This weekend I finally stopped in to a record store that's a ten minute walk from my house, a store that I've passed by hundreds of times in the past six months. It was a long-held assumption that prevented me from stepping in to check it out earlier: I figured Antone's Records just had a bunch of old blues music that I'd really have to be in the right mood to want to check out, but of course it turns out that's all wrong.
If you've ever lived in Austin, or even just visited, you've probably heard about the legacy of the late Clifford Antone. During his time here he started a venue, a record label and a record store all under the name of Antone's. The venue, often called "the home of the blues", was started in 1975 and hosted blues and soul legends like B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Pinetop Perkins and more. It also hosted and supported countless local legends, giving the place a family feeling that was sometimes even true-to-life with Stevie Ray Vaughan and his relatives to Doyle Bramhall Sr. and Jr.
Antone's the club closed and reopened in a few locations before settling on its current 5th street setting, but the one I remember was the dark, intimate space on Guadalupe Street. Outings to the club with my college friends yielded my first glimpses of the flash of Buddy Guy, the uniqueness of Malford Milligan and the shock and awe of all-out hippie dancing. My best memory was going with my friend Chris to hang out backstage with Chris Whitley after a show there, the first of many meetings with the reclusive genius before we lost him in 2005. I felt a genuine and true atmosphere at that club, like good music flowed regularly and was stored up in the walls to reverberate in the silence. Truly those were some of my first doses of real live music heard shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, so I was probably pretty easily impressed.
Here's the trailer from the documentary Antone's: Home of the Blues which I haven't seen yet:
These days Antone's the venue has
strayed pretty far from its roots in the blues. You can hear the blues
maybe one night a week and the rest is filled mostly with rock and roots -- I saw the
Gutter Twins at full volume there last week. Antone's Record Store, opened in 1987 and located across the street from the venue's former Guadalupe location, also branches out from the blues. I went in to the small space on Saturday and spent about an hour rifling through several well-curated sections including jazz, country, R&B, vocals, rock and a special one for Texas music. They even had some brand new indie rock records which I was surprised to see - and it wasn't just the homeboys in Spoon or Trial of Dead. The prices aren't too bad and I walked out with eight selections - two of them double albums - so I have plenty of new-to-me old stuff to listen to. I even picked up a vinyl copy of Chris Whitley's masterpiece Living With The Law, and that little bit of nostalgia felt just right.
- Buy Chris Whitley's Living With the Law
on CD from Amazon.
- Buy the documentary Antone's Home of the Blues
on DVD from Amazon.
- Read more about the legacy of Clifford Antone.