50 Years in the Hole!
Bar "where everybody slurs your name" transforms into a low-rent rock palace at night
Music was an afterthought at 2538 Guadalupe St., which had been Longhorn Cleaners for three decades before the Cuginis—Doug and his parents Orazio and Billie—got a five-year lease on a handshake deal and opened the Hole in the Wall June 15, 1974. They came down from Buffalo when Orazio got a job with defense contractor Tracor, the first Austin-based business to trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
“I just wanted to open a neighborhood bar like we had on every corner in downtown Buffalo,” Doug Cugini said. While he was finishing college, his parents went into business together with Cugini’s Truck City Cafes on Ben White and I-35 access road north. The Hole’s first cook came from the truck stop.
“We had the marquee built before we even thought about having music,” Doug said. “It was to advertise our food and to just basically tell everybody ‘We’re Here.’” At $2,500, the marquee was the biggest expense besides the liquor license of $5,000. But those two have paid for themselves—boy, have they ever!
That first year, Drag buskers John Garza, George Ensle, and Stephen Doster convinced Cugini to let them set up inside, and he moved a table from the south wall, so they played facing the bar. No stage, no p.a., and no shoes, in the case of Garza.
One day an ambitious young singer-songwriter named Nanci Griffith came in and asked for a gig; Cugini gave her a Sunday, which became every Sunday for about a year. She brought her own p.a. and a bass player and demanded that the TV be turned off while she performed. “Nanci was the first act at the Hole who people came to see,” said Cugini. “She was already playing real clubs like Castle Creek and she’d bring in about forty people, which packed the place.”
The stage was built for the tenth anniversary in 1983 (the quirky Hole celebrated the first anniversary on opening day) with Omar and the Howlers having first privilege. But another band from Hattiesburg, MS would soon own the stage, which was in the picture window like some Bowery Esther’s Follies.
The Hole never had a door person—not with Nanci Griffith or Steve Earle or ex-Velvet Sterling Morrison (as a member of the Bizarros)—until Suzy Elkins and the Commandos filled the joint. One night a sign announced a three-dollar cover and only jerks bitched. Three dollars to have major label talent kick your ass from ten feet away?! After the drinking age rose to 21 in 1986, cover charges were necessary to cover lost income from the game room.
Five blocks north, Antone’s was dead most nights, then incredible for a few, but there was always something happening at the Hole as long as Alfred was in the kitchen, Brooks was behind the bar, and the game was on TV. This bar introduced Buffalo chicken wings to Austin when it opened in 1974, but by the ‘80s it was all about Todd Greene’s creations, like the Reality chicken-fried steak sandwich with jalapenos, and the vegetarian Elfagator melt. Greene, who also drew the framed caricatures on the walls, was both the Bobby Flay and Al Hirschfeld for day drinkers.
Hole booker Steve Hiltz used to scout the Austin Outhouse, ten blocks north on Guadalupe, and one night in early ’85 he excitedly returned to tell Cugini about his latest discovery. It was a married couple new to town, who played a kind of bluesy folk with a jambox for a rhythm section. “I thought he’d lost his mind,” said Cugini. “He booked someone who played to a recording? At the Hole?!” A year later, Timbuk3 was all over the radio with “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” and in telling their story, in print and on TV and radio, they made the Hole famous.
But not rich. Austin’s Cheers, where everybody slurs your name, looked dead in the water in June 2002. The closing was front page news and covered by all the local TV news teams. But the Hole came back a year later, after Austin’s Pizza’s owners bought the building, cleaned it up, and recast the club to appeal to a broader audience than the daytime stool-flatteners and music fans who had to order over them. The game room was converted to the main live stage, and a beer garden was added, so grad students could discuss Eastern philosophy and Vince Young over pints of ale without having to shout over the Rockland Eagles.
When JD Torian bought Austin’s Pizza in 2005, the Hole was part of the package, but Torian didn’t know any more about how to run a live music venue than his predecessors, so he looked for a buyer. And found a savior in Will Tanner, an El Paso club owner looking to relocate his young family to Austin.
Tanner has run the Hole with enthusiastic efficiency since February 2008, helping launch a new country music movement led by Clem N’ Clyde’s Whiskey Business, Mike and the Moonpies, Leo Rondeau, Ramsay Midwood, the Beaumonts, the Carper Family, Luke Bell and more. Co-owned by former Hole booker Denis O’Donnell, the White Horse on the Eastside could be considered a spinoff club, but it’s more about the dancing, packed with two-stepping hipsters.
It's been forty years since the LeRoi Brothers had a band brawl on stage that led to broken bones. Thirty years since Don Henley, hidden in a dark corner, jumped onstage to sing “Don Henley Must Die” with a stunned Mojo Nixon. And twenty plus since Courtney Love commandeered the men’s room for a sniffing session the night before her rambling SXSW interview. It’s been a long time since the entire crowd chased a guitar thief out the door, caught him, and returned the axe to Miles Zuniga of Fastball (then called Magneto USA). But the Will Tanner Hole was baptized in notoriety on Christmas night 2010 when a drunken Santa Claus smashed through the big front window while doing a karaoke turn.
Like most of his old-timers, founder Cugini has moved on, but a recent road trip to Florida with his twenty-four-year-old daughter pulled him back. “Have you heard this band called Spoon?” she asked, cueing up a favorite new track from Lucifer on the Sofa. Spoon played the Hole in the ’90s more than any other band, besides maybe Buick MacKane and Pocket FishRmen. Britt Daniel has said he tailored much of his early material with the Hole’s in-your-face audience in mind.
"The old times are great, but we're looking to create some good ol' days of our own," Tanner told me in 2010. It’s the cliche of the new owners of beloved clubs. But sometimes they prove true.
In Aug. ‘23 came great news that Tanner signed a 20-year lease, with the Hole’s $15,000 a month rent partially subsidized by a $1.6 million grant from the City of Austin’s Iconic Venue Fund. Part of that money is earmarked into converting the back bar, which used to be the Match Box in the ‘60s, into a new restaurant. Bring back the Reality!
Playing tonight (Saturday June 15) at the Hole in the Wall are Grand Champeen, Magic Rockers of Texas, and the Stayres.
Sorry I missed The Hole, left Austin in 1970 after 8 years at UT. Well done piece, as usual.
Terrific column. Really looking forward to the book.