Behind Bars #1: The Stocktons of Beerland
Donya and Randall turned an old furniture storage annex into a garage band paradise and led the East East Sixth Street charge
If the 2000 Presidential election had been decided the night it was supposed to, garage-rock paradise Beerland might’ve never opened at 711 1/2 Red River Street. This is the story of a young couple who were so broke, so desperate to create their dream live music venue, that they scooped up early-run newspapers of the Austin American Statesman in November 2000 and sold them on eBay. They were paying $1,500 a month rent on a vacant building for a year, as they went through permit hell with the city, so cashflow was vital.
When Beerland finally opened in June 2001, it could’ve very well been named “GORE WINS!”
The “gore” part fit, with such savage bands as Riverboat Gamblers, Dikes of Holland, Eastside Suicides, Hex Dispensers. Cherubs, OBN’III’s, Golden Boys, Manikin, Crack Pipes, Apeshits, Ugly Beats, Harlem, the Kodiaks and A Giant dog ripping body parts from that stage during its 18-year run. Twas booked by Max Meehan, who posted brutally hilarious signs at the entrance.
If there was a crowd at the bar, musicians always got served first. They had to get onstage. One night the Dirty Sweets were playing and Randall handed the singer Penny a Tecate (they always knew what you drank) over three people. “How did she get served before me?,” one guy said. “I’ve been standing here forever!” Randall asked “Do you know who that is?” The guy confessed that he didn’t. “That’s why you didn’t get served yet.” At that point the band kicked in, and Penny was front and center, the star of the show!
Donya and Randall opened seven clubs or restaurants in town since the first one didn’t traumatize them out of the business entirely. Golden rule #1: Do unto whatever you have to do to stay alive in the volatile business of selling booze to clubhoppers. Rule #2: “Please don’t do coke in the bathroom,” needlepointed on a framed white doily in the graffiti-covered restroom. You can’t say Beerland, which occasionally had bands play behind chicken wire so fans could thrown beer cans at them, didn’t have a sense of humor to go with all that attitude..
Every entrepreneur wishes they could be two people and that’s an advantage the Stocktons have. Middle school sweethearts from Elgin, they complement each other like oil and vinegar. “Before we got married (in ’98), we had to take a compatibility test,” said Randall, who got his degree in philosophy at UT, while Donya got hers in anthropology. The couple had tested higher than anyone ever, so much so that the family pastor who administered the test said they might have co-dependency issues. “No shit,” Randall laughed. “But there’s no way either of us could’ve done any of this without the other.”
This is a couple so committed to building a life together through club ownership that they slept on the stage at Beerland for the first two months it was operational because they didn’t have money to rent an apartment. Beerland opened the day they got the OK from the TABC and the Stocktons bought a case of Lone Star and a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The next day they used the proceeds to buy bottles of whiskey, vodka and tequila. From small things, baby…
The timing couldn’t have been better, as such bands as the Strokes, White Stripes, and the Hives were making garage rock hot again in 2001. Home to the aptly-named Sweatbox studio on East Fifth Street, where bands from all over the world would come to record, the town of Roky Erickson was an epicenter of this return to Nuggets glory. "They seek us out because of the live feel they hear on records made here," Sweatbox co-owner Mike Vasquez told me in 2002. “We’re not antiseptic. You can smoke and drink and play as loud as you want. It's really more like playing in your garage than at some state-of-the-art studio where time is money."
The Stocktons followed their garage punk haven six years later with Rio Rita- a coffee shop/cocktail bar on East Sixth Street. Then came Shangri-La, the Good Knight (later Sputnik hamburgers), Liberty, Grackle and Live Oak Barbecue, most of those with partners.
Here’s how the Stocktons led the revitalization of E. Sixth across I-35. While waiting for Beerland to open, Randall had a job servicing jukeboxes and pool tables for a vending machine company. Most of the old man bars on East Sixth, the ones the Stocktons and other gentry have moved into, were owned by two vending companies in town. If they didn’t own the building, they controlled a master lease. So after he left the vending biz to run Beerland, his old boss would tip him off about spaces that would soon be available. One of Randall’s favorite stops on his route was Rio Rita, a Tejano dive with character, which had just gone out of business. The Stocktons moved slow, thought hard, then took over the Rio Rita space, keeping the name. The deciding factor was a huge patio, as the smoking ban had just been voted in.
“The first few months we were open, nobody came in. I mean literally nobody,” said Donya. Randall opened at 7 a.m. every morning and Donya closed at 2 a.m. and they weren’t taking in enough money to pay the electric bill. “People were afraid to go to the East Side in 2007,” Randall said. But that would soon change, as the word got out that East East Sixth was where you went for more parking, less knuckleheads.
Though in their late 40s, the Stocktons have been together more than 30 years. They started dating when she was in the seventh grade and he was in the eighth. Randall had a shy friend who asked him to talk to Donya Vinson, the new pretty girl in school, for him. “But I told him ‘I’d rather go out with you,’” Donya recalled. They were the smart, arty kids at Elgin High (a small group), who listened to Daniel Johnston instead of Metallica or Tupac. On weekends, they’d come to Austin to see Glass Eye, Shoulders, Ten Hands and other norm-challenging rock bands.
They moved in together during Donya’s freshman year at UT, at an apartment complex called the Argosy on Justin Lane.
Though Randall’s funny personality was the same, his interests had changed during college. He’d become a harmonica obsessive, in more of a “Rock the Casbah” way than Chicago blues, until a chance meeting on the Drag flipped the switch. Randall was blowing some harp, waiting for a bus, when a long-haired guy came by and listened. “Cool man,” he said. “I play some, too.” Then the guy pulled a harp out of a knapsack and blew Randall away. “Go out and buy two albums- The Best of Little Walter and Real Folk Blues by Sonny Boy Williamson,” recommended the guy, who Randall realized, years later, was Guy Forsyth. “They’ll teach you everything you need to know about playing the harmonica.” Stockton got off the bus at Sound Warehouse on Burnet Road.
The great Chicago bluesmen took over his life for the next couple years. Then a record he heard by obscure Austin band Jack O’ Fire, featuring Walter Daniels and Tim Kerr (Big Boys), gave him an example of how to infuse blues with punk, which led to the formation of the Headhunters, which became the Converters after Herbie Hancock reformed his old band.
OK, this is boring musician stuff, but it leads to the Stocktons entrée into the club world. After playing Joe’s Generic Bar on Sixth Street a couple times with the Headhunters, Randall got a job at Aaron’s Rock N’ Roll t-shirt and souvenir shop, which was also owned by Joe Bates of Joe’s Generic. Bates had opened an Aaron’s in Northcross Mall and when Randall pulled shift duty there the eccentric, low-rent entrepreneur would call him and talk for hours. Since Randall was a musician, Bates asked his opinions on players around town. When the kid seemed to know what he was talking about, Bates hired him to book edgier bands than the usual blues fare at Bates Motel, a Sixth Street dive that cleaned up later as Blind Pig Pub. Randall’s popular weekly show, featuring garage punks like the Chumps, Lower Class Brats, Kiss-Offs and Sons of Hercules, packed the joint, so Bates eventually gave him the full-time booking job. “Yeah, I got hooked,” said Randall. “On a good night, when the band’s great and the folks are totally into it, you feel like, ‘wow, I’m the nerd from high school and I did this.’”
Blue Flamingo had just closed on Red River, so Bates Motel was the new favorite downtown rock dive. But after three gloriously chaotic years, rising rent had the club close in 1999, the year Austin also lost Liberty Lunch, Steamboat, Electric Lounge, Doug Sahm and its clubhouse, the Austin Rehearsal Complex. With one clubgoer swinging an ax, the audience demolished the interior of the Bates on it’s final night. Damages in the hundreds.
The Stocktons, married in ’98, went looking together for their own place. In early 2000 they found 711 ½ Red River Street, formerly the site of the Hurt’s Hunting Ground junk store annex, and Crenshaw Garage before that. They expected to open in two months, but the bureaucratic bullshit drove them crazy. “One guy (from the city permitting office) would tell us we had to do this or that. Then the next guy would say, ‘who said you could do that?’ and we’d have to start over.” The Stocktons took every publication delivery shift they could to supplement their full-time day jobs: Donya as office manager for a chiropractor and Randall on his vending route.
The delivery job took the Stocktons to the Statesman the night of November 7, 2000. They were there to pick up one of their publications the Statesman printed when they heard the order to recall some of the bundles that had already been delivered. It was determined that it was too early to call it for Gore. “We figured we’d help them get back those papers,” Randall said with a smile. The Statesman had printed three different front pages- “Gore Wins,” “Bush Wins” and “Too Close To Call”- and the Stocktons packaged all three in a set that sold to collectors for a couple hundred dollars each. They had bundles of them, and during the next month of recounts and court rulings the Stocktons made a bundle.
No occupation takes so much and pays so little as running a music venue in Austin. There’s a lot of stress you’re too busy to notice, but in late 2017 the Stocktons decided to slow down. Before moving to Mexico, where Randall gives mezcal tours and Donya is starting a mezcal brand called Sueños de Mujeres, they handed their first and last bar to enthusiastic regular customer Richard Lynn, owner of Super Secret Records, trusting that he would carry on the Beerland tradition. And he did, for about a year. But then checks started bouncing after SXSW2019. Employees went on strike and called in the Austin Chronicle.
Lynn abruptly sold Beerland to Stubb’s manager Ryan Garrett and Ned Stewart, drummer for Grand Champeen, who put a lot of money in remodeling and scrubbing the joint. The old regulars dubbed it “Wineland.”
Beerland reopened on New Year’s Eve 2019, but the backlash over Lynn selling the name he was given was instant and intense. This was Austin’s CBGB’s for godsakes! After two months as “Beerland” and then the pandemic, the sign came down, replaced by one that says “The Green Jay.” The garage has been converted into an upscale cocktail/sports bar, with booking expanded to standup comedy, jazz, blues and, ever-so-occasionally, rock. Beerland is gone, never to return.
“I’d be surprised if it came off in one piece,” Randall said of the iconic wooden sign he installed with such pride. “We never intended it to come down.”