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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Antone was no candidate for sainthood, being frightfully stubborn and in possession of an ego to fit his proportions. In questioning the integrity of certain musicians or club owners, he could come off sounding sanctimonious. There had been music in Austin before Antone’s, after all, and there would be after he departed. But Clifford Antone’s club wasn’t just a venue or a scene. It was an anchor. By 1980 Antone’s had relocated several miles north—though not before helping transform Sixth Street into a demilitarized zone and eventual frat boy playground—and a couple of years later would move a second time, to Guadalupe Street north of the University of Texas. It was always there,however. In turn, Antone’s lent Austin music an enduring thereness, where every visiting celebrity or peon knew to come to hear an authentically American sound.
“His impact is worldwide,” says Kim Wilson simply. “He’s never hurt a soul. He’s only helped people. That’s all you need to know.”
MAYBE SO. AND THOSE WHO AGREE need not read further, where the story takes an unhappy turn. What to do with our heroic figures upon discovering their Achilles’ heels is a peculiarly American agony—be they Lyndon Johnson, Pete Rose, or Clifford Antone. The latter would be at least as clean as most of us, his persecutors concede, but for the marijuana laws on the books. Antone famously shuns cocaine, speed, ecstasy, and the assorted new pharmaceuticals available in numerous nightclubs throughout America. He does, however, smoke pot, by his own lawyer’s admission. In Antone’s belief system, marijuana is not a drug because it is an herb. One can reject that assertion and still regard the vice of marijuana use—and, by extension, pot dealing, whether by the reefer or by the ton—as being minor by comparison with drinking alcohol, committing adultery, or other legal acts. To accept such a view, as his supporters do, is to perceive Antone’s tragedy as an unnecessary one, wherein a hero has been crazily, wrongheadedly miscast as a threat to society.
Still and all, the laws say that using or selling marijuana is a crime. No one knows this better than Antone himself, as his otherwise clean record attests. In 1968 eighteen-year-old Clifford Antone was stopped while driving from Mexico into Laredo, and a pound of dope was found in a hubcap. He received six months’ deferred adjudication. Three years later Antone was found in possession of some personal stash, which he says belonged to someone else in the car. The charges were thrown out.
Both cases were small-time, low risk. That would change. According to the feds, Antone would eventually become a significant dope dealer, a high-level Austin player in an illicit trade—with much to gain and everything to lose. And the losses would be borne by others as well, according to a source close to the investigation. He says, “All along I’ve heard people tell me what a great guy Clifford is, how generous he is. And I have no doubt that he’s done people all these favors. The problem is, sometimes he asked for favors in return. ‘You’re going to El Paso? How about taking this package with you?’ That kind of thing. Illegal favors. And because they returned those favors, on account of what a great guy Clifford Antone is, some of those people are in jail today.”
No law enforcement official has ever accused Antone’s of being a club where drug money was laundered or major dope deals were brokered. But in 1979 organized crime unit investigators Bob Nesteroff and Cary Young tracked a suspicous Austin-based plane that flew to Mexico and then to Fort Stockton. The owner, using an assumed name and an Austin lawyer’s address, turned out to be Mikal Amuny, Antone’s cousin. Nesteroff and Young observed that Amuny frequently visited his cousin’s residence, which would not be unusual, except that others did as well, and many in the group drove cars that were registered under phony names, to the same Austin lawyer’s address. When some of the cars were found to be used for transporting marijuana, the cops officially put Clifford Antone on their radar.
In October 1982 the estranged wife of a Port Arthur native named Allen Granger informed a U.S. Customs agent that Granger was on his way to Austin to procure some marijuana. On November 1, while surveilling Antone, Nesteroff and Young observed the nightclub owner and his cousin Amuny, along with an Antone’s employee named Aaron Maxwell, entering a JoJo’s restaurant in South Austin. A few minutes later Granger showed up at the restaurant. Maxwell then drove off by himself in Granger’s car. He was followed by lawmen to a residence that was rented by Royce Hebert, an old Port Arthur buddy of Antone’s—though, it was later found, the lease payments were made using cashier’s checks obtained by Antone’s girlfriend. Maxwell drove into the garage, shut the garage doors, and a few minutes later, drove out again and back to the restaurant, where he returned the car to Granger, who then drove away in it. Several law enforcement agents intercepted Granger, while others surrounded Antone, Amuny, and Maxwell as they exited JoJo’s. The trunk of Granger’s car contained fifty pounds of pot. Hebert’s residence was found to contain more than eight hundred pounds, as well as a beeper corresponding to the one Antone was wearing.
After first pleading guilty to conspiracy to possess marijuana with the intent to distribute and then losing an appeal, Clifford Antone was shipped off to the federal prison camp at Big Spring in the summer of 1985. Though the prospect of incarceration was surely traumatic to Antone, in retrospect the experience was not a watershed moment. The media, which had long admired him, made little mention ofthe ordeal. The club did not lose a step, largely owing to Antone’s older sister Susan, who ably filled in as manager and booking agent.
At Big Spring Antone had nothing to fear. The camp, a former Air Force base with the barracks converted into an inmate dorm, had neither fences nor guards. Antone’s fellow inmates included a few assistant U.S. attorneys, a federal judge, assistant U.S. Secretary of Defense Paul Thayer, and several Austin acquaintances, along with Amuny and Hebert. “He was extremely popular with both the inmates and the staff,” remembers then—unit manager Richard Sanders, who was impressed by Antone the moment the inmate allowed as to how he and Albert King were friends. In the recreation yard the club owner—who slimmed down considerably at Big Spring—showed a sweet touch on the basketball court. “He was an inmate’s inmate,” recalls one who served time there. “Did what he had to do, but didn’t kiss ass and carried himself respectably.”
True to form, Antone left a musical legacy that, a decade later, Big Spring residents still speak of with enchantment. After a flood devastated the town’s lovely Comanche Trail Park, Big Spring prison officials offered to use inmate labor to aid in the reconstruction. But city officials had no idea where to find the money to pay for the materials—until Antone stepped in. The inmate offered to recruit some musician friends to stage benefit concerts. So it developed that in 1986, citizens in Big Spring and nearby Midland were treated to concerts by the likes of Asleep at the Wheel, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson. In the process, some $80,000 was raised to overhaul the park. Says then—city councilman Johnny Ruth-erford: “There was no way any of the local folks could’ve raised that kind of money—and, of course, no way we could’ve attracted those kinds of musicians on our own. Clifford was absolutely key.”
Antone asked for nothing in return. He refused any formal recognition by the city. But he earned the admiration of locals like Rutherford, who today counts Antone as a friend and says, “Clifford’s one of the most moral people I know.” And though Antone asked for no special consideration from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the project brought national honor to the Big Spring camp. Thus, as unit manager Sanders acknowledges, “It was understood that, after what Clifford had done with the park project, we’d do anything legally to help him out.” In February 1987, after serving less than three years of his five-year sentence, Antone returned home to Austin.
For the next six months he lived in a halfway house, went to bed early, threw his energies into establishing an Antone’s record label, and otherwise showed every sign of fulfilling the vow he was often heard to recite at Big Spring: “Man, I’m never gonna come back here again.” What he hadcome back to, however, was a financial mess. Before Big Spring, Antone had become fairly flush with nightclub profits. He indulged himself with periodic trips to New York and Las Vegas, with Dallas Cowboys tickets and Italian suits, and even with real estate acquisitions throughout the city. But legal fees had bled him dry, and on top of that, Antone’s was entering a slump after a peak that saw Charlie Sexton become a pop sensation and the Fabulous Thunderbirds electrify the airwaves with “Tuff Enuff.” The club began to stage periodic benefits on its own behalf. Later, Antone’s would experience tax problems, put off creditors, and finally, in early 1997, be forced to give up the Guadalupe property and relocate downtown.
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