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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Perhaps his woes were of no special significance. Perhaps they were, however, especially if you believe the contention of investigators Nesteroff and Young that, within a year after his release from Big Spring, Clifford Antone was back to dealing weed.
By the early nineties the feds were hearing Antone’s name crop up in major smuggling operations. In the course of busting up one pot ring, a player in the trafficking organization offered to trade testimony for reduced time. “I’ll tell you about this guy or that guy,” he told federal authorities. “And I’ve done deals with Clifford Antone. But please don’t ask me about Clifford. He’s too good a guy, and if he’s the only one you’re interested in, then I’ll just take my lumps.”
Unfortunately for the feds, the intelligence on Antone had always been piecemeal, circumstantial to a fault. The investigators found themselves ruefully admiring what they perceived to be his stealth. “From the time I started dealing with Clifford,” says Nesteroff, “he’s proved to be one of the hardest to dig up background on. He’s been schooled great, and he cultivates a sense of loyalty such that no one wants to dump on him.”
Then along came Bruce Hackfeld. An El Paso pot dealer since high school who had served federal time from 1990 until 1993, Hackfeld bore an alarming resemblance to recently deceased Mexican drug kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and, in fact, bought much of his product from one of Carrillo’s cousins in Juárez. At the time of his 1990 sentencing, the feds had no idea how prominent Hackfeld was—he had been a crucial supplier to a massive Long Island—based ring. After his 1993 release he extended his operations to Canada, California, and Georgia.
Everyone agrees that Hackfeld and Antone met in the spring of 1994 at one of Antone’s regular dining spots, the Austin Four Seasons Hotel. According to Antone’s attorney, Dick DeGuerin,Antone ran into Hackfeld’s attorney, Richard Esper, whom Antone had met years before at a Lebanese convention, and Esper introduced him to Hackfeld. What follows has yet to be proved in a court of law, and as DeGuerin will no doubt emphasize, the prosecution’s case relies heavily on the testimony of convicted felons like Bruce Hackfeld, the boss of the enterprise, who waltzed off with a five-year sentence after ratting on everyone underneath him.
In any event, here is what is alleged: Using his cousin Mikal Amuny as his point man, an old Port Arthur friend named Phil Higgs as his warehouser, and two employees as drivers, Clifford Antone conducted at least four marijuana deals with Hackfeld between October 1994 and December 1995. The loads, transported from El Paso to Higgs’ storage area in Bastrop County, consisted of, respectively, 1,200, 3,300, 1,700, and 2,400 pounds. Another 400 pounds was refused because of its poor quality, and an additional 3,500 pounds was sitting in an El Paso corrugated-aluminum warehouse, “destined for delivery to Antone in Austin . . . [a]t the time of Hackfeld’s arrest on February 18, 1996,” according to a federal affidavit. Federal authorities say that Antone turned over each of these loads to his distributors—Doug Reed and John Maloney—who dispersed the loads north and east.
At eight in the morning on April 20, 1996, 24 days after Hackfeld had started cooperating with his prosecutors, there was a knock at the front door of Antone’s condominium. The nightclub owner had just fallen asleep an hour earlier. He opened the door to find nine police offi-cers, armed with guns and a search warrant. They brought in a drug-sniffing dog, which found a small stash of pot. The officers found and seized $91,000 in cash, documents that are alleged to be drug ledgers, and according to DeGuerin, several personal items of Hackfeld’s, who had been an overnight guest of Antone’s a few months earlier.
One of the lawmen, an Austin Police Department officer, hung back with Antone during the three-and-a-half-hour raid. The cop, as it turned out, was a big fan of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and he prodded Stevie Ray’s patron for information. But Clifford Antone didn’t feel like talking much.
HE HAS SPENT THESE DAYS, PERHAPS his last as a free man, wearing his same placid, beatific expression all over town, carousing with Kim Wilson, checking up on his family, rooting for the Astros, flirting with the girls at the gentlemen’s clubs, eating his chicken-fried steaks at the Austin Land and Cattle Company, and paying lip service to his plight only during sessions with his lawyer and when he takes his random urine tests. Politicians have called to express their support. So has Willie Nelson, who himself has felt the heat from the federal government in past years. “Everybody is behind me,” Antone says. “Everybody. The reaction I’ve gotten is unbelievable. You’d think I was running for office instead of getting indicted.”
The musicians at the club are there for Clifford Antone, but they don’t really know what to say to the man, and the man is not saying much on the subject himself. (One longtime friend spent a good half an hour chatting with Antone, waiting for the subject of the indictment to come up, before finally asking, “So how are you, Clifford?” To which Antone replied, “I’m in a world of trouble.”) No one seems to feel comfortable speculating aloud about whether Antone is guilty. Few of them come out and say they think he is being railroaded. After all these years Antone finds himself in a familiar dilemma: Despite its lyrical intimations of poverty and cruel turns of fortune, the blues has always resonated with self-indictment. That bedraggled Everyman who keeps picking the wrong women and boozing his days away must one day face the mirror. The blues is our all-too-humanness set to music—ever passionate, tacitly confessional.
Better, then, to leave it all unsaid, let the music do the talking. When I saw Clifford at his club this summer, he invariably buttonholed me and shouted into my ear breathless exclamations like, “Twenty guitarists onstage last night, man,” or “How about that Sue Foley, man? She’s one of my favorites,” or with a diabolical leer, “Come see the Scabs tomorrow, man; you won’t believe the crowds they bring out.”
Even as I attended to the thunder and the wail onstage, I heard Clifford Antone’s voice back at his condo the day he tried to explain to me how he, a 47-year-old man, would never leave this house of blues unless he was forcibly removed from it. “Often I say to God, ‘Why me?’ I have all kinds of family businesses I could be in. I could be making money. Believe me, I’ve tried to get away. This life ain’t easy, man. I’ve never owned a home. Never married. How can I, being at a club till four in the morning?
“But it won’t let go of me. I’m raising up a bunch of kids right now that are so good—it’s just like those early days all over again. I mean it. These kids come from Minneapolis, from California, man. I say, ‘I can’t take any more kids!’ But what musicians! I’m working with this young band, the Keller Brothers—Mike Keller on guitar, man, in two minutes I knew it. It’s like seeing Jimmie and Stevie Ray again. The guy in their band on piano just turned eighteen. He’s from Abilene, but God he does New Orleans music like he was born there fifty years ago! ‘Tipitina’s, Tipitina’s …’”
I remember how his fingers tinkled imaginary ivories as he sang, how he then went on about all these other kids. Johnny Moeller from Dallas: “He’s got the heart to play the blues that hard like Stevie did.” Teddy Morgan from Minneapolis: “I said to him, ‘Go back home, kid, and keep practicing—you’re gonna be good someday,’ and he went home and got his training, and now he’s a monster.” Doyle Bramhall, Jr., the son of a Dallas blues great: “Of course, Doyle Junior’s so good I don’t wanna talk about him. It’s too scary.” When he talked, his fingers mimed each musician’s instrument, as if that were as much of each’s identity as his given name.
I remember another conversation about the young ones. “The kids I got now,” Clifford began, then winced and said, “That’s what kills me. Leaving those kids. Those kids needme.”
It was the time for me to ask the damning question: “But Clifford, if you did what they say you did, you knew the chances were good you’d get busted. So who’s really to blame for those kids getting left behind?”
But let me plead guilty. I didn’t ask it. I couldn’t ask it. The music must have drowned me out.
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