The lives and good times of the Continental Club
It's been a private club, a topless bar, a daydrinkers' hideaway and, since 1979, a glorious rock-in-a-box
There were three times more people outside the club than were able to fit inside, where it was brutally hot and gloriously sweaty. Sitting in little clumps on the sidewalk and standing in the street behind the stage, the throng drank 7-11 beer, smoked joints and reminisced about nights spent in the glorious black wooden box where Bad Brains would play one night and Lou Ann Barton the next. And you’d go to both because the connection to band and audience was so unobstructed and pure.
The Continental Club closed its doors for good on August 29, 1987. It was replaced on New Year’s Eve, four months later, by the Continental Club, no relation. Ski Shores owner Steve Wertheimer bought the club from the Shuler family and recast it as a Fifties-style hamburger joint with red-and-black-tiles. That first year he struggled finding a musical identity, and lost money, but Junior Brown’s Sunday night residency turned it around. The guit-steel maestro didn’t draw in the beginning, and Wertheimer pulled money from the bar register to keep him coming back. But after word got out there was a guy who sang like Ernest Tubb and played guitar like Jimi Hendrix, the line outside the Continental on Sundays would be a block long. Then, Alejandro Escovedo provided an indelible link when he rocked delirious fans as he’d done with True Believers. Today, the Continental of Steve Wertheimer and his veteran staff has grown into an internationally-known roots-rock haven.
It’s a rare thing for a club to have two golden eras with different owners, but the Continental was all that and continues to bring much-needed soul to South Congress.
The CC that closed in ‘87, not the one that opened in ‘87, is my favorite live music venue ever. That has alot to do with age. Leaning against the back wall was a 29-year-old’s natural body position, but decades later it’s sitting on a stool. Other clubs have felt like home, especially Lounge Ax in Chicago. But the Continental WAS home.
The only fight I ever saw there was during one of my “Corky’s Star Search” competitions on Monday night. I had to handle bouncer/ doorman duties- with instructions not to call the police under any circumstances- when a full-on brawl broke out one night between supporters of competing hard rock bands. Sportscaster Vic Jacobs and Dino Lee were there, kinda acting as my backup as I broke it up. Then 10 minutes later the fight raged up again.
The mark of the club, however, was mellowness in the face of oft-aggressive music. For a room that had zero ambiance, the Continental was a special place because of what happened onstage. My first night in Austin, April 1, 1984, I wandered in off South Congress and saw the Butthole Surfers in a psychedelic haze. Quite an introduction to Austin music. For the next three years I’d see so many great shows: Minutemen, accordionista Steve Jordan, the Replacements, Johnny Thunders, the Skeletons, Del Fuegos, Meat Puppets, Green On Red and on and on. But the cozy confines ruled by Mark Pratz and J’Net Ward had become especially known as the clubhouse for the “New Sincerity” bands- True Believers, Zeitgeist, Glass Eye, Doctors Mob, Wild Seeds, Texas Instruments, Dharma Bums, Daniel Johnston, Black Sand, Two Nice Girls. These bands also forged a scene at the Beach (now Crown & Anchor), but that was more of a cool hangout. The no-frills Continental Club was where you went to get a face fulla music.
That legacy started in Sept. 1979, when the owners of the shuttered One Knite (at current Stubb’s location) took over the lease at 1315 S. Congress. “It was a neighborhood bar with a pool table and pinball machine,” recalled Roger Oneknite Collins, of the dive that opened at 7 a.m. and closed at 8 p.m. “Martin, the owner, wasn't thrilled when he heard we wanted to put live music in. He was concerned about his vending machine money, so we had to guarantee in the lease he'd make a minimum amount from the pool table and pinball.” Summerdog was hired as bar manager and Wayne Nagel booked the talent.
Stevie Ray Vaughan’s 10-year overnight success story plsyed out at the Continental in 1982, when Jerry Wexler stopped in. "It was almost an out-of-body experience, I couldn't believe it,” the legendary R&B producer told the Austin Chronicle. Wexler called Claude Nobs at the Montreux Jazz Festival the next morning and got Vaughan booked on the spot. That's the gig where Stevie met David Bowie, who hired him for Let’s Dance and Jackson Browne, who offered his studio for free. Texas Flood was recorded there in six days.
A more telling Stevie gig at the CC was when a guitar solo made a chunk fall from the ceiling. The club wasn’t quite breaking even.
Pratz, Ward and soundman Terry Pearson took over the bare bones club in 1983, kicking up the national bookings with Louis Meyers on the phone, while keeping the focus on local acts that could draw. Michael Hall, now a writer for Texas Monthly, hosted “Hoot Night” every Sunday. One night a street band from Hawaii called Poi Dog Pondering rolled into town and ended up charming everyone. They decided to stay for a few years.
Pratz, Ward and Meyers also ran Liberty Lunch in a building owned by the city. With 1/3 the rent ($600 a month) and three times the capacity, it made sense to concentrate on the Lunch and close the Continental. Still, it was crushing news.
That final night lineup was advertised as Glass Eye, Wild Seeds and Zeitgeist. True Believers had another gig in town that night, but, thanks to the generosity of Zeitgeist, they would play the very last set. The buzz went through the crowd as the Troobs turned up at the back door like gunslingers. With Brent Grulke (dressed in drag, as were the members of Wild Seeds) at the sound board, the Escovedo Gang was so loud that folks in the street needed earplugs. It was great, but True Believers blew out Zeitgeist’s amps after about four songs. Lasting memory from loadout: John Croslin talking to TB bassist J.D. Foster about paying to repair the amps and Foster shrugging, “Hey, man, that’s rock and roll.”
The joint has been around since February 1955, when local businessmen Morin Scott and Dorsey Wier opened the Continental Club as a “private” lounge so they could serve mixed drinks. The opening week featured the Four Guys vocal quartet from Houston, with future actor Larry “Hogan’s Heroes” Hovis just out out of high school.
After nine months of operation, the Continental and another private saloon, Jesters Club at 3010 Guadalupe St., were challenged by the Texas Liquor Control Board on their loophole to sell drinks with alcohol (which wouldn’t be legal in Texas until 1971). The clubs reportedly sold drinks to non-members. The results of that injunction couldn’t be found online, but the Continental went public in 1956, serving only beer and wine and setups.
The Sunday night jam session brought out some of the area’s best musicians, but after the club was sold in the early ‘60s, the jazz moved to Club Unique on Guadalupe St., just north of the Drag.
In 1966, the Continental became Austin’s second topless joint, owned by Frank Hoffman, who also ran the first, the Mardi Gras Club. The C.C. got shut down a couple times for lewd behavior, so the entertainment changed to go-go dancers in bikinis.
Dorothy Armstrong ran the club in the early ‘70s, getting its first permit to sell liquor by the drink in 1972. Leading to the “Barfly” years.
We can all marvel at what the Continental has become, especially with the Gallery listening room upstairs. Like Mark and J’Net before him, Steve is a special kind of club owner, who fosters a family atmosphere with his staff, which is why he keeps waitresses and bartenders for decades- and musical residencies almost as long. Toni Price isn’t there any more for Tuesday’s “Hippie Hour,” which turned the street behind the club into a Cheech and Chong scene during intermission, but Jon Dee Graham, James McMurtry and the members of Heybale! have been assured at least one payday a week for years. Gary Clark Jr. played there every Wednesday for a year, working out his sound to small crowds. The Peterson Brothers are doing the same thing every Monday.
And then there’s the go-go dancing back bartender Clara Que Si, an inadvertent music critic who gives an instant thumbs-up whenever she’s overtaken by the musical spell and jumps onstage to frug. Riding the CC back to ‘66. The building at 1315 S. Congress Avenue, which opened in 1947 as a laundromat, is a special, special place. This is still Austin as long as the Continental Club is rocking.
LEGENDARY NIGHT: BUCK OWENS IS IN THE HOUSE!
Austin is a Buckaroo town, more Bakersfield than Nashville, so it was natural that local musicians did a tribute night to the ‘60s honky tonk hero whose twangin’ #1s include “Act Naturally,” “Sam’s Place” and “Waiting In Your Welfare Line.” Guitarist Casper Rawls, then of the Leroi Brothers, and drummer Tom Lewis of the Wagoneers, put the first Buck Owens Birthday Bash together in 1992 and the show was such a blast that it became an annual Continental Club event. Every Travis and Hays County country musician of note put it on their calendar and, as a courtesy, Rawls invited Owens, a native of Sherman, Texas, every year.
And in the fourth year, the country legend showed up! Only four people from the club- Rawls, Lewis, Wertheimer and singer Kelly Willis- knew ahead of time that it was going to happen and even they weren’t 100% until Owens came in the front door about an hour into the marathon show. Wertheimer whisked the ultra-special guest to a roped-off spot at the corner of the bar, but he’d been spotted and it shot through the crowd: “Buck Owens is in the house!”
The seed was planted a year earlier when Owens, deeply touched by the annual birthday tribute, sent Rawls one of his red, white and blue guitars. On the pick guard Owens had engraved “To Casper, I might see you August 12, 1995!” Buck’s private plane was enroute to Austin that day, with singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale and Buckaroos pianist Jim Shaw along for the jam.
After checking things out for a bit, Owens took the stage to sing a duet with Kelly Willis on “Loose Talk” and the crowd lost it. Later, Owens joined Rawls and the house band for three numbers: “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” “I Don’t Hear You” and “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail.” A birthday cake and a raucous singalong of “Happy Birthday” followed. It was a party no one present will ever forget.
Lewis said that the moment that’s stayed with him came late in the show, when Buck came from his stool in the back corner to the side of the stage to watch the Derailers, who wore matching suits like the Buckaroos and modeled their sound after the Telecaster-driven band from Bakersfield. As Tony Villanueva and Brian Hofeldt tapped into the chemistry of Owens and his long gone musical soul mate Don Rich, Buck had tears in his eyes.
This was our life... home was the Continental Club:) Julie Hewitt