The inside listening room, which defined intimate with its 44-person capacity, was jampacked, with three or four times as many people outside. So at around midnight, the fiddle wizard Erik Hokkanen and his band of accordion, flute, guitar and bass, came outside and played “Orange Blossom Special” in the middle of all that.
Flipnotics closed for good Monday night. Correction: Flipnotics closed for no good reason. The coffeeshop/music venue was losing money and behind on its rent and real estate on Barton Springs Road is too valuable for that and so the beloved “old Austin” spot, which opened in a former pet grooming shop in 1992, was no more on Tuesday morning.
Part of living in Austin for 30 years- my anniversary is April 1- is watching beloved music venues close. Liberty Lunch, Electric Lounge, the Beach, Steamboat, the Black Cat, Cannibal Club, emmajoes, Room 710. We gather to say goodbye to the fallen faves. A few, like the Continental Club and the Hole In the Wall, have closed amid much fanfare, then been resurrected and return to a place of local prominence. But usually our places of euphoria become office buildings or soulless booze-boutiques.
Just a few of those who signed up to play Flipnotics final open mike on Thursday.
But losing Flipnotics feels even more personal because it was much more than a room to hear music. Flips was a place to meet. Something to do when there was nothing to do. I used to do all my interviews there because the vibe was always so relaxed. I remember one Saturday sitting there with my notepad while country singer James Hand, in full 1950s honky tonk regalia, sobbed at a picnic bench when he talked about losing his parents. The wood on the patio floor seemed even more country store old.
Flips just felt real. It was where big dogs on the patio seemed to come with the place. Everybody smoked so it didn’t bother me as much as one person smoking. And there were always homeless guys lurking around, but those guys played guitar.
On the closing night, someone brought a megaphone and people stood on a stone ledge in the back and told stories about why Flipnotics was important to them. One woman met her husband there. A musician found his band. A man had moved to town and didn’t know a soul until he started going to Flipnotics and met people who are his best friends 20 years later.
I didn’t talk, but I was thinking about why Flips was special to me. This past summer, my son came home from college and stayed with me in my dodgy trailer on Barton Springs Road. I was worried that he’d be miserable, but he found Flipnotics and had a great summer. He played and sang music for the first time in front of people at Flipnotics’ Thursday open mike. Which made him practice like crazy. Which made him start writing his own songs. Which made him better. Jack came back Thursday for one more song. So many singers signed up to play that they moved the session outdoors after midnight and kept it going until the cops came on a noise complaint.
The buzz last night is that Torchy’s is looking at the funky building at 1601 Barton Springs Road for its newest location. I’m a fan of Torchy’s tacos, but Austin won’t get back what it lost. Is the word “funkiness”? That doesn’t seem to go far enough. Flipnotics was almost a person, with its own quirks and manners. That’s the word, “personality.” That’s what this town loses when one-of-a-kind places like Flipnotics close.