One Knite: "The Dive That Wouldn't Die"
While the 1,500-capacity Armadillo was getting national attention, the real Austin club scene was being born at a downtown club 1/10th the size
Her friends in Manhattan told her to be careful, the club was a hellhole and the clientele was pretty rough. Even the cab driver gave her a warning on the way to CBGB, the New York City club that spawned punk rock. When Rebecca Kohout looked around the graffiti-covered club full of black leather and ripped shirts that night in 1977, she had to laugh. “I thought, man this place isn’t scary at all. I hung out at the One Knite.”
CBGB was the Copa compared with Austin’s most notorious dive, located at 801 Red River St. where a much-expanded Stubb’s currently sits. From 1970, when a trio of pals bought the business for just under $2,000, until it closed on July 4, 1976, the One Knite was known for its hanging junkyard decor and its illegal after-hours parties that often raged until dawn.
But the most lasting legacy of the counterculture speakeasy is the musicians who started out there and went on to bigger things. Long before Clifford Antone opened his first namesake blues club on Sixth Street in 1975, the One Knite hosted the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Marcia Ball, W.C. Clark, Angela Strehli, Paul Ray and the Cobras, Joe Ely and many, many more. They all played for tips.
Jimmie Vaughan and Doyle Bramhall’s band Storm played every Monday night for five years. They called it “Stormy Monday,” but Tuesday was just as nuts.
“There was never a cover at the One Knite, so bands didn’t make any money to speak of,” said Ball, who formed Freda and the Firedogs after sitting in with Bobby Earl Smith’s band at the club. “But it was a place where you could really cut your teeth.”
Cleve Hattersley of Greezy Wheels remembers the crowd being right on top of the stage. “They were in your face, and pretty rowdy sometimes, but they would be cheering you on. It was a great feeling.”
In the early ’70s, when Austin was first getting a national reputation as a music town, the Armadillo World Headquarters and Soap Creek Saloon got most of the attention, deservedly so. But the scruffy downtown joints like Split Rail, Chequered Flag, Alamo Lounge and the One Knite are where the Austin club scene, the one that lives on today, was being born.
It was a time of war protests and love-ins, when local scenesters had names like the Guacamole Queen, Red Fred and Summerdog. There was no “Ray” in the middle of “Stevie Vaughan,” who Ray Hennig drove to the One Knite almost every night after his Heart Of Texas Music store closed up for the evening. “He’d play every guitar in the shop all day long, then go to the One Knite to jam,” Hennig said. Stevie’s earliest bands Blackbyrd, the Nightcrawlers and the Cobras were One Knite mainstays.
“No club west of I-35 had such a funky East Austin feel like the One Knite,” said Hattersley. W.C. Clark liked playing the room so much that he quit the Joe Tex band to play the One Knite and other clubs with Southern Feeling, featuring Angela Strehli and Denny Freeman.
But music wasn’t always the primary draw at the One Knite, which had a coffin-shaped front door and served dollar pitchers of beer. “People didn’t care who was playing,” said Ball. “They’d come to the One Knite to hang out.” You get turned on to a lot of good music that way.
“It was more of a clubhouse than a place of business,” recalled Wayne Nagel, a local booking agent and band manager. “It was just so wide open, with a real cast of characters.” With a craps game often breaking out on the pool table, “anything goes” was anything but an empty cliche at the One Knite.
The antithesis of the “cosmic cowboy” scene that was popular at the time, the One Knite’s interior was painted as black as bassist Keith Ferguson’s fingernails. And with a fleet of Harleys always parked out front, the aroma of danger was almost as strong as the stench of stale beer.
This hippie Cheers was where Banditos bikers sat next to former President Lyndon Johnson’s Secret Service detail who sat next to big-eyed flower children who sat next to East Side bluesmen and law students. They all sat under such objects as lawn mowers, tricycles, bed springs, shoulder pads and typewriters, which hung from the ceiling.
“The Secret Service guys were pretty laid back,” said co-owner Roger Collins, whom everybody still calls Roger One Knite. “They said as long as we weren’t counterfeiting money or plotting to kill the president, we were cool.”
Although the origins of the One Knite name, inherited from the previous owners, are unclear, it fits this many years later because remembrances of the dive almost always begin with the words “One night . . .” One night a group of militant feminists from Lubbock tried to shout down Storm, claiming the blues lyrics were sexist. They were no match for Jimmie Vaughan’s Stratocaster, however, and soon left. One night the Banditos decided to have a little fun with the band Dirty Leg. In order to be admitted back into the club after a break, each band member had to allow a gnarly, teeth-missing, biker mama to give them a big wet kiss. One night a touring British band came in during a Storm set and asked if they could jam, but when they said they weren’t a blues band, the members of Pink Floyd were denied the stage and sulked off to the dark side of the club.
Get a bunch of ex-One Knite regulars together, like at the One Knite Reunion at Stubb’s in May 2004, and you’ll hear so many stories about a time, quite frankly, the tellers are lucky to have lived through. But don’t expect the beer to flow as freely as in the old days. “I’d say that most of the old regulars have either passed away or gone through rehab,” says Kohout, who organized the reunion concert.
While clubs had to close at midnight in the early ’70s, owners Collins, Roddy Howard and Gary Oliver merely padlocked the front door from the inside and let the revelry continue. We’re not talking about just sneaking a beer after closing time.
When someone pulled out a couple of machetes and a bag of marijuana, the cheers would go up for a Hot Knife Party. “The knives were heated red hot on the kitchen stove,” recalled T.J. McFarland, who played drums with D.K. Little at the time. “Then a handful of pot was spread along the length of one knife. The other hot machete was laid on top of the first and the knives screamed and spewed smoke like a rocket. The room would fill up with pot smoke and people got so stoned so fast . . .”
There had to be rules amid such chaos. “After midnight, we’d unlock the door only once an hour,” said Collins, who slept in a broom closet in the ladies’ room. “We’d pick up all the beer and clean up all the evidence, then let out whoever wanted to go.”
The men in blue often were waiting to corral the OK gang, once hauling 14 employees and customers off to jail in a paddy wagon. It was a one-block drive. “They were trying to run us out of business,” said Collins. Sometimes the cops would barge in two or three times a night, checking IDs and looking for drugs. They couldn’t stand those hippies flaunting their radical lifestyle right across the street. Collins kept a log in 1973 that showed his club was raided 150 times over a three-month period.
It would be the IRS that finally put out the joint. “We spent all our money on partying,” Collins said. Well behind on back taxes, the club held a benefit in late ’75 starring a red hot Willie Nelson. Tickets were $2.50 each. Even though the club was jammed more than triple the legal capacity of 150 people, proceeds were limited because nobody could get to the bar.
As one could imagine, given the ability of Hot Knife Parties to slice and dice memory cells, there are several versions of how the One Knite was transformed from a hangout for University of Texas law students (a trio owned the club) to a musical launching pad.
The story we’d most like to believe is that the Velvet Underground christened the One Knite in cool. After a VU show at the Vulcan Gas Company in 1969, the band and their hedonistic ragtag followers took over the downtown dive and debauchery ensued. It was all the buzz.
Gary Oliver heard about that crazy night and he ended up frequenting the place. After sliding into a bartender role, he bought out one of the three owners, who was graduating from UT and moving away. Before it was the One Knite, 801 Red River was the International Club, a Tejano bar, in the ‘60s.
Oliver, currently an editorial cartoonist for the Big Bend Sentinel, still has the $600 receipt for his share of the business. His friend Roddy Howard bought out another graduating partner for $600. Eight months later, Roger Collins paid $750 cash to the last law student owner, and the One Knite was ready to become a live music venue.
“In the beginning we had only acoustic acts, like Jimmie Gilmore, Blind George, Little & Crow, Cody Hubach,” said Oliver. The first stage was four tabletops nailed together. “Then one night in 1971, the guys in Storm came in and said, ‘This is the best blues dive we’ve ever seen. When can we play?’ We didn’t have a real stage, especially for a band with drums, so they just set up on the floor. They were incredible and the place was packed.” The next day, a proper stage was built.
“After Storm, even the folk acts were turning up with full bands,” Oliver said. One of those was the Flatlanders, featuring Ely, Gilmore and Butch Hancock, backed by Lubbock cohorts drummer McFarland and guitarist John X. Reed.
“We really felt in our element at the One Knite,” Ely recalled. “Those were some of our best shows.” Ely thought those nights were resigned to hazy recall until he discovered, thirty years later, that two of their One Knite sets were recorded on Oliver’s reel-to-reel. “We were stunned, and thrilled, when we found out that those tapes exist,” Ely said. “We had no idea we were being recorded.”
The Flatlanders Live at the One Knite June 8, 1972 (featuring Steve Wesson on musical saw) was released on CD in time for the 2004 reunion concert at Stubb’s. “When we played the One Knite, it never felt like a real gig,” Ely said.
Besides running the club, the One Knite owners hosted outdoor concerts, the most notorious of which was the 1973 “Last Bash On the Hill.” Roky Erickson had just gotten out of Rusk State Hospital for the criminally insane, so the 13th Floor Elevators reunited for the free show. An unannounced Willie Nelson also played a set at Hill On the Moon- off City Park Road between RR 2222 and Emma Long Park.
“Willie showed up in a Winnebago with Sammi Smith,” recalled Collins. Smith, who had a big hit with “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” was married to Willie’s guitar player Jody Payne. “He drove right through the crowd down to the stage. He was amazed by the number of people there. He would talk about that concert for years.”
A crowd of 3,000 was expected. But when local radio stations talked up this free concert with the 13th Floor Elevators back together again, 15,000 showed up. RR 2222 was backed up for miles and folks were ditching their cars to hike up the hill.
Brothers Crady and Berry Bond, who owned the scenic 10-acre festival site which sloped down to a creek, had put on a few outdoor concerts there, but the local police, assisted by Texas Rangers and DPS, had been regularly hassling and arresting attendees and staff. The Bonds’ security crew wore American flag armbands for identification, and when one wore his upside down he was taken to jail for desecrating the American flag. Another 58 were arrested at that August 1970 festival.
When the Bonds decided the Hill On the Moon concerts weren’t worth it anymore, their partners in police harassment, the One Knite, suggested one final blowout. They’d book the bands and bring the beer. “We just wanted to have the biggest party Austin had ever seen,” said Collins. “It was our Woodstock moment.” All the businesses listed on the poster contributed to the beer expense- 62 kegs of Lone Star which would be given out free. “We didn’t care about making money, just like at the One Knite.” All the bands at the Last Bash played for free.
Songwriter Harvey Thomas Young had moved to Austin from Lubbock a year earlier “and I was wondering what the big deal was,” he said. “But then I went to that concert at Hill On the Moon and that changed the way I thought about music. That show (March 18, 1973) made me realize that rock and country and blues could all fit together.”
Austin music had come of age.
Next Up in the “Clubland Paradise” section: Rome Inn
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