Emo's on Sixth: Before the Move, Before the Mourn

There are two Emo's. The one that exists now, over on East Riverside — fine, whatever, it books good shows — and the one that existed at 603 Red River Street from 1992 to 2011, which was not fine, was never whatever, and was the filthiest, loudest, most essential music venue in Austin for the better part of two decades.

You didn't go to Emo's to be seen. You went to Emo's to be deafened.

The original Emo's was two rooms: the inside, which was dark and loud and smelled like a combination of PBR and poor decisions, and the outside, which was a gravel parking lot with a stage and a sound system that existed primarily to annoy the neighboring businesses, a task it performed with distinction. The inside booked punk, hardcore, metal, and whatever didn't fit anywhere else. The outside booked everything from country to hip-hop to bands whose genre was essentially "we have amps and feelings."

Here's what you need to remember about Emo's on 6th:

• The bathroom was a war crime. We say this with love. The graffiti alone was a doctoral thesis in Austin counterculture. The plumbing was a suggestion. If you used the facilities and emerged without an altered worldview, you weren't paying attention.
• The door guys were legends. Not because they were friendly — they were terrifying, some of them — but because they maintained a door policy that was essentially "don't be a complete idiot," which in the Red River district on a Saturday night was a higher bar than it sounds.
• The sound in the indoor room could physically relocate your skeleton. We saw At the Drive-In there in 2000 and are fairly certain our vertebrae have never fully returned to their original positions.

Emo's was the anchor of Red River, and Red River was the anchor of what was left of Austin's live music identity after Liberty Lunch got demolished. When Emo's announced it was moving to East Riverside in 2011, the reaction was a mix of grief, rage, and the grim resignation of people who had already watched this movie. Different address, same ending: another piece of Austin's sound, paved over for the convenience of whatever was coming next.

The new Emo's is bigger. Nicer. Better bathrooms. And look — it's a perfectly good venue. But it's a perfectly good venue the way a reprint is a perfectly good book. The text is the same. The smell is different. And something about holding it just doesn't feel right.

The 603 Red River location is now part of the Red River Cultural District, which is a phrase that would have made anyone at the original Emo's laugh until they choked on their Lone Star. "Cultural District." They put a name on it. As if the culture needed a zoning designation to exist, when in reality it existed despite zoning, despite noise complaints, despite everything the city did to pretend it wasn't there.

If you were at Emo's on 6th — on any night, for any show — you carry it. You carry the ringing in your ears and the stamp on your hand that wouldn't wash off for two days and the knowledge that Austin used to have a place where the music was so loud it drowned out the sound of the city changing around it.

We still have Hole in the Wall. We still have a few spots left. But Emo's on Sixth was something that doesn't come back once it leaves. We know this because it left, and it hasn't.