumper Blind George McLain, who stomped out a beat in his stocking feet, with showing him that the One Knite could be a blues bar. And like the Banditos, the Vaughans claimed 801 Red River as home turf. That was the genesis of a blues scene that gave the world Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Marcia Ball, W.C. Clark and so many more.
The Armadillo World Headquarters, which opened in August 1970, gets most of the credit for Austin being known as a music town, deservedly so. But the scruffy downtown joints like the Vulcan, Split Rail Inn, Chequered Flag, and the One Knite are where the Austin club scene, the one that lives on today, was busy being born.
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Bill Bentley on Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground who moved to Austin after the band broke up. They were in an Austin bar band together before the other members voted to replace Morrison with a blues guitarist.
The Vulcan Gas Company opened for the Armadillo.
That was so excellent, Michael, one of the best of your great chapters on Austin music history. I'm grateful that you're talking about the contributions of Roger Collins, Roddy Howard and Wayne Nagel. One of the criminally-neglected aspects of Austin music history is how those guys also took over management of the Continental Club in the mid-1970s and created a scene there on South Congress. Their tenure at the Continental often gets overlooked, but I can testify that the scene there was smoking hot. Wayne corraled me on the sidewalk outside of Raul's in early 1978 and convinced me that The Skunks should play there, and that turned out to be a great idea. I, too, have several "One night at the One Knite..." stories, including one in which a good friend left the club after our birthday gathering for him and promptly drove his car the wrong way, right into a DWI. I and several of my friends testified at his trial, claiming that he was "kind of a crazy guy and could easily be mistaken for being drunk," and despite the preposterousness of that , he was acquitted. The One Knite was a hell of bar.
I had a copy of the Velvet Underground poster, actually a handbill. It was printed on the back of an Oat Willies poster, or maybe the other way around. It's in the Wittliff Collections in San Marcos now.
Great story. Thanks.