The Gospel According to Blind Willie Johnson 
SXSW 2010 
Clifford’s Blues
Passionate and stubborn, generous and careless, Clifford Antone created one of the world’s best nightclubs in Austin. But now that he’s up against his second federal drug charge in fifteen years, he may really have to face the music.
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Maybe the two sides of Clifford Antone can’t be reconciled. That a man of his rose-colored upbringing could evoke such a shadowy mystique is all the proof one needs that life can never be trusted, only lived. Port Arthur was a place of torment for Janis Joplin, its environs the stuff of nightmares for author Mary Karr. But to Antone, it was heaven. “Maybe you didn’t have people with Harvard Ph.D.’s there,” he reflects, “but you had good, kind people, folks who were friends, and who are to this day. You had great Cajun food. And, man, you had dances, where guys and girls learned how to get along. You didn’t have fancy nightclubs, but on Friday night at the skating rink you’d hear Johnny and Edgar Winter. On Saturday afternoon, Aaron Neville. Who could ask for more than that?”
Privilege is relative, but almost from his birth in 1949, Clifford Antone knew he was luckier than most. His grandfather Elias Antone emigrated from Tripoli, Lebanon, in 1895, at the age of fifteen, and settled in the south Louisiana town of Jennings before relocating his family to Port Arthur in the twenties. Throughout the Golden Triangle the Antone family owned liquor stores, a clothing boutique, and a food import business. Clifford and his two sisters were raised on the upper-crust east side, a stone’s throw from the Intracoastal Waterway. None of Clifford’s buddies had a family maid, or his wardrobe, or his fastback Mustang.
Clifford took after his father, Jamal Antone, a dignified gentleman who, unlike most men in this refinery town, always wore a suit to work. He frequently loaned out his wheels and was uncommonly mannered—which, along with his suave features and dress, abetted his reputation as a ladies’ man. His friends knew to show up at the Antone household on weekends, when the extended family would gather for prodigious Lebanese feasts. Clifford Antone’s strong devotion to blood ties grew out of his Port Arthur childhood. Today he still travels to Houston to attend a niece’s birthday, and he was a constant presence when his sister Janelle lost a child at birth. It is among the uglier features of Antone’s recent saga that several law enforcement officials perceive his family loyalty as evidence of a “Lebanese Mafia.”
His virtues notwithstanding, young Clifford was no stranger to the wild side. He smoked three packs of Marlboros a day as a teenager and often got liquored up with his pals at the juke joints in Vinton, Louisiana. (Antone quit alcohol and cigarettes more than 25 years ago.) But it was the music at these haunts that spellbound Clifford Antone. The Boogie Kings, Cookie and the Cupcakes, the Champagne Brothers, the zydeco master Clifton Chenier. Soulful, unadorned, and gracious outpourings from musicians who saw their gigs not as highfalutin performances but as dances. A decade or so later, Antone would model his new club after the glorious Vinton dive, the Big Oaks—“Not because of the way it looked,” he says, “but the way it felt.”
After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High in 1968, Antone enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, harboring half-hearted ambitions of becoming a lawyer, with the fallback of joining the family liquor store business. Two years later he was a hippie dropout with no ambitions to speak of, unless listening to music counted. Like many fans of such bands as Cream, Fleetwood Mac, and the Rolling Stones, Antone had come to learn that the riffs he was listening to had been heisted from old blues artists like Elmore James, Willie Dixon, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Otis Spann. The notion appalled him. Antone swore off the popular stuff and sought out the ante-cedents. He stopped going to rock concerts and began hanging out at places like Castle Creek, to hear Muddy Waters and James Cotton, and Alexander’s Barbecue, where he heard a brassy girl named Angela Strehli and a skinny guitarist from Dallas named Stevie Ray Vaughan.
What came next is the stuff of Austin legend. In 1973 Clifford Antone opened an imported-clothing store, which did okay business but which would become better known for its back room, where Antone and fellow blues aficionados would jam after hours. Two years later, following the passage of legislation that allowed bars to stay open until two in the morning, Antone and his friends determined to open a club where true blues artists could play regularly. Guitarist Bill Campbell discovered a cavernous building across from the Driskill Hotel, on East Sixth Street. Antone peered in through the window one evening and believed he was looking at the reincarnation of the Big Oaks. He and his friends mulled over possible names, rejecting Phantom Moon, Rendezvous, and others, before, by a show of hands, electing to name their blues joint after the only one of them who had the slightest business acumen. Just how much, or how little, was demonstrated when Clifford Antone closed down his clothing store that summer without attempting to sell it—unaware that a whole business couldbe bought or sold.
The concept of Antone’s was inspired lunacy. For the most part, East Sixth in 1975 was foreign to white folks and not altogether safe by anyone’s yardstick. More to the point, who gave a damn about the blues anyway? Progressive country dominated Austin’s sensibilities. Of his music circle Antone would later acknowledge, “We were the lowest of the low.”
Ah, wondrous adversity. Antone scrounged up $600, and like that, they were in the building. Friends crawled out of the woodwork, donating their labor and hauling in goods to be paid for whenever. A public-address system, a piano, an air conditioner, new plumbing, new wood panels—“It was all magic. You gottaunderstand, it’s too crazy to even talk about—it was just pure, absolute magic in its finest form,” he murmurs with a tremor in his voice. On July 15, 1975, Antone’s Night Club opened with a five-day run of Clifton Chenier. Every blues musician in town and numerous Port Arthurites (including Antone’s parents) flocked to the new venue. So exhilarating was that first week that by its conclusion, it dawned on 25-year-old Clifford Antone that he hadn’t yet booked a band for the following week.
Antone’s started hot, and all that follows is a highlight reel wherein Austin comes into its own as a national music powerhouse. Whether by seeing Stevie Ray climbing onstage with Albert King, sultry Lou Ann Barton sitting on Muddy Waters’ lap, a belligerent Boz Scaggs exchanging blows with a bouncer, or Antone himself tapping on the shoulder of Stray Cats guitarist Brian Setzer as the latter was mounting the stage to guitar-duel with Jimmie Vaughan and saying to him, “Sit down, son, and learn something,” any visitor could see the very rare thing that this club was all about.
They were all calling Clifford Antone, all the Chicago blues artists he deified, Jimmy Reed and Eddie Taylor and Big Walter Horton, offering to come down to Texas to play at his overnight sensation of a club. Antone treated them all like kings—because they were, damn it, and they deserved better than they’d gotten. He had friends chauffeur them around town, he put them up in hotels, and he let them play for weeklong runs—which meant that Antone’s musician buddies could actually get to know Big Walter, jam with him all night, and drink hard liquor with him at nine in the morning. Closer to home, Antone gave fledgling bands like the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Double Trouble steady work. When they needed rent money, he emptied his pockets—as he did for wayward relatives and street people he’d never seen before. The way he saw it, he’d done nothing to earn his fortunate upbringing, and everywhere he looked there were people who deserved no less than what he had. Above all, those immortal bluesmen deserved all he could give. And so he paid gladly for Eddie Taylor’s eye operation and, later, for his funeral. It was an honor.
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