Roger Collins

Jump into the Red River Podcast with Roger Collins, co-owner of legendary Red River haunt the One Knite during its early 1970s live music heyday. Settle in as we crack open the One Knite’s coffin-shapped doors to hear about how Joe Ely and the Flatlanders found their footing on the One Knite’s tabletop stage and how a teenage Stevie Vaughan became Stevie Ray. Along the way, we’ll hear about the music scene’s commingling with the marijuana distribution business, trouble with Harvey Gann’s APD vice squad, and how Roger went from shooting out the streetlights at the corner of 8th and Red River to hanging out with Willie Nelson on the White House lawn.

The podcast is a collection of real stories, history, memories and perspectives from people connected to the cultural district - past and present. Everyone remembers the past a little differently, and some tales include sensitive and explicit topics. These stories don’t always reflect the view, mission or endorsements of our organization - they’re simply part of the rich, complicated history of the place. We’ve done our best to honor each storyteller’s voice, but can’t promise every detail is fact-checked or free from the occasional fuzzy memory. Think of this podcast; heartfelt, imperfect, and full of character. Thanks for listening with an open mind and for celebrating the many layers of our District’s shared heritage.

Support the Red River Cultural District at: www.redriverculturaldistrict.org

Follow us at: @redriverculturaldistrict

The host of The Red River Podcast is: Greg Beets
Special thanks to: Richard Whymark
Explore Richard and Greg's work at: www.acuriousmixofpeople.com

Music for this podcast is provided by: KindKeith

KindKeith (they/them), the musical project of Fort Worth native Keith Galloway Jr., is an Alternative Rap/R&B artist known for blending soulful...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you believe in protecting and supporting Austin's live music scene and our culture, we invite you to get involved at Red River Culturaldistrict.org. Your support helps keep the music alive. From Austin, Texas, you're listening to the Red River Podcast. Stories of music, culture, and community. Exploring the legacy and lore of Red River Street in downtown Austin.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Well, I'm Roger Collins. Most people know me by Roger One Night. And uh I was one of the owners of the One Night Dive and Tavern, which was located at 801 Red River. We own the club from uh uh 1970 to 1976.

SPEAKER_02 0:41

How did you get to Austin?

SPEAKER_01 0:43

When I turned 18, we were stationed in uh San Antonio at Brooks Air Force Base, and I graduated from Highlands High School, and as soon as I could I schedodled up the up the uh brand new Interstate 35 to Austin to enroll in the University of Texas in '66. And uh in fact, Charles Whitman was my welcoming party. We just stayed in the dorm, and uh and that was during orientation.

SPEAKER_02 1:13

Wow, yeah, well that's uh quite quite an introduction to the city. So how did the whole music thing start for you? How did you first get involved in music in Austin?

SPEAKER_01 1:22

As a teenager in the early 60s, I grew up with Bob Dylan and uh was fascinated and enthralled by Bob Dylan music, and immediately I think gravitated towards the folk music scene in in Austin and the clubs that uh that played that, the uh Jade Room and the uh checkered flag and the hungry horse and those kinds of clubs. I come from an era in Austin where the clubs were over on Lavaca, and there was one club on Red River, and that was the New Orleans Club. Yep. It was actually the most popular club in town in the 60s when I came to UT. You know, also the East Austin area of town was an area of town that had some great entertainment spots for primarily the black residents who lived in East Austin. We went over there for for blues music. Bill Campbell and uh Towns Van Zant took me over to uh Ernie's Chicken Shack, and uh so I gravitated towards that scene and that music, and uh probably within six months of of arriving in Austin was drawn into the anti-war Vietnam movement and uh became a somewhat of a political activist during my student years at UT and participated in all the marches and and music was a prevalent thing and you know in the in the marches. And the the first club I think that uh really enthralled me more than anything was the Vulcan Gas Company.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

What was Congress Avenue like at the time that opened? Was it was there much going on down there at night or very dead.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

Yeah, it was uh you know, like a lot of cities in the in the 60s, uh downtown area was a dying area, especially at night. And uh the only thing that was going on uh in Congress or or downtown was the Vulcan Gas Company. And the guys that opened the Vulcan, from my understanding, I I know several of them. Uh they you know gravitated out of the university uh anti-war movement and uh head shop experience here in Austin and opened the Vulcan and and started booking acts that I I guess to generalize were were mainstream counterculture, that type of music. Janice Joplin, 13th floor elevator, you know, uh Mance Lipscomb folk singers that uh came in, several of the local bands, Shiva's headband, and uh the whole scene at the Vulcan started as as university students coming uh for the music, but they didn't serve liquor or beer, and so they had no beer license, so they didn't have an age requirement. And my understanding is Don Hyde was one of the original owners. They set it up uh you know for the purpose of attracting the high school age student, also, uh, as well as the young college student. And the other thing that ended up uh gravitating towards the Vulcan were the military guys. They would come down from Clean, and uh so it created quite a quite a scene with military guys coming. In fact, I even believe that uh Fort Hood placed the Vulcan off limits because it was mostly uh associated with long-haired uh hippie type of of clientele, and they didn't want their troops associating with the Vulcan, so but I don't think that stopped them, but in fact I know it didn't. And there was a lot of uh experimentation with LSD and and Peyote in in those days, too, going on in town, and the atmosphere at the Vulcan was was conducive to that. They had a light show every night, they were very known uh for psychedelic music, Rocky Erickson and the 13th floor elevators.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

If I'm not mistaken, the the Vulcan was where the uh Velvet Underground played when they came to Austin.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Correct. And uh Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground came there, I think in 69. They were in town, I believe, for three nights. Lou Reed came up to campus and uh spoke at Dr. uh Krupa's English class. He talked about going to a club uh called the One Night, which was uh a very uh interesting place. This was, I think, in 1969, and my partner, Gary Oliver, was uh enrolled in that Dr. Krupa English class. And he heard about the one night, so he went to check it out. And uh that's really how I discovered the one night was through my my partner Gary and uh Roddy Howard, which was my third partner, and uh he was he was good friends, and we were all three good friends, and uh so when they discovered it, I discovered it, and uh things went from there.

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Uh yeah, I wanted to ask a little bit about what the one night was like before you guys took it over.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

The one night was was a junk store. It was an old junk store down on the Red River in the 60s, and it was one of these stores that maybe had 20 customers a day, and you know, they would come in there and browse the dusty shelves of the junk, and uh that was it. It became uh a building for rent, and there were several several business and law students up on the UT campus who were looking for a clubhouse type of place, a place where they could drink and not pay a fortune to drink, which back then beer wasn't very expensive anyway, but uh they discovered the one night was available to rent for uh $150 or something like that, or maybe $300 a month, and they rented it in uh 67, I believe. Occasionally they would have people come in who uh wanted to play uh, you know, uh a wandering minstrel type of person who uh would come in and hey, you mind if I play uh my guitars and you know, things like that. So they had an occasional act come in and do that. And over those three years, they sort of expanded the hangout experience, and uh when we discovered it, it was still very much of a hangout type of club, not a live music venue. But we looked at it as a place to turn it into a live music venue in 1970, and the reason that it was even available in 1970 was these guys were graduating and leaving town and uh they're getting ready to get rid of their clubhouse. And so we decided, well, we needed a clubhouse, but we put live music in it. So that's really uh how the transition uh occurred.

SPEAKER_02 8:31

What was Red River like at that time? I mean, were there was there's was there a lot going on down there? What was it like what was like during the day as well as like at night?

SPEAKER_01 8:39

If you uh go into any uh town or city in Texas in the downtown area, what you're gonna discover is is that there are dead areas, and that's pretty much what Red River was. A block from uh uh the one night on uh 9th Street was the city ice house. We still in the 60s had city ice houses where you could go and uh buy blocks of ice. I mean, they manufactured ice by the 50-pound block, and uh, you know, they still had these big prongs that you pick up the ice blocks, and and people in the late 60s still use these blocks of ice for refrigeration in refrigerators. So, I mean, this is this is the period of time we're talking about. That was located just around the corner from the one night on 9th Street. On 8th Street, just around the corner from the one night, was the police station. There was a Spanish restaurant across the street from the One Night, uh, Jaime's Spanish Village, that had been there and uh was there all through the 70s and uh eighties, I believe, and uh and on. On 11th in uh Red River, and there was a club known as the 11th Door, and it was a and it was a small folk club. Jerry Jeff Walker uh played there occasionally, Carolyn Hester played there occasionally, and that was the only entertainment or club on Red River. It was not a a place you would see huge throngs of people. It was a place that attracted maybe maybe 20 people, the 11th door was. Going towards town, there was, you know, I think another junk store on one side of the street. There was a uh vacant warehouse, and so there really wasn't much between uh Red River and campus. There were houses, if I remember correctly, and uh houses uh strewn throughout that whole area, and uh but as far as businesses go, there were there really wasn't anything. It wasn't a high-rate area, a high rent area of town. Yeah, it was it was an area of town that if you're looking for a place that you wanted to be away from everything and get cheap rent, that's the type of place it was. And uh wasn't a place that people visited on a daily basis for really anything, yeah, other than the ice house.

SPEAKER_02 11:11

So, musically speaking, when the three of you took over down there, I mean, did you have a vision for what type of music you wanted to have at the one night?

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Well, our vision was what really was popular in the day, and and and you know, based on the size of the place and and our taste, and and they more centered around the uh uh single guitar player type of venue. Uh in fact, our first act that I can remember was Joe Ely. He walked in off the street with his guitar and uh wanted to pick. Another act that that we hired was uh Cody Ubach, another another single guitar player act. We we didn't have a stage. What we had were three tabletops that were nailed together, and they weren't sitting on anything other than the ground. So they gave the performer the idea that he was sitting a little bit higher than the audience, and he was sitting on his little stage, and that was it. The club consisted of seven, eight, nine tables and uh booths along the wall, and uh so it was a a picker's type of club, and uh and it was really what suited uh you know the music scene in in the town at that time.

SPEAKER_02 12:26

Yeah. If I'm like walking into the one night in 1970, can you walk me through the club? Like if I if I come into the entrance, yeah, what's the first thing I'm gonna notice? What am I gonna see?

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Well, the first thing you're gonna see are our doors. Uh you came into the into the club uh through a coffin door, and then the coffin door opened up into a rectangular building about the size of uh maybe two two large living rooms in a in a in a house put together. But it was just a simple rectangle, and the bar was located on the left-hand side. As a matter of fact, I built that bar, and the next thing on the left side was the men's restroom, and the next thing was the women's restroom, and then there was a storage room in the very back of the club was just where the tabletops had been set up as a as a stage, and also on the very back wall of the club was an exit door, but when you exited out that door, there was a staircase that was very steep, very old, very rickety, and very long, that went almost you know vertical. And there was a landing out there on the back door that was big enough to accommodate maybe three people, and it looked like it was coming off from its connections to the wall, and from that landing was a staircase that uh was attached going down the side of the wall made out of wood. You had to be a very brave soul to go out on that landing, and a very brave soul to go down those stairs, and those stairs exited out into a little field uh, and that field budded up to Waller Creek, and it also was the parking lot driveway for a Hispanic family that lived down there. We had a Hispanic family that lived underneath them one night, and we had another Hispanic family that lived in a small I I don't really want to call it a house because it was not very much of a house that was uh that ran across along Waller Creek back there. Back up on into the club, on the other side of the club from the restrooms was lined with booths. And uh we had about seven or eight booths lining that side of the wall. And as as you came in the front door was a pool table.

SPEAKER_02 15:05

Now, I know over time, you know, it started as is a picker's venue as you're describing it. Right. But it at some point it became the the place where a lot of the local blues type acts started to run.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

In I think it was late 1970, uh, Jimmy Vaughn came in one day and and he had a band called Storm, and he he said, Boy, this looks like it would be a great place for for a blues club. And uh we said, you know, we usually didn't have bands, we had pickers, we didn't have a stage or anything, and he said that'd be fine. And uh and that's really how the whole music scene started, uh, as far as I remembered. Uh we decided at that point that we would build a stage, and Jimmy Vaughn and Storm started playing on Monday nights, and uh, and we started getting a good crowd, and so we sort of gravitated towards other bands, and uh one band after another, we became a band club, and our our pickers started getting very upset because we started taking their nights away. And we had a lot of pickers. Actually, uh Kenneth Thredgill was one of our pickers, he was one of our regular pickers. Kenneth Thredgill and Bill Neely, Bill and Bonnie Hearn, Blind George McLean. They sort of made the transition from pickers also to bands. And so we we went from single acts to duos to, you know, and we had a few bands scattered in there, and gradually as as the bands became more popular than the pickers, it just changed over. Cody Ubach, he became a very good friend of the of the club because he was down there all the time, and he was one of the last pickers to to actually lose his night, and uh that was probably in about 1973.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

Oh, so we hung on there for a while. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

And uh with bands interspersed, uh, even though Storm played a regular gig on Monday nights. That's how Stevie Vaughn ended up uh at the one night because his brother was playing there. As soon as Stevie uh came of age to get out of Dallas and uh and move move to Austin, I think that was in uh 71 when he came down and started picking with his brother. He actually became a member of Storm as uh as a second guitar player with his brother. Over the course of the five years that we were open there, Storm was was definitely our breadwinner. And I think we were their breadwinner. Um we had a huge throng of people every Monday night. It became known as known as Stormy Monday. You know, it would be wall to wall. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 17:44

So tell me a little bit about Stevie Gray Vaughn, or Stevie Vaughan, I guess probably as he would have been known back then. I mean, when when he first started coming in there and playing uh as as a very young man, I mean, how much of his style that people have come to know was already in place?

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Well, when Stevie, when Stevie first appeared and and started playing with Jimmy, it was very obvious that he was a a phenom and and just excellent guitar player. You know, when you hear somebody like Stevie, even even as a young 17-year-old, he was very, very good and very gifted. And so he he had a a lot of talent uh very early. And uh, you know, obviously his his style developed and and changed a little bit over those years in those early days. I think one of the things that changed him more than anything in those early days was the different bands that he experimented with and and played with. You know, he would learn learn different parts of his style and and flashiness from from playing with him. I think Crackerjack probably influenced his style more than anything. Several of them during that period were experimenting with dress and clothing. Tommy Shannon and Johnny Winter had just come back from uh from playing uh big, huge music festivals. And they were on the scene, you know, with all this English clothing mob, and uh, and so they brought that influence back to uh to Austin and uh that whole professionalism part of it. Look, if we're gonna be on stage, we're not just gonna be a bunch of Austin, Texas boys. We're gonna we're gonna be real, you know, performers on stage. So when we talk about Stevie, I think he learned, you know, who I'm gonna be Stevie Ray Vaughn, you know, I'm not just gonna be Stevie Vaughn, you know, the kid from Dallas. And uh so I think he he learned that part of it. But he was just Stevie Vaughn in those early days.

SPEAKER_02 20:06

When you guys were booking, were you primarily doing residencies where people would get the same night every week? Or how did that work?

SPEAKER_01 20:14

We had a very interesting philosophy at the one night. There are several things I think that that go into understanding how we were running the club that are important. There were three of us, Roddy Howard, Gary Oliver, and myself. We all came from from UT, and uh we were all involved uh one way or another in the in the anti-war movement, and the whole counterculture scene uh you know that was going on during the late 60s, early 70s. We were all involved in uh in smoking marijuana and and believed pretty much that marijuana ought to be legalized at that time, and uh uh, you know, there was a huge, huge cultural scene in America that that supported and and believed in that trend. It was, you know, associated with the hippie movement. Uh and we all had a belief that music should be something that should be provided and available for for anybody that wanted it. We did understand, though, that bands uh, you know, they need to have an income also. I mean, we understood the the economics of that situation, but we also uh we were very much against formal booking agent types of situations because you're having to pay a middleman and it's as counterculture as you could get. We did not believe in in uh expensive cars, we did not believe in expensive houses and uh but uh you know, I wouldn't call ourselves like I said, but I wouldn't call ourselves True hippies because we also didn't believe that you should be living in a tent. My partner Gary, he believed in that type of uh society to the extent that he would he would never never have any part to do with a club that charged a cover charge. Ever. He was totally against uh you know clubs charging cover charges. And he was a musician also. But he said, you know, the only way we're gonna have live music is it has to be free because I'm not gonna be a part of it. And he was, you know, the founding member of the of the club. Well, Roddy and I bought totally into that. And uh as time went on, we really believed that we could do this for free. And if the music was worth listening to, then our clientele would contribute and pay, and they would do that by passing the hat. And so if the music was good, then they got rewarded. If the music wasn't worth it, then they didn't get rewarded. Now, you know, obviously that system has a lot of fallacies, but that's the system that we set up. And the bands didn't make a lot of money, but neither did anybody else. My two partners were legally blind. They had Social Security benefits for being legally blind citizens. So they had income and they were legally blind from childhood. Uh both of them could see, but they had like 820 vision, you know, in that range, and very poor vision. In fact, my partner Gary was an artist, and to draw, he would literally have to have the paper touching his nose. And really, really mind-boggling to see the scope of his artwork and understand how he did it, because he was uh literally blind as a bat, so to speak. And so going into your question about how we booked bands, uh bands came to us because the popularity of the club grew. Um, Stormy Monday became extremely successful for, like I said, Storm and the club, and passing the hat, they would sometimes make several hundred dollars easily, and this is a lot of money in the early 70s. Sometimes they make as much as three, four, five hundred dollars. There's another important thing to understand also about the culture. Austin, Texas, at that point was sort of the tip of the spear of the marijuana movement process. Marijuana became a very booming business for Mexicans in Mexico, and there wasn't a lot of crime associated with it in those early days. Uh, it was just a matter of growing marijuana, shipping it up to the United States, and Austin was on the tip of that spear. It was a shipping shipping point for distribution. It was a college town, and there were a lot of enterprising, young people that were in the culture that believed in in marijuana being available and free, and and they became marijuana dealers, and uh, and they would ship marijuana out of Austin to all sorts of points around the United States. And it created a lot of money coming into Austin. And a lot of that money went into club businesses in Austin. A lot of the people that were associated with clubs, not as not necessarily all of them as owners, but as customers, also were spending a lot of money that was, you know, coming from the marijuana business. And uh there wasn't there wasn't a problem associated with it, uh, you know, a societal problem, other than the fact that the police and the vice squad didn't like it, and Texas didn't like it, and the laws didn't favor it. And so it was, you know, a very harsh and strict uh punishment system if you got caught with it. How it affected our clientele? Well, we attracted a lot of that type of business because we were counterculture, we were anti-war, we were in favor of legalizing marijuana in those days, and uh marijuana dealers uh were some of our customers, and we had a lot of different different types of customers. We became known as a biker club. It was not because we tried to become a biker club, it was just because of our philosophy of allowing anybody to come in the club. We didn't care as long as there was not any problem caused, and the bikers agreed to that. They became actually friends, but but it actually would contribute to our downfall in the long term because they started parking their bikes out front, and uh people would come by and see a hundred bikes out front, and they weren't gonna come in there, even though there weren't problems. You know, the bikers became known for traveling in drugs, and so they had a lot of money. So a lot of this money ended up going into the hats that the bands were passing. I say this because sometimes the band could pass a hat and they might make fifty, seventy-five dollars for a night. Other nights there might be three or four of these dealer guys in there, and they might drop a hundred dollar bill in the hat. And it would not be unknown for somebody to collect the hat and uh come back with three or four hundred dollars in it. Also, it created the culture that was associated with the what night, the the outlaw, illegal, the whole uh anti-societal cult. The whole thing goes hand in hand uh with and and and creates the whole uh the whole image of our club. We got a very uh extremely bad uh reputation with the Austin Vice Squad. To start with, we were right around the corner from them, half a block away. So they had to pass the place every time they left the uh precinct. Not only that, in in the early 70s, I was still a UT student, and I was still participating very actively in anti-war movements up on anti-war protests up on campus. There was a very large protest in 1971 up on campus, which which was very common back then. Very common. Um, multiple arrests, and uh, you know, I was even arrested many times on some of these protests, and uh I usually kept a fairly low profile and did not did not say anything, even though uh at these protests it was very common for people to come up out of the uh out of the crowd and make a little speech or burn their draft card or something like that was a very common occurrence. And I had I had been involved in these movements for several years. At one of them in 1971, uh I decided to finally say something at one of these speeches and uh made a you know one-minute speech up at the up at the protest speech. Well, that afternoon or evening I uh was back up at the one night, and the vice squad, headed by Harvey Gann, came by. There was about eight or ten of them, and there were also several uh bikers uh who were hanging out at the club. And anyway, Harvey Gann and several of his officers pulled up into the front of the club and uh and uh uh he immediately walked up to me and I knew who he was because every student on campus knew who the the vice squad captain was, and and uh but I had no idea that he might know who I was, but he sure did, and uh he walked up to me out on the sidewalk. He said, You're Roger Collins, aren't you? And I looked at him sort of suspiciously, and I said, Yeah, and he said, Well, I know that you're one of the owners of this place. I also know that you made a speech up on campus today. And he proceeded to quote my speech, and he and he quoted me word for word, pretty much what I had said up on campus, and uh it really brought home to me, you know, how how much we were underappreciated by the Austin Bicequad. Because after he made that speech, he proceeded to tell me that he didn't like our kind of people. One thing led to another, and he said, you know, we're gonna drive you out of business. And I said, What are you talking about? And he said, You're not gonna be in this business any longer because we don't like you guys, and uh and we're gonna literally drive you out of business. Uh I replied something like this back to him. I said, Well, you can try, but that's gonna be impossible because we don't have any business. And I proceeded to tell him that our rent was so low that we didn't really give a shit about it, and that we didn't depend on cover charges, and we didn't care if no customers came in, we would still have a place to drink. I don't think he had ever expected that type of statement to come back at him. Well, I didn't really expect his type of behavior to come back at me. What happened over the course of the next 90 days were we were rated on the average of two and a half times a day for the next 90 days by uh Vice Squad and Austin police officers. And it got so bad that the police officers started covering their badge numbers with electrical tape when they came in because we started writing their badge numbers down. After you raid a place, you know, a couple of times a night for a week or two in a row, then the customers start staying away. And so there would only be, you know, six, seven of us in there, the the owners and the pool players and a few beat, you know, people drinking. And, you know, this was still in our very early days. They never never arrested anybody because there wasn't really anybody to arrest. I journaled all of these, all of these entries down over the course of that 90 days and logged how many police cars, how many officers. I still look back on this. The biggest mistake I ever made was after 90 days, myself and my two partners went down to the police department to the internal affairs department, and we sat down with an internal affairs officer and said, Look, we owned the one night up the street. And he said, Yeah, I've heard of y'all, and and we we got a complaint, and proceeded to show him my journal of all these raids. And I said, This is in the last 90 days. Do you think this looks a little bit abnormal? He was actually amazed that we had written all this down and that we had records of all this, and uh, he actually agreed that it looked looked pretty abnormal, but the mistake I'm talking about that I made was he asked if he could keep the journal. Uh oh. And I was a neat, naive 23-year-old, said, sure, keep it. The raids actually stopped for for a major, major part. And after that we became, you know, settled down again, and but I never got the journal back. And uh, and uh, but but he did stop the the raids, and when Harvey Gann was running us out of business, I think my marriage was also going out of business at the same time period, and uh unfortunately I I was going through a a divorce or did go through a divorce, and after the divorce, and I didn't have any place to live, so I decided that I would just live at the one night. And I took that small room, you would it was a storage room, it had its own door that went out onto the stage, right? But what I did was I put another door because you can't come out on the stage if you're in your room during the middle of a band. That would be bad. Not only that, the bands would frequently set up an amplifier or something in front of my door on the stage, right? So if I wanted to go back to my room during the middle of the show or something, I open I created a door through the women's bathroom. So you're either going on stage or or through the women's bathroom. Right. To get into my room. While I was living in that room that for about probably a year and a half, we were uh being broken into between 8th Street and the actual building is a gully that is is about four feet wide and goes down about 15 feet. And what was happening is more than once we got broken into, and what was happening is the thief was going down that ledge and knocking out the window, which was just boarded up, and then crawling through there, and then they would break into the cigarette machine of the pool table and the pinball machines, steal the money, go back out and head out. We got broken into two or three times over the course of a month. And so I decided that what I was gonna do was start sleeping in there in my room without going anywhere, and I got a shotgun in hindsight again. Not a very good decision on my part. And sure enough, one of the nights, I hadn't been there very long, I'm awakened at about four o'clock in the morning by somebody kicking in the in the window. I get my shotgun and I go out on out the front door and very, very quietly and walk around outside the building, and I'm standing out there on 8th Street, and there's this guy, this Mexican guy, standing on the ledge with his back to me, and he's pounding in the window. And he's still up there pounding in the window because we had fixed it, so it was a lot harder to pound in. And he was up there pounding it in, and I'm out here with this shotgun, and it's four in the morning, and I'm nervous as hell. Uh, you know, never even had a gun, never held one before in my life. And I sit there and I yell, halt, and he turns around and looks at me, and I look at him, and he looks at me, and I look at him, and he just all of a sudden jumps into that gully. It's about 10, 12 feet, and he so he falls over, and I start yelling at him, stop, stop. And he takes off towards Waller Creek, and I pull the trigger of that shotgun, and he's already probably 50 yards away from me. I mean, he's already way out the back of the one night by the time I pulled the trigger. Well, that causes quite a ruckus at 4 a.m. when you're half a block from the police station. And in about five seconds, I have about eight or nine police cars surrounding me and asking me what the hell I'm doing out there with a shotgun. And uh, and I just told them, you know, well, uh, somebody's just breaking into my building, and I just shot at them, and and they start lecturing me and telling me how stupid I was and uh take my shotgun away. And while they're out there interviewing me, they tell me that a Mexican guy had come into Brackenridge Hospital with buckshot. And they're trying to decide whether to arrest me, and and they're interviewing this guy down at the hospital at the same time, you know, another team of them, and and they're saying, Fortunately, Roger, that that he doesn't want to press charges against you, but you could have been going to prison here for a long time for shooting this guy. They take my shotgun away. But we were never broken into again.

SPEAKER_02 39:03

Well, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 39:07

And I really didn't mean to shoot this guy because I didn't know what I was doing.

SPEAKER_02 39:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

But I was out there holding this gun thinking that when I tell him to stop, you know, he's gonna stop, and I like a like you see on TV, and I'm he's gonna come there and I'm gonna arrest him and I'm gonna call the police. And but none of that happened.

SPEAKER_02 39:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:28

It did not did not go down the way I thought it would.

SPEAKER_02 39:31

Wow. Well, I guess I mean, did you ever even fired this shotgun to her?

SPEAKER_01 39:36

No, but that didn't ever stop me from uh there was another interesting experience after that one. After that one, uh and I and I guess when I'm I'm going over some of the outlaw days of the one night. We uh this was probably about a year or two later. I think uh now I had a pistol. I didn't have a shotgun anymore, I had a pistol. And uh I was I was becoming a quite of a notorious club owner, by the way, by 74, 75, and we were getting you know, our reputation had really grown by this time, and uh and the city installed new streetlights out on uh Red River, and one happened to be right over our corner, and it was bright as hell. Well, this is where everybody liked to go and smoke a joint, you know, because we didn't, even though we were pretty much rebellious, we did not allow them to smoke pot in the club. They would go outside and smoke it on the curb. But with the city street light, it was a little bit glaring. Not only did it bother them because they were so out in the open now, but uh, and and the by the way, the laws for smoking a joint were pretty harsh. My my partner, Roddy Howard, he was on 10 years probation for possession of half of a joint, marijuana joint. Wow. Ten years felony probation. But anyway, they installed these streetlights and they were coming inside and bitching about the new street lights and uh how they couldn't smoke uh a joint outside on the streetlights. So I had been drinking too much that night and said, well, I'll take care of it. So I went outside on the uh street and started firing my pistol at the street light. Well, turns out I was a very bad shot. But again, again, I think I fired six or seven times at the streetlight, missing it all the times, and then knew that I was going to attract attention, and uh immediately got rid of the gun and uh went back inside, and then about five minutes later, we had ten police cars and officers coming in the club, and it was really interesting because they went and talked to a customer in the club and asked that customer, you know, what had happened. We could tell that they were talking to people, and asked a particular customer who we had always suspected of being undercover cop. And sure enough, that guy pointed me out and told the uniformed officers that it was me, but they couldn't find a gun because I had gotten rid of it, and they didn't really have any evidence that anything had happened other than this guy saying that he had fired one and said, it wasn't me, I don't have a gun. And uh so nothing happened. But uh Web we found out that there was an undercover cop that we suspected, and and he never came back to work there because he blew his cover. But well, but that was my outlaw days at the one night. Literally shooting the lights out, or trying to anyway. In those days, uh Lyndon Johnson, President Johnson's detail, was stationed in Austin, Texas, his social uh Secret Service detail because Lyndon had retired in the Hill Country, and uh the Secret Service all basically operated out of the Austin office. They very much enjoyed bars, and several of them enjoyed sleazy bars and dive bars, which sounds pretty weird because these are United States Secret Service officers, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:32

Well, one evening, and this was probably in 1973, about four or five Secret Service officers come into the club in the afternoon. I think this was about five o'clock in the afternoon, and they just sit at the bar and have a beer and start talking about what the place is, and we start talking to them and uh telling them it's you know what. It is. It's club and live music. And so it's pretty cool. Come back. They come back in the evening. Gary Green was one of them. He became my best friend. Wow. And this was back in the days when I'm pulling guns and associating with people who are running marijuana. Well, the Secret Service and I become best buddies. And Gary Green actually becomes one of my best friends until he dies 30 years later. And uh we had several conversations, Gary and I did, and one of them goes that uh, you know, Gary, you obviously uh know who I am because they also liked Willie Nelson. And so they also wanted to go to all the picnics. We all start, you know, hanging out together. And Gary tells me, he said, Roger, you know, this was on one of the rides to the picnic one day. He said, Really, I don't care what you do, as long as you don't counterfeit money, try to kill the president, or run guns. He said, I'm with the Treasury Department, and that's what we do, and that's all we do. If you run guns, try to kill the president or counterfeit money, then we're gonna have a problem. And I said, Gary, I don't do any of those. Wow. And he tells, well, we're not gonna have any issues then. And uh for the next three, four years while we're open, they become regular customers at the one night. And so we've got secret service agents in our club that are being raided by the police hospital, and they were there several times when we were raided, and uh they would always show their badges and uh, you know, and have slight conversations, but but I ended up, we we'd go to picnics together. In fact, when Willie Nelson played at the White House for uh Jenny Carter, Gary Green was the one that ran my fingerprints so that I could get White House credentials to go to that that show at the White House. Wow. And uh that was in 78 or 79, so I was part of the Willie Nelson detail to the White House and and had dinner on the uh White House lawn. I thought it was always pretty spectacular that here this rogue outlaw for the one night is having dinner at the White House on the on the lawn with the president. Wow. You know, the other thing that we became notorious for is throwing after our parties. And uh at first in the early 70s, we started throwing uh after our parties at people's houses after the club would close. We would, you know, invite all the guests that wanted to come, and and we would usually load up uh uh a few cases of beer out of the one night, and you know, this would be midnight, and we would take it over to uh to a residence. And a lot of times those residences were over on 38th Street hippie houses that were notorious in Austin at the time. There were several of them. And uh we would have all night parties. There would be sometimes a hundred people there, and uh, you know, things like hot knives parties became became notorious.

SPEAKER_02 47:35

For folks who don't know, I mean what because I the the first time I ever heard of a hot night, hot knife party was uh was in context to the one night. So talk about what a hot what a hot knife party is.

SPEAKER_01 47:47

Okay. Well, when you're the when you're the distribution point for all of that marijuana coming out of Mexico, the marijuana becomes extremely cheap because we're the starting point, pretty much. And you know, prices for marijuana back in in the late 60s and early 70s were as cheap as $5 a pound. And we used to we used to see that all the time. You know, bales of marijuana would come come through Austin, and uh, you know, these people would buy 80-90 pounds of it, you know, for $400. What these people would do that were distributing this uh marijuana would be they would be, you know, contributors to the parties. And they would bring large amounts of marijuana, not just a joint or two like you see today. Uh, you know, they would bring several pounds of marijuana to a party. Well, when you have several pounds of marijuana at a party, it becomes very, very consuming to sit there and roll it into small joints. And what we would do is we would take these huge machetes, and you would take machetes and you would stick them in the fire, because a lot of these parties had fires because they were outdoors, and and sometimes they'd be out at the lake, and uh we had several places out of the lake that that we'd have outdoor fire pits, and we'd heat these machetes up, and then what they would do is they would take handfuls of of marijuana out of these pounds and they would put it on top of one machete, and they would take the other machete and put it on top of that, and it would just create just bellows of smoke coming out of it. And then people would just sort of stand around and and inhale the smoke coming out of those machetes, and and those were hot knives parties. And uh they were very notorious in Austin, and uh it was something, it was a sign of the times and the culture that you couldn't actually see today and wouldn't happen today. We decided that it would be a lot easier sometimes to have these parties inside the one night. And we became very notorious for these parties, and they became big after our parties for uh for the armadilla, as a matter of fact. We had a lot of armadilla acts that we used to come to the one night and they would party with us till five or six in the morning. Commander Cody became one of our biggest parties. James Taylor did that, James Taylor and Carly Simon. Johnny and Edgar Winter used to come over from Houston and and come to our after hours parties, and uh Tommy Shannon used to bring them over from uh from Houston. They would jam uh with Storm ahead of time, and then they would we would also keep the music going.

SPEAKER_02 50:38

So would would these people coming over for after hours, like these people who played the armadillo, would they would they jam? I mean, would they jump? Oh yeah, they would jam. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 50:45

Yeah, yeah, the party. They would be, we would, we would have the stage set up, you know. For instance, Commander Cody played the piano. So we had to have a band that played the piano. So sometimes we would bring uh keyboards in and or bring a band in knowing that. In fact, I have a picture of Commander Cody wearing one of our one-night shirts on stage at the Armadilla during one of his performances. He became one of our best friends, and uh we would frequently go over to the armadilla during their shows, and uh it end up backstage with the performers and and hijack their shows and and bring them over to the club. We were not we were not nearly a big enough venue for these types of artists, and we knew that they liked to party, and we we had the atmosphere, and so we became very famous for that. That's probably one of the biggest parts of our reputations is our after-hour parties.

SPEAKER_02 51:39

Wow. Now I now one of the stories I I've heard about that is Pink Floyd showing up and um were they were they playing at the Armadillo?

SPEAKER_01 51:50

They were playing at the auditorium, I believe. Okay. The story goes is that they came over on a stormy Monday when when Jimmy Vaughn and Storm was playing, and they came over and love Storm playing. They wanted to jam, but Jimmy Vaughn said, you guys don't know how to play the blues, and told them told them they couldn't jam. And supposedly they got their feelings hurt, and uh were told they couldn't play, and uh I'm not I'm not sure about that, but uh that's supposedly what what transpired. We had we had a lot of things transpire. We had we had one interesting night when Alvin Crow was playing. We Alvin Crow and uh he was actually one of our original pickers as as uh as a single guitar-playing picker. And then he became Little and Crow, which was D.K. Little. So D.K. Little was also one of our single pickers, by the way. And uh they formed up as Little and Crow as we sort of progressed into a bigger band sort of thing. Well, they we'll be Little and Crow. Well, there was one night that there was a band, a women's band, liberation band. They were very, very much into the women's liberation movement and very much into women's rights and probably on the very much radical side of the movement. Well, Alvin Crow at that time period in his life was not anywhere close to that part of his philosophy. And they were up on stage and they were playing something and making speeches about women's live and women's rights, and literally Alvid got into a fight right there on the stage with with one of the women's live oration uh girls, and uh a big fight broke out between Alvid and the women's lib people up on the front of the stage. We would have all kinds of uh evenings in in which because we featured anybody that wanted to play and anybody that wanted to pick, if we had a if we had an open stage, you're welcome. And uh, you know, we didn't care what your message was. Actually, we did. I mean, we didn't have any uh racist uh any KKK representation, didn't want any of that. And uh anything on the left side, I guess we welcomed. We had several momentous evenings uh where bands that uh bands got their start in the one night, which is uh which is pretty impressive. Greasy Wheels was one of the biggest bands in the in the 70s in in Austin, in fact, probably was the biggest band. And uh a lot of people don't know this, but they actually got their start at the one night. And Cleve Hattersley, who started Greasy Wheels, uh, he had been in uh in prison for a marijuana violation and had just gotten to Austin and wanted to start a band. I think he got together with Mary and uh and maybe maybe Lisa, and they came in uh as a threesome asking to play. I think the way Cleve tells, in fact, he wrote it in one of his books, The Story, he asked me uh if they could play uh, and he only knew like nine songs or something, or and that was their set, and and that was the birth of Breezy Wheels.

SPEAKER_02 55:38

Wow, okay.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

And uh another famous band that got their start was Freedom the Fire Dogs got their start at the one night.

SPEAKER_02 55:46

Oh yeah, Marshall Ball. Yeah. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 55:49

And what happened there is, in fact, uh Bobby Earl Smith still still tells this story when he plays today, is that uh he was playing in the one night with a band called Dub and the Dusters. And it was him and Freddie Fletcher, and I don't remember the other members of the band. I think there was a force of them. And Bob had a Bobby Earl and uh he had a strict rule, nobody sat in. And he enforced that rule ever. He didn't have anybody set in with Dub of the Dusters, and uh he said, no, we're not gonna ever have anybody. Well, they were on break, and Freddie Fletcher went outside and met Marcia Ball on the sidewalk. She had just come over from Louisiana and was new in town, and he started talking to her and smoking a joint out on the sidewalk with her, and he said, Well, why don't you sit in with us? And Marsha also has a strict rule that she doesn't do that either. But Freddie talked her into coming in and then he got up to the stage and he told Bobby Earl, he said, Bobby, let's let Marsha sit in. I met her and she's a great pim. Bobby got in an argument with no, nobody sits in. Well, Freddie Fletcher convinced him, and she sat in with them at duh as Dub and the Dusters and Marsha Ball, and they formed Freedom and the Fire Dogs that night. Yeah. And they were huge. They I mean one of the best bands to come out of Austin, and uh, as far as I'm concerned, they have a huge record that back then. Towns Van Zant used to be one of our regular performers at the one night. Oh yeah. And uh yeah, he would be back, he would play the guitar and and uh and sing his songs. He he loved to gamble. We would play craps on the pool table. I didn't I don't think I ever beat Towns. I always suspected he was cheating. Because craps is a game of chance, but he never lost.

SPEAKER_02 57:52

So what are the chances of that, right?

SPEAKER_01 57:56

The other big band that uh that I think really got their start at the one night was the Flatlanders.

SPEAKER_02 58:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:05

Joe Ely, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock. Joe and Butch were both some of our original guitar players as singles acts. And uh and I I guess Jimmy was too. And they formed uh the Flatlanders there. And they got a regular nightly gig there at the at the one night, and we loved their music. In fact, they were one of my favorite bands. Well, my partner, Gary Oliver, used to have a real-to-reel tape deck, so he would set it up on a table in uh front of the stage, and he would hang two mics down from the ceiling, and uh he would record a lot of different bands. Well, in 1972, Gary recorded the Flatlander show. And uh that tape ended up at Gary's house, and uh Gary was became pretty much of an eccentric type of uh artist with uh and a hoarders, just sort of like I am, and he would uh have all of this stuff in boxes. And in 1980, Gary moved to Marfa, Texas, with all of his stuff, and that tape moved with him. And I think in the late 90s, um he was going through his tapes and uh he saw the Flatlanders tape and played it, and uh, Gary was also a very uh very meticulous guy. If it wasn't of quality, then he wasn't gonna share it with anybody. And uh and he thought that this one was a decent quality, so he got in touch with Joe Ely and Bush Hancock and told them that he had this old tape of them. One thing led to another, he played it for them, and uh they decided, wow, this is pretty cool. We're getting the Flatlanders back together, and uh let's let's make a record out of this. And so this live recording from the One Night in uh 1972 turned into this uh Flatlanders live at the One Night show.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:16

I know that you had uh one of the few times you did charge a cover, or maybe the only time you did, is when you had Willie come play there to kind of benefit the club. Oh yeah. And I wanted to talk a little bit about uh about about that that particular uh night.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:30

Well, I have started running running with Willie and and his folks very early on and in 1970, we uh we were trying to do an outdoor concert that would be Austin's version of Woodstock. And so we got the idea together that we would throw this huge outdoor concert, and just like Woodstock, everything would be free. How we decided to do this was we had a very good reputation by this time because we had been open a couple of years, and all of the hippie businesses in Austin were owners and that that were frequent customers of ours. So, you know, we exchanged business with them and and they came into our club and so forth. So we got the idea that we would go around to these businesses and solicit funds to pay for, set up entertainment, and free beer. Because not only did we want to have a free concert, we wanted to have free beer. We do things on a grand scale. Wow. And we were trying to attract a crowd of around 3,000 people. Now, there had not been a large outdoor concert in Austin at this time. There were a few out at out at this place called the Hill on the Moon that was owned by a friend of ours called Crady Bond, and he was a regular customer of ours, and it was also where several of the local bands of the time lived and and uh used as a practice hall. Well, he had a stage set up out there, and he had done a couple of concerts, and the most recent one that he had done had been raided by the police, and they had arrested like 56 people. In fact, there was a big newspaper story about it, and these concerts were Hill on the Moon concerts, that's what they were called. And they had an audience of about three, four hundred people. That was a large outdoor concert in those days in Austin. Well, we thought that we could attract 3,000, maybe 5,000. Big concert. And so the way we do it is we would have multiple big bands and free beer. And Crady, since he had been raided by the police and 56 people arrested, he was not interested in doing anymore, so he decided to sign on and donate his place, and we'd call it the last bash on the hill. We got the 13th floor elevators to play, and Rocky had had just gotten out of the state hospital, and as soon as he got out, he started gravitating to the one night, so he became a friend of ours and and started hanging out there. Well, we got him to put back the elevators, and uh, and so we would feature the elevators at this concert, and we had Storm, which was our big Monday night band, and then we had what Tanglewood, and these were all Freed and the Fire Dogs. These were all huge Austin bands in 1973. All of them, you know, were were attracting audiences as big as you could fill the venue, like armadilla-sized audiences by themselves. Storm was a featured act at the armadilla by this time. So was Freed and the Fire Dogs. Uh 13th floor elevators were huge. They all agreed to play for free for exposure. We were getting the concert grounds for free. Nobody was going to be paid. Those days we didn't pay anybody. You know, everybody, if you wanted to do this, just sign on and we'll allow you to do it. So we got the sound system donated, and so we used all the money to buy 63 kegs of beer. And we talked to Willie Nelson. Now, this was in March of 1973. This is three months prior to the Willie Nelson Dripping Strings first Fourth of July picnic. This is before that.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:50

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:51

So we decided let's go after Willie. He had played the armadilla and made his uh made his debut there. And so we ran Willie down and told him what we were planning on doing, and he said, sure, I'd love to do it. Except you can't advertise me because I'm getting ready to have this big picnic thing in dripping springs, and those guys would not be very happy that are promoting this, which was the armadilla, if you advertised that you're gonna have me before that. And so we said, okay, we'll put you down as a surprise guest, because we can't keep a secret anyway. And so we we printed up all the posters and the flyers and went to radio stations and got all of this uh announced and uh we've got people coming in. Well, the radio stations pick up on it uh that we're throwing this huge free concert with free beer out on the hill on the moon. And they start broadcasting it on the radio. Our three thousand turns into fifteen thousand. Wow. And we we got into a huge, huge deal with the with the highway patrol. And the concert site, the hill on the moon, was like two miles down City Park Road, off of 2222. Well, the cars for our concert had filled up both sides of that road and shut that road down and had now backed on to 2222 and were backed up on 2222 at the time when I got into the conversation about a half a mile. Wow. And there were about who knows, five to ten thousand people already in the and the concert was full going. And the people were in there, and this highway patrolman finds me and says, Who's running this thing? And I don't remember what I told him. I think I told him that, well, I know I'm part of it, and I don't think I owned up to completely that it was me, but he said that if you guys don't get this parking thing situated and shut down or opened up within the next 10 minutes, then we're shutting you down. And I said, Well, I don't think you're gonna do that. Because, you know, I I don't think I told him this, but I already realized how are you gonna shut us down? There's there's a concert going and there's you know 10,000 people in there.

unknown 1:07:38

Oh God.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:39

And uh Willie shows up with Sammy Smith and his band, and uh there was already, I don't know, seven, eight thousand people there, and he showed up in his Winnebago and he said, Wow, this is this is big, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:54

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:56

We say, Yeah, Willie, there's the stage down there. And the setup was you had to get through the crowd to get to the stage. And he sort of just started driving the Winnebagoes through the crowd down his hill. But he loved it. And it was really his first big outdoor concert. And uh I started I started associating and hanging out with Willie. I had a lot of free time running the one night, and uh, so I started hanging with him, going on road trips, and uh became good friends. And uh in 1975, Storm had quit, and they were turning into the Thunderbirds, and so our bread and butter had abandoned us and uh things were changing, and our popularity, like usually what happens to all clubs, were was waning, and you know, things were happening differently. I think uh a couple of places had opened up on 6th Street, and uh so we were not we were we were struggling. And we also didn't have any way of making any money, we didn't charge anything, and uh so I got to Willie and asked him if he would uh if he would consider doing a benefit. Well, at that time in his career, Willie didn't do benefits, he didn't like benefits and he was totally against them. And uh but with the help of Pooty and uh and I we convinced him to come and do it. And he knew how big it was because we only legally hold, I think, probably 125, maybe was what the fire marshal might have rated us for. We only only thought we would charge a cover charge of uh five or six bucks. This was to help us pay our IRS bill and to keep us going a little bit. Willie and his whole band set up on stage, and we ended up having, I think, something like 525 people through the door. And it wasn't a deal of which you went through the door and then you left because you didn't like the show. It was that you went through the door and you stayed. But now there is one thing though that bears mentioning, because by this time we had expanded to the building next door.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:16

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:17

And the building next door basically we had moved our pool tables over to it. So we had taken the pool table out of the front of the one night and moved it over to the to the left, which is now this it's the seating area where you sit if you're in Stubbs.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:36

That's that was our pool room. Like every every party that we have, we had free drinks and free whiskey, and so even though we did this benefit and attracted 500 people and charged to cover, uh, you know, I I remember that we raised uh we must have had more than 500 because we raised about $3,000. And we spent, I think, about $1,500 on uh supplies and uh and accoudiments for the uh guests, and uh it was a great party like all of our parties, and uh, you know, Willie had fun. We stayed open until until July the 4th, 1976.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:23

Yeah, so you guys were around at at the same time as the original incarnation of Antones then, correct? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:29

Yeah. Oh yeah. Antones 74. Yeah, yeah. That was back back when things started opening up on 6th Street.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:37

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:38

Yeah, and uh they opened up sometime, I think, in 74. Which also attracted we had Paul Ray, and it attracted Paul Ray, it attracted Stevie from us, and uh it got Jimmy Vaughn, and so we lost the mainstays of our of our music to to different, you know, things like Antones and the Thunderbirds. And uh another one of those stories about us coming from the other side of the tracks, what happened with the IRS when uh when they decided to finally uh call in their note. That happened in the late June of 1976. They called Roddy and Gary and I down to the federal building. We were full-fledged in our hippiedum uh outfits at that time. We all three were pretty scraggly, all three had very long hair, all three of us did not have uh clean blue jeans on, and we all three had t-shirts on, and we had no lawyer, no representation, and we had just been issued this summons letter. You are to appear before the IRS in the federal building for a hearing on such and such day. And the three of us and six IRS guys in suits around this conference table, and I don't think they were quite expecting what they got because they were sort of like that Hardy Gann uh uh run-in that we had earlier, told us, you know, these six guys in suits looked at us and smelled us and so forth, and uh and uh gave us a lecture and said, Well, you owe this much money, and if you don't come up with this much money, we're gonna close you down because we're the government and we're gonna close you. And we looked at them and pretty much said, Well, we ain't got any money, and uh, you know, we're sorry that you want to do that, but do what you got to do, and we'll see you later. We moved some of the bar equipment and some of the stuff out of the club uh that day into a storage locker, padlocked the doors, never saw it again. That was on July 4th, 17, uh, 1976. We figured that was a great day to close. Yeah. On Independence Day. We we never heard another word from the IRS. And it was fine with us. We we were sad to see it go, but we were ready to move on to other adventures in our lives. And uh Roddy and uh one of our bartenders, Rick, and I got into another venture, but only lasted a few weeks, called the Chaparral Club out on Ben White Boulevard. We decided in uh 76 that we were going to uh book large axe to compete with the armadilla. We went out there and and rented this joint, and by this time my partner Roddy was into dealing marijuana pretty decently, and so he had some income from that and said, Well, let's invest it. You know, that's one of the things about these marijuana dealers is that they needed places to invest their money, like legitimate places that you know one of the things that sort of has gotten my ire over the years is is how the culture and the scene from where a lot of these clubs in Austin came from, back when they were created and the whole scene was created, the people that were creating them were sort of castigated and living below the scene and below the culture, the accepted culture in Austin, right? Because these people were all hippie marijuana drug dealers, right? Even though a lot of these folks were smoking pot and smoking dope, they couldn't associate with that class of people. I mean, it's well known Clifford Antones was busted and sent to Big Springs Penitentiary, you know, for dealing marijuana. I was associated with many, many club owners in Austin, Texas over the years because of my different clubs and and friendships with the club owners. And uh about nine-tenths of them were all involved in you know that scene of life. And that's where they got money that they were investing into the music business. And so, you know, the whole music scene, in my opinion, you know, started out of that culture. But they even talk about how the drug money was the seed money for the Volcan Gas Company and the seed money for the armadilla.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:21

Which is, you know. The the stems and seed money, I guess you could say. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:26

And so it's it's like uh the whole the whole scene was created that way. Could it happen again? No. Should it happen again? No. But that's the way it started, and uh it's turned into you know phenomenal phenomenal things since those early days.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:41

That's what it's built on. There's not a whole lot of denying that. And yeah, so it's a it's history. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:48

You know, it's just not talked about. It's sort of like, well, we've forgotten all that, and now we're moving on, and uh, well, you forget it if you want, but that's what happened.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:00

Thanks for joining us for the Red River Podcast, a production of the Red River Cultural District. To learn more about how the district is working to preserve and support Austin's DIY arts and live music scene, visit Red River Culturaldistrict.org. The Red River Podcast is a part of a larger storytelling project called Cultural Curve, celebrating Austin's live music and preserving the stories, sounds, and sphere of Red River. Your host has been Greg Beats. Audio production by Richard Weimark, and Music is alive by Kind Keith. And I'm Kind Keith. Thanks for listening.