Copyright Variety
Fresh lettering has gone up on the marquee at Antone’s nightclub in Austin: “Forever.” That may err on the side of slightly wishful thinking, but the club at least has a better head start on eternal life than most. The nationally celebrated mecca for blues and other roots music has signed a 50-year lease deal with its landlord to cap off a 50th anniversary celebration that has lasted throughout 2025. Few, if any, comparable nightspots that don’t own their own real estate have inked a deal that would guarantee them a home for decades going forward. But few are considered as indispensable to their communities as Antone’s is, and this one is benefitting from a landlord that not only understands the club’s history but wants visitors and tourists not to visit Austin at night only to find that there is no live music at the center of the self-proclaimed Live Music Capitol of the World. The deal is actually for 30 years, with two 10-year-extensions after that, but Antone’s is expecting to be putting a 100th birthday party on the marquee in 2075. In other news announced Monday, Antone’s is also planning to build a museum on its second level that will be open for tourists during the day as well as clubgoers at night, which will double as a VIP room. The museum is expected to open in 2017. Will Bridges, the co-owner of Antone’s, and Zach Ernst, director of booking and creative, took over the venerable club and its attendant operations about a dozen years ago, with a move into the current downtown location a decadea ago. They talked with Variety about the venue’s past, its present — which just included an Antone’s-themed episode of “Austin City Limits” that aired on PBS Saturday — and its apparently wide-open future. “The first 50 years was just such a heroic effort — all these twists and turns, with a fighting, scrappy, never-say-die attitude to get to 50,” says Bridges. “And of course it’s gonna take a lot of work to get through the next 50. But to have the vision and the runway to be able to presumably duplicate that, it’s empowering, for sure. And it certainly is going to be exciting to announce because, as much as we’ve been milking the 50th anniversary for everything it’s worth, I don’t think people were expecting us to jujitsu that into: Just when you thought we were done, we’re gonna do it for another 50. “Antone’s has moved a lot around in its first 50 year,” he adds. “We’re actually in the sixth location. And so it’s part of our DNA to persevere, and if Antone’s gets displaced, it goes and finds another home, and that in itself is unique. So in a way, this is kind of departing from that m.o. But longevity, of course. is the real goal.” Prior to this late-breaking development, the centerpiece of the 50th anniversary of Cliff Antone establishing a blues club in Austin was an elaborate boxed set on New West Records titled “Antone’s: 50 Years of the Blues” — a five-disc, 41-track collection with 18 new recordings as well as classic and previously unreleased material, produced by Ernst. Putting that together spurred the idea of forming an all-star blues revue in the tradition of the old Antone’s house band and doing a few select dates around the country, including an L.A. Troubadour show, a party/jam at the Village Recorder in West L.A., an AmericanaFest gig at Jack White’s Blue Room in Nashville, and a Lincoln Center outdoor show at Damrosch Park in New York … not to mention the “Austin City Limits” that just aired. “While it may have seemed like we were just inventing new things to come up with to do to celebrate the 50th,” says Ernst, “the boxed set was really the nucleus of all of it, and all those other projects were just ways to kind of tour it around. We have had a lot of fun traveling and taking Antone’s on the road for the first time in about 35 years.” Although Antone’s has not been strictly a blues club since at least the ’90s, this was a way to double up on that core mission. “The older class was saying this is the closest thing they’d experienced since the old house band, and a lot of the younger players were saying that this brought a sense of musical family that they had yearned for their entire careers. Those who were exposed to the old Antone’s culture always felt connected to it, but they never had that opportunity to find their flock or be with their tribe, and this was it. So it’s kind of turned into a thing that has a life of its own, and we’re excited to see where that continues to go” with more all-star revue concerts in the near future. Getting back to the 50-year lease, Bridges explains how it came about. “Eleven years ago, when Zach’s and my team took on the club, we signed a 10-year lease with two five-year options,” the co-owner says. “So we wouldn’t have been thinking quite that long-term yet, as far as necessarily needing to ask for a big extension, because we still had another 10 years left. But those first 10 years went by pretty quick, so we were at least cognizant of: OK, what happens in 10 years? Austin is getting increasingly more difficult, and if we do have to find a new home, the odds of that are getting slimmer. But there was this grant program that we first started getting involved with three years ago, when Austin created an economic development corporation sidecar entity that has been rebranded as Rally Austin. I’ve learned a lot about that being a model for growing municipalities, of kind of a trust to try to take control or ownership of venues or cultural assets spaces that harbor arts and music culture in different cities. I remember learning about one in San Francisco 10 or 15 years ago. It always sounded a little pie in the sky for Austin. But the idea is, if you can have some entity step in and be kind of a intermediary, it can help make sure these spaces don’t just go to the chopping block of commercial real estate.” But Rally Austin had a prerequisite for bringing spaces into the program, which is that they are either able to buy their property or have a long-term lease. “So that was the catalyst for us going to our landlord very early in that process, about three years ago, saying, ‘Hey, we wouldn’t normally be coming to you right now talking about this. But if you’re open to exploring a long-term lease that could unlock some funds for us…’ Our landlord said, ‘I’m open to it.’ And slowly but surely as the thing evolved, he got on board and really helped.” Bridges says the landlord’s business “has a lot of key properties downtown. And so when we first went to him 12 years ago (about taking over Antone’s), we were very transparent about, ‘Hey, we’re a music venue. We’re not gonna be able to compete just on normal economics. We’re not gonna be the highest bidder for this space. But we bring a different type of value to downtown.’ Especially 11, 12 years ago, there was a lot of talk about music venues escaping downtown because of increasing rents and property tax and just property values overall. And Austin’s a young city — we’re always kind of reading ahead in the story to see how this plays out in markets that are further along than we are in their life cycle. But one of the doomsday things I remember everyone talking about is, if you lose your cultural class, if you lose your arts and music in downtown, you’ll become a donut city. “We thought it was really important to make a point to go back into downtown,” Bridges continues. “And so part of our original pitch was in kind of the headwinds of all that questioning of the arts and music leaving downtown — escaping to greener pasture, so to speak — we made that commitment to him, saying, ‘We’re gonna do the opposite. We’re gonna plant the Antone’s flag back downtown as close to the original cross streets of the original 6th and Brazos location as possible, and reverse that trend and bring that cultural value back to downtown.'” Since they moved into Antone’s sixth location, it has been just shy of a decade — a nice round number that Bridges seems to have kind of let slip, until you query him about it. “It’ll be 10 years on New Year’s Eve, which we hadn’t even thought about. You know, maybe we should throw a 10-year anniversary party in the ‘new’ building! But … we’ve kind of eclipsed that” with all this other news, he laughs. The museum was something they had hoped to put together off-site, until the eureka idea of doing it adjacent and slightly smaller than first imagined came up. “We have so much memorabilia that’s been gifted to us over the years, and so much generosity within our immediate network of folks that we knew would be happy to lend stuff,” Bridges says. “So we were toying around with that idea for a long time, but we couldn’t figure out where to put it. Finally, one of our board members inspired us to just put it upstairs, which we thought would’ve been too small of a space. But we took some tours and went to Memphis, for example, and saw Stax, which is amazing, but also saw Sun Studios, which showed me that you can pack a lot of amazing history into a small package and sometimes it’s almost more impactful in that way. — along with also being in a space where the music actually happened. “It’s gonna be installed there in the upstairs space, and there’ll be a lot of synergies having it open during the day, attracting more activity to the building in the daytime hours, but then also be open at night. So it won’t be a traditional museum; it will be on top of a music venue. There’ll still be a bar in there. “People already come by Antone’s, especially tourists of course, during the day, because there’s not a whole lot of music things you can do during the day in Austin. One of the lightbulb moments for me with having the museum on top of the club is: I remember coming in one day, and we have a record shop downstairs called Big Henry’s. I caught our record shop attendee giving a little impromptu tour of the club, and one of the tourists was taking a picture of the beer guy pulling beer in. And I thought, ‘We can do better than this! We can give him a little something better than the beer guy.’ “So people are yearning for daytime experiences and we hope to be a destination for schools and youth groups and people that want to take their kids to be exposed to music. But then at nighttime, on any given day, we have 200-400 people coming through the club who are there for the music. So, in Texas, we have the saying “shooting fish in a barrel.” We think it’s gonna be really easy to entice those folks to go upstairs for a small donation to the Clifford Antone Foundation. We also excited about it being kind of a special club for our Clifford Antone Foundation members during shows, because we’ve always had a camera system where you can still hear and see the show downstairs. So it can even be maybe analogous to a VIP experience like the Founder’s Room at House of Blues.” Antone’s is reemphasizing the blues with the 50th anniversary boxed set and shows, but on a day-to-day level, the club programs plenty of different genres. Ernst explains that evolution. “After doing this (booking) for a couple years, I realized that I could get the big cast of fans who love to come to Jimmy Vaughn shows or Maceo Parker shows or Billy Gibbons shows and maybe get them out once a month, but you can’t expect those people to come all the time,” he says. “So I have always been spacing those throughout the calendar just for our own enjoyment. But Antone’s also means a lot to the city of Austin as just a 400-cap room that touring bands can play for the first time, sort of like the Troubadour or Bowery Ballroom. We had a Billy Strings show, and a Lizzo show, and Jack Harlow, all these bands that have gone on to be arena acts, who play the club their first time through. So I’m always cherry-picking things and wanting to have a diversity of lineups and genres and older crowds and younger crowds. “So that hasn’t changed, but this year, really going out on a limb with this blues revue thing that we created, is just from knowing that people outside of Austin care about this stuff, and knowing that there’s an audience for it and not giving up on it just because a lot of the heroes have passed away. You know, they said ‘the blues is dead’ in 1975. Here we are 50 years later, and people might still say that stuff. We’re just having fun, reconnecting with all these old friends and making sure that we can continue to host them at our stage and think creatively about how to encapsulate that feeling and share it with the world.” Continues Ernst: “Yeah, Antone’s is a blues club, while presenting the genres that we’re passionate about underneath kind of the blues umbrella — R&B, zydeco, soul, gospel, all these genres that Clifford loved… Antone’s was like a lifeboat in Austin’s music history when other clubs would get closed or scenes would be displaced, because Antone’s would kind of absorb them, at least temporarily. That’s when Antone’s started to transcend beyond just being a home for the blues, and the blues just became almost like a term of endearment for soulful, authentic music here in Austin. It’s like jazz is to New Orleans. It is kind of our root genre, our mother tongue. So the mission is twofold: It’s focusing on those (root) genres, presenting that music, developing those artists. But it’s equally just sort of doing the same for Austin’s music ecosystem at large.” For anyone who wants to get involved in the mission of Antone’s going forward, there is the Antone’s Forever Fund, administered through the Clifford Antone Foundation. “This is our battle cry, our mantra, our campaign for the next 50 years,” says Bridges. “You know, we were in this scrappy survival mode for the first 50. So we’re using this achievement and this milestone as a paradigm shift to go from surviving to thriving. And Antone’s Forever is what we call what’s gonna be this initiative to make sure that Antone’s thrives for another 50 years in Austin. We’re making a big cast plaque that’ll go in the entrance and people can put their name on it, and their name will be in the entrance of Antone’s for the next 50 years.” Or forever, whichever comes first.
