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Your support makes all the difference.“Honey don’t you be yelling at me while I’m cleaning my gun,” sings James McMurtry as he opens his regular Wednesday night set at the Continental Club – the grand-daddy of venues in Austin, Texas – with the first lines of a song off his new album.
In the US city is known as “the live music capital of the world”, the Continental Club, housed in a modest two-storey brick building since 1957, is easily findable thanks to its emblematic giant retro neon sign. For over half a century a block of names scrawled on a chalkboard behind the Continental’s bar have outlined each week’s daily offerings of live bands and singers, slanted towards a dynamic mix of rootsy music.
McMurtry says the Continental’s historic status boosted his own career because “a lot of people go to the club just to go there, and I happen to be there. A lot of us [musicians] have benefited like that”. For otherwise hard-travelling in-house musicians, playing there has practical advantages, too: “We can go straight in... and we don’t have to get a soundcheck.”
That the Continental has endured so long is unusual, McMurtry says. “There’s an attrition rate, a lot of clubs close within two-and-a-half years... But the Continental has always been around.”
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