Open Letter to Whoever "Optimized" the Hole in the Wall

Dear new operators of the Hole in the Wall,

I watched you sandblast the nicotine stains off the ceiling last month. You left the exposed ductwork, of course. That's mandatory now, like the Edison bulbs and the reclaimed-wood menu board listing "smoked" this and "foraged" that. The ductwork and I go back further than you do. It used to rattle every time the bass player hit the low E on a Telecaster older than both of us.

Last Thursday I paid your $9 to stand in the same spot where I once watched James McMurtry mutter "Too Long in the Wasteland" like it was a threat aimed directly at the drunk guy in the UT baseball cap. The new PA is very clean. Impressive, even. You could hear every syllable of the lyrics. The problem is nobody on stage had anything worth hearing. The lead singer kept checking her engagement metrics between songs. I am not making that up.

The bar itself is still there, same scarred oak, same weird lean to the right if you know where to stand. But the woman who used to run it on weeknights could pour a beer, spot a fake ID from twenty feet, and tell you exactly why your ex was no good, all without breaking stride. The current staff wears black aprons and asks if the hazy IPA "works for your palate." My palate worked fine in 1999 when it was just Bud Light in a can that cost whatever was in my pocket.

You kept the neon "BEER" sign. Nice touch. Real heritage play. Except the beer selection now includes something called a "session lager" brewed with toasted quinoa and "notes of Austin summer." I asked the kid behind the bar what summer tastes like. He suggested I follow the brewery on Instagram for tasting notes. The old summer at the Hole tasted like hot asphalt, cheap cigars, and the faint possibility that the girl at the end of the bar might talk to you if the right song came on the jukebox.

That jukebox. Lord.

It used to hold actual physical CDs. You could play "London Homesick Blues" three times in a row and the whole room would sing along like it was church. Now it's a tablet. The tablet suggests songs based on what people in "similar venues" are playing. Last week it tried to feed me Post Malone while a local outfit tried to set up their pedal steel. The pedal steel player, a guy who's been hauling that thing around since the Clinton administration, just looked at the screen like it had personally insulted his mother.

The bathrooms still have that powerful ammonia-and-regret aroma, at least. You didn't touch those. Yet. Give it time. Some consultant will tell you customers expect "bathroom experiential moments" and you'll install those fake exposed filament bulbs in there too. The graffiti that used to climb the walls like ivy told the actual history of this town. Bad poetry, phone numbers for people who moved away in 2007, one very detailed drawing of a armadillo giving the finger. All gone under three coats of industrial gray. Progress.

I sat at the back table where the sound is still somehow perfect despite every law of acoustics. A couple in matching "Keep Austin Weird" hoodies asked if I could take their picture. They wanted the stage in the background but not the actual band. "The vibe," the guy explained. His watch cost more than my first car. The car had a hole in the floorboard and I used to park it on 26th Street and walk over here with a six-pack hidden in a paper bag because the Hole didn't card if you looked like you belonged.

You know what belonging looked like? It looked like not needing to announce it on a sign.

The parking situation is exquisite now. Used to be you'd wedge your dented Civic between a plumber's van and a rusted-out El Camino, pray the tow truck guy was feeling generous, and stumble out at 2 a.m. with half a Shiner still in your coat pocket. Today there's an app. It knows where you are. It charges you in real time. The lot behind the club, where bands used to load in and argue about whose girlfriend was driving, is now "reserved for VIP bottle service." There is no bottle service history at the Hole in the Wall. The only bottles that ever mattered came in cases of 24 and got warm if you forgot them in the trunk.

The new sound guy doesn't smoke. Doesn't drink. Doesn't know that the monitors used to cut out if more than three people stood too close to the left speaker. He has a spreadsheet. He has a noise complaint protocol. The old sound guy had a lighter, a bad attitude, and the mystical ability to make a $300 PA sound like the Ryman Auditorium if the band was worth a damn.

I keep thinking about the night in 2008 when the power went out during a thunderstorm. The band lit candles, kept playing acoustic, and the whole room sang along to "Pancho and Lefty" while rain came through the roof in sheets. Water dripping on your laptop during that set would probably get me banned for life now. Health code violation. Insurance issue. Bad for the 'gram.

The weird part, the part that actually stings instead of just annoying me, is that you clearly love the idea of this place. You kept the name. You kept the footprint. You even kept that godawful mural of the longhorn that's been peeling since before Obama. What you don't love is what it actually was: a room where nobody important had to be important for three hours. A place where townies, students, musicians, ex-cons, and the occasional English professor all stood shoulder to shoulder and agreed, without saying it, to leave each other alone.

That's not a business model. That's a miracle. And miracles don't scale.

The city is full of rooms with better lighting now. Cleaner bathrooms. Safer parking. More coherent branding. What it's running out of is rooms that remember your name without asking for your email address. The Hole in the Wall remembered. It remembered in the way the bar rail was worn exactly where the serious drinkers planted themselves. It remembered in the way the stage light always made the guitar player look like he was about to confess something terrible.

You can't optimize that. You can only replace it and then charge extra for the replacement.

So keep your session lagers and your content-friendly acoustics. I'll be at the new place down the street, the one that still has a sticky floor and no password for the WiFi because God forbid you might have to talk to the person next to you. It's not the Hole. Nothing will be again. But at least it hasn't been improved yet.

See you at last call, maybe. I'll be the guy not taking a picture of it.

Yours in permanent irritation,

The Old Austin Grouch

The new wallpaper is very nice, by the way. Matches the aesthetic. Ruins the memory.