Throwback: Gang of Four at Club Foot
Excerpt from "Austin Music Is a Scene," coming in Spring 2024
A budding entrepreneur whose dabbles included brokering horse semen to thoroughbred breeders, John Bird reportedly “won” a failing gay disco called 110 Club in a card game. With its two-tiered sightlines, Bird returned the former location of Boondocks (whose Lorraine Dillard and her sons had the second level built in 1976), to a live music format. Jim Ramsey’s Spotlight Productions booked the club’s first two roadshows—the Stranglers on October 28, 1980 and Gang of Four, with F-Systems opening, a week later, on the night Ronald Reagan was elected President.
After berating the crowd of Americans for choosing “a B-list actor” to lead them (2016: “hold my beer”), the politically radical Gang firehosed the room with danceable punk rock that left everyone dripping. “It was one of those great rock shows that crosses the line into pandemonium,” said photographer David C. Fox. “You know that saying about how ‘rock and roll saved my life’? That’s how that night felt.”
Also there was Brad First, who walked back to Duke’s Royal Coach Inn, the punk/new wave club he ran with Fox, Roland Swenson, and Sam Staples, and sat there in the dark with head in hands. Our days are numbered, he thought. There was no way bare bones Duke’s, in the former Congress Avenue location of the Vulcan Gas Company, could compete with that new live music palace just two blocks away. He’d have to keep selling shoes at the mall to pay the bills.
Duke’s had been a down-on-its-luck Mexican bar, taken over and rejuvenated by the punk/new wave scene, just like Raul’s before it. When Austin’s first punk club closed in February 1980, it created a void that Duke’s rushed to fill. But Raul’s was back just two months later, booking aggressive punk bands, while Duke’s catered to the new-wavers: F-Systems, Terminal Mind, 5-Spot, Gator Family, Standing Waves, Skunks, the Shades, the Next. Both clubs booked the Big Boys, the most popular punk band in town.
With Swenson moving to NYC, temporarily it turned out, with Standing Waves, First met with Bird (the brother of author Sarah Bird) as soon as he could about working at the newly-named Club Foot. “Duke’s had Joe King Carrasco booked, a big draw,” said First. “So he said, ‘if you can bring Joe King Carrasco to Club Foot instead, you’ve got a job.” Brad also diverted Joe Ely for a New Year’s Eve show, and X after that. Staples was hired to run the lights.
Brad started booking Club Foot the week the Armadillo closed for good. This is called timing. Antone’s was also soon between locations, with an eighteen-month gap between Great Northern Boulevard (#2) and 2915 Guadalupe St., so Club Foot got B.B. King, James Brown, Sam & Dave, Willie Dixon, Albert Collins, SRV, Fabulous Thunderbirds, John Lee Hooker, and other acts that would’ve went with Austin’s “Home of the Blues.”
But the club was better known for the bands that exploded on MTV, including U2, New Order, R.E.M. and the Go-Gos, so First convinced Bird to upgrade the club’s video screens and sound system. “The perfect club, to me, was one where the people stay after the show and hang out and dance,” he said. Metallica also played the 950-capacity venue.
Club Foot was a sensation on the scene, but losing money, First said, partially due to Bird’s insistence that the club stay open seven days a week. “If we had 100 people, it looked dead.” First got fired in 1983 for booking King Sunny Ade, which ended up being one of the most celebrated concerts in Austin music history. The $7,500 fee was high for the three-year-old club, and First also had to charter a bus to bring the group to and from Houston. No touring African band had ever played an Austin club, so it was more risk than Club Foot owner John Bird was willing to take.
The venue at 110 E. 4th Street, behind the Greyhound station, would have to sell 800 tickets just to break even. “A $10 ticket was almost unheard of back then,” said First, who couldn’t risk not booking a band he knew would turn Club Foot into a den of delirium.
Promoted in conjunction with UT’s African Student Union, and trumpeted by Dan Del Santo’s World Music radio show on KUT, the King Sunny Ade show sold out, and those who were there describe it more in religious than musical terms. The Talking Heads 1980 show at the Armadillo on the Remain in Light tour primed the local audience in African polyrhythms, but this was the real thing! The crowd gasped in ecstasy after three solid hours of the original groove music.
Bird had decided to fire staff and rebrand Club Foot as Nightlife, but after the King Sunny Ade triumph, he let First book shows there on a freelance basis.
Great story and one of the best music venue layouts ever. Big Cadillac /other car bar with window views of the bus station. No bad seats and great bands. Iggy Pop,SRV and Dire Straits and so many others . First time I remembered seeing Stevie sing as the front man was there.
Great article. Interesting about the timing of these clubs. Lots going on. Btw the color photo of Fsystems should be credited to Ken Hoge.