AUSTIN, Texas—Music fans travel from all over the world to Austin to catch a live band any night of the week while having a beer and taco on the patio of a club.
But the Covid-19 pandemic is bringing what industry insiders fear could be a debilitating blow to the iconic venues of the self-proclaimed live-music capital of the world.
Two-thirds of the city’s venue owners said they expect the Covid-19 crisis will force them to close permanently by late October, according to a June survey by the Austin Chamber of Commerce. Many had already struggled before the pandemic as rent and other costs rose rapidly in the fast-growing Texas capital.
With Austin’s live-music scene already on the ropes, Texas bars were forced to close—twice—with no timeline for when it might be safe or profitable to reopen.
“I don’t see anything really opening until [mid-]2021, by which point most of the clubs we know now will have disappeared,” said James McMurtry, a longtime Austin singer-songwriter.
The street in Austin, Texas, where now-closed event venues Scratchouse and Barracuda were located.
Photo: Mary Inhea Kang for The Wall Street JournalSome clubs have already pulled the plug since March. Threadgill’s, a beer and chicken-fried-steak joint, opened in 1933 with the county’s first post-Prohibition beer license and launched the career of Janis Joplin. It closed for good at the end of April, a month into the pandemic shutdown, and auctioned its extensive historic memorabilia this month.
“ ‘Music came to Austin organically and the fear is that if we ever lost it, it would be hard for it to come back.’ ”
Shady Grove, a restaurant known for its outdoor concerts, closed permanently in May, after 28 years. Last week, 16-year-old music venue One-2-One Bar said that it would sell the business after it applied for city aid but didn’t receive enough to keep it from racking up debt. Scratchouse, a four-year-old downtown club, spent late March and April posting links to support fundraising pages. But by early June, it was forced to announce “with a heavy heart” its end.
Another two clubs on the same block closed too, including Jason McNeely’s Barracuda, which was only starting to become profitable in its fifth year.
“It was pretty simple with the math,” Mr. McNeely said, explaining that high rent meant the venue’s profit margin was slim even before the pandemic. “There was no way we could save it.”
Jason McNeely was forced to shut his club Barracuda as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Photo: Alex Scott for The Wall Street JournalEven if music clubs were allowed to reopen, he and other venue owners said it would be neither safe nor financially viable to try to keep people distanced before musicians who project when they sing.
Rebecca Reynolds, president of the Music Venue Alliance Austin, said there are a few U.S. cities that hang their hats on music but Austin’s $2 billion music industry depends on live clubs rather than the recording and publishing houses of cities like Nashville, Tenn. Over the decades, Austin’s low cost of living and hippie culture birthed dozens of venues and musical careers from Stevie Ray Vaughan and Townes Van Zandt to, more recently, Gary Clark Jr. and Shakey Graves, as well as festivals such as South by Southwest and Austin City Limits.
The Austin City Council christened Austin the world’s live-music capital in 1991, after a survey indicated it had more music venues than any other U.S. city. But Austin soon grew from a quirky college town to a hip destination for tech companies and coastal transplants, pushing rents up and forcing out many venues and artists. Studies in the 2010s found the industry was losing thousands of jobs.
Ms. Reynolds is clear: The pandemic will permanently change the live-music scene in Austin. “That is definitely happening.”
Threadgill’s in Austin launched Janis Joplin’s career. It closed for good at the end of April.
Photo: Mary Inhea Kang for The Wall Street JournalEven before Covid-19, Austin music venues had been falling victim to redevelopment. On a sunny winter day in 2016, Mayor Steve Adler gathered with musicians to unveil a sweeping proposal aimed at saving live music in Austin. He often repeated that he didn’t want Austin to become like San Francisco, “once a city that created art, and now a city that consumes art.”
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City Hall, which sits next to a statue of Willie Nelson and breaks every city council meeting for a live-music performance, took the charge seriously. City staff outlined dozens of recommendations and held years of meetings with the musical community to find out how to help. Few of their ideas came to fruition, however.
Many in the music community are angry that venues weren’t among the recipients of Covid-19 relief money that the city gave out under the Cares Act.
Mr. Adler said in an interview that there were too many immediate needs for city leaders to prioritize a single industry, but the city might have other funds that can help. The city is also lobbying in Washington, D.C., for venues that were found to be ineligible for other federal assistance to receive it, he said.
“Music came to Austin organically and the fear is that if we ever lost it, it would be hard for it to come back,” he said.
A sound engineer recording the band Tomar and the FCs at Bud’s Recording Services earlier this month.
Photo: Mary Inhea Kang for The Wall Street JournalThe Austin singer songwriter Mr. McMurtry, who is the son of Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning Texas writer Larry McMurtry, has been a critically celebrated part of the Austin music scene for decades. Mr. McMurtry is now worried for the Continental Club, where he played twice weekly when not on tour. Meanwhile, he has been playing virtual shows for tips, which has no overhead, but it is easy to oversaturate performing for mostly the same audience, he said.
Up-and-coming singers are worried about losing a place to launch their careers.
Mélat, an Austin-area native born to Ethiopian immigrants, was just beginning to see her singing career break out before the pandemic, she said. Austin had begun to show an interest in her brand of R&B and she had completed her first statewide tour in March. Now she has a message on her phone’s lock screen reading, “Who are you going to be today?”—to remind her not to look too far ahead.
Mélat, an Austin-based R&B singer, says she is terrified of what the pandemic might do to the city’s music venues.
Photo: Kevin Hayden“I don’t know what the landscape looks like after this, and it’s too depressing to think about much because it’s everything we do,” she said of music venues. “I’m terrified.”
Still, some people think the city can be saved. Jennifer Houlihan, the former director of a now-defunct nonprofit to help Austin music who now works in tech, said there is no shortage of musical talent or love in Austin. “This is a very optimistic city.”
Write to Elizabeth Findell at Elizabeth.Findell@wsj.com
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