Stubb's Amphitheater

Christopher B. Stubblefield, known to everyone as Stubb, ran a barbecue joint in Lubbock from 1968 where Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock played Sunday night jam sessions in a room with a few tables and a jukebox. He was a better cook and a better host than businessman, went broke more than once, and moved to Austin in 1986, where he became a well known figure long before there was a restaurant with his name on it. He died in 1995. The Austin restaurant that carries his name opened the following year in an old stone building on Red River Street, and the part that changed the city is behind it: an outdoor amphitheatre cut into the slope down toward Waller Creek, holding roughly two thousand people, with the downtown skyline directly behind the stage. That yard is one of the reasons Red River became Austin's live music district. It is large enough to take touring acts that would otherwise skip the city or play a shed in the suburbs, and small enough that it still feels like a club show. During South by Southwest it is one of the festival's principal outdoor stages. Stubb never saw it, which is worth saying plainly, because the venue is named for a man whose actual contribution was thirty years of feeding musicians for free in another town.