Like many of the clubs from Houston’s hippie days the date and reason why Jimmie Menutis’ closed is lost to history and the wrecking ball. Dukes also stated that the club was filled “dark, short, white guys walking around” while acts like Bo Diddley, King Curtis and Jimmy Reed played onstage. Jimmie Menutis’ Lounge has been described by Scarlet Dukes’ 1960s Texas Music website as “being as close to a ‘nightclub’ as anything in Houston at the time.”ĭukes went on to write that, like many of the supper clubs from the big band era, the venue featured a single bandstand surrounded by tables covered with red cloth.
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Despite the literally hundreds of music venues that came and went prior to the mid 1960s the first club that can be identified as catering specifically to the psychedelic scene is Jimmie Menutis’ Lounge and Club which was operating from the early to mid 1960s at 3236 Telephone Road. While many bars and venues get wakes when they die almost none get obituaries which makes piecing together their history very difficult. Unfortunately, like most live music venues, many of the clubs that created the scene left little or no trace of their passing.
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There are few ‘historic venues’ in Houston (Fitzgeralds and the Eldorado Ballroon not withstanding) and most of the lineage of Houston’s music history has fallen to the bulldozer while the story of Texas’ impact on the psychedelic music scene of the 1960s and 1970s is only just now beginning to be told. Like much of Houston’s history, the history of its music venues is always on the verge of being forgotten.
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The marquee for Jimmy Menustis' Lounge and Club