Getting lowdown on 29th Street
Antone’s is Austin’s internationally renowned “Home of the Blues,” but from 1977 until its final blowout on April 24, 1980, the Rome Inn had the hottest blues scene in town. Stevie Vaughan and Lou Ann Barton played every Sunday and Paul Ray’s Cobras had Tuesdays, but the hottest night was “Blue Monday,” with the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
The T-Birds had only one album during their Rome run, but it was a great one. The Fabulous Thunderbirds (also known as Girls Go Wild) brought the Louisiana swamp to their Texas blues romp in ‘79, making fans out of the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, who hired the band to open shows.
An Italian restaurant since 1958, built in the former Shipwash Grocery building on 29th Street at Rio Grande, the Rome started hosting live music in 1976, with a progressive country lean in the wake of “Good Hearted Woman.” Manager Jack Davis booked the likes of David Allan Coe, Milton Carroll, Willis Alan Ramsey, Vassar Clements, Asleep at the Wheel, Mother of Pearl and Doug Sahm (Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell stopped by to see Sahm on a day off from the Rolling Thunder tour). The music was so successful that beer sales topped food receipts, which put the Rome Inn in violation of its restaurant zoning. Citing proximity to campus, among other things, the city denied a zoning change, so Davis brought in the Armadillo kitchen in Nov. ‘76, with Bruce Willensik as chef, to see if they could sell more food, and they did for awhile.
But when Davis added booker to cook Louis Charles “C-Boy” Parks’ duties in ‘77, the blues took over and cuisine didn’t have a chance.
“Nobody would go down to Antone’s on Sixth Street to see the T-Birds,” said former club owner Steve Dean, whose AusTex Lounge (at the current Magnolia Cafe location at 1220 S. Congress) was a hub for roots rock in the early ‘80s. “But when C-Boy gave them Mondays, they built it up to the point that if you didn’t get there by 8 o’clock, you might not get in.”
Billy Gibbons took a busload of friends from Houston about once a month, but he was forbidden to jam by manager Bill Ham (the penalty was $25,000), who didn’t want to give that ZZ Top guitar sound away for free. Gibbons took a seat and watched the “fiend scene” he wrote about on “Lowdown in the Street” from ZZ Top’s 1979 album Degüello: “So roam on in, it ain’t no sin to get low down in the street.” That same year, the T-Birds paid tribute to the lovable man in the sweat-stained blue T-shirt with slow harp instrumental “C-Boy’s Blues.”
A hard-working old Black cook with a love in his heart for people, C-Boy is what made the Rome Inn special. Parks came to work in the kitchen in 1967, the year after fire gutted the dining room. Ten years later he was running the show. “C-Boy would crack you up, like how he’d cover his crotch with his hands whenever he passed a microwave,” said his unlikely protégé Steve Wertheimer, an accounting student who lived in the neighborhood. “He was just always having fun, and just always working.”
The blues scene integrated Austin before the Civil Rights Act, with UT students going to Charlie’s Playhouse on East 11th to dance to Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets in the late ‘50s. The heroes of white blues musicians like Bill Campbell, the Vaughan brothers, Lewis Cowdrey and Angela Strehli were old Black bluesman who looked and talked like C-Boy, giving the Rome a lift of authenticity. There was no race at the Rome, just mutual respect.
Parks died in 1991 at age 66, but not before he saw his student flourish in the club business with the Continental. Then, in 2014, Wertheimer fulfilled a longtime promise to himself by opening a soul-themed bar seven blocks up South Congress from the Continental. It’s called “C-Boy’s Heart and Soul,” of course, after the man who worked two fulltime jobs a day (including fry cook at the Nighthawk), but always came from back behind the bar, no matter how busy he was, to dance to “Mathilda.”
After the Rome Inn closed with a Friday night blowout to beat them all, the club had a brief, yet glorious, resurrection as punk club Studio 29. It was also a bookstore for a couple years, but since 1987 it’s been Texas French Bread. The building suffered a terrible fire in January 2022, but co-owner Murph Willcott is rebuilding the landmark in its classic design.
Fantastic video from the final week of the Rome Inn 4/20/80. Filmed by Steve Dean:
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