Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

Cheap Trick called their agent furious about being booked into a rib joint; they left converted. Stubb's Waller Creek Amphitheater at 801 Red River Street is the outdoor stage behind Stubb's Bar-B-Q, the restaurant and venue that opened in 1996 in an 1850s building - a year after namesake C.B. Stubblefield, the legendary Lubbock pitmaster, died on the very day his partners bought the property. The geography made the venue: the lot slopes naturally down toward Waller Creek behind the restaurant, forming an amphitheater bowl that holds around 2,100-2,500 - the room that turned a barbecue backyard into one of America's most respected mid-size stages. The booking history is a festival lineup in slow motion - Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, the Beastie Boys, Metallica, Willie Nelson, Lady Gaga, Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard have all played the creek bank, and SXSW treats the venue as an unofficial headquarters every March. The 250-capacity indoor stage opened in 1997 - an unknown Keith Urban was among its first bookings - and the Sunday gospel brunch became an Austin institution running decades deep. The operation seeded an empire: co-founder Charles Attal's work booking the amphitheater grew into C3 Presents, the Lollapalooza and ACL Festival producer, which with parent Live Nation acquired Stubb's outright in 2022 - more than 100 shows a year and 2.28 million tickets sold since 1999. The Red River Cultural District has grown up around the anchor - Stubb's, the Moody Amphitheater and Moody Center now line one street - while the restaurant still serves the sauce that made a Lubbock cook's name national. The indoor stage's wax-figure shrine to Stubb himself, the gospel brunch's standing waitlist and the amphitheater's creekside load-in are all part of Austin concert lore - and the venue's dual identity means a national headliner's crew eats the same brisket the lunch crowd queued for at noon.