{"id":43157,"date":"2025-11-10T12:42:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T12:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/43157\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T12:42:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T12:42:12","slug":"antones-announces-50-year-lease-extension-blues-museum-the-austin-chronicle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/43157\/","title":{"rendered":"Antone\u2019s Announces 50-Year Lease Extension, Blues Museum \u2022 The Austin Chronicle"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a locally owned music venue, 50 years<\/a> can feel like eternity, but the Antone\u2019s team isn\u2019t letting the milestone stall their imagination for the future of Austin\u2019s Home of the Blues.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, still basking in the glow of a half-century of operations, co-owner Will Bridges and his team are declaring \u201cAntone\u2019s Forever,\u201d announcing a freshly inked 50-year lease for the club\u2019s Downtown location, a pending museum on the building\u2019s second story, and the creation of the Antone\u2019s Forever Fund to protect the venue\u2019s legacy for the next 50 years and, ideally, beyond.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bridges and head booker Zach Ernst tell the Chronicle that picturing a 100th anniversary for Antone\u2019s is difficult even for them, but, with a decade leading the historic venue under their belts now, they\u2019re ready to step into a new era.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople of our generation will be the 89-year-old bluesmen at that time,\u201d says Ernst. \u201cThere are some kids who are 15, 20, 25 that are really the real deal, and hopefully Antone\u2019s can be a home for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was real estate nonprofit Rally Austin\u2019s Iconic Venue Fund, which helped fund similar lease extensions for Hole in the Wall<\/a> and Empire Control Room & Garage<\/a> in recent years, that catalyzed thinking differently about Antone\u2019s\u2019 future. With the program in mind, Bridges approached the venue\u2019s landlord about a long-term lease to qualify them for the fund\u2019s financial support.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe ended up coming to the table and blowing us away with his generosity,\u201d Bridges says. The stability felt wildly unprecedented for the scrappy club, now in its sixth home. Signing the lease gave Bridges, his team, and the Antone\u2019s board of directors the opportunity to shift their mindset, finalizing a $1.3 million investment deal from Rally Austin and embracing the storied stage by officially launching a long-discussed museum project and conservation fund.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe light bulb moment for us was using the milestone and the achievement of the 50th to get out of the granular street fight of running a music venue day-to-day and graduating into this more preservation and development mindset,\u201d says Bridges. \u201cWe just want to really lean into that and own that role unabashedly, and continue to be a beacon for [the] Live Music Capital of the World, Austin, the blues, Clifford\u2019s legacy, all these things.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Antone\u2019s World Famous Museum of the Blues, expected to open in 2027, is a pivotal part of that role.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s centered around Antone\u2019s, but it\u2019s also a story of Austin\u2019s live music history and a story of the blues,\u201d Bridges says. \u201cWe brought in some other historians and experts to help us kind of show where Antone\u2019s is in [the] overall blues history universe, and how it all fits together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inspired by Memphis music museums like Sun Studio and Stax Museum, Bridges says the curators plan to \u201cpack a lot of punch into a small space,\u201d recreating eponymous club founder Clifford Antone\u2019s office and displaying key memorabilia from musicians who made their mark on the scene.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first item the group received, which Ernst says \u201cset the standard for how cool this stuff has to be,\u201d was an original Nudie suit made by the great Rodeo Tailor and worn by Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. \u201cIt was on display in the club for a while as a proof of concept during early talks about the museum,\u201d Ernst says. A custom-stitched suit that Doug Sahm wore on his first Austin City Limits appearance and a stageworn suit of Freddie King\u2019s will also be on display, highlighting the fashion of Austin in the Seventies, when the club first opened.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe bought a significant swath of Clifford\u2019s record collection, a lot of originals, a lot of Seventies and Eighties pressings that were informing his taste as he developed the club,\u201d Ernst, Antone\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9<\/a>, adds. The record collection, he feels, speaks to the founder\u2019s personal taste, which would ultimately become \u201creally critical to the way that Antone\u2019s became a melting pot and launched new generations of blues artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Bridges, geneticist Spencer Wells, and Austin blues star Gary Clark Jr. resurrected<\/a> the club at its Fifth Street location in 2016, they knew they were stepping into big shoes. Making the venue viable and infusing enough authenticity into the new location to pass what Bridges calls \u201cthe sniff test of the older generation\u201d felt like big enough tasks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no amount of money or development that will make or break Downtown,\u201d Bridges told the Chronicle in 2015<\/a>, when they first secured the space. \u201cWhat it needs is cultural investment and that\u2019s our generation\u2019s responsibility.\u201d The venue owner seems to feel that responsibility just as much now, describing their next steps as a \u201cgrowing up moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not the kids anymore. We\u2019re in our forties, and now we\u2019re kind of the experts, and we shouldn\u2019t shy away from creating the framework and the mechanisms we need to make sure this stuff gets the support it needs so it\u2019s going from surviving to thriving,\u201d says Bridges.<\/p>\n

A note to readers:\u00a0Bold and uncensored,\u00a0The Austin Chronicle\u00a0has been Austin\u2019s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community\u2019s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a locally owned music venue, 50 years can feel like eternity, but the Antone\u2019s team isn\u2019t letting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,25642,1551,11647],"class_list":{"0":"post-43157","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-austin","9":"tag-austin-headlines","10":"tag-austin-news","11":"tag-blues","12":"tag-feature","13":"tag-venues"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}