The Gospel According to Blind Willie Johnson 
G-L-O-R-I-A
When the legendary Liberty Lunch club closed in July 1999, senior editor and musician Michael Hall came up with a way to say goodbye to an era—play “Gloria” for 24 hours straight.
Jane says: Fantastic. I felt as if I were there. JCH (July 24th, 2009 at 6:58am)
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Musicians began leaving around closing time, but others showed up. There were some bleak hours before the dawn, but the skeleton crew pushed on. E-D-A. E-D-A. A guy from India played drums for three hours from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m., then passed out backstage. Singers were especially scarce, and occasionally an audience member would jump onstage and sing a few verses. Brian Zoric, the Brooders’ bass player, left around 4 a.m. and I took over. I loved the simple repetition of the basic riff. Around 5 a.m., music journalist Ken Lieck stood onstage and played a tape of English alternative rock guru Robyn Hitchcock, whom he had interviewed the day before. “You are eight hours into the Gloriathon,” Hitchcock said. “You have 16 to go. Thank you.”
A few people who ran another club in town showed up high on drugs and took over the stage, singing and screaming and energizing us. At about 6 a.m., I lay on my back and looked up through the open roof past the red and green stage lights. I watched the sky slowly begin to lighten, birds flying past. Time was passing, the Lunch was dying, we were still playing. A few minutes after 7 a.m., Ward walked onstage with a tub of Lone Stars. Bar’s open! We toasted each other with one free hand and kept playing.
I had hoped to stay all 24 hours, but beer for breakfast pushed me over the edge. At 8 a.m. I drove home to take a nap. I slept hard for a few hours and rushed back at 11:30 a.m., sure that the whole thing would have died without me there to watch over it. As I drove north, crossing the river on the South First Street bridge, I heard the familiar chords and melody bouncing off the empty warehouses, like the city itself was playing the song. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard. I walked in and there were ten people in the audience, slumped on the picnic tables, and ten people on stage, locked into those chords. E-D-A. E-D-A.
As the day progressed more musicians showed—some returning from last night, others for the first time. Sometimes I was playing with total strangers, other times with people I had known for years. Singer-songwriter Jimmy LaFave got up and sang. Joe “King” Carrasco did too, bringing his dog with him. A guy got up and sang the chorus backward: “A-I-R-O-L-G, Airolg!” (“I’m from Wisconsin,” he explained.) Drummer Garrett Williams brought his young son up and each played a drum kit. Somebody read some Yeats, somebody else some Flann O’Brien. Singer-songwriter Beaver Nelson read from a pamphlet on irritable bowel syndrome. The guy from India woke up, stumbled onstage, and began to take a leak behind the drum riser. John Ratliff, who was playing the piano, asked him what he was doing. “Looking for my tools,” he replied.
The highlight came that afternoon, when Van Morrison himself joined in. I had contacted his management a few weeks before, letting them know we were doing this, but I also asked if Van wanted to participate somehow. His manager told me that Van hated the song and didn’t do it anymore, but he was playing a festival in Chester, England, and maybe we could work something out. I gave him the club’s phone number; he said if Morrison chose to do or say something, it would be between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., Texas time. I talked with Rich Malley, a drummer and techie, who borrowed a homemade gizmo from a guy he worked with that would transfer a phone signal to an audio one that could then be played over the PA system. The gizmo looked like something from Plan 9 From Outer Space and Rich plugged it into the soundboard.
At 3:45 p.m. we were playing away, exhausted but aware that something cool could happen at any minute. All of a sudden I saw Rich running out of the Lunch’s office holding the club’s portable phone over his head. He connected it to the gizmo and we all quieted down. We could hear something through our stage monitors, guitars but no drums, coming from 5,000 miles away, where the road manager was crouching onstage, holding a cell phone to another stage monitor. It was E-D-A all right, though Morrison was doing it a lot faster than we were. We sped up to his tempo, all of us aware that we were performing one of the great rock and roll songs of all time with the guy who wrote it. We heard him talking, introducing the song by saying that a bunch of people in Texas were playing “Gloria” for 24 hours. We heard the roar of the crowd. Then he began: “Well she comes ‘round here…” Onstage, we all looked at each other, grinning. He got to the chorus and we deliriously sang along.
After about two minutes of this, though, all of us in Austin started to get the same feeling, that we were losing our momentum, losing our song. We looked at each other, now with a different kind of knowledge: It was time to go back to the way we had been doing the song for 17 hours. Tex Edwards took charge, yelling “G-L-O-R-I-A” and we all came in: “Gloria!” We drowned out Morrison and went back to doing the song our way.
The last few hours were a glorious mess, the stage packed—four people playing two drum kits, four guitarists, a piano player, an organ player, a trumpet player, a half-dozen people banging on cowbells and tambourines and singing. The last hour got louder and more frantic, and there was now finally a huge crowd for our huge energies—we were basically the opening act for the Saturday night lineup of Doctors’ Mob, David Garza, and Joe Ely. We held back the last chorus as long as possible, finally hitting it a few minutes before 9 p.m., crossing the 24-hour mark screaming “Gloria!” into the night.
For years friends and strangers have come up to me and gushed about playing the Gloriathon. I think back. Really? Were we onstage together? Have we all been swallowed up by the communal memory? The song ate us up that night, the memory might as well have, too. I have no idea how many of us played. It could have been 50, it could have been 100. I like the haziness of that—it’s very, uh, Austin.
Ten years later, the site is part of the booming Second Street District. The square Silicon Laboratories structure that was built on the Lunch site is as much a part of the city skyline as any other modern building. Next door, in the space that held that general store 150 years ago, is upscale restaurant Lambert’s; across the street is the Minx boutique and BoConcept design consulting company; down the block the W Hotel is under construction. It is a very different world from 1999, and that’s fine. I’m not bitter. Cities evolve, and so do people. Hell, my latest band, The Savage Trip, played at Lambert’s during South by Southwest in March. We played a completely normal 40-minute set.
But sometimes, when I drive north across the South First Street bridge, I look at the landscape and remember those chords echoing off the long-gone buildings, and I try to remember what it felt like driving back to Liberty Lunch that morning.
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