Clubland Paradise: Austin Outhouse 1981-1995

Eccentric roadhouse on the North Drag haunted by Blaze and Townes and Horsies

Curly and Cody at the Austin Outhouse. Courtesy Chuck Lamb.

Cody Hubach is one of the major unknown figures of the Austin music scene, going back to the ’60s when he held court at the Red Lion on West Sixth with his friend Bill Wilson, a Bergstrom airman who would later record for Columbia with Dylan producer Bob Johnston.

Hubach’s soulfully-sung folk/blues were a fixture at the 11^th Door and Chequered Flag clubs, but the only time the Statesman profiled “the Manchaca Troubadour” was as a sculptor who sold a piece to Luci Johnson, for a Christmas gift to Tricia Nixon, in 1968.

After his favorite venues- the One Knite, Split Rail and Spellman’s- closed, Hubach found a new musical home in the late ’70s at the Bentwood Tavern at 3510 Guadalupe. This was a classic neighborhood bar, with darts and shuffleboard and sweaty sports teams, but manager Chuck Lamb and harmonica-playing bartender Ed Bradfield started booking music there, in the corner, around 1978. Besides Cody, regulars included Blaze Foley, Jubal Clark, Pat Mears, Rich Minus, Calvin Russell, Lost John Casner, and Townes Van Zandt. It was a stage of zero status, but where these hard-living friends could play the songs they just wrote in front of people.   

That motley bunch of musical poets conveyed when Lamb bought the license plate-plastered joint in 1981 and changed the name to the Austin Outhouse. It was the club you went to if you’d been eighty-sixed from the Hole. True to its name, the Outhouse was a shithole supreme.

For a stamp of extra weirdness, 3510 was the new homebase of Curly Thompson, Austin’s #1 musical savant, who was a fantastic drummer, played blues harp with just his hands and sang like Bon Scott when he wanted to. Curly lived with his mother, and after she shot herself in the head in the early ’90s, a sister came down from Oklahoma to take him away. Curly’s not been seen since, and because it's hard to imagine him living anywhere but Austin, he’s most surely passed away, another character that made the Austin scene unique. Just like the Outhouse.  “I loved those years, good and bad,” Lamb recalled. “Music every night, good and bad. People you probably know, many you never heard of. It was real.”

The club had been bailed out by benefits—most notably a Timbuk3 show, with their first Austin supporter Blaze Foley opening—in January ’89 that paid two months back rent on the verge of eviction. A week after that jubilant celebration, Foley was shot to death by the son of a friend.

Blaze Foley was the first Timbuk3 fan and got them booked at the Outhouse.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the musical focus at the Outhouse gradually changed after Blaze’s death to more indie rock. It became the new Beach, north of campus, with such bands as Happy Family, ST37, Texas Instruments (T.I.), Pocket FishRmen, Coz the Shroom, Go Dog Go, Brompton’s Cocktail, Siddhartha Suns, and so on. They always kept an open mic, and singer-songwriters were about 20 percent of the calendar.

In ’93, Asylum Street Spankers packed the place every Wednesday with their old-time acoustic music and zany antics. It was a total scene. First Wednesday was Pajama Night—which some lovelies took as Lingerie Night. “At the end of the set we’d say, ‘now let’s go break into Barton Springs and go swimming’ and half the crowd would come with us,” recalled Forsyth, a Kansas City immigrant who, like so many from elsewhere, came to Austin because there were more places to play and more people to care.

Asylum Street Spankers. Guy Forsyth in red pajamas.

“When you saw a great show at the Outhouse, you walked out feeling like you’d stolen something and gotten away with it,” said Forsyth, who played the Outhouse until Flamingo Automotive bought the property for an expansion in 1995.

“I was sad the night we turned out the lights,” said Lamb.

Clubland Paradise is a book within the book “Austin Music Is a Scene,” profiling more than 40 of the scene’s greatest live music venues. Look for that Austin music history book on TCU Press in the summer.

Here’s the list of 40 Greatest Live Music Clubs in Austin History Maybe we should’ve done 50.