Liberty Lunch was the Armadillo in the trousers of ‘80s and ‘90s Austin

Beloved club's 1999 closing marked the end of the century in live music

To those of us who moved to Austin in the ‘80s and had to hear about how we missed the Armadillo World Headquarters: think of how much worse that would have been if we didn’t have our own ‘Dillo in Liberty Lunch! This city-owned venue was bulldozed in 1999 to make room for Computer Sciences Corp. headquarters. The rent in this prime downtown location was only $600 a month, so the Lunch’s days were numbered. For 24 years!

Maybe because it was permanently temporary, I still remember everything. Not just the lineups, like the triple bill of My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr. and Babes In Toyland, which were unforgettable. I remember how the best place to see the band was stage right, where the pot smoke from the patio hit the jet stream of sound. The best doorman for the bands and the worst for the pest list was the guy who used to perform weird folk as Blanche. He was stone-faced as a Palace guard, but couldn’t quite mask delight when he made someone from the Austin Chronicle pay cover.

Physically, there wasn’t much to the room, which had a big stage so flimsy that Run-DMC had to perform like statues in ‘85 because every time they moved the record skipped. No place to sit. No place to shit, at least in private. Acts had to use the gross prison bathrooms because there wasn’t running water backstage. “Are you going to play ‘Stinkpot?’ a fan asked a squatting member of Soulhat one night. “I’m playing it now.”

Mark Pratz, J’Net Ward photo by Dayna Blackwell.

But what made the Lunch was the people who worked there. They were your hosts and got their reward when audience members would mouth “thank you” with a hand on their heart on the way out.

You felt safe at Liberty Lunch, which was all-ages, so many parents just dropped their kids off so they could go out for a quiet dinner or home for loud sex. Mark and J’Net never allowed their customers to be frisked and when heavy metal act King Diamond demanded that audience members be patted down one night in the ’80s, the Lunch let them keep the deposit and canceled the show.

Besides great roadshows, the Lunch nurtured several local scenes, including funk-rap with Bad Mutha Goose, Do Dat, Bouffant Jellyfish and Retarted Elf. Any kind of live dance music worked there. Any kind of music really.

“I always thought of it as the Willie Nelson of Austin venues, that one infallible place,” said David Garza, who sold out the Lunch with Twang Twang Shock-a-Boom in 1990. When he left the group, prematurely it seemed, only 100 showed up for his first solo gig at 405 W. 2nd Street. “Lunch don’t lie,” he laughed.

On a dead night- and there were much more of them than Neville family members- the room was so big that it was kind of embarrassing for everyone. That’s club life.

Fleshtones’ Peter Zaremba. Photo Bill Leissner.

Mark and J’Net, now married, ran things from ’83- ’99, but let’s not forget the Austin couple that founded Liberty Lunch. Before Esther’s Follies, Shannon Sedwick and Michael Shelton took over the site of the former Calcasiue lumberyard- lately used as a ratty ass flea market- on Dec. 9, 1975. They planned to call this food/ performance space Progressive Grocery, but while scraping the paint off the front of the building they saw the name Liberty Lunch from when the Texas Lighthouse for the Blind served lunches there after WWII. During the patriotism of 1976, they decided Liberty Lunch was the name.

Jimmy Buffett hanging out at the Lunch soon after it opened. Photo Scott Newton

With chef Emil Vogley, the club’s Cajun-flavored restaurant got a rave in Texas Monthly soon after opening and the staff struggled to keep up with the demand. The music and the beer gradually became the focus, with Beto y Los Fairlanes (salsa), the Lotions (reggae) and Extreme Heat (funk), each inspiring dancing on the pea gravel floor that covered the whole place in dust. This was around when that dopey tropical mural (which especially seemed out of place at GWAR) was painted. The city owned the property and wanted to shut down Liberty Lunch and all those half-naked stoned hippies from the very beginning. “Liberty Lunch has always been a point of contention with the city,” said Sedwick. But something cool was happening. And pro-bono lawyers like to dance, too.

Charlie Tesar took over in 1980 and, after constant rain canceled shows in the summer of ‘81, built a roof over the Lunch with girders, trusses and beams bought from the Armadillo, which closed on the last day of 1980. The torch had been passed, but the old Lunch crowd hated it not being open-air. Austin was so much cooler before roofs.

Pratz, the doorman since ‘78, started booking the club around ’81, then joined with Louis Meyers, manager of Killer Bees, in ‘83 to form Lunch Money Productions. Reggae, African juju music and, of course, the Neville Brothers from New Orleans, did especially well. “Direct from Jamaica” in the ad would guarantee a crowd of at least 600, no matter who was playing. Double that when it was Burning Spear.

At 1,200 capacity, the Lunch was the perfect launching pad for bands like Nirvana, Replacements, Pavement, Foo Fighters, Beck and Alanis Morrissette, too big for the Continental Club, which Lunch Money also booked. You’d see k.d. lang, when she was a rockabilly singer, and then the next night would be Fugazi and then the Count Basie Orchestra. The Lunch even had pro wrestling, mixed with rock n’ roll, on a few nights. The eclectic booking goes back to the ‘70s.

In 1998, City Council voted to end the Lunch lease and rent the land to a high-tech company. When Greg Dulli of Afghan Whigs called out a stage hand in Dec. ’98 and ended in Brackenridge with a fractured skull, it gave the club a black eye, and everyone kinda knew there’d be no reprieve this time.

Photo by Sung Park AAS

The Lunch’s perfect swan song came in July 1999, when Texas Monthly writer Michael Hall had the ridiculous idea of enlisting Austin musicians to keep playing “Gloria” by Them for 24 hours continuously. Who’s going to play at 5 a.m? Or two in the afternoon?

One of Hall’s short-lived bands the Brooders started the one-song marathon at 9 p.m. Friday July 23, kicking it off in a trance of vibrato guitars for 15 minutes. And then Hall started singing those lines that launched 10,000 bands; “She comes ‘round here…” It was another 45 minutes until the chorus was reached like a climax. “G-L-O-R-I-A, Gloria!” Twenty-three more hours to go.

The Austin music scene showed up like they do. All night, all day. Jam bands, blues players, shuffle drummers and sax players. (One thing you’ll never see on eBay is a “Gloriathon” bootleg.) One musician came offstage at 4 a.m. to find his car missing, so he went down to the station, filed a report and went back to the club in the morning light, played another hour- and then found his car exactly where he’d parked it the day before. One drummer was so wasted he just pissed up against the back wall of the stage. Fresh beers were distributed at 7 a.m., like coffee. The Gloriathon was a 24-hour orgy with bodies coming in and out all day and night. It was just craziness, but everybody came together to put their hands on their hearts. Customers became musicians- playing on the stage where Black Flag, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Elliot Smith, Trouble Funk, Oasis, Ebenezer Obey, Wilco, Tragically Hip and many more kept them enthralled. The Toadies were the last touring band to play that stage, Rick Nelson the first.

Every musician brought their own thing to “Gloria”’s simple E-D-A chords that relentlessly built to a climax, and then walked back down that hill to start over again. G-L-O-R-I-A, Gloria! That part never got old. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” Gretchen Phillips sang it, Patti Smith style.

At about three in the afternoon, Van Morrison’s road manager held up a phone as Van the Man sang “Gloria” at a festival in Scotland, and it was piped over the sound system at the Lunch. He didn’t normally perform the 1965 song anymore, Morrison said, but there were a crazy bunch of folks in Austin, Texas playing “Gloria” for 24 hours straight, so he dedicated it to them.

A great moment, for sure, but the superstar cameo was a deviation of what was really happening. We were not just toasting a beloved venue and the people who made it shine. We were saying goodbye to a paradise of our youth, a time and place that made us feel as if we finally belonged. The summer of ’99 marked the end of the ‘80s in Austin. It was time to start families, to get on with the work that would define us, to see what we were really made of, now that the fantasy was being torn down.

The last hour of the Gloriathon, with the finish line in sight, was the best. At 8 p.m., the crowd waiting outside to see Saturday’s headliner Joe Ely was let in, just as the stage was wailing, with about 20 people up there. Joe King Carrasco’s dog yelped into the same microphone as his owner- an insane harmony that felt right. The newcomers urged on the hodgepodge orchestra, and for awhile there was no song, just players. It was challenging, abrasive, yet full of purpose, and the audience pumped their fists at the ugly and beautiful dissonance. But here she comes. When they hit the final familiar chorus, something beautiful burst. The whole place, now jam-packed, was singing along and stomping. There is no sadness in the final climax.

It was only a building, and an ugly one at that, but for over 20 years Liberty Lunch was a structure where musicians and fans were at their best.