 "Photo: Mark Mulligan")
The owner of Joe's Generic Bar on Sixth Street was found shot and dead by police officers at his home Wednesday afternoon.
Austin Police Department officers discovered the body of Joseph Nevill Bates III, 51, after responding to a 911 welfare call. He lived at 1025 East 45th St. near the H-E-B on Red River.
Authorities are still investigating who shot him and are in the process of contacting family members. Police detectives declined to comment on details of his death.
His murder will be the first one in that ZIP code since at least 2001, according to the Austin Police Department's online statistics.
Joe's Generic Bar opened 19 years ago and was known for the small blues and rock bands that frequently played there, as well as the bar code sign that hung in front of it.
Bates said on a Yahoo message board dated Sept. 25 that when he first started Joe's "things were great for an entrepreneur."
"But when the street got really popular, the city stepped in and ruined the party," he wrote.
He blamed the decline of the bar on new restrictions on where to sell beer, the limitation of seating and the rent quadrupling since the bar was first opened.
The bar finally closed its doors on Sept. 30 but Bates said in a post two days earlier that he was glad for the opportunity to move to a new location because Sixth Street, or "sick street" as he put it, "is a complete wasteland of crap now,"
Eve Monsees, an employee at Antone's Records, began going to Joe's when she was 15 years old.
She remembered playing with her band, Blues Power, at Joe's once or twice a week for over two years.
"It was a real good place for people like me who are just starting to play. It was a real loose environment, a real hole-in-the-wall type of space," she said.
Monsees could recall only seeing Bates at the bar a few times.
"He was sort of a mysterious figure," she said.
Bates was not close to any of his co-workers, said Jay Bishop, manager of Joe's for the last six months.
Bishop couldn't say much about Bates. He only knew that Bates preferred to stay at home with his three dogs, turtles, fish and birds.
He hadn't spoken to Bates for over a week, stating that the bar owner was "pretty much a recluse."
Detectives request that anyone with information contact their homicide tip line at 477-3588.
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