Clifford Antone
ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, environmental activist Robin Rather, and others remember the legendary Austin nightclub owner who died May 23, 2006.
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It was sentencing day. Judge Nowlin’s courtroom was packed to the gills with at least fifteen or twenty well-known musicians and a parade of people who showed up to testify for him about the sentence. After all, it was his second time, and there were mandatory sentencing guidelines in place that were pretty heavy. So there was this long line of people who wanted to say, “Hey, this is a guy who’s great for the community, this is a guy who’s given a lot. Don’t put him away for long.” I believe they only let twenty people speak, and then a number of us, maybe fifteen or twenty of us, went to Threadgill’s. Clifford was really really down—talk about dark, that might have been one of the darkest days he ever had. At this point the judge had heard all the arguments, but he hadn’t yet handed down the sentencing. So we went to Threadgill’s and everybody ordered. Clifford didn’t wanna eat anything, and he just sat there. I held his hand the whole time. He didn’t really wanna talk a whole lot, and everybody else was talking and trying to keep their spirits up. After a couple hours of that, toward the end of the lunch, he leaned over and said, “I wanna write my life story. People have been after me to do a book for a long time and maybe now it’s time.” He said it real quietly, and we’d never talked about it before. The specter of 20, 25 years was hanging over his head. I think we started that afternoon; it’s basically finished, it just needs a real good edit.
Robin Rather
He was a man of his word. A handshake was all we ever needed, although I used a contract with other clients. He always did what he said, meant what he said. That’s the first thing about him. A man of honor—he really had an old-world sense of that. I don’t mean like a mafia don at all, I just mean his word was his bond. It wasn’t just payment of fees, which of course is near and dear to the heart of every lawyer. We are all diminished by his loss. He had a heart as big as a horse’s. When he told me what the facts were, what had happened, what he’d done, what he hadn’t done, what others had done, and what they hadn’t done, I could bank on it. That would be the truth. He didn’t ever try to hide anything from me. He never did want or ask that anything be done that wasn’t on the foursquare in his defense. We had legal defenses, we had factual defenses, and when it was obvious that either the legal defenses were not gonna work or would get overruled by the court, he’d go to the court and step up to the plate and say, “It’s my responsibility, here I am.”
The last one was toughest, because the stakes were so high and times had changed on him. When he was first involved with marijuana, everybody in the world was smoking it, and he just carried a little bit for friends. He never was a big-time dealer. But the times changed in that the federal government started blaming each person that was involved for the total amount of marijuana. So if you were just a small-time guy among a hundred people involved and you touched a load, not that you had responsibility for it, or bought it or sold it or anything like that, you could be held responsible for it. So he found himself, at the end there, basically having put some people together and then responsible for moving some marijuana—the government was gonna try to blame him for everything. Others both above and below him made deals. He held out because he just didn’t wanna lessen his own responsibility over the shoulders of somebody else. He helped a lot of people, and I guess he expected the other people wouldn’t try to shoulder their responsibility off on him, but they did. So when it finally came down to it, he had to go into court and take his medicine for it. Clifford testified, and he just said, “Okay, here’s what it was. Here’s what I did. Here’s what the people I dealt with did. Here’s the amount of money I made.”
Dick DeGuerin, Clifford’s attorney
Clifford had an incredible guitar collection, and it all wound up getting sold. He had collected guitars for a long time and had a lot of very sentimental ones as well as valuable ones. So the Gibson guy gave him two or three guitars that were really special, and a few months later, Clifford came back to him and said, “Now I hope you won’t get mad at me, but I met a kid who really needed a guitar so I gave him one of the ones you gave me.”
Robin Rather
My husband [Antone’s house band guitarist David Murray] and I went to see him in prison on Christmas Day. People went to visit him all the time, but he didn’t want anyone to come on Christmas Day if they had kids, because he felt like Christmas was for the family. Our son hadn’t been born yet, so we decided we’d go. It was a freezing cold, rainy day, and we drove down there and we sat there. The guards had a list of who was checked out to come visit, but they would jack with Clifford, just to mess with him. That particular day they let me in, but they wouldn’t let my husband in. So my husband sat in the car in literally freezing cold rain for two and a half hours and wrote a song about Clifford. It was a little hard for me because I didn’t wanna be away from David, but it was a really good visit. Clifford wanted to know about everybody else. How’s this person? How’s that person? He wanted to talk about how my life was. And we talked quite a bit of politics that day. He loved to talk local politics, and he followed national politics. When he talked about himself, he focused on what he wanted to do when he was getting out. But he didn’t want to talk about prison at all because he didn’t want you to know about it.
Robin Rather
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