The first thing you notice walking up to the East Side Lounge--before you wonder why the cops aren't messing with the folks drinking beer in the dirt parking lot like they would if the club was just a half a mile to the west, before you think to count the number of cars Pug blocked in by parking his clean, new, white and gold Eldorado behind them sideways, even before you smell the meat in the 'cue stand next to the front door with it's thick, sweet smoke sailing clear out to the street--is the sound spilling out of the last real juke joint left in Austin. But still there's a twist: the initial register in your ear is not a familiar lick or melody, not the tightness of the band or what instrument has the lead. It's the sound of a crowd, a rolling, swinging tide of people laughing and hollering and singing and screaming at one another. It's the sound of a good time.

And when you pull open the heavy, metal door to the faded yellow, cinder block shack, as wild a party as you have ever seen opens up in front of you. Maybe fifty people are sitting and standing, drinking and jawing, cramped tightly at tables littered with empties. Bottles of Pinch and Weller's poke out of brown paper bags and big fat purses, resting next to the centerpiece on each table, a small, white bucket of ice. Straws with dark red lipstick at the tips stretch out of Busch Tallboys and bottles of Miller's Lite. Folks dressed to the nines and doing the dozens, people just off work in their UPS uniforms, all talking about what they did today and who looks good tonight, how their youngest boy made out in the ballgame over the weekend and "What the hell happened to Ricky Williams when he got to New Orleans?"

At a table in the back you’ll find Sarge, sharp as always in a perfectly matched suit and bowler, royal blue tonight, holding court with a couple ladies. Sitting next to him in a stately southern straw, Pug feeds one of his finer lines of bullshit to Chili, keeping one eye on the lady to his left and the other on his ex-wife at a table across the way. Over in the corner, Nat King Cole ("People told him he looks like Nat so long he started thinking he was") waits for the song to end so he can start to croon "Rambling Rose."

Standing at the door you wonder how often this goes on, how it is that all these people know each other so well, and how you're going to fare in this place where you don't know a soul.

But make no mistake, the party aside, the music will hit you, and when it does you'll forget all about trying to find a way to fit in. It will probably come right after Joyce points at the guitar player and shouts "Ah shit, looks like Clarence is smiling, looks like he's fixin' to get it! Get it Clarence!" Then you'll look through the smoke to the back of the room, past the bar and the neon and the Black History posters provided by the good people of Budweiser. There, on a cleared-off section of the concrete dance floor, framed above by a "Happy Birthday ________!" banner, and below by the gaping mouth of owner Ira "Boss Man" Hill, who sits every night at the edge of the jam-packed dance floor with his back to the band and sound asleep, Clarence is in fact taking off. And fast on his heels are the rest of an unbelievably tight, six-piece blues group. The East Side Band is tearing the place apart.

Then you'll get the Blues. Not the Blues of B.B. King or Eric Clapton, but the blues of T-Bone Walker and Spot Barnett. The Blues with the "Rhythm &" left in. The Blues as it flowed through Memphis, Malaco Records, and Muscle Shoals. The Blues of Bobby "Blue" Bland and Duke-Peacock and Little Willie John. Houston Blues, as in Bee Houston. Blues from the Tiffany Lounge and the Eastwood Country Club in San Antonio, from the Bluebird in Fort Worth. Some of it dates back to the forties, other parts sounded new in the seventies; but it's all mostly forgotten, a style that the Lomaxes and Strachwitzs of the world would be recording now if they still went poking around little out-of-the-way joints looking for the real thing.

Doug Sahm's drummer Ernie Durawa says that at the Tiffany in the fifties, it didn't matter what color a player was. "You just needed to know how to play Honky-Tonk." The Blues at the East Side is that Blues.

It comes from a band that's almost completely unknown in the city that calls itself the "Live Music Capitol of the World." Hardly anybody west of the interstate knows guitarist and bandleader Clarence Pierce, who picked up his chops in the clubs in San Antonio before moving to Austin in the seventies and making his home at the East Side in 1989. They've never heard him or Larry Williams, the big tenor saxman and music teacher who plays like Sonny Rollins blowing the ghost of Clifford Scott off the walls and clean through the folks on the dance floor. Trumpet player emeritus Martin Banks is familiar in town, as the city's strongest link to Duke Ellington and Ray Charles should be, but his partner Mark "Homeboy" Patterson, who rounds out the horn section with a strong second trumpet, is still a stranger. So are the seemingly inseparable members of the bedrock rhythm section, Burley Manor on bass and Charles Shaw on drums, and guitarist Tim McDaniel, the vato-looking white kid from El Rito, New Mexico, who came to Austin two years ago with "SRV" tattooed on his right arm, intending to learn the Blues in his hero's old haunts. Now he takes meals to Clarence in exchange for guitar lessons.

The East Side Band is a "house band" in the truest sense, playing two and three nights a week for people that couldn't be more "family" if they were blood-related. The players recognize every shout, every move on the dance floor, and the exact right song to play on everybody's birthday. (And as the banner attests, every night is somebody's birthday.) Every lady knows that when she goes to the women's room at the left of the stage Clarence is going to give her a catcall with his guitar and pretend to follow her in, and every man fully expects Clarence to demand a beer when they go past him to the men's room. Then, when the band breaks and Clarence calls out, "Somebody bribe the juke box. It’s just like everybody else, it can be had," Little Milton and Barbara Lynn always hold the party over until the band comes back on.

And at night's end, after Mr. Hill starts to stir, and his wife, Miss Rose, who can barely see over the bar she tends, scoots everybody out, after the last rib bone hits the trash can by the 'cue stand and the last car drives off down 12th, everybody knows where the party's going to be tomorrow.

Trying to explain the magic at the East Side Lounge is like trying to define the Blues itself. You're either going to get it or you're not. Lightnin’ Hopkins said simply, "The Blues is a feeling," and that sums it up as well as anything else. It's like Justice Stewart trying to define pornography for the US Supreme Court: "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it."

Listen to the East Side Band and see what you think the Blues is.

And bare in mind, the scene described above took place on a Monday.