Villa Fontana might be the most famous venue you’ve never heard of.
Unless, that is, you attended shows during its late-’70s through mid-’80s heyday. In which case, it likely shaped your view of just how exciting and varied live music could be — and the blurred lines between rock’s rebellious punk and heavy metal uprisings.
Housed in an abandoned corner of the original Hemisfair site, Villa Fontana emerged as an unlikely — and all-ages — cradle of underground punk and metal. Although it’s famous for having hosted the legendary Slayer vs. Slayer show, where the now-iconic California thrash band performed with a like-named Alamo City outfit, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the spot’s influence.
From around 1980 until 1985, Villa Fontana hosted the likes of the Dead Kennedys, Riot, the UK Subs, Black Flag, G.B.H., D.O.A., Die Kreuzen, the Big Boys, Hickoids, Meat Puppets, Sun City Girls, Juggernaut, Watchtower, the Offenders and dozens more acts representing the flurry of creative activity simultaneously rising from the emerging punk and metal scenes.
“The Fontana was really special: the first San Antonio theater that served as a venue for under-18 crowds and original metal music,” said veteran San Antonio musician Art Villarreal, who played guitar in SA Slayer, Karion and other metal acts. “It was the first in Texas besides the Ritz in Austin.”
Villa Fontana was originally part of the Pearl Pavilion for Hemisfair ’68 and avoided the wrecking ball which demolished so much else erected for the event. A decade after the fair, the venue emerged as a go-to for quinceañeras, weddings and high school commencements.
But it also led a secret, seedier side hustle as a hub for underground music.
More than just a concert venue, Villa Fontana captured an era when DIY punk cross-pollinated with underground heavy metal. It was an exciting and creative time before bland alt-rock and posing hair metal hijacked the respective movements sometime later in the ’80s.
It was a time when fiercely independent San Antonio radio stations KISS and KMAC were important local tastemakers and helped turn the city into an international nerve center for hard rock.
Jason McMaster, Austin-based frontman for prog-metal pioneers Watchtower and late’-80s MTV darlings Dangerous Toys calls Villa Fontana and its place in the era’s rock pantheon “history-book worthy.”
“For a hot second, it was a cool place for anybody from us to Slayer to Helstar to the Offenders to [Millions of Dead Cops] to crossover metal-punk bands to have shows for cheap — three bucks a head,” he said. “I know that I had a good time, and I know that it was often sold out. And I know that it’s tattooed on everyone’s hearts and brains.”
Raoul Cortez’s dream
For rockers, Villa Fontana may be best known in its Hemisfair location, but the ballroom originated decades before at 411 South Presa St., poised above the showrooms for two long forgotten automakers: Packard and Willys-Overland.
The venue was the brainchild of Raoul Cortez, the father of Spanish-language radio and TV broadcasting in U.S. Cortez was not only San Antonio’s inaugural Rey Feo, he’s honored in the Smithsonian for his history-making contributions to Spanish-language media.
Born in Xalapa, Mexico, in 1905, Cortez moved to San Antonio just after the start of the Mexican Revolution. He worked at iconic downtown clothier Penner’s then at Pearl Brewery before landing a reporting job at newspaper La Prensa. His typewriter from that era is on display at the Smithsonian.
But Cortez’s real dream was opening his own radio station. His father had owned one in Mexico, and as a youth, Cortez sold ad time to sponsors. But starting a new U.S. radio station in the 1940s was tricky, especially as World War II raged. The FCC had frozen all new radio licenses to ensure broadcasts would support the Allied forces.
With that in mind, Cortez applied for a license, promising to promote the war effort to Spanish-language audiences — a groundbreaking idea. He received the license but didn’t launch station KCOR until 1946, the year after the conflict ended.
Cortez’s venture broke history just the same. The bootstrap operation was the first all-Spanish language radio station owned and operated by a Latino. Cortez and his staff further broke ground by wring original radio plays and hosting superstar Latin American singers and musicians.
After growing KCOR into a nationwide Spanish-language enterprise dubbed the Sombrero Network, Cortez founded the first Villa Fontana to host the many artists he featured on air. The Ramiro Cervera Orchestra, the Felix Solis Orchestra and Ruco Villarreal were among the artists who kicked back in the original location after their SA concerts.
“Villa Fontana was my grandfather Raoul Cortez’ venture,” said San Antonio businessman and Texas Public Radio board member Guillermo Nicolas. “He was a real entrepreneur. Radio, TV, bowling alleys, restaurants. He opened the club to entertain the big stars who used to come from all of the Spanish-speaking world to sing live on his radio station. They’d sing at the station during the day, sing at the Alameda Theater at night and wind down at the Villa Fontana.”
Hemisfair and after
As Hemisfair transformed downtown, Villa Fontana closed and ultimately moved into the Pearl Pavilion left over after fair ended. Fronted by a small canal created for Hemisfair, the pavilion was a cute two-story building with rickety balconies that evoked a bygone era. Ironically, it’s that quaint structure so many aging San Antonio rockers fondly remember.
“Built in imitation of the old-world charm of the famed Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark, the bright new pavilion was a place of gaiety and laughter,” the Express-News wrote of the pavilion in 1968.
The interior was decorated to resemble turn-of-the century San Antonio with various murals showing spring waters that flowed “straight to the brewery” to produce Pearl’s namesake brew.
The pavilion’s bucolic murals and tributes to a bygone era gave no hint of the heavy metal and punk mayhem yet to come. Indeed, many of the musicians and fans interviewed for this article thought the old-timey decor they witnessed there in the ’80s indicated Villa Fontana was a hundred-year-old Wild West relic.
After the fair’s six-month run and a failed attempt at turning the pavilion into a USO post, the building languished until Cortez stepped in. Having recently sold his radio network plus a TV station he’d since acquired, the entrepreneur sensed a chance to relocate Villa Fontana and give it a new use.
“A lot of the talent stopped going because the carrot of singing on the radio was gone,” said Nicolas, Cortez’s grandson. “Hemisfair was a new opportunity and venue for new customers and talent.”
Villa Fontana moved in, but much of the Hemisfair remnants around the building had fallen into neglect. Parts were fenced off, razed or crumbling in disrepair. The relaunched Villa Fontana was tucked into the corner of a massive parking lot in the shadow of the Tower of Americas. The canal in front remained, but it was a far cry from its glittering glory.
This new version of the venue became a hall for rent, mostly for quinceañeras, weddings and graduations.
DIY space
By the time the laid-back, earth-toned late ’70s coasted into view, rock ’n’ roll had had lost its exciting, transgressive and rebellious spirit. It had become corporate, pompous and boring. Or, worse, disco.
Against that backdrop, the youthful energy of punk emerged, dragging rock back to its loud, dumb, fun roots. It many ways, it was a distillation of the mid-’60s garage rock scene — raw, unfiltered, unpolished — a middle finger to the Eagles and other bands which represented the recording industry’s airbrushed commercial output.
Without established venues to host their bands and receptive labels willing to release their records, the era’s punks created their own world through a do-it-yourself, or DIY, ethic. Austin’s Big Boys were at the forefront of that effort.
“There was this weird thing in the ’70s,” Big Boys bassist Chris Gates said. “There was me in my room with a guitar, and there’s Van Halen at the ‘Enormo-dome,’ and nothing in between for local music. And then this punk rock thing happens, and … we’re all the weirdos that aren’t like this ‘Morning in America’ Reagan bullshit. We’ve found each other and there’s a space to do this. You don’t even have to be good, you just have to have something interesting to say and we’ll support it. We had this DIY community all over the country that shared information, so we didn’t have to figure it out ourselves.”
That DIY outlook meant renting halls and promoting your own shows. In San Antonio, Villa Fontana fit the bill. Similarly, Austin had the Ritz Theater, another forgotten space that found new life thanks to punk. Both were appealingly funky, all-ages —a punk requirement — and, best of all, cheap to rent.
“There was a seediness to [Villa Fontana] that had its appeal, man,” recalled longtime San Antonio musician Bobdog Catlin, who played with SA Slayer, Juggernaut and myriad other acts. “That was a building past its prime. The water-stained ceiling, the overall vibe, off to the side of a massive parking lot in the shadow of the Tower.”
By the time local promoters started renting the Fontana for shows, the building felt like it’d been forgotten in time. Paintings of San Antonio’s storied springs still adorned the walls, though the context was long forgotten. The second-floor railing was legendarily shoddy.
“That balcony — that was tough,” Catlin said. “That place would never pass code. That place was fucking dangerous, man. There was a white railing along the balcony, like a white picket fence. I remember it being a little scary. The whole balcony was a little scary.”
Just the same, local promoters such as Hickoids frontman and Saustex Records honcho Jeff Smith, BOSS Recording Studios head Bob O’Neill and independent operator Tony Chainsaw saw the aging venue as an opportunity to host shows for bands too loud, raw or weird to be accepted elsewhere.
At a show for British street-punk band G.B.H., the crowd was whipped into such a frenzy that members stage-dived from the rickety balcony.
“I don’t know who started the stage dives off the balcony, but that was fucking crazy,” Catlin said.
Word spread quickly that Fontana was both all-ages and lax in drinking-age enforcement — a golden combo for any miscreant teen. Indie promoter Chainsaw began hosting all-day punk shows, while Jeff Smith brought in legendary SoCal hardcore group Black Flag for the first-ever Hickoids gig.
Iconic punk act the Dead Kennedys played the venue Aug. 15, 1984, on its Kill Everyone Tour.
“They were on fucking fire, man,” Catlin said of the band. “[Singer] Jello Biafra was wearing a cast. Someone had broken his leg. He was ranting and raving about how [Fear frontman] Lee Ving had paid someone to do it — all that paranoia that made him so wonderful back then.”
Metal up your ass
The punks weren’t the only underground outsiders who found refuge at Villa Fontana. Before heavy metal found mainstream MTV acceptance in the latter part of the ’80s, it too was a musical refuge for misfits and outcasts.
“Heavy metal was for people who didn’t go to the prom,” as McMaster of Watchtower and Dangerous Toys succinctly put it.
McMaster began driving from Austin to San Antonio to hang out with SA Slayer — then just known as Slayer — in a garage rehearsal space.
“Off Fredericksburg and Babcock: Danville Street,” McMaster recalled. “Hallowed ground if you ask me. SA Slayer rehearsed in that garage, songs were written there. It’s how Don Van Stavern from SA Slayer became friendly with Mark Reale and joined Riot.”
For those unfamiliar, New York’s Riot was a pioneering force in power metal, recording album after album of anthemic material with guitarist and bandleader Mark Reale. Though terminally unrecognized, the band still retains legendary status among discriminating metalheads. Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, for example, is an ardent fan.
During one of Riot’s periodic breakups, Reale moved to San Antonio — a key market where fans had seized on the band’s music. In that garage off Fredericksburg Road, Reale joined forces with SA Slayer bassist Van Stavern and drummer Dave McClain to form Narita, a short-lived group that produced some of the best U.S. metal of the era. Some of its songs later ended up on Riot’s Thundersteel album.
If it’s all a bit confusing, just know this: a makeshift San Antonio rehearsal space helped shape U.S. metal in the ’80s by producing SA Slayer and helping reinvigorate Riot.
Against that hotbed of creativity, San Antonio’s metal underground also found a home at Villa Fontana, which hosted shows for both touring and local acts dealing in fast and heavy riffs.
Like Catlin, McMaster was struck by both the venue’s down-in-the-heels vibe and the creativity it showcased.
“It needed paint, there was a strange catwalk all the way around, the roof probably leaked in places,” he said. “The catwalk did not look sturdy at all, rickety stairs to get up there. A funky old country dancehall — that’s how I remember it. But to be 18 and playing in there was just wonderful.”
Cross-pollination
Whether they initially realized it, the metalheads and punks of the time were kindred spirits. Both loved loud, fast rock ignored by the mainstream, and both despised hippies. As the city’s emerging metal scene looked to expand, it needed to learn DIY promotion from the punks.
Turns out some of the punks were happy to oblige.
“The punk rock dudes were falling in love with the metal stuff,” McMaster said. “And the punk rockers said, ‘Whoa, we are the same people. Let me show you how to promote your shows, make a flier, make a shirt and a sticker.’ We learned it all from the punk rock dudes. It was cross-pollination, and it was new and fresh and fun — before it was called a crossover. It’s fellowship.”
McMaster credits the Big Boys’ Chris Gates with showing him the ropes. After a chance meeting at a high school gig, Gates befriended Watchtower and taught the group’s members how to make their own merchandise and promote their own shows.
“In the early years, it was unheard of to have merchandise,” McMaster said. “The punk rock bands were doing that, printing their own shirts in the garage. So, Chris Gates showed us that and printed the first Watchtower shirts in his garage.”
Gates said he saw Watchtower as kindred spirits in figuring out how to navigate the music underground.
“Watchtower were mind-bogglingly good at what they did, but they had no idea [how to take it to the next step],” Gates said. “Stuck at a rehearsal place and playing an occasional kegger. Not too different from me, three years earlier.”
But Watchtower and the Big Boys didn’t represent the only meeting of the minds. Numerous points of contact occurred between the metal and punk scenes of the time. Both were fueled by youthful energy.
“There was a DIY magic to it all,” SA Slayer’s Villarreal said. “It was really a magical time, very exciting. Making our fliers, doing our own PR, no handlers. We were running the asylum.”
For Gates, a Motörhead gig in San Antonio represented a defining moment in the merging of punk and metal.
“There was a Motörhead show in San Antonio in ’83, and about 200 punk guys drove down to the show,” Gates said. “The metal guys didn’t know about slam dancing yet and the punk guys made them uncomfortable, but Motörhead was the connective show. A bunch of angry Hispanic dudes wanted to kill us because we were slam dancing, and they didn’t know what that was. By the end of the night, they were having a ball and we were all moshing together.”
SA promoter Chainsaw’s all-day parties also stood out as memorable Villa Fontana moments. At one of those, all-female trio Heather Leather brawled onstage while stumbling through a cover of Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill.” The band was comprised of the three sisters, and they fought like only siblings can.
“It gets to the big drum riff of the song and she plays it wrong,” Catlin remembered of the dustup. “The bass player looks over her shoulder and says, ‘Fucking play it right, bitch,’ or something to that effect. So, they restart from the beginning. They get to the drum riff. And, goddamn, if she doesn’t do it again. Ruthie says something really mean to her. So they start over again, she fucked it up again, and Ruthie threw down her bass, and they went at it — fisticuffs onstage at the Villa Fontana.”
Such unscripted bouts of insanity were as far as SA music fans could get from the scripted and choreographed rock shows happening at local arenas.
“Follow that, motherfucker,” Catlin said of the onstage brawl. “It was cool as shit. Brilliant. That’s why Heather Leather were the punk rockers’ favorite metal band.”
A unique ecosystem
The 1983 compilation album Cottage Cheese From the Lips of Death, curated by Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers, stands as a significant representation of San Antonio’s initial mixing of punk and metal.
Recorded at now-defunct BOSS Studios, Cottage Cheese captures the energy of Texas punk from the era, featuring the Dicks, the Big Boys, the Offenders, the Mydolls and more. But tacked onto the end is “Meltdown,” a bonkers track by the then-unknown Watchtower.
“We were down in San Antonio at BOSS studios,” McMaster of Watchtower said. “The Butthole Surfers — Gibby and Paul — were finishing up a session. We were all hanging around the control room and they’re switching the reels out. ‘Meltdown’ comes on. We’re trying to sound like Rush on speed, like a pissed-off Geddy Lee meets Udo from Accept. It comes on and it’s crazy as shit-sounding, and Gibby said, ‘What the hell is this?’”
The Surfers were instantly smitten by what they heard.
“We were a metal band, but not really a metal band,” McMaster said. “In the early throes of it, the punk rockers came to the shows, the nerds, the weirdos. We were the Sonic Youth of metal. Punks and hardcore folks fell in love with it because it was not hippie shit at all. It was barely rock ’n’ roll influenced.”
Haynes and Leary slapped “Meltdown” onto the final product, marking McMaster’s first vinyl appearance among many of his crossover heroes.
Speaking of the Surfers, there are conflicting accounts as to whether the bizarre psych-punk band played the Villa Fontana. While most interviewed for this article said the group never performed at the venue, memories get hazy over time.
“I know that Butthole Surfers played there with Hugh Beaumont [Experience] and Fudge Tunnel,” Catlin maintained. Well, sort-of. “I know that for a fact, but I could be wrong.”
To be sure, Cottage Cheese represents just part of an entire ecosystem that grew up during the Villa Fontana era. That also included radio and print media, each reinforcing the other.
In San Antonio, the heart of that ecosystem was KISS/KMAC radio, where DJs Joe Anthony and Lou Roney engaged in fearless programming, regularly playing then-unknown bands such as Judas Priest, Budgie, Rush, Scorpions and Triumph who later broke out into international fame. The DJs made San Antonio an international tastemaker for hard rock.
“I was at this party with Danny Fields, who worked with the Doors and signed the MC5,” Gates of the Big Boys recalled. “One of the things he told me was that in the ’70s and ’80s, if a major label signed a rock band and they were trying to figure if a band would “go” or not, they sent them to Los Angeles, Detroit and San Antonio.”
With two stations spinning hard rock and heavy metal bands that the rest of the country had yet to catch up with, it’s little surprise so many San Antonio kids had a taste for the hard stuff that dominated at Villa Fontana.
“Radio was the most powerful thing we had, and we were ahead of the curve, compared to other scenes,” Villarreal said. “Joe Anthony and Lou Roney were a couple of music nerds with carte blanche to play what they wanted. It was completely organic.”
Tom “T-Bone” Scheppke, who served as KISS’s music director during much of the ’80s, remembers things a bit differently.
“People think it was all organic, but that’s up for discussion,” he said with a laugh.
While more freewheeling than rock stations of today, Scheppke said there were still some rules and constraints.
“It was still block format. An open-format rock thing — free rein or DJs,” Scheppke said. “It was pretty amazing.”
Slayer vs. Slayer
Fewer things better symbolize the Villa Fontana’s influence than the now-legendary Slayer vs. Slayer gig.
As the heavy metal underground bubbled up across the U.S., it was inevitable that two bands would choose the same name. And so it happened: separate bands named Slayer rose to the tops of their scenes in Los Angeles and San Antonio.
SA Slayer recorded its album first at BOSS Studio, but a delay in its release allowed LA Slayer to swoop in and lay claim. Shortly after SA Slayer gave up the ghost, a local promoter brought the West Coast Slayer to town for a show billed as Slayer vs. Slayer.
It went down at Villa Fontana. Two bands, one name. Many in attendance argue SA Slayer outperformed the out-of-towners. That night, Texas metal’s distinctive aspects were on full display.
“For Texas metal, we wanted to play a more technical brand, to have the instrumentation stand out,” says guitarist Villarreal said. “More about technique and power. Our lyrical content was about war, oppression in society, the police — a rebellious tint to those songs. An observer to war history, not a celebration of it. Societal issues. None of our songs were about getting laid. It was creative expression and observing our world, where we were in our lives. We had a strong aversion to being generic.”
Catlin pulled double duty for the show. As an employee at Hastings Records at Windsor Park Mall, he assigned himself as liaison for LA Slayer, who’d arrived at the mall for an in-store performance.
“This was 1984. Slayer’s first American tour,” says Catlin. “Touring with a Camaro, pulling a U-Haul, pulling up to the mall. I mean, how ’80s can you be?”
Scott Womack, Hastings’ manager and bassist for local metal band Juggernaut, took pride in taking in-store promotions a step beyond. For the Slayer in-store, he sent an employee to a local butcher to buy large animal femurs, meat still attached, which he fashioned into upside-down crucifixes to hang above Slayer while they performed.
“There are hundreds of rabid Slayer fans,” Catlin recalled of the mall show. “Hundreds of satanists outside and they’re trying to get in, rattling and shaking the glass panels, screaming satanic shit, and the glass panels are starting to bend. It was scary.”
Crazy as it got, nobody died.
Meanwhile, after the mall performance and before the Villa Fontana show, Catlin swilled vodka with the touring band. Unaware who their drinking buddy was, LA Slayer told Catlin they weren’t looking forward to the nighttime gig.
“Kerry King, the least friendly of the four band members, looks at his watch and in his gruff voice says, ‘Its about time to get down there and see this other fucking Slayer band.’ He looks me right in the eye, says, ‘What do you know about these guys anyhow?’” Catlin said. “I said ‘I’m the guitar player.’” And they said, ‘But you’re cool.’ And I said, ‘You win, we lose. We broke up, you have the name.’ And at that point, all the potential drama bullshit that could have gone on just went away, because we’d spent the day together. It ended up a really fun night.”
Leaving a legacy
As vital a scene as Villa Fontana fostered, change was in the air come 1986. The energy of the metal underground had been swallowed by glam, and punk splintered into various underground rock scenes, most of them considerably more tame.
The Fontana was demolished for an expansion of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.
“The city razed it. Very sad,” Villarreal said. “And when the Fontana shut down, things started changing. We were seeing the glam influence. Younger guys wanted to be Poison or Warrant or Guns n’ Roses.”
KMAC changed ownership in 1982 and became a religious station. San Antonio’s original den of allegedly “satanic” heavy metal was reborn as a spot for Christian talk radio. God, or at least the FCC, apparently had a sense of humor.
While KISS continued to play the hard stuff, Scheppke recalls the station losing more and more of its autonomy as the ’80s unfolded. Finally, in 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, lifting limits on media ownership and effectively killing independent radio voices in the U.S.
“Eventually at KISS, they hired a guy from California who came in with a list and said, ‘This is what you’re gonna play,’” Scheppke added. “We went from playing The Vamps and Judas Priest to Hall and Oates and Eddie Money. And KISS became the No. 1 station in town.”
With San Antonio radio’s power to break heavier and more challenging bands, the city also lost its national prominence as a hard-rock destination.
As the changes played out, McMaster left Watchtower to form Dangerous Toys, who scored a platinum record and had videos in heavy MTV rotation. In the end, Watchtower influenced an entire generation of challenging prog-metal that flew in the face of ’80s glam-rock glitz. It just didn’t happen fast enough.
“Until the wall was completely on the ground and in rubble, the world was not ready for a band like Watchtower,” McMaster said. “Later, there was a shit ton of bands like that, though — Celtic Frost, Tool, Clutch, Voivod. Young people creating their own style that wasn’t Twisted Sister.”
As grunge, alt-rock and other trends shook up the market, metal bands that dominated the ’80s, from Dio to Anthrax, were now back to playing clubs. McMaster found himself revisiting the DIY skills he’d cultivated a decade earlier with Gates and honed at Villa Fontana.
“If you’re a musician, there’s a whole lot of DIY. It was important to realize,” McMaster said. “I’ve gotta go put the gloves on and get back into the ring if I want to make art, be relevant. I have to play guitar, it’s my therapy, its my job. As Rob Halford said, ‘Adapt or die.’ So, I got a day job so I could pay to make fliers and post them around town for my shows. It wasn’t a big thing for me to go back to DIY. I’d been doing that just a couple years before.”
For Villarreal, the Villa Fontana era can’t be duplicated.
“You can’t manufacture the energy of that age, being 18 or 19 years old,” he said.
Still, the infectious rock n’ roll spirit that infected him then defies trends and the passing of time, he added.
“Rock til I die. That’s the plan.”
Subscribe to SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
