How could they tear Charlie's Playhouse down?

Greatest Eastside nightclub ever, just ask the white kids

A story of race in Austin in the late ‘50s comes from an unexpected angle. The era’s familiar protests by African Americans was present on E. 11th Street, but the picketing was against integration. White college kids had become crazy for rhythm & blues after listening to Lavada Durst on KVET and watching Cactus Pryor’s Now Dig This show on KTCB, and so they’d been flocking to Eastside hotspot Charlie’s Playhouse. Which was fine except that the club’s regular black clientele was left outside if they didn’t get there early enough.

Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets

”We couldn’t go into any club on the west side, but yet we couldn’t go to our own clubs on the east side on Friday and Saturday night,” lamented Villager editor/publisher Tommy Wyatt.

Fraternities would reserve four or five tables each in the 300-capacity joint. Double-dating couples showed up in Caucasian clusters. They had more disposable income than the Black clientele, so they were fine with Charlie Gildon, who owned the entire block of barber shops, liquor stores and the Playhouse.

“This was where it was happening,” Oscar Fresh Jr. said about E. 11th. “You not only had Charlie's, but you had the I.L. Lounge right next door, then across the street was the Derby Lounge and next to that was the Elk's Club. Then there was the Victory Grill a block away. Man, it was always jumpin’.” The prostitutes hung out at Shorty’s under the awning, which protected from the elements, and also obscured the calves of the crossdressers.

Shorty’s on E. 11th. “Hey, baby, want a date?”

Co-hosted by teenaged singer Joyce Webb, who owned an art glass business in Wimberley until recently, Now Dig This was the Austin version of American Bandstand. Pryor brought in black bands from East Austin like Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets, Jean and the Rollettes and Major Burkes to play live every Saturday morning. The college kids wanted to know where they could see these bands and the answer was Charlie’s Playhouse, which used to be the Show Bar at 1206 E. 11th until 1958 when Gildon bought it from D.J. Tony Von. Before the Show Bar it was the Black Cat.

Charlie Gildon was a businessman.

“Charlie’s Playhouse is where we went to learn all the new dances,” says Lucky Attal, the antique dealer who graduated from Austin High in 1959. Jim Crow segregation didn’t limit where whites could go.

Gildon didn’t allow the races to sit at the same tables, but they danced together to house band Hubbard and the Jets, as well as touring acts like Freddie King, Johnny Taylor, Albert Collins, Miss Lavelle and Joe Tex. Guitarist Bill Campbell, a white man from Smithville, often sat in with the black bands and even toured the South with Pigmeat Markham, leading the way for the Vaughan brothers, Denny Freeman, Paul Ray, Angela Strehli and the like. If you wanted to learn how to cook Creole cuisine you went to New Orleans. If you wanted to play the blues, you went to the Eastside.

The I.L. Club on E. 11th, owned by Ira Littlefield, got Charlie’s run-offs when the Playhouse was packed. The I.L. occasionally booked rock bands in the ‘60s before the Vulcan Gas Company opened.

The initial consolation to picketers outside Charlie’s Playhouse was to have “Soul Night” for blacks only on Mondays. “So many of the students, particularly from Huston-Tillotson and so forth, didn’t think that was quite right,” Wyatt said. Monday was a school night.

Wyatt said the community had some empathy for Gildon’s position. “Now, economically you can understand that, you see, because this man was in business, that’s the way he was making his money. I mean he was making huge amounts of money on Friday and Saturday nights. But at the same time it was still offensive to the students over here.”

The protest got the message across. Not wanting to cross the picket lines, and, no doubt, feeling unwanted, the white flock dwindled to the hardcore and eventually Charlie’s became a Playhouse almost exclusively for African Americans again. “Charlie was a little upset,” said Wyatt.

Integration ended up crippling the tight-knit East Austin community, especially when the hub- black high school L.C. Anderson- was shut down in 1971. In the first case of forced busing in the U.S., and therefore a national story, Anderson students were sent to white high schools, amid much rock-throwing and racial slurs. The federal government had chosen Austin as its test case because the city has a liberal reputation. But what viewers all over the country saw were scenes that smacked of Mississippi.

Austin’s racist history was made official in 1928 when city planners tried to move all the town’s black population, which had pockets in Clarksville, Wheatville (24th and Rio Grande) and South Austin (West Mary Street), to “The Negro District.” You couldn’t swim in a city pool or play at a recreation center or go to a movie unless you moved to East Austin.

But let’s remember that it was an Austinite, Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed into law the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which made segregation illegal.

With the African-American clientele permitted to shop, eat, dance, whatever, all over Austin, the shops and clubs along East 11th, which was nicknamed “the Cuts” because it slashed across East Austin at an angle, hit hard times.

Charlie’s closed in 1972 and became Twink’s Playhouse, then the Jackson “4” Club for a couple years and then was torn down. One of Austin’s most legendary live music venues, certainly up there with the Victory Grill, is now an empty lot across the street and up a block from Nickel City (formerly Longbranch).

But in 1960, Charlie’s was so hoppin,’ and nobody was ready to go home at midnight, that Gildon bought the former Cheryl Ann’s nightclub at 1167 Webberville Road and opened Ernie’s Chicken Shack. Besides the best fried chicken in town (everything tastes better at 1 a.m.), Ernie’s would slide you a $10 pint of hooch in a bag when the law wasn’t watching.

Until it closed in 1979 after Gildon died of a heart attack at age 57, this was THE after hours club in Austin. Whoever was playing at Charlie’s that night would pack up at midnight, legal last call at the time, and head straight over to the Chicken Shack, where they’d play ‘til 5 a.m. on weekends. Gildon ran a gambling operation in the backroom, where football legend Bobby Layne was a regular.

Sam’s Showcase on E. 12th would feature cross-dressers on their “Women of the Future” nights. Photos by Neal Douglass 1955.

Eastside, man. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was its own world with its own code. Probably some grease going around, too, but if it didn’t impact life on the other side of East Avenue (now I-35), it didn’t seem to matter to the cops. Gildon packed heat at all times and had to shoot a couple customers that had gotten out of line, but he was back at the Shack by Friday.

People will argue about which era of Austin was the greatest. Was it the ‘70s during the Armadillo heyday? Was it the ‘80s when the Liberty Lunch/Beach/Continental Club axis put some euphoric jangle in your stride? To some, it was the ‘90s, when South By Southwest made Austin the live capital of cool every March.

Put me in a ripped vinyl booth at Ernie’s Chicken Shack in the ‘60s. It’s 3 a.m. and Freddie King just walked in with his big, red Gibson guitar. Bury me there if you can.