Rome and Raul's made West Campus the place to be
Rome Inn blues and Raul's punk moved the center to West Campus
ROME INN
Antone’s is Austin’s internationally renowned “Home of the Blues,” but from 1978 until its final blowout on April 20, 1980, the Rome Inn had the hottest blues scene in town. Stevie Vaughan and Lou Ann Barton played every Sunday and Paul Ray’s Cobras had Tuesdays, but the hottest night was “Blue Monday,” with the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
An Italian restaurant built in the former Shipwash Grocery building, the Rome started having live music in the mid-’70s, with such acts as Balcones Fault, Alvin Crow, Rusty Wier, Billy Joe Shaver and Doug Sahm (Bob Dylan stopped by to see Sahm in May 1976 on a day off from the Rolling Thunder tour) bringing the Soap Creek sound to 29th and Rio Grande. But the joint really found its identity later with the blues.
“Nobody would go down to Antone’s to see the T-Birds,” said former club owner Steve Dean, whose AusTex Lounge (at the current Magnolia Cafe location on South Congress) was a hub for roots rock. “But when C-Boy gave them Mondays, they slowly built it up to the point that if you didn’t get there by 8 o’clock, you might not get in.”
Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top came with a busload of friends from Houston about once a month when he wasn’t on tour. Gibbons was forbidden to jam anywhere by manager Bill Ham (the penalty was $25,000), so took a seat and took in the “fiend scene” he wrote about on “Lowdown in the Street” from ZZ Top’s 1979 album Degüello: “So roam on in, it ain’t no sin to get low down in the street.” That same year, the T-Birds paid tribute to the lovable man in the sweat-stained blue T-shirt with slow harp instrumental “C-Boy’s Blues” from their debut LP Girls Go Wild.
Louis Charles “C-Boy” Parks, a hard-working old black cook with a love in his heart for people, is what made the Rome Inn special. Parks didn’t own the Rome, where he came to work in the kitchen in 1967. But after it changed to a live music venue, he was eventually promoted to manager because all the musicians loved him. And he loved them. “C-Boy would crack you up, like how he’d cover his crotch with his hands whenever he passed a microwave,” said his unlikely protégé Steve Wertheimer, an accounting student who lived in the neighborhood. “He was just always having fun, and just always working.”
The blues scene integrated Austin before the Civil Rights Act, with UT students going to Charlie’s Playhouse on East 11th to dance to Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets in the late ‘50s, and bands like Clarence Smith (Sonny Rhodes) & the Daylighters backing white singer Joyce Harris in 1962. The heroes of white blues musicians like Bill Campbell, the Vaughan brothers, Lewis Cowdrey and Angela Strehli were old black bluesman who looked and talked like C-Boy, giving the Rome a lift of authenticity. It was a room of mutual respect.
Parks died in 1991 at age 66, but not before he saw his student flourish in the club business with the Continental. Then, in 2014, Wertheimer fulfilled a longtime promise to himself by opening a soul-themed bar seven blocks up South Congress from the Continental. It’s called “C-Boy’s,” of course, after the man who worked two fulltime jobs a day (including fry cook at the Nighthawk), but always came from back behind the bar, no matter how busy he was, to dance to “Mathilda.”
After the Rome Inn closed, the club on 29th Street had a brief resurrection as punk club Studio 29. It was also a bookstore for a couple years, but since 1987 it’s been Texas French Bread.
Watch this video of Stevie to understand what was going on at the Rome.
RAUL’S
On Dec. 31, 1977, Roy “Raul” Gomez, Joseph Gonzales and Bobby Morales opened a bar at 2610 Guadalupe Street, formerly called Gemini’s, where they wanted to feature Chicano music. But the Sex Pistols made for other plans. Nine days after Raul’s opened, the British punk rock sensation played Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio and every cutting edge music fan from Austin was in the crowd thinking “I could do that, if I only had the guts.”
Three who did were Kathy Valentine, Carla Olson and Marilyn Dean who started a band called the Violators. Future Go-Go Valentine wanted it to be an all-girl band, but they couldn’t find a bass player, so she enlisted her friend Jesse Sublett, who was working with guitarist Eddie Munoz on a band called the Skunks. Joe King Carrasco, who played Raul’s in a Tex-Mex band called El Molino, had told them about the dive on the Drag, which actually wasn’t doing so well with the Chicano format. The target audience just wanted to go home with a six-pack after the whistle blew.
The kids approached Gonzales, who figured what the hell and put them on a bill with Bill Maddox’s art-rock band Project Terror in January ’78. It didn’t take long before Austin had its very own CBGBs. This sort of thing was happening all over the country, but because Austin was already a live music city with a standard of aptitude, the bands were really good, not just drunks stumbling around onstage and taunting the audience, though there was some of that, too. The Big Boys and the Dicks, lead by overweight queens, were like no other bands in the country. Then you had the art rock of Terminal Mind and F Systems, the melodic quirkiness of Standing Waves and D-Day, and the flamboyant singer- focused bands like the Next with Ty Gavin and the Jitters of Billy Pringle.
The Raul’s scene started getting a national rep with “The Huns Bust” of Sept. 1978, when cops mistook staged chaos onstage for real violence, and started busting heads. Six clubgoers, including Austin Chronicle publisher Nick Barbaro and Richard Dorsett from Inner Sanctum records, were taken to jail. With Rolling Stone writing about the incident, Raul’s was on the radar, as touring acts like Patti Smith and Elvis Costello popped in to jam, then up-and-coming acts like Psychedelic Furs, the Cramps and Black Flag started getting booked.
“If you cut your hair short, wore black and hung out at Raul’s you became a target for frat boys and hippie rednecks alike,” said Roland Swenson, the SXSW director whose entree into show biz was managing Standing Waves. “That bonded the kids in the scene in a way I’ve not seen since.”
Punk rock was a gang, a family, for those who felt left out.
When I was living in Hawaii, “the Rock,” looking for a town to escape to, I got a photo in the mail from my friend Andrella, who pulled guitarist’s girlfriend duty- running lights for the Cramps. It showed shirtless singer Lux Interior in the middle of a delirious packed crowd in full-on punk and rockabilly regalia. “This is TEXAS!” she wrote on the back, as if she’d seen penguins in the desert. I remembered that Lester Bangs lived in Austin. But by the time I got here, Lester had died and Raul’s was closed. One had lived to be 33, the other just 3 1/3, closing April 1, 1981.
Nobody ever called the Huns a great band, but this group of Radio-Television-Film students was responsible for the club’s most notorious night. “We sounded like the Sex Pistols with Sid on every instrument,” Huns drummer Tom Huckabee wrote in the liner notes of a 1995 reissue of The Huns Live at the Palladium 1979.
Led by flamboyant singer Phil Tolstead, the Huns debuted at Raul’s with great anticipation of chaos on 9/19/79. Someone threw a trash can onstage and it got crazy fast, with the audience becoming part of the show. When beat cop Steve Bridgewater sauntered in, Tolstead fixed on him and directed the lyrics of “Eat Death Scum” at the man in blue. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” Tolstead pointed at the cop and the cop pointed back. Some naughty words were said and the officer took the stage to arrest the singer for obscenity. And then he kissed him: Tolstead full on the lips of the cop, as he was being handcuffed. A melee ensued and within minutes there were 10 police cars outside.
Punk rock in Texas?! That night put Austin on the map as a place where other types of music besides “progressive country” was played. It also established Austin as a town that doesn’t take itself too seriously. “I saw a cop walk onstage and I couldn’t believe it,” Huckabee said in the Daily Texan. “We said on posters, ‘No Police.'”
The Daily Texan article was picked up all over the country and in NME. Riots at punk shows were big news, as America wondered what the hell happened to white kids. One of those who read the Rolling Stone story was a high schooler in Del Valle named David Yow, who joined the growing number of Raul’s regulars after the bust. “It changed the way I thought about music,” Yow has said. There was something going on with rock and roll and lines were being drawn. Many stepped over to the Raul’s side 36 years ago and never came back. Or, like Phil Tolstead, a soldier in Jerry Falwell’s religious right crusade in the mid-‘80s and a regular on The 700 Club, they went the other way.
Raul’s gave you the opportunity to show who you really are. Club Foot followed, on E. 4th St. behind the Greyhound station, with better bookings (U2, Metallica, James Brown) and production. Raul’s, which closed the first time in Feb. ‘80, didn’t even have a house p.a. until Steve Hayden resurrected it two months later for one more year.
Besides sprucing up the dive, Hayden forbid cover songs because he didn’t want to pay BMI’s music licensing fee. His version of Raul’s was more punk, less new wave, with such regulars as the Dicks, the Big Boys, MDC and the Offenders.
The Huns bust wasn’t the only notorious occurrence at 2610 Guadalupe St. In 1965 it was Roy’s Lounge, owned by segregationist Roy Eazor, who refused to let Blacks into the club, defying the Civil Rights Act. Roy’s was hit with a code violation and picketed for a month, but Eazor stayed open and dropped beer prices 50% for those who
crossed the Student Interracial Committee picket line. Eazor opened the private Waterloo Club at 2610 in 1966 to legally prohibit Blacks.
The address was a revolving home of clubs in the ‘50s- Moulin Rouge, the Beachcomber, the Sky Room (with Bobby Doyle) and Touchdown Lounge- and the ‘70s- Buffalo Gap, the second location of the Hungry Horse, Sunshine’s Party, then the Gemini Club before Raul’s.
Anyone know what band Stevie was playing with in the first photo? thanks
Great Stuff Michael