All,

Sorry for the re-print here of more stuff to read, but this one is worth 
the time I think. It parallels some of the same sentiments that the 
closing of the Bottom Line brought and I think you all will relate and 
commiserate with us down here in Austin. This one is touching nerve folks!

-Austin Bob

*********************************************

Cactus Cafe is about connection
Music lovers and musicians go to feel intertwined with the music and 
each other at intimate club now at center of debate.

By Brad Buchholz
Austin-Statesman Staff

I've come to understand that saying farewell to beauty is essential to 
loving Austin, living in Austin. So when last week's big news hit — the 
Cactus Cafe, slated for closure in August — I was not devastated. Hey, 
I've been saying goodbye for years now. Goodbye to Armadillo World 
Headquarters and Liberty Lunch. Goodbye to Clifford Antone and Bud 
Shrake. Goodbye to Las Manitas. Goodbye to those grand Shady Grove 
pecans on Barton Springs Road.

As much as I love the Cactus, I've been steeling myself for this moment 
for a long time. I was downright philosophical, in fact, as I shared the 
breaking news with Austin musicians who think of it as home. Then, on 
Monday, I drove down to the Cactus, caught a rousing night of jazz and 
folk and bluegrass by the Houston band Wheatfield, and came face-to-face 
with the intensity of my own denial.

Truth be told: The Cactus feels like home to me, too and it's not simply 
a matter of music. The Cactus, at its heart, is about closeness, about 
intimacy, about sitting so close to the musical campfire that you feel 
the fire-glow in your bones. The only thing prickly about the place is 
its name. You go to listen, to feel, to connect.

"When I'm onstage at the Cactus, I'm not a singer-songwriter showing off 
my craft. I feel like it's a relationship," says Austin's Sara Hickman, 
who has played the room for decades. "That audience is there to have a 
relationship with me, and I want to rise to the occasion and to be in 
relationship with them."

The Cactus devoutly has supported music grounded in lyric and language 
and story for more than 30 years. Its legacy is formidable. The 
legendary songwriter Townes Van Zandt considered it his home club. Young 
unknowns named Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen launched their careers 
here. Yet the allure of the place is bigger than history and legacy, 
bigger than the physical space. It's about intimacy and community and 
closeness.

"The Cactus is definitely about family," says acclaimed Austin 
singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves, who worked sound at the Cactus for a 
time. "When I'm home, off the road, the first thing I do is look at 
who's playing there. It's like going over to a friend's house to hear 
music."

When you walk into the Cactus, you don't merely see a familiar face at 
the door, you shake hands with a heart-commitment that spans decades. 
Griff Luneburg, who books and manages the Cactus, began working there as 
a bartender in 1981. The core staff, Luneberg, Chris Lueck and Susan 
Svedeman, have invested a combined 73 years in the Cactus.

Between sets on Monday, I couldn't resist reminding Lueck that he has 
worked more years at the Cactus (27) than the legendary Darrell Royal 
spent coaching the University of Texas football team (20). Suddenly 
reflective, Lueck talked passionately about the Cactus family. He 
recalled how Van Zandt, wild as the wind, gave him "responsibility" pep 
talks — successfully insisting that Lueck return to college and complete 
the few remaining hours toward his degree.

Lueck, a man distinguished by thick forearms and a soft heart, recalled 
people who have met and married at the Cactus. He expressed gentle 
gratitude for the members of the Cactus family, doctors, who counseled 
him a few years ago upon learning he had a heart condition. And he 
remembered Hickman's first show in the room, how she passed out colored 
construction paper and invited the audience to create their own art.

"She totally won me over," Lueck says. "Me! A metalhead!"

----------

I knew the Cactus Cafe before it was a music venue. I visited the first 
time, as a UT student, with my friend Richard Zainfeld, in 1976 or 1977 
-- to play, believe it or not, in a UT bridge tournament! (I'm sorry, 
Townes.) There was little magic in the air that night; the Cactus was 
just another room in the Union. I can testify, from experience, that 30 
years of music have brought magic to those walls.

Hickman now refers to that space as the Carnegie Hall of Austin — mainly 
for the way the staff nurtures a house ethic that honors music and craft 
and listening. At the bar, transactions are conducted in hushed tones, 
or sometimes with only eye contact. The bartenders know how to muffle 
the jingle of a cash drawer, how to shake a margarita with minimum 
intrusion. Everything is secondary to song.

The Cactus is not contrived. It's not about the hottest trend. It's 
simply a place that fosters intimate connection to song -- whether the 
artist is Guy Clark or Chris Smither or the Cowboy Junkies or Alejandro 
Escovedo. You're actually paying for smallness at the Cactus. There are 
only 150 chairs in the place. The sound is sublime. And if you want: You 
can sit close enough to the stage to feel a visceral heart-connection to 
the artist on stage.

James McMurtry likes to tease Cactus aficionados for their 
respectfulness. "It's OK to breathe between songs, you know," he said on 
stage not long ago, daring someone in the Cactus audience to break a 
bottle or misbehave. Yet a few minutes later, McMurtry broke into 
"Angeline" — "a song I played for the very first time in this room 20 
years ago." When McMurtry's son, Curtis, joined him on stage, we could 
see and feel in this very small room the tenderness between father and 
son, with Curtis quoting T.S. Eliot and joking about his dad's grouchiness.

The Cactus is Eliza Gilkyson leading the house outside after a fire 
alarm and playing an unplugged rendition of her father's tune "Bear 
Necessities," on the West Mall. It is Tom Russell riffing on Orson 
Welles and Charles Bukowsky. It's Gatemouth Brown taking a cell phone 
call on stage — and asking the house to help him give directions to a 
friend.

The Cactus is the pretty woman at the table in front of me who has made 
it very clear her life won't be complete until Loudon Wainwright III 
plays her favorite tune. "The Swimming Song!" she cries out throughout 
the night. "The Swimming Song!" Wainwright eventually plays it, of 
course. And when he's done, his fan rises from her seat, saunters onto 
the stage, and gives him a big kiss.

"Well, I can see the security is out in force tonight, Griff," 
Wainwright says from the stage. Everyone in the house cracks up — 
vitally aware of the connection between "Cactus" and "closeness."

Ray Wylie Hubbard recalls his experience on "The Dating Game" — really — 
in the 1960s and makes us howl with laughter. Then he talks about Rainer 
Maria Rilke and brings us to the deepest place of introspection. He 
demonstrates that Cactus connection is personal, musical, social, 
intellectual, physical. And in many ways: They mirror the kind of 
connection associated with "university."

"For a half hour after I heard the news, I kept asking myself, 'Why 
would the University of Texas close the Cactus?'" Cleaves says. "And 
then I thought: Isn't it part of their responsibility to integrate 
college with community, to have an interface with the community? What a 
perfect way to get nonstudents and nonuniversity people onto the campus. 
I think they're giving up a very valuable asset of their own, not just 
an asset to the larger music community."

Gilkyson, who probably has headlined more shows than any woman in Cactus 
history, agrees that the room is "one of the few places where the 
university meets the town." Her first thoughts about the closing were 
very specific: "First and foremost, I'm upset for Griff. He's put his 
whole life into this." But she saw the big picture as well.

"Griff is important because he helps us understand who we are as a 
group. Like Jody Denberg (longtime music director for radio station KGSR 
who left last year), he helps us find out who like-minded people are, 
and help us have a group identity," Gilkyson says. "The question before 
us is what can we do as a body to ensure that things we care about 
continue to have a booth in the marketplace. That's the question. As 
well as, 'Who are "we"?' anymore.

"Community is going out the window across the board, in all walks of 
life. I'm sure this is a wake-up call for all of us to attempt to make 
community wherever else we can. It's something we're going to have to be 
active about if we want to see the benefits of community continue to 
manifest in our part of the world."

----------

When I was young — and intermittently broke as a freelance writer — a 
few of my friends gently challenged my affection for the Cactus. "It's a 
lot of money, going to those shows," someone told me, in the interest of 
responsibility. Why not save the cash, and invest in the material things 
I'd need to support a writing life?

Then and now, I've had a hard time explaining that a night at the Cactus 
is like a going to the world's coolest library, like going to 
soul-school. The Cactus is so much about conveying story, attaining 
intimacy in a quick and compact way, all the while connecting to 
philosophy, literature, spirituality, whimsy. What more could a budding 
writer want? So many years ago, I marveled how artists like Gilkyson cut 
through convention and touched the bone of truth. It changed my life.

The Cactus family remains hopeful. Thirty years ago, a younger 
generation bemoaned the loss of a funky listening room known as the 
Alamo Lounge and a few years later found a new home called Cactus. The 
latest news — that the UT Alumni Center might adopt it in 2011 — 
demonstrates that those who treasure the place are thinking about 
compassionate solutions. Still, I worry. As it's hard to imagine Babe 
Ruth in a "new" Yankee Stadium, would we feel Townes Van Zandt's spirit 
so vividly in a "new" Cactus Cafe.

After watching Chris and his staff shut down the room Monday night after 
the Wheatfield show, I took the familiar walk down the Texas Union 
corridor — passing kiosks marked "Starbucks" and "Quiznos" and "Wendy's" 
— and wondered about the future of the Cactus. You could see it coming. 
Really.

Outside, the university was quiet, blanketed in a gentle winter fog. The 
Barbara Jordan statue gleamed in the cool night air. Dew glistened on 
the leaves of centuries-old live oaks near Hogg Auditorium. I paused a 
minute, thought of timeless things, and imagined how nice it would be if 
we didn't have to say goodbye, at least not yet, to the Cactus Cafe.


------------------------------------

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