Aaron Peña made a vivid first impression on Azeneth Dominguez, proprietor of the famed Saluté International live music club on North St. Mary’s Street.
The 21-year-old accidentally dropped a Negra Modelo, which shattered on the floor.
“I was quick to clean up the mess,” Peña wrote in a 2015 homage to the club and Dominguez in the San Antonio Current, but “it would be a few years until she would let me forget about it.”
As it did for many San Antonians, Saluté offered a formative education for Peńa, exposing him not just to the greats of San Antonio’s West Side Sound, but also to the vagaries of running a live music establishment.
Saluté closed its doors in 2012, and in 2016, Peña and a handful of partners opened The Squeezebox on the other side of North St. Mary’s, less than a block away. They began refilling that live music niche, booking legends like Flaco Jimenez and his brother, Santiago Jimenez Jr., Eva Ybarra, the TexManiacs and Nick Villarreal.
They didn’t limit themselves to conjunto and cumbia. DJs became a big part of Squeezebox’s rotation, as did late jazz great Jim Cullum.
“Jim hoarded pianos,” Peña told the San Antonio Report. “He’d buy pianos and leave them in all the bars where he played. I helped him move at least three pianos.”
For years, Squeezebox was an unequivocal success. Then the story gets sad, and sadly familiar: a pandemic. A reopening dogged by code enforcement crackdowns. A noise ordinance task force. Parking clashes with the Tobin Hill neighborhood. And through it all, road construction that blocked access to businesses dragged on and on and on.
News that Peña would close Squeezebox at the end of July ricocheted around San Antonio. He had become a leading voice in the St. Mary’s Strip morass, advocating for fellow business owners and holding the city to account.
It was an exhausting, demoralizing time, but Peña acknowledges a bittersweet upside: “I learned how to, I guess, be civically disruptive, how to figure out, what’s the head of the snake? And how do I go after that?” he said.
For Peña, learning to do battle with city officials was just the latest knot to unravel. He had already learned the bar business from the ground up — literally. He got his start picking up cigarette butts at the Friendly Spot, before graduating to a spot behind the bar. An apprenticeship at the Brooklynite led to a management role there before Peña opened Squeezebox.
His advocacy, along with that of Chad Carey, owner of Paper Tiger and Little Death Wine Bar, included biting humor on social media that helped keep the plight of their fellow small businesses in the news.
Their efforts, along with others who didn’t make headlines, helped bring some financial relief to some of the businesses, but for Squeezebox, the losses were too great.
As he closes the book on Squeezebox, Peña is energized by his latest project, opening a pair of adjacent bars with Roger Herr, owner of Bar Loretta, that are set for a soft opening later this month.
A shared love of music played a key role in their collaboration. Herr, who owned bars in New York City before returning to his hometown and launching Bar Loretta, said he’d “just recently developed a crush on West Side soul music … and here’s a guy opening a place just two blocks from me that features this kind of music that I’d just fallen in love with.”
That place was Amor Eterno, Peña’s second bar, located behind Bar America on South Presa Street. When Bar Loretta opened some months later, Peña became a patron. “And then I was like, sh–, he’s a cool guy, too,” said Herr.
When he first pitched Peña his concept in late 2022, Herr said Peña didn’t quite get it, so Herr made him a playlist. “Then it just clicked,” Herr said.
The new owners are turning the old Francis Bogside location at 803 S. St. Mary’s St., which began life as a bar and short-lived restaurant, into Gimme Gimme, a rock-and-roll bar and A Perfect Day, a wine bar.
Gimme Gimme won’t be a rock music venue, although Peña said he hopes they can offer live music occasionally. Instead, it will offer a rock-and-roll aesthetic through its design. Herr says think Max’s Kansas City, which became a magnet for rockers, artists and their hangers-on in the 1960s and ’70s.
A Perfect Day, which will have a more mellow, neighborhood vibe, does have a small stage, and Peña hopes they can book “jazz trios and lounge acts” there.
Before the soft opening, however, Peña will get behind the Squeezebox bar one more time, on Thursday, July 13, to sling drinks for his regulars, for employees past and present, friends and family.
Could there be another Squeezebox in his future? Or at least some version of it?
“Yeah, absolutely,” he said. “We’re looking around.”
“My grandmother owned a bar on the South Side, before I was born: Amelia’s, on Mitchell and Probandt. So it’s probably just in my blood.”
