Hole in the Wall

This bar opened on Guadalupe Street across from the University of Texas in 1974 and was never meant to be a music venue. Its owner Doug Cugini has said as much: musicians drank there, so he let some of them play, and the stage grew out of that rather than from any plan. It turned fifty in 2024, and something like ten thousand musicians have worked it. The first years were a folk room, with Townes Van Zandt, Blaze Foley and Nanci Griffith on the bill. Cugini has said Griffith was the first act that people came specifically to see, packing the place with the forty or so who would follow her. What followed was less predictable. The bar became a proving ground for punk, cosmic country and whatever the university crowd was listening to next, and Timbuk 3, Fastball, Spoon and Shakey Graves all played it before anyone had heard of them. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lucinda Williams, Doug Sahm, Shawn Colvin and Reverend Horton Heat played it too. It sits on the Drag, the commercial strip facing the campus, in a low building that has been swallowed on both sides by newer and taller student housing. The room is small, the front bar is separate from the back stage, and it opens early. Very few American college towns still have a venue of this age doing the same job in the same building.