Do Your Part and Move Along
In the great pantheon of Austin clubs, live music bars, dives, and dumps, Hole in the Wall on Guadalupe Street looms large.
Probably top five.
It’s been a thing since the early ’70s, and plenty of people have come out of there and played on the stage and all that kind of stuff.
There’s all kinds of memorialization of folks in the front room. Photographs, drawings, paintings. There’s like a 50-head Mount Rushmore, pen-and-ink kind of drawing. All kinds of stuff.
You may be unsurprised to know that there’s no monument to me there.
Not that I want there to be. I certainly don’t need it.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I do have a pretty rooted bass-player mentality, where pushing from behind and helping everything along is my thing.
This all being said, in the early 2000s, The Hole in the Wall place was closed. Had a for-sale sign on it, and that was it.
It was on the side of Guadalupe Street, on the northernmost end of what everyone calls the Drag, that wasn’t particularly popular, next to a sh#tty Jack in the Box.
Seriously, in the local stack of Jack in the Boxes, this was a bad one. And that’s saying something.
At this time in my life, I was a super-latent, non-practicing musician. Total wannabe, but in the scene, going out, knowing folks, seeing music, all that good stuff.
Pre-kids, married, functioning alcoholic, probably. All that good stuff.
But I was working with a pizza company that I would later get really involved with. And they wanted something on the Drag for pizza. I sourced this Hole in the Wall deal.
They put their pennies together and bought it.
And so it was resurrected.
No one could ever trace down the ownership of the name.
After about a year, maybe, they ran into some cash trouble, and I introduced them to the concept of sale-leaseback.
During the course of this, they took the idea and shopped it to a bunch of different people, but we eventually got our deal done.
And for the second time in the early 2000s, the Hole in the Wall got a reprieve.
Fast forward to 2005. I, and some partners, buy Austin’s Pizza, and we grabbed the baton and ran the Hole in the Wall.
Say, we didn’t properly own it.
So, about 2007, 2008, we sold our interest. Good at pizza—bad at bars.
I say all of this because Buckdancer has a big show there on September the 11th, coincidentally from 9 to 11.
And it’s my 55th; my Sammy Hagar birthday. So it’s a big show for a lot of reasons. A sort of homecoming.
We’re going to sell it out. We’re going to sell it out. We’re going to sell it out. We’re going to sell it out...
It’s the night before the HUGE UT–Ohio State game. It’s right up on the university. Big deal.
I tell all this because I do want this down somewhere, even in a small, sometimes pretty well-visited blog.
In the whole talk about the Hole in the Wall, my little part gets skipped. But, you know, if it didn’t happen, it wouldn’t be there. And people would have long forgotten it.
But you do your part, and then you move along.
The guy I sold it to has sold it, and it’s a new group now, which is doing a great job with it. I mean, obviously they are, right? They booked us.