Researching a reader’s question about the exact location of the first Soap Creek Saloon off Bee Caves Road led us to this fantastic, half-forgotten document published by the American-Statesman on Aug. 15, 1996.

“The Great Dead Club Crawl” is an attempt to catalogue the music venues of Austin legend, a typically ambitious artifact of  XL, our extra-sized entertainment section launched that year. It comes with no byline in our digital archives, but I know that  Ed Crowell edited it. I can’t remember if  Michael Corcoran or  Don McLeese contributed to it.

I showed the 1996 document to  Peter Blackstock, one of our current music writers, who rightly observed that it needs a lot of updating and that quite a few of spots listed in the “Epilogue” have changed names and owners, some of them multiple times. Also,  LibertyLunch and  Black Cat Club, two of Austin’s most lamented Dead clubs, were still in operation at the time.

He also advised that I clean up the text a bit before reviving it, which is exactly what I’ve done in order to provide this snapshot of Dead Austin Clubs as viewed from 1996.