Chess Club, opened by the owners of Hotel Vegas and former owners of Barracuda, started throwing shows at its DIY venue on Red River during SXSW 2022.

“I really f**k with that game,” the long-haired metal singer says, taking a jaunt around the tiny stage in Austin’s new DIY venue, “called chess.”

He’s doing some between-song banter as his touring band, Alabama’s No Cure, reaches the end of its punishing set inside Chess Club. Never mind that the venue, opened during SXSW 2022 by the folks behind now-closed Barracuda, Brian Tweedy and Jason McNelly (also of Hotel Vegas), and Max Vandever, conceptualized the name as a tribute to anything except the board game.

Outside, the throngs of downtown partiers are astonished by the throaty growls and rapid-fire double bass drumming. Many flippantly pretend to be “into” what they’re glimpsing. A man ironically wearing a pink cowboy hat throws up the devil horns, eliciting laughter among his group. Seconds later, another group of women walk by and all three mock headbang before giggling away into the night.

For the 30 or so inside forming a circle pit, this is a way of life. It’s just another Wednesday at Chess Club, Austin’s newest venue, a 100-capacity speck on the corner of Red River and Seventh Street without a sign (it’s coming soon), a website (ditto, maybe), or an overarching musical theme.

What it has is the magic inside: a straight edge black metal-tinged hardcore band from Alabama destroying on a brutally hot Tuesday evening in Austin. That’s not to say that punks (straight edge or otherwise) have an issue finding places to play in the rapidly changing city. It’s just that moments like this are seemingly harder to come by every time Elon Musk moves one of his companies here or a luxury hotel announces its arrival as "Texas-tough, tech savvy."

Everyone has heard the stories about Raul’s, the Ritz, Liberty Lunch, and old Emo’s. Those teeny hovels took in audacious acts like the Big Boys and Daniel Johnston and the Butthole Surfers and exported a homegrown cultural cache to the world. People flocked to Austin because it was cool, and it was cool because it had dumpy venues that allowed discerning folks the ability to see Scratch Acid alongside 25 or 30 other freaks. 

After losing numerous beloved venues to either the COVID-19 pandemic or Austin's rapid development, Chess Club is an anomaly, one of a few microscopic beacons of underground fury in a city that was once defined by them.

A view of the 100-capacity room from the Chess Club stage before opening.

Less than three months into the pandemic, the owners of Barracuda announced the venue’s permanent closure. Located in the former Red 7 building – an important place for punks and metalheads for almost a decade beginning in 2006 – it was another blow to Austin’s underground music scene on Red River, which had just lost Beerland in May 2020.

“We ended up going dark, having no idea what was going to happen,” Vandever says on a recent weekday afternoon at an empty Chess Club. “We thought maybe we could reopen, and then we just it got to the point where we just couldn't afford to.” 

As fate had it, their landlord at the Barracuda storage space also owned the tiny spot that once housed the dance club Plush, also a pandemic casualty. About a year after Barracuda closed, he offered it to its former owners. Even though it was much smaller than Hotel Vegas or Barracuda, they couldn’t pass up the chance.

“I think that for having shows, it’s the perfect size,” Vandever says. “It’s so hard to pack a 350-cap room — that always felt demoralizing. And now it feels like a party with 30 people in here.”

Chess Club opened during SXSW 2022, a return-to-form for the music conference, which hadn’t had in-person events in nearly three years. The name comes not from the game, but from Chess Records, the Chicago label that introduced the world to Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, and, according to some, the concept of rock and roll via the “Rocket 88” single. There is a single blank chess board that sits above the bar, and the front door is now adorned with some chess imagery, but the group is wary of introducing too many two-toned items into the space, lest it become known as a ska hangout.

The last remnants of the previous tenants, Plush, are visible on Chess Club's patio.

Vandever says the inspiration for the venue comes from three spots: 29th Street Ballroom — where Tweedy and McNeely booked shows more than a decade ago — the erstwhile Beerland, and Taco Land, the long-shuttered underground space in his hometown of San Antonio. As a teenager, Vandever played punk shows at Taco Land, in awe of the space that hosted metal and punk legends like Gwar, the Cramps, and the Dead Milkmen, who honored the venue — “There’s a place in San Antone where I can go and not feel alone” — in song.

“I always thought that was the coolest place ever,” he says. “The owner was this guy named Ram and he was kind of infamous for calling people pussies, random people he just met, and for pulling the plug on bands if he didn’t like them.”

Ram Ayala, who owned Taco Land until he was shot and killed in a 2005 robbery at the venue, was harsh but sweet, known for helping out bands with gas money or funds for equipment repairs, and for booking unknown bands. The mild-mannered Vandever doesn’t hurl obscenities at bar patrons or unplug guitar amps during sets — that I know of — but the spirit of the microscopic DIY club, where new bands are discovered and bonds are forged, is very much alive inside Chess Club. 

Vandever books some shows, but many of the the newer gigs are put together by Pat Troxell, who handles most of the heavier, often all-ages shows, and Trish Connelly, who also books at sister venues Hotel Vegas and the Volstead. The ethos is simple: book shows they'd like to see in a weird little room.

“The intimacy of it is appealing,” Connelly says. Bands and attendees have told the promoter and label-owner that Chess Club feels like a house show in the best possible way. “You get a big, old room and there might be 70 people in there, but it seems scattered. You get 70 people at Chess Club and people are dancing, the band is interacting, enjoying the dynamic between the crowd and the stage. It’s a unique space.”

Despite the owners shying away from the board game aspects of its name, Chess Club has slowly embraced its iconography.

Chess Club opened without a sign out front. If one didn't know to look for the 617 painted to the right of the door, they'd probably keep walking — past the former Beerland in one direction, and the closed-down Emo's in the other. A sign letting folks know where to see the punk show or DJ night arrived just after the Fourth of July. But Chess Club is slow-rolling its social media output, letting the hype grow organically instead of spamming ads on Facebook. At first, the venue didn’t have any online presence.

“It was intentional, for sure,” Vandever says. “When we were starting, Jason didn't want to have any social media, because he wanted it to be a true DIY venue. But as we started booking shows, we realized that it's just not practical.”

Now, at the beginning of every week, the Chess Club Instagram account posts individual flyers for each night at the club. The punk and hardcore ones, for locals like Laffer and Mugger, are crude cut-and-paste jobs, or black-and-white illustrations, whereas the indie shows and DJ nights are infused with muted blocks of color. 

No Cure, a straight edge metal band from Alabama, headlined a recent weekday punk show at Chess Club.

The night I show up, to see a couple straight-edge hardcore and metal groups, the mostly indecipherable flyer tells me that there’s a $5 cover. As I glance inside the venue, I see only a couple dozen people going bonkers. “It’s actually $10,” the woman working the door tells me. Such are the growing pains of an adolescent venue — especially one this size — between the need to stay afloat, the proper practice of ensuring paying the artists a fair wage, and the urge to remain accessible to a community that so dearly needs venues like Chess Club.

Connelly recently booked TC Superstar, a local synthpop group that regularly plays venues on tour with capacities reaching or exceeding 300 people, like Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn and Axelrad in Houston. At about a third of the capacity of those venues, booking at Chess Club becomes a — no pun intended — strategic game of satisfying the bands and the Austin music community.

“We’re trying to find the sweet spot of, we don't want to overcharge, but it'd be cool to have bigger bands play and it'd be an intimate thing,” she says. “But it’s a balance of — does it make sense? And if so, what would people pay at the door?”

Vandever says that the club doesn’t make money from the door; that all goes to the bands playing. So when the show is $5 and only 30 people come, that’s a meager remittance, especially with one of the bands being on tour. And with a majority of the bands being straight edge — alongside, it can be assumed, much of the crowd — that’s not exactly a heavy cash-flow night for Chess Club. But it is a labor of love.

“We know it's going to take some time, and I think if we become successful, that would be a happy accident,” Vandever says. “If there's any chance that we could leave some kind of footprint in Texas music history, that would be enough for me.”