Notes and Musings

I've moved

2011-02-12T19:47:00.000-06:00

Come see me at joenickp.com

Joe Nick On The Air, 7 pm central 1-1-11

2011-01-01T08:51:00.003-06:00

As always on the first Saturday of every month at 7pm Central Time, I'll be presenting the Texas Music Hour of Power on KRTS 93.5 FM in Marfa and Far West Texas, and on MarfaPublicRadio.org for you internet listeners. Tune in and twang on.

slow blog

2010-12-09T15:15:00.001-06:00

I would like to apologize for the infrequent blogs here. I'm trying to finish my cultural history of the Dallas Cowboys for Little, Brown and Company and prepare the Texas High School Football: More Than the Game exhibit which I am curating for the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum in Austin (exhibit opens on July 30 and runs through January 2012). Bear with me. I'll be back and blather more regularly soon enough.

Tom Russell on Doug Sahm

2010-11-16T11:09:00.000-06:00

The Ballad of Little Dougie

He’s sitting on stage somewhere in the night. Clutching a Bajo Sexto. One of those deep throated Mexican instruments; a sonic cross between a 12 string guitar and a broken steel cable whacking beats against a wooden thunder drum. A tuba with strings. Doug Sahm is poised. Historically posed. Leather jacket, black cowboy hat, pointy toe black boots. Long Hair and shades. The real/true beat king of Americana long before it was deadened into a recycle bin for old rockers and hat acts and tired folkies. My friend Peter from England gave me this picture. Doug is probably one of the only gabacho/gringos who could play the bajo sexto; he also played guitar, steel guitar, bass, drums, and all of it. They say he played once with Hank Williams. He used to call me in the middle of the night and whisper arcane warnings: “Man you gonna get fat on Mexican food down in El Paso. Watch out.” He said he’d drive out to see me, but “them Mexican banditos out there would steal my Cadillac.” He called me “St Olav’s,” because he loved that song of mine. He even recorded it once. Doug wanted us to tour Norway together and take it all back. The fame, the glory, the Norwegian Kroners. It never transpired.

He was called “Little Dougie,” in those 1950’s photos. A ten year old kid behind a steel guitar. Then he was the young dude with Beatle bangs and flamenco boots who hit ‘em hard with “Mendocino” and “She’s About a Mover.” He sang with Dylan. He was American music in the raw/real sense; music drawn from the border, Mexico, accordions, steel guitars, East Texas blues, girls tight red dresses, white boy rock, and British Invasion boomerang POP. Doug Sahm. Crooning, moaning, and wailing his way through his own Great American Songbook.

I hung out with him in a New York deli once. He spent twenty minutes telling the waitress how to make real corn beef hash. Then we went back to his hotel room where he chastised me for tossing my cowboy hat on the bed: “No hat on the bed, dude, its bad luck!” Then he showed me his bag of vitamins, mineral water, and the special coffee machine he travelled with. The road warrior in his final season; with medicines for the ritual.

A year later he died, in a Motel, in Taos, New Mexico. Gone, but never gone. Little Dougie.

The other night I watched the Texas Tornados. Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez and Doug’s son, Sean. On fire. Doug looked down and whispered to “Boogie,” (which is what he called Augie) – “Heh, Boogie, keep your eye on St. Olav’s, don’t let him get fat on that El Paso Mexican food. And don’t let him throw his hat on the bed, boogie.”

Roll on, Little Dougie, roll on.

(I’ll send this one out to the regulars in “Bar Mendocino,” Helsinki, Finland.)
Posted by Tom Russell at 1:49 PM

Joe Nick on Texas High School Football

2010-11-05T15:24:00.013-05:00

the Golden Triangle edition, written by Bob West of the Port Arthur News
click the headline for the whole column

"One of the interested spectators at the Nederland-PNG game Friday night was a fellow named Joe Nick Patoski. Joe Nick is the guest curator for the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, with the special task of showcasing the history of Texas High School football. He picked up some Jimmy Johnson and Little Joe Washington memorabilia from the Museum of the Gulf Coast and is constantly scouting for anything that will enhance his display due to open in July of 2011. One result of Patoski’s trip to Southeast Texas was a visit with Orangefield superfan Bennie Cotton, who is going to be spotlighted in the BullIock Museum. If you think you have anything that would add to the exhibit, particularly from the early years, Patoski can be e-mailed at footballexhibit@thehistoryoftexas.com . . . Patoski, by the way, could have attended all 87 games in the Mid County Madness rivalry and arguably never have seen a better, more entertaining one than the latest version. Count me among the multitudes who didn’t think Nederland had much of a chance. An unexpected victory like that over an arch-rival should certainly silence some of the sniping toward head coach Larry Neumann."

A few shots from the Nederland pep rally and the game, which is one of the best rivalry games I've witnessed. The boudin balls sold by the booster club three for $2 were pretty great too.

2010-10-31T10:14:00.013-05:00

The concept of a World Series is a new one in Texas, which explains the looks of disbelief and all the photodocumentation in Arlington on Saturday. It was great attending a baseball game where every pitch counted, and the crowd paid attention. No wonder everyone was wallowing in it afterwards. On to the next.

the Canadian Wildcats, the top ranked 1A team in Texas

2010-10-27T11:10:00.034-05:00

Images from last Friday's clash between the Stratford Elks and the Canadian Wildcats, along with some photos of Canadian, one of the most beautiful small towns in Texas, and some shoutouts along the way to the Amarillo High Sandies, the West Texas Consolidated Comanches, the Phillips Blackhawks, the Stinnett Rattlers and White Deer too. Canadian won, 21-7, but the game was closer than the score.

Willie book review

2010-10-27T11:05:00.003-05:00

from the blog Words & Then Some:
(Click on the headline to link with the entire blog)

"And, this month I find myself in complete awe of Willie Nelson and Joe Patoski’s Willie Nelson an Epic Life. Wow. Just wow."

Guy Clark

2010-10-22T22:17:00.003-05:00

some real nice words from Robert Wilonsky of the Dallas Observer, the hardest workin' blogger I know (and a great writer writer too) and his Unfair Park column.
Click on the headline and watch the vid of the interview from the Kessler and Guy and his compadre Verlon Thompson doing "The Guitar:"

Or go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoBBelf3vF8

Joe Nick Patoski's a friend -- a hero also. One of the sharpest, wisest, wittiest and warmest nonfiction writers Texas has ever produced; one could do worse than attempt to emulate the Fort Worth native and UTEP'er presently at work on that book about the Dallas Cowboys and Dallas Texans. Certainly, Jeff Liles couldn't have done better when he asked Joe Nick to moderate last night's Q&A with the great Guy Clark at the Kessler.

That's clear in the video above, 14:47 of pure gold from two of Texas's best. I love it when Joe Nick says to Guy, "You write songs, sometimes the songs are writin' you." Another highlight among many, Clark's advice to aspiring songwriters: "Listen to Dylan Thomas read his own work." Your work-week musical farewell forthcoming. Till then, on the other side from last night's performance, "The Guitar." But one classic amongst many.

Rio Grande Valley football

2010-10-17T10:59:00.025-05:00

scenes from Edcouch-Elsa, Harlingen, Brownsville, and Mission

The Next Book

2010-10-14T16:01:00.001-05:00

Generations on the Land, a project initiated by the Sand County Foundation and published by Texas A&M Press

Willie Nelson book review

2010-09-21T09:38:00.001-05:00

from Acidica's blog:

I recently finished reading the Willie Nelson biography wrote by Joe Nick Patoski called An Epic Life. This was the second bio I have read about Willie Nelson, the first one being about 15 years ago. I enjoyed this book much more, some of it is because I am a bigger fan of him now and am more interested in his story. But overall, it is a well written book and covers his whole life up to 2008. Willie has lived quite the life and seems like such a down to earth guy, not worried about money or what people think of him and such. He seems like the kind of guy that would take time to actually talk to you and listen to your stories, be a great honour I think to meet ol' Willie. He truly is an original outlaw, how many people can say they smoked a joint on the roof of The White House. Well, Willie can!!!

If you have any interest in Willie Nelson or country music period, this is a book well worth looking into. Highly recommended reading material.

Monterrey Prepa Tec

2010-09-14T13:39:00.012-05:00

Monterrey Tec (click on the headline for info on the school) was the second football team from Mexico to show up this season at the Palace on Parmer for a game against 5A powerhouse Stony Point High School of Round Rock.

Prepa Tec, the prep school for Tecnilogico de Monterrey, is the best high school football team in Mexico, national champs for the past seven years running. Which is not surprising because Monterrey is the most upscale Texan city in Mexico (the HEB in San Pedro rocks and has valet parking) and is all of two and half hours from the border

Five years ago, Prepa Tec started playing big border high schools in the Rio Grande Valley including McAllen High (a great story on that meetup that ran in the Washington Post can be found here
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/why-we-compete/2007/10/community.html )
and Mission High, and rolled over 3A Port Isabel 51-0 and 4A Rockport-Fulton, 47-0.

Last year they played 5A powerhouse Allen High north of Dallas to a respectable 35-21 score.

This year, they're traveling deeper into Texas and playing five top shelf Texas high schools, all 5A or 4A - The Woodlands, Highland Park, RR Stony Point, Gregory-Portland and Corpus Christi Ray.

"We got stomped" by the Woodlands, 44-7, an assistant coach told me before the start of the Stony Point game. Allen High was a slight improvement losing 35-21. 4A Highland Park whupped them 52-30. Stony Point was pretty ugly after halfway through the first quarter and ended up 52-7. Maybe G-P or Corpus will be more competitive. Getting trounced by bigger, faster teams has its upside, the assistant said before the Borregos Salvajes (the Wild Rams) took the field. The team was getting better as the competition was getting better. He promised, "Five years from now, we're coming back and beating Allen and The Woodlands."

Brownwood, Texas Friday Night

2010-09-05T20:38:00.013-05:00

Nowhere else.

Texas High School Football

2010-08-31T12:25:00.032-05:00

The real Friday Night Lights got underway last week and I caught four games as part of my research as curator of Texas High School Football: More Than The Game, an exhibit that will open at the Bob Bullock State History Museum in Austin on July 30, 2011 and run until December 31, 2011.

If you've got artifacts or items that you think should be in the exhibit, holler back.

In the meantime, here a few images from Week Zero including the Universidad Autonomico de Nuevo Leon Prep Tigres vs. Round Rock Stony Point Tigers, the Wimberley Texans vs. the Cuero Gobblers in Cuero where Wimberley broke Cuero's 33 game win streak at home in an exciting barnburner, and the Calvert Trojans vs. the Garden City Bearkats and the Throckmorton Greyhounds vs. the Follett Panthers at the Six Man Super Saturday in Hico (hicosupersix.com)where an Elvis impersonator appeared at halftime.

Favorite sign of the week was in front of a Cuero church:
“God doesn’t play favorites But we do! Go Mean Green

No one does high school football like Texas does. In case you didn't know.

Esteban Jordan

2010-08-14T09:48:00.004-05:00

The greatest Tex Mex acordeonista who ever lived passed away late Friday night August 13 in San Antonio.

Click on the headline to watch the NPR youtube audio/video of the Corrido of the World's Best Accordionist

on the radio, Saturday night, 7pm CDT

2010-08-06T08:05:00.002-05:00

It's another thrilling episode of All Over the Map, this Saturday night, 7 pm Central time on the General Store on Marfapublicradio.org KRTS 93.5 if you're tuning in around Far West Texas. This week playing a whole lot of Texas roots and folk sounds for the Folk Alliance Convention in Marfa and the Holy Trinity of Tex-Mex Rock-Roll.

Big Bend Ranch From Every Angle

2010-08-03T12:35:00.007-05:00

(click on the link to go directly to Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine)

Yeah, it's hot as Hades, but in the spirit of cooling you off, here's a story from the latest Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine about a midwinter adventure weekend in the biggest state park of 'em all, Big Bend Ranch State Park, down in the southwest corner of Texas.

Big Bend Ranch From Every Angle
Adventure by foot, by horse, by bike and by boat.
By Joe Nick Patoski
Photography by Laurence Parent

Photographer Laurence Parent and I have shared some pleasantly intense adventures in our favorite part of Texas over the course of creating the books Texas Mountains and Big Bend National Park and several magazine articles. In “The Ultimate Big Bend Hike” (Texas Parks & Wildlife, August 2005), we hiked across Big Bend National Park for six days and nights from Rio Grande Village to Lajitas, and in “No Hike for Old Men” (Texas Parks & Wildlife, August 2009) we hiked across the spine of the Franklin Mountains in El Paso in a single day.

Big Bend Ranch State Park, the biggest and most interesting of all our state parks, presented a whole ’nother sort of challenge. Rather than attempt a long-distance crossing or set a high bar for a single day’s effort, we decided the state park needed a long weekend of different activities to get a full appreciation of its assets. Three days of post-Christmas cross-training adventures were planned. We rounded up Jeff Whittington, who had walked across Big Bend with us; Diane Golden, whose Golden Adventures in Dallas does travel packages for marathoners, cyclists and skiers; and Steve Kennedy, an avid cyclist who runs the Old School House Bed and Breakfast in Fort Davis.

Figuring out the logistics of what we could and couldn’t do was the tough part. I got a reality check from David Riskind, state parks director of natural resources, who guided me through the ranch on Google Maps long enough to convince me our schedule would be dictated by limited winter daylight hours, drive time on rough roads and the understanding that distances can be deceiving in the Chihuahuan Desert.

A schedule was sketched out with the knowledge that improvisation would be part of the deal. The whole trip was subject to rescheduling if the weather gods weren’t cooperating. The lows the previous weekend at the ranch had dipped down to 5 degrees, cold enough to break several water pipes. By Wednesday, though, the forecast for the next weekend called for highs into the 60s with clear skies and light wind. We were good to go. Everyone traveled all day Friday from across Texas — the last hour over 27 miles of hard dirt road — so we could meet up by sunset at Sauceda, the three-bedroom, 10-person-capacity ranch house, which would serve as our Reata for three nights.

Saturday started with breakfast in the bunkhouse, a visit with park staff and a saunter over to the nearby stables to saddle up for a morning ride. Of all the activities planned, riding horseback inspired the most complaints. Laurence didn’t want to ride at all. He may scale 14,000-foot peaks carrying 60 pounds of camera equipment, but he didn’t cotton much to straddling a horse, he admitted a few days earlier. But even the reluctant equestrians saddled up.

Wranglers David Marquez and Javier Medina led us on a two-hour loop through the brush into the dry wash of Leyva Canyon north of the Big House at Sauceda. While all five of us had our respective fitness regimens, no one claimed to excel on horseback, although I did well enough at range riding school in Utah about 15 years ago to feel comfortable in the saddle.

Our morning ride went through some extremely rough country defined by creosote bush and spiny lechuguilla. Even in winter, the scenery took on a more verdant, pastoral look wherever there were signs of water, whose presence was marked by stately cottonwoods. A couple of times, my horse, Flaco, aka Palomito, broke into a gallop to jump across a gully, but I held on as I quickly refamiliarized myself with riding techniques. My trust was rewarded by Flaco’s nimble footwork, stepping over slick rocks with the grace of a ballet dancer.

The wranglers can lead riders on a longer, four-hour ride along some of the same route to Baños de Leyva, Marquez explained as we watched a family of mule deer, including two large bucks, wander along a ridgeline. Baños de Leyva is a series of pools deep enough to dive and swim in during warmer months, he said with a tantalizing smile. The wranglers also lead full-day, eight-hour rides from Botella near the main gate on the western end of the ranch to Sauceda, or from Tres Papalotes, a former line camp in El Solitario, back to headquarters.

Two hours on horseback was more than enough for us tinhorns. Diane was complaining about pain in her knee flaring up while she was riding. Jeff groused about a pinched nerve in his lower back. My thighs were sore, all right, and my butt felt plenty banged up, but the discomfort vanished once we started hiking.

We enjoyed a quick lunch back at the bunkhouse at Sauceda and were about to head out toward El Solitario for our afternoon hike when a college-age guy wearing a Buffalo T-shirt drove up and asked where he could find Cabin 17.
Cabin 17? There was no Cabin 17 at Big Bend Ranch State Park.

The kid explained that he had flown from New York to San Antonio the night before, then drove from San Antonio to meet friends of his, and this was where his GPS had sent him.

We laughed. Maybe Cabin 17 was in the Chisos Basin in the national park, a four-hour drive away? The kid underscored the isolation of the ranch. He couldn’t get a cell phone signal here to call his friends, and neither could we; his GPS was just about as untrustworthy.

Rather than wait around to solve the mystery, we hopped into Laurence’s four-wheel-drive XTerra and headed east beyond the end of the maintained but rough dirt road and into El Solitario, a circular collapsed caldera nine miles in diameter that is the geological signature of the park. Our destination was Tres Papalotes, a small corral with one windmill and a one-room shack inside El Solitario. The 10-mile drive took about an hour and a half, the last part on single-track roads that were semi-cleared paths in the scrub. We passed the windmill at Tres Papalotes, drove another quarter-mile, parked and began hiking into the Lower Shutup, the southernmost of three drainages out of El Solitario.

The Lower Shutup follows a rock-strewn dry wash surrounded by tight walls. It is not a place to be when it rains in the watershed because the wash quickly floods. There was enough moisture in the creek bed from the previous morning’s drizzle to easily identify paw prints. Raccoons and skunks had been hanging around the wash, but the prints that made the strongest impression belonged to a mountain lion. They were fresh prints in the wet sand. I was inspecting a second lion paw print a few yards from the first print, thinking how fresh it looked, when a pleading cry like a wounded animal pierced the air, startling us enough to freeze in our tracks.

Scrrreeeeoowww

Jeff, who was about 25 yards ahead, whirled around and put his index finger to his lips. Stop. Look. Listen.

“A juvenile mountain lion,” someone whispered.

The sound was coming from somewhere up the western wall, as close as 30 feet away or as far as 100 feet. No one could tell for sure.

I immediately scanned the opposite wall. You never want to be between a young lion in distress and its mama.

Scrrreeeeoowww

The cry broke the silence again, only sharper this time. I was getting nervous.

Scrrreeeowwwww

Nothing.

Slowly but surely, we started walking down the drainage again, ears pricked, eyes sharp. Around a couple of bends was some kind of scat in the wash with hair in it, apparently belonging to some kind of cat. We continued descending down the Lower Shutup, hopping the jumble of slickrock and boulders in the middle of the drainage until we reached some pools. The pools turned into a trickling rivulet that would eventually join Fresno Creek. The flushes of rain over the eons had sculpted swirls and tubs into the rock, with the boulders growing larger and more numerous the longer we hiked. Diane and Jeff were particularly nimble as we scrambled whenever necessary, until we reached one pour-off that looked so steep and narrow we would need ropes and climbing gear.

So we turned around. We needed to reach Laurence’s vehicle with enough daylight to at least get to the main road toward Sauceda. We tiptoed past the point where the juvenile mountain lion was calling for mama and made it back with plenty of time to pause along the road and take in the long-distance view of the Chisos in Big Bend National Park lighting up at sunset, accompanied by the sounds of a pack of coyotes in full yip and howl.

If our goal had been to hike the ranch, we would have started earlier and kept going. Hiking out of the Lower Shutup to the Buena Suerte Mine near Lajitas is a 12-mile, all-day sucker that traces some of the historic road that may have been constructed in 1916 for Gen. Pershing’s troops as he chased Pancho Villa. Another hike beyond our turnaround point would take you into Fresno Canyon. The 19-mile Rancherias Loop, accessed from two trailheads along River Road into the rugged and rocky Rancherias mountain range, is the ranch’s premier overnight hiking trail.

Dinner back at headquarters was followed by an eyeful of some of the starriest sky on earth before hitting the sack.

Day Two began with breakfast in the bunkhouse accompanied by reports of seeing foxes and shooting stars. Then we loaded mountain bikes from the park livery (Steve brought his own ride) into a truck driven by a park ranger, who drove us beyond Agua Adentro, stopping four miles from the park gate.

From here we would cycle 13 miles back to Sauceda, stopping for short hikes. Our first pause was near Agua Adentro, where we walked a few hundred yards up a rubble-filled dry wash from the road, then up a slope to some boulders where Steve showed us a shaman figure that had been drawn on the rock in red pigment. Steve had been on archaeological digs on the ranch and knew several good places to look around, including Agua Adentro, the small springs below the road that were fed by the same dry creekbed we had hiked through. “Don’t tell anybody about this place,” he told us when we got to Agua Adentro. I already had, since it was not the first time I had visited the small falls in a shady cienega, or wetlands.

We continued eastbound a few hundred yards to a limestone overhang hugging the road. The well-ventilated overhang had mortar holes worn into the floor with a few handprints on the ceiling, clear signs that this was a fine spot for the prehistoric hunters and gatherers to hang out.

We’d ridden three and a half miles from the starting point to the trailhead of Ojito Adentro when we ditched the bikes and hit a trail seven-tenths of a mile long leading to a canyon and up a dry creek bed. The trail ended at a trickling waterfall thick with maidenhair fern and a pristine pool of water. It was a delicious, remarkable place to pause, eat lunch and relax, before hiking back to our bikes.

The next eight and a half miles were tough. I thought I was in shape from road cycling. But my limits were tested by the rocky surface of the road with stretches of washboard, the heavier bike with tires that couldn’t be deflated and the lack of shock absorbers. Twice I spun my tire in low gear and opted to walk the bike up a steep incline.

I was sweating and my legs ached. It was not an easy ride since we were gaining more than 500 feet of altitude from our starting point. Steve, who cycles the 60-mile Davis Mountains Loop, made it look easy. I was the last one in, more than ready for food, a cold drink and a brief nap in the warm sun.

Temperatures that had climbed into the mid-70s made it all possible. I don’t know if I would’ve attempted the bike ride any other time of the year unless we started close to sunrise and were done by noon.

It was four hours from start to finish, hikes included.

If cycling had been our weekend priority, we would have likely driven out of the interior to River Road toward Lajitas to explore the 25-mile network of trails of the recently opened Contrabando Loop.

Day Two wrapped up with a mile hike into Cinco Tinajas, five ascending pools in a tight slot canyon of slickrock that we had ridden past on our horseback ride. Halfway down the mile-long trail to the pool, two hikers with backpacks emerged from the brush, bushwhacking their way through thorny catsclaw and creosote. They were the first people we had seen in the park since the lost Cabin 17 guy.

A thin layer of ice covered the bottom pool of Cinco Tinajas. Very little sunlight reached this part of the canyon. Jeff, who had already distinguished himself as the group’s rock climber, climbed and scurried up to the third tinaja before quitting. He could’ve climbed to one more and possibly both pools on the polished rock, he said, if he was willing to get wet, which he wasn’t.

For sunset, we drove back toward Agua Adentro to watch a cluster of mountains bathed in flaming sunlight.

Good food, good friends, good stories and good feelings following a good workout concluded our second evening. Diane had to head back to Dallas in the morning. So did Jeff, who was going to hike into Closed Canyon, a slot canyon off River Road, on his way out.

But Laurence, Steve and I, joined by Steve’s wife, Carla Kennedy, weren’t done yet. On the third morning at the park, we drove to River Road, turned east toward the Big Hill and stopped at a parking area where Mike Long of Desert Sports was waiting with a small raft and an inflatable kayak. We parked and were shuttled eight miles upstream, beyond Closed Canyon, to the Colorado Canyon put-in.

The Rio Grande was running low and slow, but with enough flow for a pleasant four-and-a half-hour paddle. Jagged mountains and ridges hugging the river provided plenty of visual stimulation. The wildlife was the eye candy. Twice, hawks rose from their perches to alight on a distant overhang as we paddled past. Hundreds of red-eared sliders sunned on rocks oblivious to passers-by. Flocks of geese and ducks took off from the water at the sight of an oncoming boat, flying overhead in squadron formation. A family of javelinas supped at water’s edge until they quietly disappeared into the brush.

“I’m whipped,” Steve announced when we reached the takeout. It was good to hear, in light of how he left us eating dust when we were cycling the day before. I knew what he meant. With more flow, the paddle would have been more fun. And a longer paddle, all the way to the Grassy Banks near Lajitas, or a multiday paddle into Santa Elena Canyon and the national park, would have been even better.

But still …

Thirteen miles cycled. Six miles hiked. Five miles ridden on horseback. Eight miles paddled.

The January blahs cured in a long weekend with perfect weather and zero crowds.

Big Bend Ranch State Park is like having your own private wilderness — big enough and wild enough to spend a lifetime exploring.

About the only recreational activity we didn’t engage in was driving some of the more than 70 miles of unmaintained 4x4 high-clearance roads around the ranch, including 25 miles of tracks in the Cienega section in the far northern part of the park, which is also a hiking and cycling destination. We’d already had enough “bobblehead” action just driving into and around the main roads of the ranch.

Between the Cienega, Fresno Canyon, the Encino Trail … there is so much land that it would take a lifetime to fully explore. Call it a ranch, call it a park. Six of us simply think of Big Bend Ranch State Park as a great place to have an adventure.

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Lubbock High School's famous student

2010-07-17T10:15:00.016-05:00

Dropped by Lubbock High School the other day. The distinctive red-tile roofed, sand-colored brick building constructed in 1930 is the most outstanding architecture in the largest city of the Great Plains and listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The contractor went so far over budget during construction that he sold his family's East Texas oilfield interests and never completed another building.

The Home of the Westerners is just as significant as the alma mater of Charles Hardin Holley, better known as Buddy Holly. Dixie Chick Natalie Maines, Ralna English of the Lawrence Welk Show, crooner Mac Davis, Crickets Jerry Allison and Joe B. Mauldin, singer-songwriter Sonny Curtis (composer of the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme), Ohio Players drummer Jimmy Sampson, Texas music producer and pedal steel virtuoso Lloyd Maines, Rolling Stones sax man Bobby Keys, Lost Gonzo Bob Livingston, Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr, and football stars E.J.Holub, and Hub Bechtol are also LHS grads, but only Buddy has his own trophy case at the school.

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Saturday Night Texas Road Music 7pm Central

2010-07-02T12:57:00.003-05:00

Another episode of All Over the Map on the General Store airs on MarfaPublicRadio.org (click on the headline for the link and tune in), KRTS-FM, 93.5 at 7 pm Central, Saturday July 3.

This week, it's an hour's worth of Texas road music, nuthin' but pedal to the metal tunes to drive by.

Water, Comanche Springs, and the Rule of Capture

2010-06-28T11:10:00.006-05:00

My cover story in the Texas Observer on Water, Comanche Springs, Clayton Williams, T Boone Pickens, and the Rule of Capture.

Click on the headline to go directly to TexasObserver.org or better yet, get a subscription to the TO. It's worth it.

Groundwater is covered by an archaic law that could leave us high and dry.
by Joe Nick Patoski

Published on: Thursday, June 24, 2010
Playing By The Rule

Water and where to get it has been an obsession ever since humans arrived in the American West. People have searched, begged, lied, stolen, cheated, killed and been killed for it. Land has been seized, plundered and rendered useless because of it. Riverbeds, lakes and communities have been drained and abused and trivialized into detritus, remnants left behind in the pursuit of progress.

The process is still playing out, nowhere as dramatically as in Texas, where 21st century water wars are breaking out across the state.

In West Texas and the Panhandle, water marketers such as millionaire farmer Clayton Williams Jr., developer Woody Hunt, Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz and Dallas corporate raider T. Boone Pickens have plotted ways to move the precious commodity from rural areas to thirsty cities, lining their pockets all the way while ending farming as a way of life in the remote Dell Valley of West Texas and in Roberts County in the eastern Panhandle.

North of San Antonio, golf course developments and booming bedroom communities compete with small towns over water in the Guadalupe River. Along the border, farmers squabble with their counterparts in Mexico for their fair share from the Rio Grande. In Kinney County, the heart of Texas’ artesian aquifer region, farmers are fighting each other over their rights to sell water. Caddo Lake—the only naturally formed lake in Texas, in the wettest corner of the state—has been the object of a historic tug-of-war between lake people and the nearby town of Marshall. Nueces Bay, and every other estuary on the Texas coast, is threatened by reduced freshwater in rivers because of increased withdrawals upstream.

Court dockets are backlogged with so many water-related suits, you might say they’re waterlogged. Candidates for high office speechify about the problem but offer no real solutions. Lobbyists stuff their pockets in anticipation of a legislative session in which water will be one of the most serious long-term issues facing Texas.

Much of this fussing and fighting comes courtesy of the Rule of Capture, an archaic piece of British common law carried to these shores. The Rule states that whoever owns a piece of property owns the water beneath it. The Texas precedent was set in 1843 in the case of Acton v. Blundell, when Texas was a republic and people were largely ignorant about the nature and movement of groundwater. The Rule of Capture was upheld in 1861, when Frazier v. Brown was decided, and again in 1904 when the Texas Supreme Court heard The Houston & Texas Central Railway Co. v. East case. The court upheld The Rule by reasoning water below the soil was too “mysterious, secret, and occult” to regulate.

On the other hand, surface water—water you can see, such as rivers, lakes, and bays—belongs to the people of Texas, a doctrine most Western states apply to both surface and groundwater (See “Who’s Water Is It Anyway?”).

No state politician of power and influence has since dared to propose eliminating The Rule, even though Texas is the only state in the arid half of the United States to embrace a principle other states regard as foolhardy. About the best the Texas Legislature could muster to address this unequal use of the earth’s most precious resource was the 1949 declaration that groundwater districts were the preferred method for local communities to “conserve, preserve, protect and recharge underground water reservoirs.” Although districts have the power to space wells to minimize drawdown, if it comes down to legal hairsplitting, The Rule still has precedence. If you are lucky enough to have groundwater, it is yours to sell for a handsome profit.

Water is the New Oil in Texas. The winners and losers are still to be determined.

My own curiosity about Texas’ quirky way of dealing with water began while wandering around a friend’s property a few miles northeast of Fort Stockton in that vague transition zone where the Permian Basin becomes the Chihuahuan Desert, and mesas turn into mountains. It began with a simple question about what appeared to be a sluice gate for a canal in a patch of overgrown desert. Fort Stockton, I quickly learned, was one of the early losers.

Fort Stockton is known largely as a major food-fuel-motel way-station along Interstate 10. But for most of its history, the reason for Fort Stockton’s being was Comanche Springs, once the most abundant spring complexes beyond the Balcones Fault. Native Americans relied on the springs for thousands of years during seasonal migrations. The Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca passed through there in 1534. Comanche and Kiowa tribes used the springs as a rest stop on their way to and from raids into Mexico every fall. All kinds of adventurers, soldiers, railway workers, outlaws, tradesmen and thieves relied on the springs for their long treks between the civilized East and the wild West.

The springs were named, according to several accounts, for the Comanche who was shot dead for trying to steal horses from Anglo travelers headed to California during the Gold Rush. His body lay by the springs for several years, which inspired the name Place Where the Comanche Thief Was Killed, ultimately shortened to Comanche Springs.

It doesn’t take a military strategist to know that the best way to subjugate people is to take away their water. So Fort Stockton was founded in 1859 as a military camp with the dual purpose of disrupting traffic along the Great Comanche War Trail and protecting Anglo settlers. The fort was strategically located adjacent to the largest of several artesian springs. Guarding the springs hastened the demise of the Comanche, the Lipan, the Mesalero and every other band of nomads.

That allowed Anglo settlement, but not an end to fighting over water. When Pecos County was organized in 1875, its first legal case was a dispute over water rights. By that time, more than 6,000 acres in the desert were being cultivated thanks to irrigation water that flowed by gravity from the springs. Because of water, Fort Stockton thrived, becoming a major stop on the southern transcontinental railroad and a place to rest and refuel on major highway routes linking Florida to California and Mexico to Canada. Because of water, 108 families north and east of town lived on farms. They formed a water district so that the water could be dispersed equitably through an intricate network of canals and sluice gates. Grapes, apples, pecans and alfalfa flourished in this 9-square-mile Garden of Eden. People floated in inner tubes along the canals for up to 15 miles away from town. Visitors came to swim in the springs and picnic under giant cottonwoods along the Imperial Highway.

The town’s biggest social event was the Comanche Springs Water Carnival, established in 1936 to commemorate Texas’ centennial. Two years later, an elaborate, open-air pavilion was constructed around the pool to better showcase the pure, 72-degree water.

That was until 1951, when the Water Carnival was cancelled because there was not enough water. Earlier that year, 52 irrigation wells had been drilled 10 miles west of Fort Stockton on land owned by Clayton Williams Sr., his brother J.C. Williams, and several others. The wells were equipped with pumps powered by diesel engines to draw water from deep below the surface. They worked so efficiently that the flow of Comanche Springs slowed to a trickle within hours after the pumps started. The farmers east of town ran dry, but landowners west of town expressed no remorse. Under The Rule, they could have all the water they could pump because they owned the ground above it.

Geologists and hydrologists determined that Comanche Springs was fed by rainfall in the Glass Mountains, some 50 miles southwest of Fort Stockton. The rainfall drains through braided channels coursing through limestone deep below the surface before bubbling up as springs east of town. The wells drilled west of town intercepted that underground flow.

The Pecos County Water Control and Improvement District Number One filed suit in Texas courts on behalf of the 108 farming families it supplied with water, challenging the prodigious pumping by the new farmers.

On June 21, 1954, the Texas Court of Civil Appeals ruled in favor of Clayton Williams, et al. by upholding The Rule of Capture, agreeing with the landmark 1904 Texas Supreme Court decision that groundwater was too mysterious to regulate. The Texas Supreme Court affirmed the decision.

Sadly, a half century later, the courts and the legal system still embrace the mysterious, secret and occult. The Rule rules.

Clayton Williams’ son, Clayton Jr., may have learned to swim in Comanche Springs, but when it came to pumping water, business was business. He followed in his father’s footsteps by continuing to pump groundwater to irrigate crops on the high Chihuahuan Desert. When Williams unsuccessfully ran for governor of Texas in 1990, Jan Jarboe of Texas Monthly asked if he thought Comanche Springs could flow again if he stopped pumping 41 million gallons of groundwater daily. “They might,” he reckoned. “But I’m not going to do it. It’s my land, and I have the right to use the water....I’m a businessman. I’m a cow man. I’m a conservationist. I didn’t dry up those springs. I bought the land. It’s mine, and if I didn’t pump water, it wouldn’t be worth anything.”

Now Williams wants to repurpose his rights from farming to municipal use in order to pipe water to Midland, though the city hasn't shown any interest. He also wants to pump it to the proposed NowGen experimental “clean” coal power plant in Penwell, in which Williams is an investor. A 100-mile pipeline would be constructed by Williams’ Fort Stockton Land Holdings through private property seized through the use of eminent domain.

The Middle Pecos Groundwater Conservation District has scheduled two hearings for Williams’ application for late September and early October. Williams believes the pipeline is a win-win deal, as he related to the Midland Reporter-Telegram in March: “I went to Fort Stockton and told them I’d build a reverse-osmosis plant, process their water at cost, and pay $2.35 million in property taxes to the school and $1.45 million to the county. I’m only paying $20,000 now, so that’s a big bump. It would be more economic benefits and high-paying jobs. To me, it’s not complicated. We live in the box of law.”

Former Speaker of the House Tom Craddick tried to help Williams by introducing House Bill 4805 in April 2009 to create the West Texas Water Supply District on 20 acres near the Midland International Airport. The district was designed to give Williams his own private government agency to capture and sell his water.
The bill was greeted with loud howls of disapproval in Fort Stockton.

“This is not in the best interest of Pecos County,” County Judge Joe Shuster testified to the House Natural Resource Committee. “There’s not been an independent study of groundwater in Pecos County. It’s disingenuous to say that this amount of water [extraction] would be safe for all parties.” The Hidalgo County Commissioners Court, the Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council, Laredo’s mayor, and the eight-county Rio Grande Regional Water Planning Group have called for a moratorium on Williams’ permit request until studies on groundwater flows, including water from the Pecos River watershed, and their impact on the Rio Grande are complete.

House Bill 4805 died in committee, but the fight is not over.

“It will be back before the Legislature in 2011, probably in a timelier manner and with more organized support,” says state Sen. Carlos Uresti, a San Antonio Democrat whose district includes West Texas. “Those of us who are committed to protecting the water must be vigilant during the interim, during the next session of the Legislature and the sessions after that.”

We've learned a lot over the past 150 years, and what happens to groundwater is no longer mysterious or occult. In the Panhandle, scientists have studied the drawdown of the Ogallala Aquifer, the vast reservoir of groundwater that extends from Texas up the spine of the Midwest into Canada. The Ogallala provided abundant sustenance for farm crops in the region for more than 150 years. But so much water has been pumped out that no amount of rain can refill the aquifer to levels of 150 years ago.

Less than half of the aquifer’s capacity remains, and what’s left costs more to pump, making irrigated farming in the Great Plains a risky proposition. That didn’t stop T. Boone Pickens from trying to exploit the Ogallala. In the early 2000s, he made deals with neighboring landowners around Roberts County to form Mesa Water Inc., which would pump Ogallala water and ship it via pipeline to Dallas, or wherever the highest bidder happened to be. He couldn’t have done it without The Rule.

Pickens has not yet found a buyer willing to pay his price for water, or built a pipeline to deliver the water, but he nonetheless felt compelled to accuse three northwest Texas groundwater districts of trying to ruin his business. The three are among the 98 groundwater districts in Texas, which by law must have plans to assure a water supply that will last 50 years. Groundwater districts were reaffirmed as the preferred means of local control with the passage of Senate Bill 1 in 1997. The districts are among the few entities that can limit what the Rule of Capture allows.

One district, Hemphill County Underground Water Conservation District, located in the arid northeastern part of the Panhandle, and including some of Pickens’ property, has established some of the most stringent limits on the Ogallala by planning to leave 80 percent of what remains in the ground for 50 years. A healthy aquifer would ensure flows in the county’s creeks and rivers, including the Canadian River and the headwaters of the Washita River. George Arrington, a Hemphill County rancher who sold a percentage of his rights to Mesa Water, joined Pickens in a lawsuit in March against the Texas Water Development Board. Arrington and Pickens complain that the Hemphill district’s plan is unreasonable and that Mesa Water would be denied as much as 18,000 acre-feet of water annually (an acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons), hindering Mesa’s ability to turn a buck. They want the conservation plan thrown out.

Privately owned groundwater’s connection to state-owned surface water, such as the vanishing Rio Grande, is clear. The Rio Grande has been running dry below El Paso since the mid-20th century from intensive agricultural and municipal use in Texas, the Mexican state of Chihuahua, New Mexico and Colorado, and the damming of the river at Elephant Butte in southern New Mexico. Over the past 10 years, the Rio Grande has frequently run dry before reaching the Gulf of Mexico east of Brownsville.

Historically, the Rio Grande has been replenished with inflow from the Rio Conchos in Chihuahua, which joins the Rio Grande above Presidio in Southwest Texas, and by the Pecos River above Del Rio. Several dams were constructed in the Conchos watershed over the past 25 years, rendering that river’s flow less dependable. This is where Clayton Williams’ plan to export water runs into trouble, because his groundwater in the Pecos watershed feeds the Rio Grande, an international waterway.

“The idea to export water from a desert is just so insane that you would laugh if you were not so afraid that it will actually happen,” says Kirby Warnock, whose relatives farmed the now-arid land east of Fort Stockton. “I mean, on the face of it, any proposal to export water from a county that only gets 13 inches annual rainfall should be shut down immediately, except for the ‘flat earth’ groundwater laws we have in Texas. I am hopeful that Mr. Williams’ proposal will finally spark some legislation to implement strong groundwater laws in Texas, and recognize that water is a shared resource.”

Neither the lakes constructed over the past century in Texas, nor the reservoirs below the ground that took thousands of years to fill, are satisfying the thirst of Texas’ growing population. Otherwise, Kinney County landowners wouldn’t be suing the local groundwater district for restricting the amount of groundwater they’d like to export. There wouldn’t have been the unsuccessful lawsuit filed by the San Antonio Water System against the Lower Colorado River Authority for canceling a $1 billion dollar deal to sell Colorado River water to San Antonio. And there wouldn’t be water marketers such as End-Op making deals with the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority to move groundwater from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer southeast of San Antonio to nearby cities and suburbs. It’s also why almost every creek, spring, and river in Texas is showing signs of stress.

Those realities make the fence and cage surrounding Big Chief Spring adjacent to the pool in Fort Stockton all the more curious. The cage was put in place decades ago to protect swimmers from the powerful force of the spring flow, a force that is now gone. Since the springs went dry, the cage has become just a memento of what once was. Even if springs have no legal rights in Texas, maybe, just maybe, Clayton Williams Jr. will do the right thing, and pure water will once again gush out from this once-sacred ground.

We shouldn’t hold our breath.

Joe Nick Patoski is working on two upcoming books, one about the Dallas Cowboys and the other on Texas' best stewards of the environment. This story is adapted from a project about water in Texas.

Space Opera, the final chapter

2010-06-26T20:50:00.003-05:00

Frank Gutch has finished the final chapter of his epic saga of the Fort Worth band Space Opera.

Click on the headline for a direct link to Rockandreprise.net where Frank's story is parked.

Or just read it here:

CHAPTER SEVEN: I Ain't Going to Swim Here Anymore...

While the band members basically went their own directions, they were never far apart. They kept in touch, if only by phone for certain periods. They had been together for too long and had been through too much together to not feel that thread of brotherhood.

“The decade from 1985 to 1995 seemed to go by really fast,” said Bullock. “Three of the four Space Opera members were raising families and working---- myself in video, Scott as a music instructor, and Brett as an accountant and business manager. Phil, of course, was still out there, pounding away in the clubs.

“The four of us somehow managed to get together now and again in our favorite haunt, the recording studio. Whenever and however we could get free time, we continued to record our songs. Then, in '94, Scott and I revived the chamber folk concept and started playing coffeehouses and the like around North Texas.”

“Grand Saline was what they called this coffeehouse acoustic act they had for a short while,” according to Scott's wife, Mary. “It was Scott, David and a few other players, including the cellist Mary Maneikis, who later taught my daughter to play the cello.”

“That was the final incarnation of our chamber folk concept,” Bullock said. “We reformed Space Opera in '95 and began rehearsing on weekends at Eagle Audio, a 24-Track studio in Fort Worth. That eventually led to a concert at The Caravan of Dreams, a really fantastic and, sadly, now defunct concert club.”

That concert created a buzz in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Dave Ferman of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram got wind of it as rehearsals kicked into high gear. Citing the TV presentation of the Beatles' Anthology as incentive, Fraser gave Ferman a preview interview.

“Fraser and Bullock don't want this to be a one-off gig.” Ferman wrote after talking with Fraser, “or to be seen as a time machine for aging hippies and HOP patrons. Space Opera, they say, is going to be a working, living band.”

The band had plans--- to restructure their lives around the working band, to record the show and possibly release it, if only to create interest in further shows.

“'To re-form for one show is a waste of time,' Fraser went on. 'It would be a nostalgia event. We see more to it. We want to get a product out internationally and play regularly, and once we get to rehearsing on a regular basis, it won't take long.'”

“We want to play,” Fraser said in the interview. “We've got a year's worth of working on this material and we need this show to work to give us a strong anchor to do other things. If anybody really liked the band, it was because we always did new things. We're sprinkling the set with older material, five cuts from the (Epic) album, but most of the set is entirely new, or if you have heard it before, it was in a different format.”

To complement the band at The Caravan, they added Jeff Ward, owner and engineer of Eagle Audio (where Space Opera was to record their second album), on keyboards. William Jackson rounded out the lineup, playing multiple instruments including clarinet, oboe, accordion, English horn and Viola de Gamba, an instrument popular during the Renaissance.

One of the odder tracks played that night was a complete surprise to the audience. They recreated the idea which gave The Mods instant credibility when they covered Lennon and McCartney's It's For You back in the sixties. This time, they covered another obscure Beatles track titled L.S. Bumblebee, or so the guys thought. They found out later that it wasn't The Beatles at all.

“We found this song on a Beatles bootleg tape,” Bullock explained, “but it turned out to be not by the Beatles at all but a really great 'parody' song by Dudley Moore. It was one of the coolest songs The Beatles never wrote.”

The response to the show was enthusiastic and the guys were somewhat elated, but Claudia Wilson saw the other side. Even at the Caravan, decades after the Epic album, the band put enormous pressure on themselves.

“I think Brett was just happy that they'd gotten through it,” she said. “They wanted to be perfect. They didn't want anything screwed up. I don't know that it was obsessive or to that point, but they had very high standards for themselves and when you have those standards and you want to do it live, it takes a lot of work. They always recorded their live gigs and went back and listened and said, okay, what do we need to change. What do we need to do to make it better. When they played Caravan of Dreams, it was like, wow, they still have the chops. Their live sound was as close to studio as they could get it.”

“It's the closest thing to time travel I can imagine,” Phil White told Ferman. “We started in Scott's garage and I remember every nook and cranny and the smell of it. The word 'reunion' is really thrown around these days, but our fans bring their grandchildren. That's a reunion.”

In '98, Space Opera played Dallas at the Sons of Hermann Hall. Before the show, Fraser let the cat out of the bag regarding the playlist.

“This time around,” he told the Star-Telegram, “it's a leaner and edgier sound, just for this gig. We have different material--- a song we played years ago by Tracy Nelson, and one of our favorite Bob Dylan songs, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.”

Bullock compared the two shows.

“About 600 audience members was the main difference,” he said. “We were a cult item in Fort Worth, but forty miles away in Dallas, no one remembered us and the audience was depressingly sparse.

“As far as presentation, it was less formally structured than the show at The Caravan, more like a straight-ahead club gig, even though many of the songs were the same.”

The various rehearsals for the gigs convinced the guys they needed to give it another go. Not only was it fun, the music was still growing. And, as important as anything, the pressure was off. It made a world of difference.

“You reach a point where you're not seeking fame and fortune,” said Bullock, “and when that's gone, you go back to what you began doing it for, which is to play with these guys. You have a sense of freedom when you realize the big things aren't going to happen.”

The idea of doing another studio album had been tossed around over the years, but the stars never aligned. This time, the four got together and talked it over seriously. Schedules were rearranged and arrangements made. Of course, this was to be no marathon Manta session like it was in '72. The world was different and so were the guys.

“It wasn't like they all could just go spend a week in the studio,” Claudia explained. “They had to do it on weekends when everybody could get loose. Everybody had lives and families, except Phil, and it took time to get to where it could all happen. It was a struggle to co-ordinate four lives. And when you don't have a roadie...”

Five lives, actually, for Space Opera had never really taken a step toward recording without Cass Edwards, who was essentially the band's executive producer. And six, if you include 'added band member' Jeff Ward, who in addition to playing on the album owns and operates Eagle Audio where the album was eventually recorded.

Brett Owen Wilson was chosen to be producer, an honor extended to him by the band, and specifically Scott Fraser.

“Brett appreciated the quality of the music,” Claudia Wilson explained. “ The other guys were just so good and he didn't have all of the ego invested in it because he was just there to play drums and be part of the group. He really appreciated the guys' musicianship in the way they composed and how they put a song together. I mean, some of their poetry blows me away even today.

“Plus I think they needed to have someone in charge. There were always things going on and they said, well, let's make Brett the producer. Brett was a very modest person. He would always get angry when the mix didn't have the guitars loud enough because he said this is a guitar band. He knew he was part of the foundation upon which it was laid, but their creativity and the music they'd written--- I think they knew it was partly due to Brett's ability to play drums differently.”

MY FATHER'S BONGOS.....

The working title of the project was “My Father's Bongos”.

“The recording engineer, Jeff Ward, had a box of percussion instruments that we would rummage through and use for recording,” explained Bullock, “tambourines, shakers and whatnot. Several times when the bongos would come out, Jeff would say, 'you know, those were my father's bongos.' I think it was Scott who latched onto that reference as an album title, and it seemed suitably random.”

Dave Ferman, once again, was privy to the album talk.

“The band went into the studio in 1999,” he wrote, “and finally, just a few weeks ago, signed off on a new 12 track CD. In November 1970, the band astounded a hometown audience by playing an opening set for the Airplane that featured no breaks between songs--- instrumental themes and Bullock's vocals provided the links as band members switched instruments. One of the linking themes, an old Scottish ballad called Awake, resurfaces on the new CD.”

Gene Triplett of the Oklahoman wrote in a review, “What I'm hearing on the new CD, self-released by the band, is a 2002 technology version of the same group, with denser production and much more accomplished musicianship (which is something to say since they were already amazing in their early twenties) and remarkably original (and intelligent) songwriting.”

The critics may have loved it, but marketing was nonexistent. A Space Opera website promoted the CD and a few copies made their way into a couple of Dallas/Fort Worth music stores, but outside of that, even finding out about the CD was a crap shoot.

“I don't know if anybody had a clue as to where to put word,” said Claudia. “I mean, when you bring out a second album after 30 years, try to find those fans. A whole lot of it was that back in the day, the world of music was a different universe. When they started playing here locally, it was the dawn of FM radio and airplay was how you got known. It's not the same anymore.”

“We haven't tried to market that second album widely because we are totally clueless at that sort of thing,” agreed Bullock. “I was pretty happy with a lot of the album. It was recorded at a time after we had pretty much given up on our thousandth reunion and the thought was that we should create a representation of the music we had been performing during that period (1996-99). We were busy with other things and just came together on weekends to record, and there was never a concept that everyone agreed on.”

An agreement has since been reached with Dean Sciarra of itsaboutmusic.com. The two Space Opera CDs plus the Whistler, Chaucer CD are now available there.

THE EPIC ALBUM.....

The re-emergence of Space Opera was not lost on John Reagan, who had lived on the Epic album for three decades. A fan in every sense of the word, Reagan considered the album a lost classic and took every opportunity to promote it as such. It is, therefore, no surprise that he was a key player in its reissue as a CD.

“I heard Space Opera early in '73,” Reagan explained, “when Holy River came on my car radio one evening while driving from Austin to San Antonio. That was back in the good ol' days when FM radio played nothing but album cuts from many different bands, known and unknown. I was utterly blown away by the instrumental intro to Holy River. I thought that The Byrds were back together and better than ever. I bought the album the next day and have not been the same since.

“(When CDs became the new format) and many old records began to be reissued on CD, I thought about it and wondered why Space Opera had not yet been issued. Early in 2000, my frustration took over and I resolved to see what could be done about it.

“At the time, I only knew that it was an Epic release and knew nothing regarding ownership or control of the master. I located Scott in Fort Worth by way of the Space Opera website and he pointed me to David in Dallas. I soon learned that Epic, now Sony, owned the master and that the band would love to see a reissue. They confirmed that it had not yet been reissued as a CD.

“When I first contacted Sony regarding possible reissue, I had no success (of course, as they themselves only reissue titles they believe will succeed, according to their own economics). I next approached Sundazed. They indicated they would do it, then dragged their feet. I gave up on them after about a year. Next, I tried One Way, who agreed to reissue but wanted us to buy a certain number of CDs to help cover their minimum order under their Sony licensing deal, more copies than we could afford.

“I finally settled on Collector's Choice Music, having been impressed with their esissue titles, great catalog and website. Since I was interested in getting not only the reissue but also maximum exposure and distribution, CCM seemed ideal. After several conversations with Gordon Anderson of CCM, he agreed to the reissue and to list it in the CCM catalog and on their website. On our part, we agreed to purchase a certain number of copies to help cover their minimum, this time at an affordable price. We were lucky to get backers in Fort Worth and Oklahoma City to help.

“Other things made the CCM deal advantageous. Instead of a plain four-page booklet, Gordon put together an eight-pager and reproduced all of the original album graphics (I personally believe that he did that because he, too, was a fan).

“Upon receiving the master from Sony, the band was not really satisfied. Gordon allowed us to tweak it to the band's liking, using the same studio in which Space Opera had recorded their recent second album. In a way, we remastered Sony's remaster.

“The CD booklet lists me as manager, but that was only the band's nod to me for the help.”

“The CD provided by Sony Music,” elaborated Bullock, “was a digital copy of the stereo master. In other words, the original mix of the album. We were each given copies of the disc for review. I didn't need an A/B comparison with the vinyl to know that I could hear detail buried in the record; i.e., guitar parts that I remembered playing that couldn't really be heard on the LP.

“All four members of Space Opera were involved in the remastering process, discussing and ultimately approving changes made to the original master. Since we didn't have the multi-track tapes, we were basically altering the mixes to emphasize different aspects of the music. We had to go song by song and decide which changes were appropriate. In the end, I think we improved the bass response and overall crispness of the album.

“You see, the pressing somehow took some of the punch out of the album and in remastering, we sought to restore the crispness and clarity. A definitive remaster would have involved going back to the multi-track master tapes, but it is doubtful that that will ever happen. Overall, though, I am much happier with the digital version, and delighted that the album is once again available.”

So is Reagan. The experience was one he would not trade for anything.

“It's still my favorite record,” he said. “After all, for me, Space Opera was the American Beatles.”

LIFE CATCHING UP.....

Space Opera may have taken a few chops on the chin on the music side, but real life had a way of evening things out. While the band considered themselves such the entire run, there were long periods of group stagnation. While it didn't stop music on an individual level, the band gatherings were fewer and farther between outside the few years which produced the second album and the reunion gigs.

BRETT OWEN WILSON

Brett Owen Wilson passed away on Jan. 26th of 2005 of cardiac arrest, leaving behind wife Claudia and son Colin Alexander Trout Wilson and other family members as well as his extended Space Opera family, although leaving behind seems hardly the proper term. His death, sudden and totally unexpected, was a blow to the hearts and very souls of the people who knew him best.

Life after New York was good to Wilson. Upon returning to Fort Worth after Space Opera's last major label attempt, Brett took a back door journey into accounting and made it his business, though he always kept one eye toward the band.

“He worked at the HOP as the daytime bartender for quite some time,” said Claudia, “and then started as a waiter at a French restaurant, Le Chardonnay. At the time, it was an extremely popular restaurant here in Fort Worth and Brett knew all of the wait staff, so when they went (from the HOP) over to Le Chardonnay, they took Brett with them. It was a white cloth restaurant opened by a dashing young French guy, Michel Baudouin, who had been very popular in his previous venues, so Brett waited tables and became a close friend of Michel's. He had been doing a little bookkeeping for Craig at the HOP, so Michel thought that was something he should do for him so that he, Michel, could be out front greeting people with his little Texas French accent. So Brett started keeping the books. That is how he got into accounting.”

Accounting treated him well, allowing him a certain amount of freedom in his personal life as well as providing for the family. According to Claudia, he was very content in his life and comfortable with his situation. For Brett, having the family and friends close was essential, and he had that.

In talking with the various people interviewed for this project, you get a feeling that Brett is still with us, ready to pick up the sticks at the drop of a hat. For a long time after Brett's death, Claudia kept his voice message on the answering machine. Phil White jokingly swore that Brett wasn't gone. “I swear, I talk to him all the time. One of these days, he's going to walk through a door and be back.”

“Phil would leave messages for Brett to tell me,” Claudia explained. “And he's not the only one. Another friend who lives out of town leaves messages with Brett to pass on to me, also. I got a new answering machine and our son came down to help me bury a very old cat and I said, okay, you make the recording. Just do a normal answering machine recording and he inadvertently probably said what was on it when Dad's voice was on it.

“Brett was the primary caregiver,” she continued. “He brought our son up. I think a lot of women thought he was a single parent. I had my business when Colin was born and Brett was keeping books for only one restaurant, so he adjusted his schedule so I could work full time at the ad agency I worked for at the time. He took care of Colin all day long and I think, quite literally, Colin lost his best friend when his dad died.

“Brett had the most wonderful father there ever was. I think so much of the man. He was a great example of a gentle soul... and strong. I think that was the model Brett had put on him (by his own father). Of course, I think he had the Ward Cleaver model put on him too, so that was the kind of parent he was. He had a marvelous capacity to love his kid. I think, looking back, what an advantage that kid had to be around his father so much growing up. Because that is all he had. It was over when he was 22. That is an experience some people never have with their fathers.”

SCOTT FRASER.....

As stated by Bullock, Scott Fraser never gave up his music. Through the return to Fort Worth from New York until the end, Scott was a respected music instructor. He passed away at home on the 19th of September of 2006.

Sometimes in writing, timing is everything, and I came too late for Brett and almost too late for Scott. He was reluctant, but allowed himself to be persuaded by the others to communicate.

“Scott may have not been as forthcoming as he could have been,” explained Mary, “considering all of the other times he had been approached about the band's history or the their history as Fort Worth musicians. Some (writers) didn't even ask and published so much misinformation that he couldn't, or wouldn't, or didn't want to try to set it straight anymore.

“Scott lived a very private life,” she continued, “but his life was rich with friends. It is funny to hear people talk about the guys at this late date and say that Space Opera thought they were better than everyone else. Clannish, true, but there was never anything but admiration and credit given where due to other musicians in Fort Worth and Texas from Scott's lips. Scott and Brett were not gregarious (the exact opposite of our Phil-anderer White). Scott got a bad rap on that. He played not as an excuse for a party, but to play his music--- sober.”

Unbeknownst to many, Fraser designed two buildings, but he was mostly about the music. Even during Space Opera's major label run, he was composing. Numerous pieces came from his pen, many of which made it to fruition. “The Angelic Suite”, for instance.

“The Angelic Suite is a short piece for chamber orchestra which Scott composed in '77 or '78. Rex Farr had a connection with the Falco Dance Company and Scott wrote the piece with that in mind. It was a spec piece never used by Falco.”

And there was The Mystery of St. Anthony.

“That was commissioned by a member of the Fort Worth Chamber Orchestra,” Mary remembered, “but they never performed it. It actually scared the heck out of me, and I told Scott so, and that I really didn't like it when he played it for me. That was the only time I said that about anything Scott did. He thought my being frightened was funny. It is on Arcadia. The Rubaiyat, Omar Kayyam's poetry that Scott had set to music, is on Tree Tales.

“Scott recorded Still Life With Cheese in memory of Brett Wilson, who always appreciated the 'cheese' Scott would come up with for Brett to hear during his weekly visits. I can still hear them giggling--- or outright belly-laughing—- at some of the stuff Scott came up with. Scott and Brett were the best of friends and Brett was like a brother to me. For all of her young life, Brett was our daughter Maggie's very favorite adult person..”

Scott Fraser was a musician and composer, true, but probably as well known to the people he came into contact with as a teacher.

“Scott taught many people, both old fans or those who had never heard of him. They all came to love and respect him and thought he was a great teacher. They let Maggie and I know just how much after Scott died.

“Sometimes I would not hear music coming out of his office during lessons and would later learn that the lesson had turned into conversation. Scott would let them talk and would assign homework (to make up for lost time). Because he was self-educated and retained so much, he was conversant on many subjects and people respected his opinions.

“He became a mentor to some kids who were from broken families or who were dealing with loss--- even to some who were dealing with mental illness. Those children's parents were amazed that Scott could get them to willingly work with him and could keep their attention when no one else could.

“He wanted to start a music school for underprivileged children, a place where they would be provided instruments and given proper instruction.”

It was the one dream Scott Fraser could not make happen. There were so many he did.

“The day Scott died, I was playing CDs of the music that he loved,” wrote Mary. “His favorite was Firebird by Stravinsky. I later told David that Scott stopped breathing on the last note of Firebird. He told me that that last, magnificent passage of that piece was French for 'lullaby'. I am so glad it happened that way. It was so right and just for him.”

PHIL WHITE.....

To help you gain a better understanding of Phil White, let me share a segment of an interview I did with Phil and friend Noel Ice a few years ago:

NOEL: I'm trying to make a CD (of Phil's demos) so we can hand out a few of them. We thought we'd send you one, if that's something you're interested in.

ME: I have absolutely no interest in it. What? Are you nuts? I'd give my left testicle for something like that! You want my address?

PHIL: No. I want a testicle.

Such was the wit that John Carrick said could have given White a second and lucrative career, that of a standup comic.

White himself was a self-professed black sheep. While the other members of Space Opera were making families and struggling to survive, White spent his time in the dives and honky tonks. He wanted to play and play, he did. He played around Texas when Space Opera awaited their equipment. He played his way to Los Angeles before the New York phase of that band. He played whenever and wherever he could, especially when there were friends or money involved.

He blazed through life, motors churning. He described his life in various ways in the interviews conducted for this article, but no description could make you understand. This gives you a little insight, though:

“I loved being on the road,” he told me. “I loved the motels and the traveling. I loved the moving. I liked room service and colored TV and trashing out the rooms--- just the whole thing. It was the whole thing for me. When we signed the contract at Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City, everybody got front money. It was right around Christmas and the other guys were so homesick it wasn't funny and they flew home to have their Christmases with their families. I just said give me the cash and I stayed in New York City and I won't even begin to tell you what I did. Times Square and 42nd Street, that was my kind of place. It stayed open all night and you could buy anything you wanted there. I stayed there until the money was gone.”

Phil White, though, was more complicated than he would ever admit. While promoting the black sheep aspect, he was wildly loyal to friends and family and was both supporter and protector to a fault. The people who really knew him understood this and returned in kind.

“Phil's a rogue and he's proud of it,” Bullock said. “Two of his best songs are autobiographical: You're No Good and Love Brings Out the Worst in Me. He set out to live a life without responsibilities and he's done a good job of it. He wasn't above borrowing someone's guitar amp, using it for a gig, and then making a little extra money by pawning it. Many times he did not have his own place and probably overstayed his welcome on more than one couch. Phil has survived on his charm, wit and talent.

“Then there was the time, back when we first got Space Opera going. Phil had a nice MGB. He loved that car but decided he should sell it and use the money to buy a truck for the band. That was a mistake because the truck he bought was a lemon and ended up abandoned on the road, but the point is that he gave all he had for the rest of us. When we were teenagers, he once used his lifeguard skills to help me out of a strong undertow in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm pretty sure he saved me from drowning. These are things you don't forget.”

The years of hard living and breathing second-hand smoke in the myriad of bars took its toll. His health began to fail and he headed to Colorado in his later years to cope with breathing-related problems. It finally got so bad that he visited a doctor. The news was not good.

“I visited a doctor when I was in Colorado,” he said. “As a matter of fact, some people finally dragged me to a doctor. I got some news that was less than encouraging, so I decided it was time for me to return to Fort Worth and gather my stuff together because I'd lost it all over the years. The people who care about me and love me and in fact admire my music have kept it and when I came back to town, they started coming out of the woodworks saying here, here's this cassette tape you left over at my house, you know, sixteen years ago or something. And the numbers started piling up. None of these were songs that were in the catalogue that I carry along with me. I write them. I record them, They're unforgettable in my mind and I can play them anytime, so I wasn't careful about making sure they were recorded and copyrighted and all.”

The months left were spent gathering and collating those songs. They helped make his last days tolerable. Besides the songs and his good friends, White was desolate--- no money, no strength. He made a deal with friends Michael Mann and Rex Farr for future publishing rights and relied on others to help him make it through.

His run came to an end on September 6, 2008. It was a very good run. A very good run.

DAVID BULLOCK...

David Bullock, like Scott, was reluctant at first to talk. We traded many emails before he decided to give it a try and I am sure that his participation was what convinced Scott to communicate as well. Of the four, Bullock and Fraser held Space Opera closest to the vest. There were moments neither wanted to revisit for fear that they would be misrepresented or misunderstood. There were things that happened, though public, they considered more private. You can give lip service to such an attitude, but unless you understand that to these four guys, and especially to Bullock and Fraser, Space Opera was a living thing, you won't understand at all.

Without Bullock, this history would not have been written. He, in fact, wrote most of it. He edited, set and reset timelines, made corrections and, in the places he remembered things differently, refused to make corrections. Every written word passed through his hands before it was posted. In a way, this is the story of Space Opera as told to... In a very big way. So rather than try to fill in the blanks as regards to him, I will print what he sent to me to fill holes and update his situation verbatim:

“While my wife and I were living in New York, I studied film and video production. I needed the proverbial day job and I'd always been interested in the visual arts. The parallels to music production were there: television studios, recording studios, editing/sound mixing, and both are basically electronic media. Over the years, I have found many musicians who have found their ways into this field.

“The best part of my life has been my marriage and the joy of raising two wonderful daughters. All three of my girls are music lovers. My family has always been very supportive of the musical side of my life--- they are my most enthusiastic fans and they always enjoy coming to hear me play. So in this phase of my life, I've had the best of both worlds.

“Once the band members were all back in North Texas, I thought we would have played together more often, but it just seemed hard to get everyone on the same page at the same time. But I am truly grateful for the opportunities to make music with those three men. We often found ourselves in a zone of floating interconnected consciousness. And on a good night, we were actually a much better band in 'retirement' than we had been in our 'prime.'

“With Brett's passing, Scott, Phil and I were back as a trio. We played together one last time at Brett's memorial service--- the three of us and one empty chair.

“I began playing solo acoustic gigs several years ago. It is not the same as being onstage with Space Opera--- nothing will ever match that--- but I find myself back where I started as a teenager, standing onstage armed only with my voice and an acoustic guitar, and it is enjoyable. To this date, I am still writing and recording songs and instrumental music.

“Cass Edwards and I have begun the process of transferring Space Opera tape archives to digital files. The music goes all the way back to our beginnings and includes studio and live recordings, most of which have never been heard by our audience. I hope we will be able to release the first batch this year. I want people to hear what the band sounded like in all its phases, even in its most raw form. When this project is finished, the book on Space Opera will be closed.”

THE RECORDINGS...

While fans await the fruits of Bullock and Edwards' labors, there is music available.

Scott Fraser's music is available through his own website, now operated by his wife, Mary. Four CDs are available:

SS-433 (Copyright 1983, Remastered 2005)

Arcadia (2005)

Still-Life with Cheese (2006)

Tree Tales (2006)

The Space Opera CDs, as stated before, are available from itsaboutmusic.com.

IF I THOUGHT I COULD TELL YOU A STORY...

Over the years, a handful of people have supported Space Opera through thick and thin, but noone outside the extended family more than Don Swancy, a KFAD disc jockey who promoted the band in the early years. After reading what had been posted, Don sent an email and after reading it I asked if I could use parts of it. He graciously said yes and after reading it a few more times, I decided that parts weren't enough. Don caught the essence of what it was to be young and in love with the music scene at the beginning of Space Opera's run and how much it means to look back. Here is what he wrote:

“I was directed to your Space Opera piece and as I told David the last time we talked, it has been nothing but a joy and pleasure carrying their banner in whatever small way I could. I remember them from their weeklys at the HOP. I remember one of their nights there the only two people in the audience were my date and I. They played two and a half hours directly to us.

“After leaving KFAD, I moved to Las Vegas and worked overnight weekends for the #1 FM rocker, then moved to Lubbock TX as the music director of the #1 FM KSEL. At that point, the first Space Opera album was out and I told my DJs to listen to it and play anything they wanted from it. Of course, I hammered it every night on my shift. At one point I called my Epic rep and had him send me 25 of the LPs. I reported to the old Walrus Radio Newsletter and hyped Space Opera to them all the time. At one time, Country Max was our most requested song and I wrote an article about the band for Walrus. That resulted in them getting airplay in different markets all over the country. I left radio in the early eighties and in 1988 moved back to Las Vegas.

“When I heard that they were to do a reunion show at the Caravan of Dreams, I contacted Scott and Cass and offered my services as emcee. I flew in from Las Vegas and considered it a great honor to take the stage with them and, although it had been many years since I had been on the air in DFW, many of the hometown Space Opera fans realized the significance.

“In 1996, through a crazy chain of events, I was recruited to teach a course for the University of Nevada Las Vegas. It was their moneymaker course, History of Rock & Roll. I also taught the same course for the Community College District of Southern Nevada, CCSN. I taught fifteen semesters and in the last week of each semester, after covering 50 years of history and nearing present day, I would play tracks from the Space Opera album. I told my students, 'If you are highly skilled, live and breathe music and happen to be incredibly gifted, you produce music like this. This is as good as the art form gets.' I would usually end my semesters with the Byrds' live version of Lover of the Bayou and Space Opera's Country Max. The last ringing chord of Country Max closed the course. Scott was aware that I was using their music in my classes and was never anything but supportive and gracious. A true gentleman.

“I remember the Beard Brothers. My brother and I had a band and we played for them too. We were all part of that scene. I remember the first night Linda Waring replaced Doyle Breshears at the Cellar. I saw Space Opera at the Lewisville Pop Festival, on both the free and the main stages. I saw the Scott Theater show in those swell suits. I saw their two song, 55-minute set warming up for the Airplane at Daniel-Meyer. I saw them at Panther Hall the night of Richard Nixon's State of the Union address when David changed the lyrics (of Country Max) from 'if my friends say I'm stoned it's because' to 'if my friends say I'm doomed it's because.' Nice touch, David.

“I saw them in a little bar out on Camp Bowie one night. It may sat 75 people. Phil in the middle, and they started that swaying thing they did and before we knew it, the audience was swaying in sync with the band. Singers and Sailors never sounded better. And of course, I was there at Trinity Park for their shows as well.

“The phrase 'the Beatles of Fort Worth' has been used many times for those boys, but I think they were rather the Space Opera of Fort Worth.”

That pretty much says it, Don. And very nicely.

Rock & Reprise thanks Kipp Baker for the use of the pictures of Space Opera in this chapter. The pictures were taken during rehearsals in 1997. Kipp is a professional photographer and has his own website at www.pixure.com.

CHAPTER ONE: The Beginning...
CHAPTER TWO: Houston, We Have a Party (and later, a problem...)
CHAPTER THREE: We're Singers and We're Sailors...
CHAPTER FOUR: The Gospel According to Bullock, Fraser, White & Wilson
CHAPTER FIVE: The Best Laid Plans of Singers and Sailors...
CHAPTER SIX: When the Mountain Won't Come to You...

Supporting the Indies Since 1969

"It's Just Different Here"

2010-06-22T17:05:00.003-05:00

My story on the organic preservation of South Congress Avenue in Austin. Just click on the headline to go to the original link to Preservation magazine.

"It's Just Different Here"
Austin's once-forlorn South Congress neighborhood is flourishing again—with all of its quirks intact

By Joe Nick Patoski | From Preservation | July/August 2010

To experience Austin, Texas, you could take a walk up Congress Avenue, starting at the Ann W. Richards Bridge that spans Lady Bird Lake, the dammed-up part of the Colorado River that runs through the heart of this city. Heading north, you'd pass the city's leading banks, tallest condos, finest law firms, and most influential lobbying firms, as well as an art museum, a jazz club, and fine-dining restaurants. In about 15 minutes, you'd reach the Renaissance Revival Texas State Capitol, the best-known landmark in the Lone Star State, with a dome that stands 15 feet higher than the one in Washington, D.C.

But to immerse yourself in this city's quirky personality, turn around and go the other way. Head south from the bridge, past the bat statue, and up the hill along South Congress Avenue to the intersection with Academy Drive.

The landmark to look for is the Austin Motel, a spiffed-up classic of the American West. A message at the bottom of the red neon sign out front reads, "So close yet so far out," and the other side says, "No additives, no preservatives, corporate free since 1938."

That pretty much sums up the funk and cool that is South Congress and announces that you're not in normal Austin anymore: This is the Other Austin, the Austin whose peculiarities separate it from everywhere else in Texas. Creative enterprises here have attracted the kind of bustling street life that makes urban planners drool. Only no one planned, envisioned, or designed this. A series of serendipitous accidents involving some uniquely Austin characters are responsible. In other words, no planning has been the most effective planning of all.
Austin in October

The National Preservation Conference will take place in Austin on Oct. 27-30, 2010.

Locals refer to the idiosyncratic retail and entertainment district either as South Congress or SoCo. (Abe Zimmerman dubbed a cluster of restored shops here the SoCo Center in 1999, trying to make use of an old sign that was missing a few letters.) But no matter what it's called or how you pronounce it, you've got to admit South Congress is a testament to the power of creative restoration and reinvention.

Take the Hotel San José, one block up from the Austin Motel. A lavishly tiled "ultramodern motor court" when it opened in 1936, the Spanish Colonial Revival structure gradually fell into disrepair, functioning as a brothel for legislators for a period, then a Bible school, then a flophouse. In 1995, Liz Lambert, an attorney with West Texas roots who'd worked for the New York district attorney before she became homesick, bought the hotel for $500,000. She thought she would redo the 24 rooms one by one—until Lake/Flato Architects convinced her otherwise. The motor court was instead reimagined as an understated, almost minimalist space—ultramodern once again—with a zen-like courtyard, a pool area, and the inviting open-air Jo's Hot Coffee café across the parking lot. The hotel and coffee shop were immediate hits and have become the major alt community gathering spot on the avenue, so compelling that singer Raul Malo wrote and recorded an ode to the hotel.

The Continental Club, across the street from the San José, is one of the longest-thriving and most popular music clubs in an admittedly music-obsessed town. The modernist Continental opened as a private cocktail lounge in 1957 and later featured touring burlesque dancers Candy Barr and Bubbles Cash. In the 1970s, it was revived as a rock and blues club. Then Steve Wertheimer quit his job as a comptroller for a real estate firm to restore the club's Eisenhower-era splendor, and he reopened the venue as a roots rock and alt country showcase.

"I'm a preservationist by nature," Wertheimer says, about his restoration efforts. "I'm stuck in that period of the '50s, from the clothing and the music to the cars and the architecture. Those glass blocks at the entrance had been covered up. They needed to be brought back."

One block south and across the avenue from the Continental, in a century-old building that formerly housed Central Feed and Seed, is Güero's Taco Bar, which owners Rob and Cathy Lippincott opened in 1995 after moving their restaurant from its original location a couple of miles away. Six months after opening, President Bill Clinton stopped in for dinner ("He cleaned his plate"), business shot up 40 percent, and it's been busy ever since.

South Congress is just as distinctive for what isn't there: national clone restaurants, large chain retailers, and retail clusters amid a sea of asphalt. No master plan was sketched out to make it happen. No tax breaks were requested for improvements (in marked contrast to The Domain, a planned mall and residential development on Austin's northwestern fringe that is the beneficiary of tens of millions of dollars in tax abatements from the city). South Congress merchants just want to be left alone.

Austin was always different from the rest of Texas. It was established in 1839, not because of the area's strategic location but rather for its aesthetic beauty. The second president of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Lamar, killed a buffalo near the present capitol building and noted that the area's hills, waterways, and pleasing surroundings would make a fine place to locate Texas' government.

South Congress Avenue was South Austin's main street from the very beginning and, with the advent of the automobile, the main highway south to San Antonio. Increased traffic inspired the construction of one- and two-story storefronts in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by motels and cafés. But after the Interregional Highway, now Interstate 35, opened in the early 1960s, the road-oriented businesses declined and much of South Congress emptied out.

That was the state of the avenue in 1988, when Kent Cole and Diana Prechter fixed a beat-up wood-frame building that had operated as Flossie's bar and the Austex Lounge, and reopened it as Magnolia Cafe South, a second location for their homegrown eatery famous for gingerbread pancakes and comfort food. Why South Congress? Mainly because the rent was cheap, they say. "The only pedestrians on the sidewalks were hookers and drug dealers," Cole remembers. "Normal people did not walk South Congress."

It was so dicey the first year and a half that Prechter kept her day job while Cole started looking for other employment. A last-ditch decision to expand operations to 24 hours changed everything. The café tapped into the city's sizable late-night crowd, and the staff stepped up their game so that Cole and Prechter could make enough money to begin buying nearby properties, some of them historic. "In Austin, parking is everything," he says—a constant danger to the historic fabric of older neighborhoods. "So we would buy adjacent businesses and rent them to tenants who were sympathetic with Magnolia Cafe South, allowing our customers to use the spaces in front of their storefronts."

Memories of drug dealers and prostitutes began to fade in the 1990s. Austin, a relatively small city for most of its history, suddenly enjoyed a tremendous economic boom that attracted new residents and drove an increased demand for older housing stock in the Travis Heights and Bouldin Creek neighborhoods. That in turn spurred massive renovation along South Congress and throughout old South Austin.

A $4 million bond issue passed by the city council in 1998 for sidewalk, bicycle, and pedestrian enhancements improved the avenue's curb appeal. But when city planners followed with a long-term plan for South Congress that included light rail on the avenue, the merchants allied with the neighborhoods to stop the project.

Six months to a year of construction would be fatal to the many small businesses whose profits were marginal, merchants argued. "That's an awful long time to take a high-traffic street and close it," says Gail Armstrong, owner of Off the Wall antiques. "No one here could survive that. And if we did survive, most of us couldn't afford the spike in real estate prices that comes with rail."

"It's a complicated area," admits George Adams, assistant director in the planning and development review department for the City of Austin. "Its development has been more organic, or market-driven, which complicates any attempt to do things. You start out with certain attitudes: 'What's wrong with these people? Don't they know we're trying to help them?' Over time, we've come to understand the benefit of doing things incrementally, how to make changes and accommodate the needs of the small businesses and of the residents. South Congress has taught us a lot."

Preservationists agree. Dealey Herndon, who is overseeing restoration of the Governor's Mansion, sees the avenue as part of Austin's historic fabric: "The vibrant evolution of South Congress is a great example of bringing older neighborhood business areas to life by celebrating the eclectic character of the architecture, the simpler life of a city in an earlier era, and the creativity of new one-of-a-kind businesses. Every business is unique, every building has a personality, and all of this comes together to create a part of Austin that is universally appealing."

Today the avenue remains extraordinarily popular and largely "corporate free." When a Starbucks opened on South Congress as part of a new apartment complex built closer to downtown, merchants held their collective breath. Two years ago they exhaled when the franchise shut down.

Zoning restrictions that limit commercial businesses to no more than a half-block off South Congress, the small footprints of existing buildings, the high bar the city sets for teardowns, and the lack of parking are some of the reasons why the chains and big-box stores haven't gained much of a foothold. A bigger factor is the transition of pioneers like the Lippincotts, Cole and Prechter, and Wertheimer from renters to owner-operators and landlords.

Wertheimer misses the days when his hotrod buddies had the avenue all to themselves, when there was a liquor store on his block, and Just Guns occupied the space where American Apparel, one of very few national chain stores on the avenue, stands now. "We don't own it like we used to," he laments. But as an investor in the San José, Perla's Seafood and Oyster Bar, and Home Slice Pizza, and as a property owner who has increased his holdings over the years, he realizes he can influence future growth in his own small way, as he did three years ago when he bought and restored the Avenue Barber Shop, one of the oldest businesses on South Congress. "It's one of those things I didn't want to go away," he says. "That's where I get my hair cut. It still smells like it's 1933 in there."

Whatever happens, Wertheimer and his neighbors hope some degree of funk and cool continues oozing through. If places like the barber shop and people like Wertheimer go away, it won't be South Congress anymore. And without South Congress, Austin wouldn't be quite as different from everywhere else.

(Joe Nick Patoski has been writing about Texas and Texans for 35 years. He is the author of three biographies of Texas musicians and books about the state's mountains, coast, and Big Bend National Park.)

The Roky Erickson, 1975

2010-06-17T11:21:00.004-05:00

from Not Fade Away, Vol 1, No. 1, Fall 1975

Douglas Hanners the brains behind the Austin Record Convention, started up a music fanzine back it in the mid 1970s for record collectors. His debut issue featured an interview with Roky Erickson that was conducted by Doug, Kirby McDaniel, Deron Bissett, and me over two sessions. It was Roky's first post-Rusk interview and as you might glean he was lucid and insightful. I had the good fortune to sit in on some of the recording sessions that Doug Sahm "produced" on Roky and Bleib Alien and was underwritten by Doug Breeding. The single from that session "Two Headed Dog" b/w "Starry Eyes" was proof Roky was more than a one-hit wonder and that electroshock therapy did not destroy him. Special thanks for Nathan Hanners for transcribing the text.

This interview was taped at my house with Joe Nick Patoski, ace writer, and Kirby McDaniel, superb music director at KUT [University of Texas]. Roky and his wife Dana were present for along evening of talk, and a later interview was done at Roky’s house with Deron Bissett and myself.
Doug Hanners

KIRBY: When did you first start playing anything? Guitar.

ROKY: I guess when I was about thirteen...very nice number...I wanted to play guitar, and I’d been messing around with guitar, and I’d play things like "Aura Lee" and "Love Me Tender" and then I got into Bo Diddley a lot. And Little Richard was good; I enjoyed him. He knew...one thing he’d say -‘You know what I like, I like to hear my voice. Now listen to it.(sings) I like the way that sounds." And you could get into that. It’s like Shelley Berman says, "Have you ever watched someone drink buttermilk? You feel like you shouldn’t be watching. It’s like they’re making love with the buttermilk.” That was thawed with Little Richard...he’d say, "Oh God." It’d seem like he’d get all alone, and he’d say "Oh God," and you’d say, "Should I be watching thing?" But he’s had so much influence on me, his singing. I really learned from Little Richard.

Actually my favorite performer is James Brown. He just really blows my mind. James Brown, Bob Dylan, and Mick Jagger. And I like this thing called “Changes" by David Bowie. I think that somebody—either he wrote a song that was perfect for him or somebody said, "Hey man, this has your name written all over it, do it"...and he did.

In other words, there are a lot of breaks out there, but they don’t get broken. It’s like words—they have many levels of understanding. Maybe you may have many fantastic ideas, but because of a lack of communication, you can't get them across; and they don’t come across. It reminds me of Superman. They wouldn’t let him play anything but Superman, so he jumped out of a window. [note: George Reeves, the actor who played Superman on TV, committed suicide]

DERON: Of the certain types of music, like psychedelic music, who did you listen to as a teenager before you started playing yourself, and what kind of guitar player did you respect before you became one yourself?

ROKY: I liked Eric Clapton a lot, and I liked Keith Richards, and I liked B.B. King and I liked the Bluesbreakers a lot—that’s Eric Clapton, but I like his band.

DERON: So you were into the British revival of the American blues, actually.

ROKY: Right. I liked Elmore James, Blind Willie McTell, people like that.

DOUG: Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into music?

ROKY: I was playing with a group called the Spades at a place called the Jade Room, and all of a sudden these four cats came in, and it was like they had auras around their heads. Cause you noticed them, like they came in and sat down and I said, I wonder who they are, and then they came up and said, “Listen man, we’re with a group called the Lingsmen, and what we want to do is put together a big group called the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and be kind of a superband. Like they would have this image of big shadows playing this big hard rock and roll music. It would be Superband. So they came in and said, "We want you to be our singer, and we’ll do all the music,” and then they played for me a little bit over at their house, and it blew my mind. And so I had to quit the Spades, which was a hard thing to do. You have personal involvement, and you don't want to hurt anybody, and you don’t wanna mess anything up with your friends; you don’t wanna be cruel: "Listen man, forget you; I’ve got another band out here." So I joined the Elevators, and we just at first wanted to keep it real quiet, and then surprise them. Let people be hearing about us, They wanted to put us on television, but we said no. We wanted to do a couple gigs.

DOUG: When you formed the Spades, wasn't that right after the Beatles hit big? In trying to figure out a date on when you started the Spades.

ROKY: John Camay had a band (Spades) and Gnarly, I was able to get in it with him, and then the Elevators came and found me with him, playing, and said, "John, can we steal him from you?" and so we talked it over with John. ‘Cause it was a real emotional thing. ‘Cause John was a real good friend. [It was] like leaving home.

DOUG: Did you put out a local single as the Spades?

ROKY: We came out with a thing called "You`re Gonna Miss
Me” b/w "We Sell Soul," and it wan`t very good.

DOUG: So then Stacey and Benny and John Ike were in the
Lingsmen.

ROKY: Yeah. John Ike and Benny and Stacy and a guy named Max Rainey were in the Lingsmen, and Max was more of an easier singer than I was. They wanted more of a harder...not necessarily better or anything. Just for whatever kind of music they wanted to do. So they came and got me.

DERON: What was their sound like?

ROKY: They had a big crowd. Their records were all a little heavy. I'm partial ’cause of the wildness, and they didn‘t have the jug,

DERON: How did the jug evolve into your act?

ROKY: Tommy just had the idea, and he showed me, and I liked it.

DOUG: When the Elevators started. Were you guys into psychedelic drugs?

ROKY: We were known as the first psychedelic band, the first one to be able to play music that would make you see things if you wanted to, and then lay back and envision things like Dylan does. We liked him. And in respect to Dylan, we wanted to put out a rock and roll band. Like he was one single person. We thought we could put out more of a sound if we did the whole thing.

JOE NICK: What was the psychedelic sound?

ROKY: What we did, we made a point of being in a place when we played so that we could hear things to play for the audience. Say, somebody wasn’t able to get high—well, he'd get high with our music. He could have his consciousness or his cortex opened just by our music. We believe in a part of your brain that you need access to, called the cortex, which will allow you to open up into the many psychic things in your mind that you hadn’t been aware of before—ESP and things like that.

DOUG: We talked to Bill Josey, who had Sonobeat records back in the Sixties, and he gave me an explanation of the Thirteenth Floor Elevator name that I had never heard before. He claimed that Thirteenth meant the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, M, which stood for marijuana, and Elevator meant up high. Is that where it came from?

ROKY: The thirteenth letter is M. so we kinda let that just—not to say anything about it, but if people liked to connect it, do; it's fun; and then there`s not a thirteenth floor in a building, so we said "We’re playing on it." It was like if you want to get to the thirteenth floor, ride our elevator.

JOE NICK: Where did you all start playing as the Elevators—what clubs?

ROKY: We played the New Orleans Club and the Jade Room, and we played a lot up at a place called La Maison [Ballroom] in Houston. And then we did two shows on the Dick Clark Show [on the ABC television network], and this was real funny. We asked Dick, "Would you ask us who's the head of the band?"

And so he comes up and says. "Well who's the head of your band?"
“‘Well, we're all heads."

This was on nationwide T.V.

DOUG: You guys played Houston and Austin a lot right at the first. Did you play anywhere else in Texas?

ROKY: Dallas. But we didn’t have much luck in Dallas. We were on television in Dallas, and that was good. Remember? On "Sump’n Ellse." And we were on television in San Antonio and in Houston [the Larry Kane Show]. And then Dick Clark. And then we played with the Byrds in Ft. Worth at Will Rogers [Coliseum]. Driving an old car—I mean we were poor. The carbon monoxide was leaking into it and the devil, or God, looks down and says "Hey man, I can‘t handle it anymore”.- bam - and he stops the car and says you’re not riding in it anymore. So we got a ride to the concert, and everything was alright.

JOE NICK: Wasn’t there a club in Dallas that you were going to open called the Thirteenth Floor Club?

ROKY: Yeah, we were going to, and then they wouldn't let us do it, ‘cause our johns were not in the right place, or something like that, to their standards. They didn’t want to open up some psychedelic club. We were known as the first psychedelic band, and then the Grateful Dead came along. Then we went out to San Francisco and played at the Avalon Ballroom a lot, and that was a lot lo fun. We had an all-Texas show and there were three groups: Sir Doug, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. We put on a pretty wild show. All three of the groups got pretty far 0ut.Doug jammed a lot, played a lot of his blues, which—when he really gets going, he's good, he's really good. Ya know, I don’t really hear enough of his blues.

DOUG: How were your crowds?

ROKY: We never did have bad crowds. The only bad crowd we had was when we went to Dallas one time and we were gonna play this thing, and the guy said, "Hey, you're gonna have to play real soft and you`re gonna have to just play ‘la, de, da, de da.’ and we said no, we can’t handle it.

DERON: What was your impression of most of your gigs? You've mentioned that nits were very "up" experiences.

ROKY: I don’t know if Mick Jagger wrote "Rocks Off" to me, but I've never had a bad audience.

DERON: What’s a good audience like?

ROKY: Just real responsive—the kind of audience that won’t even clap, because they feel like they wanna do more for vou. If they clap, it's just a regular thing. Our audiences would sit there and not say a word. They wouldn’t clap, they wouldn’t even click their fingers, which was really nice. And they did it because they were blown by the music. That's what they were trying to get across: "Keep playing, we like it; we don't even want to stop to clap, we wanna hear it." So we really never
had a bad audience except that one time, and that was a beer joint.

DERON: Initially you were playing much longer songs than was common at the time you started playing. You were jamming, and this was unusual for the time.

ROKY: Yeah, right. We did a lot of things. We were responsible for loosening up a lot of people. I did a song called "Song to Abe Lincoln" which says, there are a bunch of geniuses around here; you need to relax and start jamming and doing things like we're doing, and so I think we were teaching with discretion. We hardly even knew that we were teaching that discretion is our profession. Whereas, we did influence a lot of people to relax and get out. Like when we jammed with the Conqueroo, they would do as much for us as I`m trying to explain that I hope we did for other bands. We could just jam with them and feel like we had complete freedom to really blow some people's minds with our talent—like, “Man, play it, we know you have the talent, so play it. We wanna hear it." And that was real nice.

DERON: What about the other contemporary bands in Austin? The Conqueroo that you were playing with. Did you relate to any other Austin bands?

ROKY: Janis Joplin blew my mind, man. The reason she got so famous was that because she was as real a person to her good friends. In other words, she wasn’t one of these people who went, "0h, dear, get away from me, my God. I've got to do all these things." [assuming British accent] You know, she was a real person and she blew your mind just to meet her as much off stage as she did on stage. She was so real a person that it's no wonder she made it. I’m sorry she died. That’s all I can say.

DOUG: Wasn’t there one time when she almost joined the Elevators?

ROKY: Well, we did some benefits together. We loved her. She needed to get her own name more than just a member of the Elevators. She had to be known as Janis Joplin. And I had to be known as Roky Erikson. It would be like taking every band in the world and putting them together and having one band.

We jammed with Shiva’s [Headband]. They had a fantastic band, but it's like walking into a mansion. Once you have the floor there, you know it's not going to go away. And Shiva’s was really who I listened to. And then they did go away, so I really didn't have a chance to pick up on the rest of the band. I was really impressed with his [Spencer Perskin's] violin playing.

DERON:• What about California? By the time you got there, had things changed to be more receptive to your music?

ROKY: We were there when it was right. Like, California was really going through some good changes. Especially Haight-Ashbury when we went out there after that Sigma Nu [fraternity] group that we played for. And then now that I haven't been out there, I hear that it's not as big a thing down there anymore. No clubs to go to—maybe the Fillmore's still there, but that`s not it. Actually, we lived in the Fillmore district for the first part, then we were in Los Angeles when the riots were going on. We were playing for Dick Clark. We didn't really make any other clubs in L.A. That day, I remember we did three shows; we did one for KFRC, and we did a gig for a boat going out into the bay - it was kinda terrible and kinda beautiful, but it was hard playing on the boat, ya know. But it was a neat thing 'cause we got to ride out to the Treasure Island, and go exploring on it, just really seeing all the good things in a good place.

DERON: Of all the bands who were your contemporaries in the Haight in the late 60s, which ones did you respect?

ROKY: I liked Big Brother a whole lot. They were like the Family Dog; they were like a party from home, you know. And we got to see the beginning of Moby Grape out there, and we liked Quicksilver, and we liked Doug Sahm a whole lot. We were just really impressed with San Francisco.

J OE NICK: What do you recall as being your most memorable performance? You know, the one gig that you played...

ROKY: I can remember some that really stood out. I can’t remember where they were, but I would jump on top of my amplifier and start playing with the feedback and it was because of the people's interest in us. The music would do haunting things. We had one song called "Let Me Take You to the Empty Place on My Fire Engine." And what we were trying to portray was what it would be like if you could ride on a fire engine without having to go to a terrible fire. What if the fire engine was connected just to riding it and having fun as a kid, not to a big fire.

Now we try to play space sounds, influenced by the thrill, the fun of being able to go to a horror movie and being scared out of your—you know, just sitting there watching something like “The Curse of the Demon,” where Dana Andrews picks up a poker and it's real hot and he drops it, and the guy next to him just laughs, ‘cause he did it, you know...and then he walks to the woods, and there's this fire thing chasing after him. So the Bleib Alien [his current band at the time] is kind of on that thing, all the more to let you think about things like that.

KIRBY: The Elevators had a reputation for being the first psychedelic band, but didn’t they play for a long time before you guys got into any kind of psychedelics?

ROKY: Well, no. Like with Bleib Alien being brand new. when we first came out we were brand new in the psychedelic sense. And whereas Bleib Alien will talk about the demon rising into the clouds, and they infer the cloud-filled room of smoke, or it says "firing to your heart’s desire" for the fire demon, where in the Elevators, we would actually say, "Let me take you to de empty place" and it would sound like a spade saying “the empty place,” like Uncle Remus, and he says let me take you to DMT place, which is DMT, which is dimethyltryptamine, which gives you a trip for fifteen minutes of beautiful hallucinations. What you do is you smoke it, and you hold it in as long as you can, and what it does is you can feel it going into your skin; like marijuana. You don’t feel it penetrating. But with DMT, it just penetrates, and all of a sudden everything is spinning like fire engine wheels. So we said, "Let me take you to DMT place.” It was like a fire engine ride without the calamity of a fire, as if all the negativity could be taken away from the fire itself.

DOUG: When do you think the Elevators were at their best? A lot of people claim that the very first year that you were together produced the best music in live performance.

ROKY: Well, the reason they say that is because we were more free. We would do things with feedback, and as the years progressed, we'd say, "Hey, don’t do that, don't do this...” You don’t know what you’re gonna do. Well, the whole thing is like talking about something that you would suppress. You have to experiment with your guitar before you can find out what you’re doing. And I would get out on stage and I would start experimenting, and it seemed like it was more curbed, by the members. Like the whole idea of creation was forgotten later on in the years, I feel. You know, that we weren't creating as many new experimental vibrations.

DOUG: The band went through a change there at one point— the drummer and the bass player left.

ROKY: Seems like we were always having things like that. What it is. It’s like with a lot of bands: they'll play something and it’s so fantastic, when they get away from it, they don't believe that it really happened, and they’ll forget it. And that's what kind of happened with us. We'd forget what a sound we had. We'd blow somebody's mind when we were playing and then you wouldn't hear enough about it or there wouldn't be enough interplay on it, and you’d kind of lose faith in yourself.

DOUG: Is that why you guys broke up?

ROKY: Yeah, because it.kinda got blasé—to me it did. It got kinda like...well, this isn't a special band. You know, when I started, we were playing all this screaming feedback. Now all we’re doing is just...I like "Slip Inside This House.” I wrote the melody. I would sit up in this old, old house, and it was an old crummy amplifier and an old guitar, and I'd play [plays melody]. It's probably the only song that gets played on radio - “Slip Inside This House" and "You're Gonna Miss Me." It's like there isn’t enough feedback and there isn’t enough excitement in it on the record, but the idea is captured. And- people look at it as the capturing of an idea. And they like it. It didn't have enough of that haunting feedback special thing, something extra. It didn't have enough of that in it for my liking. That's a gripe I had about it.

DOUG: It’s hard for bands to live up to their initial surge. Very few bands can do it.

ROKY: It seems like I've broken through that. I have 85 songs written, and as I write, I find out that I'm getting better instead of just writing something. And the whole reason for being able to put out a song like "You Really Got Me" and then getting away from it, is you put out something, and you get so close to it that you can't see it. It‘s like I wrote the first line to "Splash I": "I've seen your face before...I’ve known you all my life."

And I got so close to the fact that I was seeing my friends, that I had seen them and known them without having ever met them, that I couldn’t write about it, and Clementine had to write it. And I think that’s the way it is with bands. It‘s like they can’t see the forest for the trees. Clementine was Tommy Hall’s ex-wife. They’re not married anymore. I don't know if they've gotten a divorce, but they're not together. She sang on the "I Had to Tell You" record.

DOUG: At one point on the album [“Slip Inside This House”], Tommy Hall thought that he was responding to Dylan`s lyrics.

ROKY: This is like saying “What if...?” So Dylan would say, “Well, there’s a group called the Elevators, that's a neat sounding name." Maybe he didn't write anything directly, but it just came out that way because that's the way the How was. Like if you were playing music in the other room, somebody would write about their environment, so it would affect your writing...Like everything we say affects his head when he’s writing. The Elevators may have been unconsciously in the flow of Dylan's work, and that's what he [Tommy Hall] believed.

DOUG: This record label—Hanna-Barbera Records—claimed that they signed the Elevators like in '68 or '69.

ROKY: Like maybe they’d be good people to sign up with, but we never got anything from it.

DOUG: Contact Records is the Elevators' first label, actually before IA [International Artists]. Was that your own label, or was that somebody else?

ROKY: Contact? I think it was our own label,

DOUG: And then Leland [Rogers of International Artists and Kenny Rogers’ brother] found you?

ROKY: Yeah.

DERON: Any idea how many of the albums have sold?

ROKY: I don't know. But do you know that there are people that are buying them for three digit numbers, in the hundreds. The second one, Easter Everywhere—that's really bad that they can’t have what they want for $3.98 or $4.98 [it was going for $100 and up because it was out of print]. We got ripped off. I can’t even explain how we got ripped off.

JOE NICK: When did you all get started with International Artists?

ROKY: Oh man, all I can say is right now it seems like a big ripoff. Like they came and said, “Listen, we're gonna do all these things for you,” and then they ran away and couldn’t be found. We didn't get paid any money from all four albums. Never got a cent. That has a lot to do with popularity.

DANA: They did it to a lot of bands. They did it to the Bubble Puppy and the Red Krayola.

ROKY: Like, I do the organ on one of their cuts, and I do the harmonica on their album, and they just made them go in there and do it now. Like "Alright, we got five minutes for a 30—minute album—do it."

This new band has had offers from one record company in Memphis, that if we could put out one 45 and see how we do with it—now that's more like it. And then another group wants to put us out for a nationwide tour where we'd tour Texas and then the nation, apparently on my name, like "We have Roky Erikson and the Elevators and they have a brand new band and all-new material."

Like I have 85 songs ready to do, brand new ones. One of them is called "I've Always Been Here Before" and another one’s called "The Wind and More.” You know, when the wind stops blowing and something else kinda blows through. [They’re] songs that make you think about things beyond—psychic things and ghosts and goblins and gremlins and things like that, waiting behind your door. Fun things.

JOE NICK: Did you ever get any money from "You're Gonna Miss Me" being on the Nuggets album?

ROKY: We never did. Now it would be nice if I got some money. But I took that as a kind of personal good thing to do.

DOUG: The Elevators in your first albums and stuff—you guys were really among the first of the psychedelic bands and really preceded the wave of psychedelic drugs that sort of engulfed America in the late '60s. How do you feel about that now?

ROKY: Except for the bust, those were the only things you had to think about. But psychedelic kind of infers that you’re getting away from being addicted. It's like if someone has some heroin, and they take one snort, and then the rest of their life they don’t take any. They experienced it. The thing I'm concerned about is finding geniuses like Lenny Bruce dead in their room. Oh, man, it just tears you up. All you can do is wad up your magazine, just wrinkle it up, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn put in prison—bam—or Nikita Khrushchev banished from Russia—the premier, bam. It’s things like that that are bad.

But as far as the other thing, I’m pleased with it. One thing I'm not pleased about is they get me in there and they said [heavy Texas accent],. "Son, we looked at your head, and you've taken over 300 trips—trips, I say - trips of LSD, and you may have a regression where you're seeing things again.

KIRBY: You mean like an acid flashback?

ROKY: They call it...exactly. That's exactly what they call them is flashbacks. "Why, he may have a flashback and might go crazy again." And then they'd put their arm on my shoulder and say, “Son, then we'd have to put you back in here again." Oh boy, why don't you guys go bury yourself?

DOUG: I've got a loaded question here: When did you first take psychedelics? Were you in the Spades or the Thirteenth Floor Elevators? Was it in the Spades time period, or the Elevators?

ROKY: The Elevators.

JOE NICK: Were you all into psychedelics before you formed the band?

ROKY: I've always had the quest and want for something that would raise my consciousness up. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been in the flow of things, I think people should be able to talk about it. Like some people think, "I may be in this magazine...aw, I shouldn't have said that. They’ll probably think I'm a nut for saying that." And nothing gets said. Nothing really far out gets said, nothing really interesting gets said, because everybody‘s so afraid to say anything. So that’s what we‘re doing. We’re just kinda saying it.

People need to say more about what they're afraid to say, so that things will be discovered, because that’s how man discovers. That's science—being able to accept that there’s something beyond, that there are beings on other worlds that are our friends that are maybe thirty thousand years ahead of us intellectually because they've been born. Maybe we're all aliens; maybe they came down here and colonized and lived on earth for a giant thing, and then they had to split and they left everybody living here, and that we had to look like cavemen because man, we were living with dinosaurs and things. You had to be rough to exist in the environment, so maybe cavemen were smarter than you think of them. Because they said, "I'm gonna have to be here, so I’ll form my body in this way." Maybe they were aliens. You think of an alien - they could be real flexible. Like I could come in looking like Roky and then look like somebody else, look like him. There'd be two of us sitting here that looked like him. And then maybe the cavemen could form their shape to be real big and have lots of hair because of the cold and all the ice, glaciers and everything around during the Ice Age, that they had to form them, or that they were aliens, or that we're all aliens.

DOUG: Well, how many times did you guys get busted as the band, and then you got busted later on?

ROKY: Yeah, I was driving along, and the cop said I had some marijuana with me, So I said, “What can I do?” So I lied about it; like I've already said, because I was going to jail. I know it. And so they were gonna come down hard on me, because l was such a controversial, doing such controversial things. Not as much a controversial person, more or less doing controversial things, and other people sitting back and relaxing and letting me do it. So they said, “We’re gonna make an example of him. We're not gonna have all these people grooving on what he's doing. We've gotta stop it and stop it now, 'cause he's a threat."

Not a threat to the government, but a threat to the police.

DOUG: What you‘re saying is that they got Roky out of the way so that nobody would ask any questions.

ROKY: They had put me in a mental hospital [Hedgecroft] and I ran away from it. And then when I came back to Austin to do a show, a policeman comes down and says, "Hi, man. I used to he a good friend of your father. You used to ride horses on my land. All we wanna do is ask you some questions; just come down and answer the questions."

As soon as I got down there they put me in a cell and I didn't. hear from them for a week. And the club didn't know where I was. They'd said, "Listen, if you get arrested, make your phone call to the club," and I wasn't able to make that connection: So I was shafted, I was just run over.

DANA: Nobel Gunther [IA exec] said, "Don't go to Austin, you'll get busted.” And there was a car out there waiting with the motor running ready to take him to Austin. So who knows what IA was up to`?

ROKY: So I flew to Austin. And this friend of mine took me to the place out here—used to be the Torch Club, used to be the Action Club—and the police were waiting for me there.

DOUG: You went down to Houston and talked to the record company people, and Roky ended up coming back to Austin, and then they grabbed him again, and he ended up in Hedgecroft?

DANA: Rusk State Hospital. Before he even got busted, the record company put him in Hedgecroft for a rest. They said he was doing too many drugs, and he wasn't getting the music out, and he needed a rest. Hedgecroft came right after the first bust, and before the second.

DOUG: Hedgecroft is a private hospital?

ROKY: Yeah.

DANA: Roky’s mother was in on that business too, thinking that he needed a rest. And she would go to the record company and say, “You’re pushing him too hard, look at him, he's falling apart.” She was just misguided.

DOUG: When did this last bust that put you in Rusk occur?

ROKY: That was four, five years ago. Those three years were the longest three years of my life. I thought I’d never get out.

DOUG: I went up to see a friend of mine in Huntsville [Texas State Prison] Sunday; he's just in for a year at the most.

ROKY: Well, a year is just,..you wouldn’t believe. One day, by the end of one day, you've already thought up ages of thinking. You've thought everything you could think in a million years, and you're tired of it in one day. Like I was going to jail, and so I said, "Hey, man, I'm seeing things on the wall, and I'm hearing voices, so I'm crazy, put me away."

So they said, “Alright, he's crazy. “

For three years...I was such a good actor. When you put your mind to it. you can really convince people, so you gotta be careful. `Cause at the end of three years, I'm sitting there and they said, "So you‘re still hearing voices?"

And I said, "No, man, I'm not hearing voices. I lied."

And they said. "Yeah, sure you lied.”

It’s obvious now I lied. but they were just mean as they could be. There at Rusk, I got beat up there by one of the attendants once. A lot of times people are victims of police and bad record companies.

DOUG: That Rusk episode - do you mind talking about it?

ROKY: When I got there it was like, “Here comes this guy with long hair and a top hat." And they said, "Oh, boy. We got him."

If I had been wearing a tuxedo it would have been just as bad. And so they cut my hair completely bald, just as mean as they could, and they put me in khakis. And for three years you'd get up at six in the morning, and you'd clean up the place. It was just terrible, man.

I got my GED while I was there, and I got couple of credits in college, but that was the only interesting thing the whole time, ya know, Some of them were groovy; I was on television a couple of times. A couple of groovy guys managed to get me out to be in a rock and roll band with some of the patients, and we called it the Missing Links. We performed, you know, but I couldn't perform. I tried. It was so funny. I’d try to scream there and I'd be under so much tension that I couldn't scream while I was there. But I try to scream now, and I'll be able to scream now as good as ever when I get on stage again.

We have so many...like the word “wrong“ and the word "mistake" and the word "text." They should have different meanings so that when you say "text", you could say it could be in text and out of text and not be slandering the word “text," And then if someone was wrong, they wouldn't be considered. See, if I said something like, I'd say one statement; I'd slip and forget I was in a mental hospital and I'd say something, but then they’d say "You're crazy. You're gonna be put here one more year for that."

You know, llike I'd be there two years and think I was getting out, and I'd say something, and they'd say "You're crazy." They lived in the small town of Rusk, and they never got out of it. [It was] a penitentiary—like thing. Cold, man.

DANA: Paranoid is more like it—the people were real sheltered.

ROKY: It was nice sometimes. She came up to visit me every two weeks, that's all they’d allow. We had from 8 till 4, and she’d bring me a carton of cigarettes and she brought me a television and a twelve-string guitar. But you wouldn't wanna watch television because by the time you got it set up and passed all the regulations to watch your television, you didn’t wanna watch it. Or there wouldn't be a good show on. And then with the guitar, you couldn’t be inspired. You wouldn’t wanna sing "Gloria," I wouldn't do my own material in this band. I'd do others. Because I had such a pessimistic attitude—they could learn this, they couldn't learn that, they wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. 'Cause you were in there with people that were in there for murder—vicious murder—and they said, "Alright, here's the guy with the vicious murder and here`s Roky. His circle is just as big as Roky`s circle – they’re equal. They’re in here for the same thing: they’re crazy."

It's just like the "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." There’s injustice in justice.

JOE NICK: Do you think people put down psychedelics now?

ROKY: With psychedelics, a lot of people will say things about psychedelics without realizing that when you take acid, it enters your body and goes out of your body in fifteen minutes. And all it is, is in your mind and what you've thought of and been ` able to build, in your mind. And that's why it’s so beautiful: because it's an art. It's like being an artist. Because the whole idea of it is like being able to have nothing but positivity around you. Like, if you're ever gonna take a trip, you always wanna know where you're going, who you`re gonna be with, what you`re gonna do, what records you're gonna play, what books you're gonna read. So that you don’t have a knock at the door and “I'm Ariel and Happy Birthday and we have all these..." you know. [laughter]

ADDENDUM
At the time we went to press several things had changed with Roky since this interview was taped. He has released a single with Doug Sahm’s assistance and production: "Starry Eyes/Two Headed Dog" on Mars Records. It was cut at Odyssey Studios in Austin with Doug on guitar and Bleib Alien backing Roky. Doug took interest in Roky after Bleib had played their first dates; and he helped Roky get to LA where he played with Doug at several clubs in hopes of generating some record company interest. While in LA, Roky went to San Francisco and talked with Tommy Hall. He said that they are close friends, Tommy and he will probably not do any recording again. Roky is going to San Francisco with Doug for a couple of months to work on his music and possibly do some recording. He played with Doug and Freddy Fender at Armadillo recently and sounded better than ever.

Texas Accordion Kings and Queens/Big Squeeze

2010-06-06T15:18:00.035-05:00

The 21st Accordion Kings and Queens concert and the 4th annual Big Squeeze competition, presented by Texas Folklife, squeezed and pleased 6,000 fans Saturday night at the Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston.

Eighteen year old Keyun Dickson, who leads his own band, the Zydeco Masters, took the Big Squeeze crown, besting 14 year old Nachito Morales from Dallas who brought along a huge fan club; 19 year old Chuy Zamora Jr from San Antonio, a student of Rodolfo Lopez and a graduate of the Conjunto Heritage Taller in SA; and Ruben Paul Moreno, a multi-instrumentalist who performed on a Cajun accordion accompanied by only a rubboard. Dickson got the nod with a spirited, physical zydeco throwdown peppered with showmanship.

The Accordion Kings and Queens opened with The Texas Czech Legacy Band from the Houston area including three members who'd played with the great Bobby Jones, who disappeared three years ago during heavy flooding on the Colorado River, and whose legacy remains in the German film Schultze Gets the Blues.

14 year old Nachito Morales and his Dallas fans

Keyun Dickson

Heriberto Rodriguez

Eva Ybarra, the Queen of Accordion from San Antonio, delivered a solid set accompanied by a full band including Rita Del Rio working a vihuela, rather than a bajo sexto. She soared on the cumbias, including a frenetic cover of Fito Olivares' "Juana La Cubana." Throughout Eva's performance, I kept hearing shouts of "Girl Power." Yep, she can squeeze toe to toe with Flaco, Esteban, Mingo, Joel and other male accordion greats, but none of the boys can match her voice, which belts out songs passionately with the same verve as Lydia Mendoza.

Leroy Thomas and the Zydeco Roadrunners tore the roof off the sucker (even though the Miller's roof is really an open air cover) with a sizzing set of foot-stomping old school zydeco, with Big Squeeze finalist Ruben Paul Moreno on rubboard (I don't know where Moreno is headed, but I want to be there when he arrives; you read it here first). Anyone who can cover the Everly Bros. "When Will I Be Loved" and "Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound" by Hank Williams, Jr. and make em both sound soulful and hard-driving has got it going on, in my book.

Closing out was Albert Zamora y Talento, a Corpus conjunto with synchronized moves and a front man who has the potential to be the next Steve Jordan because he's working 'way far out of the traditional accordion box. Kneedrops, the accordion and bajo sexto played behind backs, and a stroll through the crowd in the middle of a song demonstrates Talento knows how to please a crowd. It's their potential taking it to the next level that make them worth watching. This is not your abuelo's and abuela's conjunto.

The last two Big Squeeze winners, Heriberto Rodriguez, an Edcouch-Elsa High student from the Rio Grande Valley, and John Ramirez from H-Town, who infuses his conjunto playing with a dollop of hip hop, also performed with Albert Zamora, matching him lick for lick and step for step.

The best part of this year's Accordion Kings and Queens and the Big Squeeze was the crowd, who collectively danced their ass off on the floor at the front of the stage, and the players, who were jamming off to the side and watching the other players' play. There was more musical cross-pollination going on around the accordion on a Houston Saturday night than you'll ever find at a folk festival. This wasn't folk music; it was just good music, powered by the squeezebox.

Joe Nick's All Over the Map Accordion Special on Marfa Public Radio This Saturday Night

2010-06-02T08:25:00.005-05:00

If you can't make it to the Accordion Kings and Queens Show in Houston this Saturday night, listen to MarfaPublicRadio.org or if you're out and about in Far West Texas, KRTS-FM 93.5 at 7 pm Saturday for the latest edition of All Over The Map on the General Store, hosted by Yours Truly. This week is an All Texas Accordion special, signifying on behalf of the bellowed instrument that makes you want to dance. I'll be covering conjunto, Cajun, zydeco, rock 'n roll, Czech-German, and nuclear polka.

Tune in, turn on, and squeeze it easy.

The Big Squeeze/Accordion Kings and Queens This Saturday

2010-06-02T08:13:00.006-05:00

Yep, accordion lovers, the National Instrument of Texas will be celebrated this Saturday evening, June 5 in Houston at the Miller Outdoor Amphitheater for FREE.
Yep, gratis, gratis, gratis. This year's 21st Annual Accordion Kings and Queens Show opens with a 100 accordion jam. That's right.

Here's the scoop from Tara Dooley in the Houston Chronicle (click on the headline to read the story in its original form)

THE BIG SQUEEZE
The 21st annual Accordion Kings and Queens Festival includes the finals of the Big Squeeze contest and performances by stars of the accordion world.
• When: 6:30-11 p.m. Saturday. An accordion jam open to the public starts at 5:30 p.m. The competition is held after the jam.
• Where: Miller Outdoor Theatre, 6000 Hermann Park Drive in Houston
CONTEST
• Who: Star performers include Albert Zamora y Talento, Leroy Thomas & the Zydeco Roadrunners, Eva Ybarra and the Texas Legacy Czech Band
• Cost: Free
• Sponsored by: Texas Folklife, an Austin-based nonprofit organization that presents and preserves Texas culture
• Information: texasfolklife.org or 512-441-9255

photo of Ruben Moreno, finalist in the Big Squeeze contest, by James Nielsen, Houston Chronicle

By TARA DOOLEY Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle

Accordion player Ruben Moreno is a finalist in the Big Squeeze Competition put on by Texas Folklife.

When it came to showcasing his accordion chops for the judges, Ruben Moreno decided to stick with the classics.

He picked out a zydeco favorite by the late legend Boozoo Chavis and a Creole number to perform in the fourth annual Big Squeeze competition, a Texas-wide showdown of young accordion talent.

“I hear something like that, something I know is traditional, and it just reels me in,” Moreno said.

“There is hope in keeping the tradition going on accordion,” he added.

The Houston native hopes to turn tradition into a career in music and one day play his own zydeco-infused melodies in great concert venues. Moreno, 20, takes the stage Saturday at Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston with aspiring accordion players from Humble, Dallas and San Antonio for the finals of the competition, part of Texas Folklife's annual Accordion Kings and Queens Festival.

The winner takes home $1,000, a new accordion, a recording session at SugarHill Recording Studios in Houston and career support.

For Keyun Dickson of Humble, winning the competition would give him bragging rights as a new “accordion king.”

“They don't have to give me anything,” he joked. “I just want the name.”

The festival and competition are a showcase for young talent. But they also shine a spotlight on the accordion, which writer Joe Nick Patoski calls the “national instrument of Texas.”

“There is no single instrument, including the guitar, that covers so many musical styles as lead instrument,” said Patoski, author of books on Texas icons Willie Nelson and Selena.

The instrument has found its way into Texas roots music ranging from the countrified sounds of the Tex-Czech polkas to zydeco, conjunto and some Tejano, Patoski said.

The accordion came to this continent with European immigrants in the 19th century, though there is discussion about whether it made its way to Texas through Mexico or ports such as Galveston, Patoski said.

Once it arrived, the sound grabbed attention in Texas with Czech, German and Polish polkas re-imagined for a new world. It squeezed its way into the music of Cajun and Creole people from Louisiana and the Texas-Mexican sounds of conjunto.

“With all our cultures, we live our separate lives,” Patoski said. “Music is where we intersect. We've been stealing from one another musically since those immigrants arrived with the accordion.”

Family and tradition play an important part in Jesus Zamora's accordion playing.

The 19-year-old from San Antonio grew up around conjunto music at home and at local festivals. But he didn't take up the instrument until he was 14.

“At first I wasn't really interested in it,” said Zamora, whose family moved to Texas when he was 5. “Then I started seeing the cultural meaning of it. It comes from where I was born, Mexico, and all that.”

Zamora plays conjunto classics such as Idalia, which is one of the pieces he will perform Saturday. He also performs with his mother and father at festivals in their band, called the Zamora Family.

Dickson was introduced to the accordion by his mother and grandmother.

But for him, the music was zydeco, and he started playing it at 3 and taught himself by listening to recordings by his accordion hero, Houston player Step Rideau.

At 12, he started a band called Keyun and the Zydeco Masters that now performs regularly at jazz cafes and Cajun restaurants.

Though he loves the music, playing the accordion has other benefits for an 18-year-old.

“I like all the girls that come out to this stuff,” he said.

tara.dooley@chron.com

The San Antonio Sound - the Next Generation

2010-05-26T10:45:00.018-05:00

Probably the most enlightening musical revelations I’ve had this spring have come from all the great new music pouring out of San Antonio – the new Krayolas’ Americano album, the new Hacienda album, and two exciting punk groups, A Girl In A Coma and Pinata Protest.

Girl in A Coma – Jenn Alva, Phanie Diaz, and Nina Diaz – whose music was initially inspired by the Smiths and Nirvana, hit me like Latina spawn of the Runaways on first listen of their 2007 debut album Both Before I’m Gone and last year’s Trio B.C. The slash-and-burn chainsaw chords and aggressive vocals were expected, but they were delivered with enough grit, grind, occasional bilingual lyrics, and local Chicana references to qualify as a Nowhere But Sananto original. That sort of explains why filmmaker SA native Robert Rodriguez was falling over himself with his camera during SXSW filming Las Home Girls, and why GIAC’s latest 3 EP series, Adventures in Coverland, which includes cover versions of Selena’s “Si Una Vez,” Ritchie Valens’ “Come On Let’s Go,” Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” along with Beatles, Joy Division, David Bowie, and Velvet Underground send ups, wound up on Joan Jett’s Blackheart Records label. They were can have it both ways. “Si Una Vez” is particularly grabbing, capturing Selena’s passion and versatility and suggesting she might have had quite a career as a spirited punkette had she lived longer.

On their new album Plethora for SAustex Records, the band Pinata Protest – Alvaro Del Norte, JJ Martinez, Matt Cazares and Marcus Cazares - stakes out territory as the spiritual hermanos to Girl in A Coma. They are a straight up accordion-powered conjunto but work the polka beat with such furious aggro that they come off like the Pogues, if the Pogues came from South Texas instead of Ireland. Their ‘tude is hard and fast, with pauses now and then for something a lil’ more sentimental like “Love Taco.”

Hacienda - Abraham, Jaime, and Rene Villarreal and their cousin Dante Schwebel - really grabbed me on their first album Loud Is the Night, mainly for their lush harmonies that recalled the Beatles and the Beach Boys but in more of a contemporary context, like Fleet Foxes. This time out, on Big Red and Barbacoa they’ve emerged from their northeast San Antonio garage with a more polished sound that reflects touring and recording with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, the coolest band to come out of Ohio since….well, a long, long time.

It was Auerbach who hipped the bros to Doug Sahm, the patron saint of San Antonio music whose definitive Tex Mex sound popularized by the Sir Douglas Quintet’s sixties hits “She’s About A Mover” and “Mendecino” set the standard by which all SA music has been judged ever since. Since Hacienda wasn’t familiar with Sahm, I’m guessing it’s Auerbach’s influence that’s responsible for the songs “Big Red” and “Barbacoa.”
Unfortunately, the music doesn’t match the localized lyrics, which come off as pandering. What’s more significant is the harmonizing, which comes off as more Beach Boys than Beatles this time around – “I Keep Waiting” and “Hound Dog” could have been tracks off of Summer Days (and Summer Nights). The album as a whole isn’t the revelation that their surprising debut was. But cuts like “Gotta Get Back Home” and the instrumental roller-rink groove of “Barbacoa” whet the appetite for whatever comes next from the Hacienda boys.

The Krayolas’ Americano is their best, most Santone recording to date, and honestly, the most San Antonio-sounding pop artists since Sir Doug himself. The Saldana brothers (David and Hector), Van Baines, Joe Sarli, Barry Smith and friends work a borderlands beate infused with plenty of pop and Beatleseque influences to transcend being a regional confectin. Their past three releases have all had their moments, especially their bilingual cover of Augie Meyers’ “Little Fox” with Augie his own self pumping the Vox organ that was the Sir Douglas Quintet’s signature; the Catholic Malinche tribute “La Conquistadora,” and a disturbing slice of the Mexico drug wars “Corrido Twelve Heads In A Bag.”

Americano shows the Krayolas wearing their Sixties pop-rock sensibility proudly on “Good Little Girl (She Don’t).” But it’s when the band digs even deeper into their hometown roots with the help of the West Side Horns and Flaco Jimenez that the music gets interesting. “Exit/Salida” is a direct descendant of Sir Doug’s “Nuevo Laredo,” groove-wise. The horns provide the hooks to the title track “Americano,” the punchy brass harmonies punctuating compelling lyrics that speak to SA’s cultural duality. It’s that rare track that once you start humming it, you can’t get out of your head. Flaco throws down some serious accordeon licks for the ambitious “Wall of Accordion,” a local ref to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. But it’s Louis Bustos’ soaring sax that makes the tune cook and smoke, rendering the accordion as almost an afterthought until Flaco’s backyard riffing on the next track “Soy La Pared” brings redemption. “Fruteria (The Fruit Cup Song)” which celebrates a San Antonio slice-of-life as a puro pop confection, “Home,” an introspective slice of life about an immigrant working woman, and the dirty blues of “Piso Diez” are all Krayolas, needing no outside musical assistance to hit the mark.

Not every track on Americano works, and their latest single “1070 (I’m Your Dirty Mexican) about Arizona’s new immigration laws isn’t even on the album. But what the Krayolas, Hacienda, Pinata Protest, and A Girl In A Coma have collectively achieved bears notice: Sir Doug is dead – long live Sir Doug; these bands represent the next generation of San Antonio music makers with a musical sense of place. The spirit of Sir Doug lingers, but each group has stepped out from under his shadow to create sound that are new and completely different but still come out puro SA. In other words, that South Texas groove is stronger than ever.
Una polkita anyone?

TheKrayolas.com
Haciendaonline.net
myspace.com/pinataprotest
girlinacoma.com/giac/giac.html
blackheart.com/adventuresincoverland/

The Springs of Texas Odyssey

2010-05-12T17:23:00.004-05:00

photo by Erich Schlegel

from Texas Highways magazine
(click on the header to go there)

By Joe Nick Patoski

Springs feed the life force for humans (and other living things) throughout Texas, and have done so ever since … well, ever since there have been humans in Texas. Archeologists point to evidence that shows people were hanging around some of Texas’ largest springs more than 10,000 years ago. That’s a long time, especially in a region historically regarded as too harsh and hellishly hot in the summer to support large numbers of people.
At least until air conditioning came along.

Prehistoric human presence at Texas springs is indicated by tangible evidence such as flint Clovis dart points unearthed near San Marcos Springs. For more evidence, consider the extensive rock art adorning the walls of shelters and overhangs throughout the region west of Del Rio defined by the confluence of the Devils and Pecos rivers with the Rio Grande. The more lighthearted modern-day equivalent of those prehistoric clues might be today’s symbols of time spent near springs: inner tubes, fly rods, swimsuits, kayaks, and paddles.

Prehistoric and contemporary evidence both pretty much speak to the same truth: When the heat is on, Texans seek out springs. Immersion in cool, pristine waters forced up to the surface from the depths of an underground aquifer beats air conditioning any day. In my book at least.

Truth be known, springs make their particular pieces of Texas a pleasure any time of the year, because of the way they bring sustenance to vegetation, to wildlife, and to the entire natural world—humans included.

All the springs of Texas together produce 117,000 liters of water per second, according to the late Gunnar Brune, a geologist for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service and the Texas Water Development Board. Brune’s landmark book The Springs of Texas is regarded as the Bible of Texas Springs because it’s the only source of detailed research and information on the subject. Originally published in 1981 as a privately printed labor of love, the book was revised by geologist Helen Besse and published by Texas A&M Press in 2002.

Brune tempered his passion for springs with a prophetic observation in his writing: Numerous springs were failing or had gone dry while the underground aquifers that fed them were being drawn down. Increased human and agricultural use, the spread of impervious cover through development, and a climate trending toward less rainfall were the main culprits.

The considerable number of communities, schools, churches, and other places across Texas with the phrase springs or spring affixed to them, particularly along the 98th Meridian where the rocky limestone hills meet the blackland prairie and coastal plains, attest to the value Texans have placed on springs for many generations. During periods of extreme drought, like the summer of 2009, springs often become a widespread public obsession—a keystone indicator of the state’s need for water.

Then there are those of us who pay tribute by simply jumping in.

My own personal springs odyssey began as a child, first at Burger’s Lake on the far west side of Fort Worth, a public swimming lake whose chilly waters are fed by Roaring Springs. Next, I experienced Aquarena Springs in San Marcos, a water-oriented tourist attraction inspired by Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida. At Aquarena Springs, the star attractions included Ralph the Diving Pig, underwater mermaids, Glurpo the Clown, and a ride over Spring Lake in a glass-bottom boat. I can still remember being fascinated by one springs complex named Oatmeal Springs, whose puddles of bubbles vividly illustrated how perfect its name fit.

As an adult, my girlfriend turned me on to swimming at Barton Springs in Zilker Park just across the Colorado River (now Lady Bird Lake) from downtown Austin. It took a few weeks to adjust to the instant chill whenever I hit the water, but once I did, I was hooked. Soon, I was swimming a mile a day on all but the coldest days of the year (on those days, the constant-temperature spring water actually felt warm). I proudly wore my Barton Springs T-Shirt that bragged the water temperature was 68 degrees year round.

Barton Springs led me to quit cement ponds (traditional swimming pools), swear off chlorine and lap lanes, and search for more springs. On my odyssey, I sought out the wholly charming Krause Springs in Spicewood, visually dazzling Hamilton Pool in western Travis County, Blue Hole and Jacob’s Well in Wimberley, the natural swimming pool at New Braunfels’ Landa Park, and back to San Marcos. At Aquarena, the swimming pigs are gone and the tourist attraction has transformed into Aquarena Center, home of the Texas River Center and the Texas Rivers Systems Institute, both part of Texas State University.

As I continued my quest, I discovered Las Moras Springs in Brackettville, San Felipe Springs in Del Rio, the spring-charged Devil’s River (arguably the most pristine waterway in Texas), an unnamed spring that fed a long stretch of the west fork of the Nueces River, and the desert cienega, or springs, known as Independence Creek, south of Sheffield. Further explorations in Far West Texas took me to Rio Grande Hot Springs in Big Bend National Park, Chinati Hot Springs, seven miles north of Ruidosa, which is about 40 miles west of Presidio, Indian Hot Springs south of Sierra Blanca, and San Solomon Spring at Balmorhea State Park.

Of all these spring-fed destinations, Balmorhea remains my favorite swimming place in all of Texas – except for a few secret swimming holes, the locations of which I’ll never reveal.

Springs have inspired my writing over the years and research into the dynamics of springs (as well as the politics associated with water rights) led me down to the path to better understand these unique environments. While on the quest, I have been privileged to witness artesian springs literally gushing from out the ground from a “honey hole” in Kinney County and (only a few weeks ago) a spring roaring out of a jumble of rocks at the bottom of a limestone cliff on the banks of the Blanco River.

Springs aren't just limited to the western half of Texas, either. One of the most unexpected springs I’ve visited are those near Bayview and Port Isabel where General Zachary Taylor’s troops refreshed themselves on their sojourn to the Mexican War in 1846.

The streams that springs feed draw me in just as much as their sources do. I’ve lazed under and around waterfalls on the Devils River, including Dolan Falls which lies at the juncture of Dolan Creek and the Devils River, at Krause Springs along the Pedernales, in Hamilton Pool, at Gorman Falls created by springfed Gorman Creek near the Colorado River in Colorado Bend State Park as well as Mexicana Falls, Cottonwood Falls and unnamed (but not unappreciated) falls. I’ve canoed, kayaked, snorkeled, swam, tubed, fished, and soaked in some of the most wonderful water on earth, each and every adventure a Technicolor splash.

I have swum alongside thousands of endangered pupfish and with hundreds of other piscine species, as well as scores of red-eared sliders and Texas spiny softshell turtles. More than a few great blue herons have shared the view with me on other occasions and in other spring-fed settings.

Believe me when I say the view of the undersides of ducks and geese floating on the surface of some of the clearest waters this side of the Caribbean—including the crystalline spring-fed pool at Balmorhea State Park and in Barton Springs—is strange and wonderfully exotic. So is the sight of scuba divers from across West Texas, New Mexico, western Oklahoma, and Kansas converging around the headwaters of the pool. As the divers navigate the water 20 feet below the surface, I’m skimming along the surface and watching their antics through swim goggles.

Those kinds of experiences have led me to believe that maybe Texas has the best springs on earth.

Turns out there’s more than a little truth to that perception. Texas is blessed with an abundance of springs — more than 2,900 springs in 183 Texas counties had been documented by Gunnar Brune over the course of his life; Helen Besse is researching and recording springs in the 71 other counties of the state.

Beginning in the 16th century, explorers mapped out trails and subsequently trade routes that were linked by springs. When the railroads came to Texas in the 19th century, springs often played a role in where the tracks were laid; without them steam locomotives could not quench their prodigious thirst. The second transcontinental railroad, which passed through Houston, San Antonio and El Paso, included stops near San Pedro Springs, Los Moras Springs, San Felipe Springs, and the artesian springs that once flourished around Van Horn. When US 90 west of San Antonio was constructed in the early 20th century, it passed near these same springs.

The largest concentration of Texas springs bubble to the surface in the Hill Country, in a region roughly bounded by Austin, San Antonio, Del Rio, and Junction. Here, the famous 1100 springs—once touted by commercials for Texas-brewed Pearl Beer—push water up from limestone beds to feed creeks, streams, and the Frio, Llano, Colorado, Pedernales, Nueces, Blanco, Guadalupe, San Marcos, and Medina rivers.

The largest cluster of springs in Texas finds the surface at the base of the Balcones Fault at Comal Springs in Landa Park in New Braunfels. The next largest springs complex emerges at San Marcos Springs, 20 miles north of New Braunfels in San Marcos.

The Aquarena Center on the banks of the springs features an aquarium exhibit that explains the unique freshwater ecosystem of the headwaters of the San Marcos Springs, as well as the importance of aquifers, rivers, and aquatic systems. Nearby, tanks house live specimens of eight endangered or threatened species that depend on the springs for their survival. In Austin’s Zilker Park, at Barton Springs pool, you’ll find an educational exhibit called Splash! which takes visitors on an underground multimedia and interactive trip into the Edwards Aquifer.

No matter where they are, or whether they have been civilized with dams, stone walls, ladders or diving boards, or if they are same as they ever were in their wild natural state, springs are destinations of choice for millions of Texans for all the right reasons: to look at, to immerse in, to play around, to appreciate, to savor, and to marvel over. Nowhere but Texas is there water like this.

Last one in is a rotten egg!

In addition to writing about Texas’ natural wonders, Joe Nick Patoski authored several books, including a recent biography of Willie Nelson and an upcoming history of the Dallas Cowboys.
Photographer Erich Schlegel particularly enjoys shooting photographs underwater, as evidenced by this issue’s cover image.

Jimmy Donley reconsidered by Ed Ward

2010-05-12T07:23:00.004-05:00

Shades of Eddie Hinton, Ed Ward does a righteous take on Jimmy Donley, the greatest, most tortured singer songwriter you never heard of, and a true master of Swamp Pop. His best known songs were "Please Mr. Sandman" "Born To Be A Loser" and "Forever Lillie Mae" although he also did a bitchin' swingin' version of "South of the Border" when he was cutting for Decca.

He was just as notorious for selling songs to Fats Domino such as "Rockin' Bicycle" and "What A Party" for a few bucks and for being successful on his second suicide attempt.

Huey P. Meaux cried telling me about Jimmy in the first interview I had with the Crazy Cajun back in 1974. I have never looked at the process of writing songs the same since.

Here's Ed (click on the head for the link to NPR and Fresh Air)

The first time I'd ever heard of Jimmy Donley was when a friend put on an album of his songs and I noted that the cover had his tombstone on it. If I'd known more about Donley, that tombstone would have come as something of a relief, because from all accounts, this was a man you didn't ever want to come into contact with. He was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1929, and by his early twenties was playing bars around Biloxi, Miss. where he came to the attention of another musician, Ernie Chaffin, who had already started to record for Sun Records in Memphis, Tenn. Donley's star might have risen earlier, but just as he was making a name for himself, Uncle Sam came calling, and he went into the army, which stationed him in Panama.

Around Biloxi, they thought the army was a good idea: when Donley and Chaffin performed, sometimes Jimmy would hear someone in the audience say something he didn't like and put down his guitar and attack them. But not even the armed services could help, and before too long, Donley was back in Mississippi with a psychiatric discharge. At this point, Pee Wee Maddux, a local songwriter, arranged for Jimmy to audition with Decca Records in Nashville, and not only did they sign him, they recorded four songs immediately, in February, 1957.

Of course, there were loads of rockabilly singers out there at this point, and Decca had more than their fair share of them, but since, like most major labels at the time, they had no idea what would sell, they just threw the records out there. They probably didn't even care that Donley's accent is sometimes impenetrable, although they figured it out six months later when they had him record some country standards. After that, they left him to his own stuff, including the song he's best-known for, "Born To Be A Loser."

"Born to Be A Loser" would have been called autobiographical, if Donley had had the insights others had into him. The song's relentless self-pity has made it a swamp-pop classic, covered by others, but Donley never saw a penny. He was deeply suspicious of the contracts he signed, and preferred to get paid in cash for everything he recorded. This would have meant the loss of a few thousand dollars if Donley hadn't done something that, for the times, was astonishing: one day he walked up to Fats Domino, whose voice resembled his, and auditioned a couple of his new tunes. Fats, a very smart man, bought them on the spot. In fact, Donley and Pee Wee Maddux got close enough to Fats that they appear in the chorus on his recording of "What a Party."

It's hard to tell how many songs Donley sold outright to Fats and his bandleader Dave Bartholomew and others, including Jerry Lee Lewis, but some with the songwriting credit "Jessup" point to Rev. J. Charles Jessup, a media-savvy preacher from the Gulf Coast to whom Donley sold the rights to his output.

It goes without saying that Donley's personal life was chaotic. He was married six times, and engaged to another woman he didn't marry, for whom he wrote one of his most beautiful melodies, "Arleeta."

Donley's violence towards his wives and girlfriends is horrifying to read about, and was fuelled, unsurprisingly, by his near-constant consumption of alcohol. Yet the women kept on coming, and kept on leaving.

In 1961, Donley did some leaving of his own: he demanded a release from his contract with Decca at gunpoint and signed with Huey P. Meaux's Tear Drop Records in Houston. These, too, failed to sell, and finally, on March 21, 1963, Donley got into his car, turned on the engine, and asphyxiated himself. Next to his body was a Bible, his mother's obituary, a picture of his wife Lillie Mae, and Ernie Chaffin's phone number. It was Donley's second suicide attempt. The first time he hadn't been able to afford enough gas to succeed. And his last request, that his friend Cozy Corley sing at his funeral, was denied: Corley was black.

Border Bandits, Bullock Museum, 7 pm Thurs May 6

2010-05-06T09:38:00.004-05:00

Come out to the Bullock State History Museum in Austin, Thursday May 6 to watch the film Border Bandits, made by my Dallas friend Kirby Warnock, based on an oral history his grandfather gave him in the early 1970s. It's profound revisionist history. Following the film is a panel discussion I'll be moderating, so no fussing and fighting or microphone hogging.

The press release:
Border Bandits
Screening and Discussion Panel
Thursday, May 6
7 p.m.
Weekday Screenings
May 7, 10, 11, and 12
Noon - 1 p.m.

It’s won the Deep Ellum Film Festival’s Audience Award, garnered a “Texan of the Year” nomination from the Dallas Morning News, and even sparked a bill in the Texas legislature. Now it’s headed to the Texas Spirit Theater.

Based on the oral history of Roland Warnock — grandfather of filmmaker Kirby Warnock — Border Bandits explores the alleged shooting of two allegedly unarmed Mexican Americans by Texas Rangers in 1915.

A discussion of the film will follow the Thursday, May 6 screening. Panelists include Dr. Don Graham, University of Texas professor, writer for Texas Monthly and author of several cowboy books; Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, UT journalism professor, oral historian and director of the U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project; Antonio Leal, senior captain and assistant director of the Texas Rangers and others.

According to the film, a group of Mexican "banditos" raided the McAllen Ranch in southern Texas. The next day a group of Texas Rangers purportedly eliminated the perpetrators. The late Warnock, then 19, witnessed the attack while working on the Guadalupe Ranch near present-day Edinburg, Texas, and later buried their bodies next to what is now a paved farm-to-market road.

“As an Anglo Texan who grew up with The Lone Ranger, I had to overcome a lot of disbelief when I started investigating this story,” says Warnock the filmmaker, whose exploration began nearly 40 years ago as part of an oral history project at Baylor University. “But it all happened, just as my grandfather said it did. I invite any doubters or skeptics to come watch it and judge for themselves.”

banditsBorder Bandits opens at the Texas Spirit Theater of The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum on May 6, 2010, for a limited engagement. Ticket prices are $5 for adults, $4 for seniors, military, students, and youths age 18 and under. The Texas Spirit Theater is located in The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum at 1800 N. Congress Avenue at the corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. For info and tickets, call (512) 936-8746.

Visit the official Border Bandits website at visit www.borderbanditsmovie.com.

Showtimes and panelist appearances are based upon availability and sell-outs, changes, and cancellations occur without notice.

Joe Nick's All Over The Map on the Radio, Sat May 1

2010-04-29T14:36:00.005-05:00

See you on the radio, Saturday night, May 1, 7 pm central for an hour's worth of new Texas Music on All Over The Map, my once a month show on Marfa Public Radio.

Click on the headline for a link to marfapublicradio.org to listen, or if you're out in Far West Texas, tune in 93.5 KRTS FM.

Cold Sun, the missing link between the Elevators and

2010-04-26T08:09:00.005-05:00

A very good Old Austin story lifted from the Rag Blog from a year ago (click on the headline to Go There and hear a music sample )

"If it ain't peyote, it ain't Texas."

Cold Sun: Austin's Lost Psychedelic Visionaries
By Patrick Lundborg

The story of how Austin, Texas was transformed from a sleepy little college town into a world- renowned mecca for rock and country music has been told many times. It's a neat hippie saga with heroes and martyrs, a few emblematic anecdotes and no loose ends… or so it seems.

But what if there were some loose ends, what if there is a whole tapestry hidden under the Vulcan Gas-into-Armadillo HQ saga as usually told? Maybe the psychedelic era didn't end with the 13th Floor Elevators, and maybe it didn't begin with them either?

One of the earliest recognitions of Austin's new and elevated standing in the music business came with a Chet Flippo article in a 1974 Phonograph Record Magazine. The piece, which is written from an insider perspective, presents an already finalized view of how the preceding 10-year period had played out in Austin and Texas as a whole. By and large, this is the story which has been propagated through subsequent retrospectives. Too large murals of the International Artists label, Vulcan Gas Co, and the few hit or hit-bound artists are painted, while many of the key elements of what constituted a scene - the KAZZ-FM station and the related Sonobeat label, the teen clubs, the legendary Baby Cakes group, the Elevators' rapid fall from grace in the late 1960s - are missing.

Of course, this is just another case of how the victors, in this case the cosmic cowboys, are allowed to remember what they feel like remembering, and then pass it on for the history book writers. But as we're beginning to learn, the victory hymns aren't necessarily the most accurate chronicles, nor the most interesting.

Reaching down into the tapestry of vintage Austin music I found a mysterious strand that seemed to run through a lot of these areas. The thread comes in psychedelic colors, spun into a lizard skin pattern, and forms the previously untold story of COLD SUN.

I

“There was a mythical Austin that is the root of all subsequent myths about it being such a ‘cool place’. That time was so magical and wondrous that the memory of it still fuels the fake scenes there, today.”

Thirty-five years later Cold Sun founder Bill Miller has few fond memories of the era that brought Austin music to national recognition. According to him and others who were there at the beginning, or 2 seconds after the beginning, it was already going downhill in late 1967 when the Vulcan Gas Co opened. Just like its west coast big brother city of San Francisco, the preceding years of 1965 and 1966 were the true golden age of Austin. This assessment can also be found in Stephanie Chernikowski’s charming 13th Floor Elevators reminiscence, first published in Not Fade Away #1 magazine in 1975. According to Chernikowski, the storm clouds were gathering over the Austin freak scene in mid-1966, a full year before the so-called Summer Of Love.

In 1966 Bill Miller and his friends were too young to be part of the UT-based Elevators circle, yet followed what was going on around the band, and other hot local acts such as the Baby Cakes and the Wig, with great interest. Miller was an unusual teenager with unusual interests that included pet lizards – big ones – and the more esoteric sides of American pop culture, interests that live on to this day. Many thought him to be older than he was, and his active networking in what was then just a small town with a tangible music scene, gave him a good grasp of the goings-on. There were the two local radio stations, KNOW and KAZZ-FM, the latter being the hipper as they did not ban “You’re Gonna Miss Me” but in fact made it a hit. The father-son team of Bill Josey Sr & Jr that ran KAZZ-FM also operated Sonobeat, Austin’s only record label at the time. Over at the Austin Statesman paper there was Jim Langdon, a local Ralph Gleason who wrote excitedly about the new “psychedelic rock” of the Elevators. The huge UT campus and related Ghetto scene supplied a bohemian undercurrent to the city, as it had for several years. But Austin was still just a local scene and noone thought of comparing it to the rich, legend-filled musical heritages of Houston and San Antonio.

Too young to have been part of the mid-1960s teen music explosion Bill Miller and his guitarist friend Tom Mcgarrigle formed their first band in 1968. The band was called Cauldron, and apart from Miller and Mcgarrigle featured John Kearney, who had played drums with Roky Erickson in his pre-Elevators band, the Spades. Cauldron soon changed their name to AMETHYST, and played at the local “I.L Club”, which was the first psychedelic underground club in Austin. The small club, named after and run by Ira Littlefield, was located in a rough East Austin (the black part of town) neighborhood and had a sign upfront that read "Famous Beatnik Bands, Nightly". Conqueroo played there several times. Some Amethyst recordings exist from the I L Club; these remain unheard but it appears that even at this early stage the band relied solely on original material such as “See What You Cause”. During this period there was some member shuffling including a succession of lead vocalists who failed to work out right. Drummer John Kearney has commented that Miller’s long, complex songs required plenty of rehearsal, one reason for him to later leave the band.

Already at this stage Bill Miller had found the instrument that he would continue to favor throughout his career, the autoharp. Autoharps were unusual but not unique within rock music at the time; some folk-inspired bands like the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Charlatans used them, or at least posed with them for pictures. But in a development similar to how Tommy Hall had turned the concept of “jug”sounds upside down with the Elevators, Miller decided to take the autoharp into places it had not been before. The instrument was adapted and rebuilt into a fully electrified unit, and Amethyst’s music was arranged to accommodate and make full use of the unearthly sounds of the electric autoharp. Most people have heard Miller’s instrument as used on the famous Roky Erickson & the Aliens recordings from the late 1970s, but 10 years earlier it resounded around local clubs in Texas.

While Amethyst was building up a repertoire and re-shuffling its members, the Austin music scene was changing rapidly around them. Despite releasing their masterpiece “Easter Everywhere” album in November 1967 and playing Vulcan Gas the same month, local heroes the 13th Floor Elevators had been going downhill ever since returning from California in late ‘66. The later line-ups of the band were arguably the best in terms of musicianship, but a lot of people were lamenting the loss of energy and excitement from early 1966. Many other teen club bands from the pre-hippie era that had spawned the Elevators were also gone or disappearing, and almost none managed the transition into the “progressive” times of the post-Sgt Pepper late 1960s. Golden Dawn, who partook in the local LSD revolution as "Elevators protegés", fell apart shortly after their brilliant I A album had been released. Bill Miller recalls that Dawn key figure George Kinney stopped by at a few Amethyst rehearsals. The Baby Cakes merged with the Wig into the heavier Lavender Hill Express and their former bands were soon forgotten. As everywhere else harder drugs entered the picture and rock music itself was splintering off into various directions. From the very beginning Vulcan Gas Co booked new local bands that represented these changing directions, such as the Conqueroo (S F Bay Area acidrock) and Shiva’s Headband (embryonic country-rock). There was also a constant back-n-forth between Texas and San Francisco, as many bands tried their luck in the Bay Area only to discover it jam-packed with starving rock bands.

Bill Miller’s Amethyst weren’t terribly impressed with this new direction and scene, which would ultimately lead to the grand 1970s days of the Armadillo World Headquarters. Amethyst was a young band, but the members had been around in the days of genuine excitement. Rather than picking up steel guitar, or get a speedfreak guitarist that could imitate Johnny Winter, the band continued along their specific vision as represented by its two constant members, Miller and lead guitarist Mcgarrigle. The two had plenty of ideas and ambition, and for a while ran their own rock club at Jubilee Hall down in Houston (maintained by notorious preacher Freddie Gage). After giving up trying to find a lead singer they settled on sharing the vocals between them, and soon Miller handled the majority of them. Apart from the Elevators heritage, which is obvious in the band’s subsequent recordings, Miller kept abreast of developments in other parts of America and added the Doors and Velvet Underground to his list of influences. Velvet Underground would play Austin in 1969 after Vulcan Gas had somewhat reluctanctly booked them; the shows were a success and another indication of something else cooking locally, apart from the country and blues mutations. Miller was there, naturally, and had a conversation with Lou Reed backstage regarding the 13th Floor Elevators.

Houston, 1969

II

“If it ain’t peyote, it ain’t from Texas”

Beyond the college student and redneck clusters there were strange developments in and around Austin at the time, and Amethyst/Cold Sun were connected to many of them. Unusual characters crowd their history, such as the band’s friend and future Roky Erickson exorcist/bodyguard Winston “Wink” Taylor, member of an esoteric Christian splinter church led by Father Robert Williams – this congregation later counted Roky’s mom Evelyn among their members and assembled in a church that once served as a rehearsal space for the Elevators. Taylor and his friends used to live in the Serpentarium, an abandoned snake farm outside town. This circle included soon-to-be Cold Sun bass player Mike Waugh, and the enigmatic Johnny Love, a Hollywood-style singer and dope dealer who many locals thought was a government agent. For a while the Snake Farm residents had a band going called Alpha Centauri. On the enemy side there was the notorious Captain Harvey Gann, chief narc officer in Austin, known to always wear a bright red suit when conducting a raid. Gann and his team watched the Elevators and other local rock bands very closely.

The Church of the Elevators

Bill Miller himself still had plenty of space to allow his special interests to grow, and in fact made the local papers when his huge tegu lizard ran away and was put into a dog pound, from which it promptly escaped. Other Miller projects included building a complete Dr Doom (the Marvel comic book villain serenaded by the Elevators) costume, although it did not progress beyond a completed metal glove. One interest that would have direct impact on Cold Sun’s music was ancient Egyptian mythology, as heard on the “RA-MA” track from their Sonobeat tapes, an 11-minute epic that also invoked Lemurian elements. And psychedelic drugs were of course everywhere, as they had been in Austin long before the Elevators started handing out free LSD at local gigs. Miller recalls that “a wider cross section than one would imagine did peyote. The 60s beatnik-peyote scene seemed to know no beginning - it had been among the hip as long as the hip had existed since way before acid was invented. It was legal and could be purchased in cactus shops and plant stores. Things were actually more cool before acid appeared.”

Proof of Dr Hermon's hip lifestyle - Art Kleps gives thumbs up!

An official secret of the town was Dr Hermon, a Viennese immigrant who the straight Austin medical establishment referred to as "Crazy Harry". Hermon had a Federal licence to prescribe and administer LSD, marijuana and mescaline/peyote. The Austrian psychiatrist carried a jet set air about him and was into concepts like hypnotism, nude therapy and psychedelic evolutionary therapy. His eccentric image and non-conformist behavior put him in contact with the Austin music underground, which he supplied with psychedelic drugs for several years. Captain Gann and the narcotics squad were aware of this, but Dr Hermon’s medical licence made him difficult to bust. Hermone’s rapport with the rock musicians was such that he was appointed doctor for Roky Erickson when Roky was staying at Holy Cross Hospital in 1968, recovering from a nervous breakdown. Unsurprisingly, in this case Hermon made sure not to involve the patient with drugs. Gann and his narcs later managed to crack down on Hermon, who was forced to leave Austin in a haste.

John David Bartlett, a local musician who worked with the latter-day Elevators and was signed to International Artists recalls hanging out with the Amethyst members: "We had many late fuzzy evenings at Bill's tiny apartment at the base of Castle Hill. There was an old white wood frame building that rambled up the hill. It had been divided into tiny efficiency apartments for the more adventurous of Austin's scene in those daze and had stairs that went up the outside along the hill. It was like an extention of the old Texas Ghetto, with a younger crowd. My house up on Blanco at the top of Castle Hill tended to attract a lot of jam monkeys. That's where we first met Bill and Tom. Tom was such an intense and great guitarist. Bill's first band didn't attract as much attention among my crowd as Cold Sun. I think I heard them only once. But in 69' we all were cut loose from the mooring and on a fairly consistant high. I remember one night best. Sitting at Billy's apartment and he played a new song. Hard dischordant autoharp as Bill screamed 'we live beneath Spider City' [from "South Texas"]... I've got to underline the way Tom looked in those daze. Dark and beautiful. And Billy all in black."

Fred Mitchim, member of the same young Austin scene, recalls his first encounter with Miller and McGarrigle at the Castle Hill freak complex: "I was listening to my friends talk about how Bill was so relieved to have his own place so he wouldn't have to keep his stash in a jar in the back yard any more. This story was my first impression of Bill moments before I met him for the first time. As we headed up the pathway I heard Cold Sun for the first (and most memorable) time. I was struck by the originality of these psychedelic yet also dark songs. And of course Bill's electric auto harp against Tom's searing single note double picking fuzz box echoplex leads. Really nice. When they finished my friends introduced me and I remember noticing Bill to be the first "dressed all in black" person I had met. Back then 6 foot tall Tom would wear no shirt with a orange tuxedo tails coat, red bell bottoms, blue rubber health food sandals, with 3 feet of black hair."

III

Around the time of the Velvet Underground shows at Vulcan, Bill Miller hooked up with another of his sources of inspiration, former Elevators drummer John Ike Walton, who had returned to Texas after a spell as a session musician in California. The newly recruited Amethyst bass player Mike Waugh introduced John Ike to Miller and the band. It seems Walton was on the verge of becoming a member of Amethyst, replacing Roky Erickson’s old Spades drummer John Kearney in an ironic twist, and while he soon bowed out he would play an important part in the band’s evolvement.

From his Elevators days Walton was familiar with Bill Josey Sr who ran the local Sonobeat label, and he suggested that Josey would check Miller and Amethyst out. After having sold the KAZZ-FM radio station in the Fall 1967 to focus on their record label, Josey Sr and Jr had released a string of interesting 45s with local artists, including the only record that the legendary Conqueroo ever would release, as well as excellent singles by the Sweetarts and non-Austin band the Thingies. The label’s story has been chronicled in some detail in Not Fade Away #2, which oddly contains no mention of Cold Sun. Beyond a fairly impressive release catalog, Sonobeat took special interest in the technical aspects of record production, and in fact claimed to be the first label anywhere to feature a mono compatible “solid state stereo” sound on their early 45s. Around this time – 1969 – Josey was working with local band Mariani, named after and lead by their drummer but noted mainly for teenage wiz kid lead guitarist Eric Johnson, as well as with Johnny Winter whose reputation was already growing beyond Austin’s borders in the wake of a Texas music feature in Rolling Stone magazine.

First, excellent Sonobeat rock 45

Bill Miller remembers the first demo session, as almost everything else connected with the band, very clearly: “John Ike told Josey about me and he asked Mike Waugh to set up a meeting. I think the first time Josey heard me was in the studio. Mike and John Ike had only heard me play solo, through an amp at my house. Josey had me record a long demo - about 15 or 20 songs with me singing into a mic in the drum room and with the harp pickup plugged directly into the board. That first demo was supposedly a song demo. I recorded it in one night. That was when Josey`s studio was still in the basement of his house. During the recording of that first demo, he phoned Vince Mariani and had him come over. I saw him from the booth, staring at me and smirking. I emerged from the booth right after recording ‘Here In The Year’ followed by ‘God Is A Girl’ and met Vince, who said to me first off, ‘Man, you`re really a freak’".

Bill Josey Sr was sufficiently impressed with Miller’s demo recordings to offer the band a development deal, where they would work on their music in order to produce recordings that could be pitched to major labels. Sonobeat made demo LPs of Mariani and Johnny Winter following the same principle, as well as a little known folk-oriented artist named Bill Wilson. When John Ike Walton did not join the band they brought in drummer Hugh Patton instead, and with a complete line-up in place they were ready for the recording studio. One final question that needed to be solved was the band’s name, however – they weren’t really Amethyst anymore, and in lack of a name Josey would refer to them as “The Bill Miller Project” for the time. About halfway into the sessions the band came up with COLD SUN, which would stick for the rest of their career. The band still used the Amethyst moniker for a few live gigs around this time.

As with many things in their history, the name “Cold Sun” is enigmatic. The 1989 retrospective album on the Rockadelic label that first brought the Sonobeat recordings to light didn’t even appear under that name, but as “Dark Shadows” which is the title of a popular 1960s mystery TV series. In the liner notes Miller denied ever having been in a band called Cold Sun, and suggested that they had always been called Dark Shadows. However he had referred to the band’s real name in a 1976 interview, where he mentioned that before playing with Roky Erickson in the Aliens he “spent seven years developing the electric auto-harp with a band called Cold Sun”. The name itself is derived from the legends of MU, made famous by the writings of Col James Churchward and more recently by the great 1970s rock band of the same name, led by Merrel Fankhauser. MU and the Lemurian mythology was popular in Cold Sun circles, although Miller says that he tried to come up with an even better band name later on.

Lemuriana - Ancient knowledge rising to consciousness.

IV

After using a local club for recording, the Sonobeat label had set up their own recording studio in the basement of the Joseys’ house. The early stages of the Cold Sun project were located to this basement studio, but the material actually preserved on tape was made at yet another Sonobeat studio in a building on North Lamar that also housed the KOKE radio station, owned by Austin’s then-mayor Roy Butler (ironically, KOKE was Josey’s old KAZZ-FM restructured and renamed). This is where all known Cold Sun recordings were made. Miller estimates the total time for the project to roughly 6 months, including work tapes, demos and actual recording sessions. All of the material had been written prior to the Sonobeat deal, but went through various changes and upgrades as the sessions progressed. There were also a few songs from the first demo tape that were discarded along the way, among them "God Is A Girl", "Graduation Day" and "Do The Ray" which were all written by Miller – the latter being the band’s “dance tune”, inspired by Roger Corman’s "The Man With The X-Ray Eyes" – and “Mind Aura” and “Shifters” by lead guitarist Tom Mcgarrigle. Vince Mariani and Bill Josey both suggested that Miller do all the lead vocals, which may have been the reason that Mcgarrigle’s tunes weren’t used. Incidentally, Cold Sun bass player Mike Waugh was well familiar with Josey, having been used as an in-house session bassist on many Sonobeat recordings before joining the band.

Despite the creative and seemingly unproblematic nature of the sessions, Miller recalls that “Bill Josey did not understand where we were coming from musically. We couldn`t explain to him what`s happening, so I explained to him that Tom and I are simply, ‘Lou Reed fans’. He didn`t understand that, either.” Josey may have had a greater input on the technical aspects of recording Cold Sun than the actual music, and as Miller remembers him “Josey was indeed a wizard - maybe the closest thing that Texas had to a Joe Meek. Josey invented the Sonotone Black Box - a mysterious device, some sort of compressor. I do remember Eric Johnson recording with the Black Box , but he only used it to a minor degree. Johnson did not understand it. Neither did I. I played through it, too, to try it out, but never recorded with it.” The highly unusual autoharp likely ticked Josey’s interest, as there were no precedents for how to record it. As it turned out the autoharp was fed directly into the board on most songs, as was the bass. The Cold Sun recordings were originally intended to be in quadraphonic sound, one of Josey’s pet interests at the time.

In addition to musical arrangements, a lot of work was put into the lyrics. Miller isn’t very proud of them today, but they still stand head and shoulders above the usual hippie fantasy nonsense from the era. Every song has several lines that stick in memory the way well-written rock lyrics do. The vast majority of them were written by Miller, but input and inspiration also came from Mcgarrigle and band friend Winston Taylor. Another lyric collaborator of Cold Sun was Sonobeat associate Herman Nelson, a square-looking middle-aged man who behind his façade was known as a local mystic and white magician. Miller recalls the source for the tracks like this:
“Whatever ideas other than Colonel Jim/Mu stuff came from me, Tom and Winston. ‘Ra-Ma’, ‘Fall’ and ‘Twisted Flower’ were very much Churchward influenced. ‘South Texas’ and ‘See What You Cause’ were not, really, and ‘South Texas’ was mostly a 100% psychedelic anthem drenched in peyote. ‘For Ever’ and ‘Here In The Year’ were 100% me . Only ‘Fall’ and ‘Ra-Ma’ contained lyrics by the other 3 people.“

A numerological infatuation shared by Josey and the band members influenced the Cold Sun lyric writing and recording, according to Miller:

“Josey was superstitious. He believed that the Johnny Winter album’s exact track length was a lucky number. It was 43 or 45 minutes and - oh, I forget how many seconds. You can check the Johnny Winter length - you will find that it is exactly the same length as the Cold Sun album - exactly, to the second. ‘Ra-Ma’, and ‘Fall’ had to be made longer to fit that time frame and a song that Tom wrote was dropped at Tom`s insistance; he was as superstitious as Josey and prone to suggestion in those areas – fearful of certain numbers. So was I. I was desperate for more lyrics and am afraid those weak lines were not very real, just whatever would rhyme. I wrote the weak lines, myself. It was still a bit short in length, so Josey got the idea to add the wind chimes thing at the end of ‘Ra-Ma’.”

The running order presented on the 1989 Rockadelic issue of the Sonobeat tapes differs markedly from how Miller and Josey had envisioned the album back in 1970. This is their original, intended track order:

1.- "South Texas" (Miller)
2.- "Twisted Flower" (Miller)
3.- "Here In The Year' (Miller)
4.- "For Ever" (Miller)
5.- "See What You Cause" (Miller)
6.- "Fall" (Miller, Taylor)
7.- "Ra Ma" (Miller, Mcgarrigle, Nelson)

While there are pros and cons of both structures, one could opine that “South Texas” would have made for an extremely strong opening, and that the album as a whole would build to an appropriate climax with “Ra-Ma”, as originally planned.

Regarding the musical re-arrangements during the sessions, Miller recalls that:

“Only ‘See What You Cause’ remained the same, even the technique of having Tom play bass and the bass player play lead guitar. Tom had no intention of playing bass, but it worked well on that song to do it that way. He and Mike both were cool about that. ‘Fall’ was the same musical passages as before, but, with new words added and the old lyrics 100% discarded - except the part about Dodge - that lyric was the same as the older version. The harmonica was also new in the ‘Josey’ era. In that photo of Cold Sun, you can see a harmonica holder attached to the top of the autoharp if you look closely. It was a harmonica holder with the neck piece removed, which I`d slide into place through brackets on the side of the harp - I would swivel the harp to ‘center’ and use the harp itself as a holder - while playing it - playing both instruments simultaneously.”

The vocals on the Cold Sun album have confused people as there seem to be two different lead vocalists, sometimes switching parts from one line to the next. The truth is that both vocalists are Miller, who in spite of not being a natural vocalist shows a remarkable versatility on the tracks – he will move from a dark, Jim Morrison-influenced vocal style into a piercing, Roky Erickson-like acid-punk voice seemingly without effort, and without ever revealing what is his “true” style. The vocal harmonies were handled by Mcgarrigle and Waugh, with Waugh given two lines of lead vocals on “Twisted Flower”; a source of amusement during the sessions, according to Miller:

”I really wanted Mike Waugh to sing the whole song and he wanted to, very much. However, he was not as good as me on that song as lead vocalist , except for those 2 lines. Bill Josey said, ‘He sounds like Jerry Lewis, and I don’t mean Jerry LEE Lewis!’. Josey later named the middle section (‘Yes, I receive the calls ...’) the Jerry Lewis bit. In vocal sessions, Josey would say, ‘OK, lets try to improve on the third line of the Jerry Lewis bit.”

The eyes of the Gecko.

V

Here are some other Miller comments on the Cold Sun tracks:

Here In The Year -- “Regarding the end section Josey said: 'That is so beautiful. Surely you aren`t really going to let Tom put NOISE over that?'. Later, I laughingly told Tom. His reply was, 'Well, cry me a river'. That song was not a Peyote song, though. It was a prediction of the Internet – but with links to the Ethernet. The original verse was ‘Here in the year 1969’. Lame, huh? Well, it was 1970, finally, and counting - and doubts increased about Josey cutting the ‘Columbia’ deal - I was motivated to alter the lyric a bit.”

Ra-Ma -- ”All bass you hear in the beginning 'dreamy' segment is my thumb doing bass lines on the autoharp as I play the other strings with my fingers… Does the harmonica RUIN it? Does it help? I think it`s good on Ra-Ma. Josey liked it on that song. He smiled. I got it on the first take. I play lead guitar on the first part with vocals, 'Crocodiles line the banks ...' etc. I wrote that guitar part and did not want Tom to waste time on it – he was too busy with other parts. Later, of course, he learned it for the live performances. Does ‘Ra-Ma’ sound better or worse, now that you know it was about Mu ?”

Fall -- ”Herman Nelson wrote far more for Josey than I realized. I had forgotten that he wrote the melody and lyrics to Mariani`s 'Re-Birthday'. I remembered a couple of lines he wrote for Cold Sun - 'Fall'. 'Willow binds like steel/from your lotus wheel' Actually that was written for a different song - If I had used his words in the song he wrote it for, you would hear, 'You may never see what you cause/You may never see what you cause/Willow binds like steel/from YOUR lotus wheel/from YOUR lotus wheel'. Funny, huh?”

See What You Cause -- ”It was an obvious tribute to Roky, whom I had never met at that time. I was good at ghost writing for Rok even back then. That came in handy as I arranged 'Bloody Hammer', 'Night Of The Vampire', 'Two Headed Dog', and others.”

South Texas -- “Inspired by a weekend in South Texas with 2 girls from Corpus Christi and a big bowl of peyote salsa and a drive-in Mexican restaurant with these great big fried tortillas. There was a motel crawling with these tiny geckos. Geckos have voices. Peyote is more AUDIO oriented than any other drug, as far as I know. Tom Mcgarrigle sounded like a Gecko with his guitar, at times.”

Twisted Flower -- “The ‘Bass’ solo at the beginning is actually the autoharp. The drum clicks start it off and then the autoharp comes in with the heavy booming autoharp bass strings playing the bass solo, then Mike Waugh decends into what is a brief 'Bass duet' before the guitar and harp come in with the higher stuff.”

VI

The basic idea for the Cold Sun studio project was that Josey would pitch the finished recordings to a major label, Columbia being the one most frequently mentioned. The method of pressing vinyl demo discs in a limited run was going out of fashion, as modern tape techniques simplified the demoing process. The Mariani LP from 1969 was the last of the Sonobeat vinyl demos, and as the Cold Sun sessions were wrapped up in the Spring 1970, stereo cassette and quarter track dubs of studio tapes were used for presenting the material. This is the reason no demo LP or acetate exists from the original sessions (note: the infamous Cold Sun acetate dates from a later stage, detailed below). Unfortunately, Sonobeat’s financials were under pressure at this point and Josey may not have been able to put enough weight behind his Cold Sun pitch. The label had scored a substantial PR hit with Johnny Winter, whose “Winter” LP from early 1969 (later re-released as “Progressive Blues Experiment” on UA) was recorded with Sonobeat before Winter signed his huge deal with Columbia, but it appears that little or no profit from it ended up with Josey. In the case of Cold Sun it’s possible that the band’s unique brand of psychedelia did not match what record labels expected from an Austin band at the time. In short, no contract was signed, and Sonobeat itself went into low-profile.

Bill Josey Sr kept working with recordings of various local artists in a new studio outside Austin before becoming ill in 1976 and passing away shortly after. His son Bill Josey Jr who had been involved with the label and the KAZZ-FM station, using the on-air DJ alias of “Rim Kelly”, showed some interest in reviving the label in the 1990s, but nothing has yet come of these activities. Bill Miller remembers Josey Sr fondly. “I lost track of Josey news around the time I began to help Roky develop his songs, a few months before BliebAlien did local shows - must have been circa late 1974. I don`t think Bill Josey did much more before his fatal illness, but have wondered what he did in that period. Things were moving so fast. I regret not visiting Bill Josey again. He was a great man, gave a lot to the Texas scene.” Bill Josey’s and the Sonobeat label’s full story still remains to be told.

The Cold Sun saga was far from over, however. The band kept working on their material and gigging locally now and then. Bill Miller recalls several new tunes from the post-Sonobeat era, such as "D.J.`s Locker", "The Worldwide Voice Of James" and "PayOla". A live recording from the time includes "Out Of Phase", "Where The Shadows Lie”, and "Live Again". Most of these were written by Miller, who was the band’s driving force at this stage. Tom Mcgarrigle actually left the band for a period, but came back shortly after. Bass player Mike Waugh, whose musicianship is still held in high regard by Miller, unfortunately left the band and had to be replaced - a very daunting task according to Miller. After another bass player didn’t work out Waugh was replaced with a Mike Ritchey, and with Mcgarrigle back this was the Cold Sun line-up for the rest of the band’s career. The on-stage photo of the band from the Palmer Auditorium (where Bob Dylan had played a legendary show back in 1965) shows this last line-up.

Fred Mitchim recalls the live Cold Sun like this: "On stage Bill would be slumped over his harp and Tom would be standing real straight like Cipollina. My memory of how they were perceived by the locals is from the 2 or 3 times I saw them play. In the clubs it went right over most people's heads. At this time I'm positive no one had ever been exposed to anything like Bill's wide eyed scary psychedelia. At the high point of each set Bill would turn a fuzz box on his harp and play it with a kitchen knife. As I was saying... Zoom... right over their heads. I don't remember them playing out that much but it seems like they we're always slaving over the album they were recording so if you were not a local musician you might not know much about them and back then almost no one was allowed to hear the recordings."

JohnDavid Bartlett has similar memories: "The 'over the head' reference is true. There weren't that many live Cold Sun shows as I remember. But at the ones I saw, when a song would end the musicians in the audience would howl, while the rest looked like the audience in "The Producers" at the end of "Springtime for Hitler".

Bill Miller considers the prospect of going west.

The band was never a success locally. It appears that their music simply was too far removed from what was happening around Austin, the parallel infatuation with country and blues “roots” music being all the rage, and the city’s growing national exposure giving increased credence to that orientation. Cold Sun built partly upon the 13th Floor Elevators, but the Elevators were dead and buried in 1971 and people wouldn’t even admit having once liked them. Their other musical influences were urban and intellectual, and wholly alien to what was going on. As Miller recalls, “We played shows that were a faithfully reproduced live version of the album - but better. We were not that serious about playing in Texas, but would have played more. When you hear that album, whatever it is that makes you like it, you should understand that the same thing that makes you like it served to make clubs and brats in Austin NOT like it”. They weren’t without supporters, though: “Vince [Mariani] never missed any show we did. We reminded him of some lost element from childhood - carnivals. After one show he said, ‘You guys sound like you just walked out of a space ship’".

VII

The band soldiered on into 1973 with Miller busy learning the ropes of the music industry. Tom Mcgarrigle left the band permanently, and Miller relocated briefly to Memphis and worked on his business network. Cold Sun was on the back burner, but another and equally interesting phase was just around the corner. Some time earlier mutual friend Winston Taylor had introduced Miller to Roky Erickson, who had been released after 3 years in Rusk State Hospital and was back in Austin. Miller recalls an early encounter with Roky: “One day, I entered Roky`s house and he had allowed a pile of wax candles to melt into the center of the shag carpet until the carpet became the wick of the giant candle, burning brightly. Roky was sitting on a large chair smoking a J. A man with long hair, glasses, and white robes was at his feet. Roky was barefoot and the man was washing his feet in some special ceremonial golden platen - presumably filled with Holy Water? The man used a special cloth and every motion seemed like some specialized routine, some ritual.”

Patrick Mcgarrigle - you owe him thanks.

Roky Erickson’s career was essentially back to zero at this point. There were some one-off Elevators reunions, but not much else. Roky had a network of friends who helped him through his Rusk period and after, among them Patrick Mcgarrigle, younger brother of Cold Sun’s lead guitarist. In an effort to revitalize Roky’s rock’n’roll career Patrick Mcgarrigle wanted to put a band together, and as part of this Bill Miller was contacted. Bringing in “the only two musicians in Texas I could trust”, Mike Ritchey and Hugh Patton were selected for the rhythm section, and so BLIEBALIEN was born. As Miller points out, this band was essentially Cold Sun under a new name, with Roky on guitar instead of Tom Mcgarrigle. Roky had written a massive number of songs – perhaps as many as 200 – while in Rusk, and the BliebAlien project aimed mainly at arranging these for a rock setting. Live gigs weren’t a priority, but as a local show at the Ritz unexpectedly was booked, Miller was called in to join the band. This marked the beginning of a phase that later would lead to Roky Erickson & the Aliens being formed, an outfit who should need no introduction. The BliebAlien and Aliens years lie outside the scope of this article, but will hopefully be covered elsewhere. According to Miller, it is “even stranger” than the Cold Sun saga.

This isn’t quite the end, however. Sometime around 1973 Cold Sun bass player Mike Ritchey had taken the Sonobeat master tapes and had an acetate made from them. The main reason was that he wanted to be able to replay the recordings – on which he doesn’t actually play – on regular hifi equipment. As far as can be determined, only 1 single acetate was made, and remained in Ritchey’s possession. At one point he played it for Roky Erickson, who was surprised as he hadn’t heard of neither Cold Sun nor Bill Miller’s songwriting capabilities. As Miller tells it, Roky confronted him after hearing the acetate:

ROKY : "Now, Bill, who is the writer in this band?"
BILL : "You are, Roky. Why would I want Bill Miller for a writer when I could have Roky Erickson? Do you think I`m stupid?"

Soon after this incident the Cold Sun acetate and the band itself disappeared off the face of the earth; the only trace of them anywhere was a brief 1976 interview reference by Miller. As it turned out, it would be 15 years before anyone heard of Cold Sun again.

VIII

“At one time my greatest fear would have been the thought of anyone hearing the old Cold Sun recordings.”

In 1989, Rich Haupt and his partner Mark Migliore of the Dallas-based Rockadelic record label were approached by Michael Ritchey, who knew Migliore since before. Ritchey wanted them to hear something with his “old band”. As Haupt recalls it,

”It was a 3 or 4 song acetate labeled Cold Sun.....needless to say when we listened to it we were blown away. Michael got Mark in touch with Bill Miller and he tried to work out a deal to release the material. After many conversations, Mark gave up and concluded that these songs would never be released as Bill was pretty adamant about NOT releasing them. I asked Mark if I could give it a try and after many hours on the phone I think I convinced Bill that his material was GREAT and that it would be a shame if no one got to hear the LP. Bill finally agreed but there were some details that were difficult to work out. The biggest obstacle was the name of the band. Michael Ritchey, who was responsible for getting the ball rolling (although he was in the band AFTER the recordings) insisted the name of the band was/should be Cold Sun. Bill on the other hand insisted on Dark Shadows, which was something he made up years after the band was defunct. I did my best to compromise and printed both "names" on the cover. The second big issue was the inserts that went in the LP. Bill wanted his extensive notes while Michael wanted a more simplistic, coherent insert. Again I tried my best to compromise and put Bill's notes in 1/2 the LP's and Michael's in the other half. There is no question that this is the best LP we have had the privilege of releasing, and hopefully Bill is glad that it ultimately has worked out the way it has. I could have pressed MANY copies of this both on vinyl and CD over the years but have stuck to my word of only releasing 300 copies.”

It should be pointed out that the acetate was not the source for the Rockadelic reissue, but rather dubs from the original Sonobeat master tapes, which were still in Miller’s possession. The acetate only features about 2/3rds of the material on the Rockadelic record, and is in pretty worn shape -- a fact that didn't keep it from selling for a whopping $10.000 on the record collector market recently. The actual deal reached between Rockadelic Records and Miller was unusual:

“All Rich Haupt paid me for the album was: A giant billboard sized picture of Simone Simon. He said - "If you let me release this, I will pay you. How much money do you require ?" I said, "I would require a giant billboard sized picture of Simone Simon, so I can erect a proper shrine for worship." Rich said , "Who is Simone Simon ?". I told him: Star of "Cat People", the icon star of Jacques Tourneur, who was the David Lynch of the 1940`s. Jacques Tourneur directed "I Walked With A Zombie". So, Rich got me a giant picture of Simone Simon. And I sent him the Josey reel dub from the Josey master.”

The album front cover was designed by Rockadelic, while Miller suggested putting the tegu lizard on the back. Apart from the liner note insert, the package included a color on-stage photograph of the band. The release was an instant success among fans of underground psychedelia, and the 300 numbered copies sold out very quickly. Despite having been bootlegged (in inferior sound and without inserts), it now changes hands for over $100. Even after the album was released Miller was unimpressed with his old recordings, and would not discuss the Cold Sun era. It would be several years and much prodding from fans across the world before he recognized that they may have great value, even if they failed to wow the world back in 1970. As of this writing plans for a CD release of the Sonobeat masters, and hopefully some bonus live material, are in progress. Meanwhile, Miller – who today is known as Billy Angel – has entered a third, or fourth, phase in his career, now as autoharpist with the Blood Drained Cows, a Southwestern rock band that also features members from 1980s legends the Angry Samoans. The Blood Drained Cows are gigging frequently around USA and have a new CD out, titled “13”. On stage the band plays a 13th Floor Elevators cover, thus closing a circle that began in Austin 1966.

© Patrick Lundborg and Lysergia.com, 2003-2008

This article has also appeared in print in MISTY LANE magazine #18, 2003.

REFERENCES

1. “Texas Rock & Roll Spectacular” by Chet Flippo, in Phonograph Record Magazine, March-1974

2. 13th Floor Elevators article by Stephanie Chernikowski, in Not Fade Away magazine #1, 1975.

3. Sonobeat article by Doug Hanners in Not Fade Away magazine #2, 1977. (Online with Bill Josey photo at www.scarletdukes.com/st/tm_aussonobeat.html)

4. Texas rock article by Larry Sepulvado and John Burks in Rolling Stone, issue #23.

5. Brown Paper Sack magazine #1, edited by Andrew Brown, 1997.

6. “13th Floor Elevators – the Complete Reference File”, book by Patrick Lundborg, 2002. lysergia_2.tripod.com/elevRefFileMain.htm

7. “Journey To Tyme”, discography of Texas music by David Shutt, 2nd edition 1981.

8. The Ghetto website, with Austin 1965-69 article by Gerry Storm.

9. Rockadelic Records website, with Cold Sun audio clip

10. Blood Drained Cows site with links to Billy Angel's site.

To discuss and learn more about Texas music from the 1960s and early 1970s, visit the Texas 60s Refuge.

Source / Lysergia

Many thanks to Patrick Lundborg and Thomas McGarrigle / The Rag Blog
Posted by richard jehn at 4:37 PM
Labels: Austin, Music, Psychedelic Rock
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2 Make/read comments:

Anonymous said...

It is so cool to hear of Captain (I think it is Harvey) Gann. The Chicano's called him "El Ganso"- the goose. He was a nice man at the time but scary.
In 65-69 peyote was such a
cool relaxed, and legal trip. What fun it was just moving from one friends house to the next. Music, matrimonial hammocks with six of us in it, "dirty martins comeback place", so so loving and so so nice.
Its a time that I'll never find again.
Peace
pms
Jun 28, 2009 10:02:00 PM
Pollyanna said...

Wonderful story, but a couple of nitpicks:

1. You forgot Bubble Puppy! I think they were from Houston but played nearly every week in Austin the summer of 66, usually at the Jade Room, on San Jacinto, I think(it's a little hazy!), and were a very popular acid (or maybe 'shroom!) rock band.

2. The I.L. Club on E. 11th Street - the building is still there, next to L.D. Davis' White Swan - was a long-established black beer joint long before psychedelia came upon the scene, and endured as such long after. (I wouldn't be surprised to walk in there today and find it unchanged.)

The Littlefields and their regulars were amused by the hippies, and they provided a venue for many acts, including Shiva's and the rockabilly blues of Hub City Movers (Ike Ritter, Ed Vizard, and, I think, Angela Strehli's brother, is it Al?). Fashionably-dressed black couples out on the town would stop by the I.L. to marvel at the hippy dancing, to them the most uncoordinated hopping around imaginable. Best were the nights when blues brought everybody together, and black couples and white couples alternated dancing on the small floor, the better to admire and/or be amused by other folkses' strange ways.

But the first regularly-booked "underground rock club" in Austin was surely the New Orleans Club on Red River, and the 13th Floor Elevators were surely the first underground band to play there, in 1966. Woody Ashwood, who will be remembered by some of our Ghetto friends, used to run weed out of Mexico (so legend says) in his exterminator's truck. He got a job bartending at the New Orleans, a flat-out frat club, and hooked the Elevators up with a gig, nearly losing his own job over it, until the manager figured out that the freaks were starving for a place to dance, would turn out in force every week, and could down as much cerveza as the frat crowd. Roky, et al, were the summer phenom; and who knew if there would ever be another summer anyway?

East Austin in general was very open and welcoming to the freak bands when other clubs stayed moronically stuck in the musical past. The first Vulcan Gas Co. lightshow wasn't at the Congress Ave. club, but at Dorris Miller Auditorium in Rosewood Park, at a Shiva's/Conqueroo/Bubble Puppy concert weeks before the Vulcan opened its doors.

Another place that deserves mention in the history of Austin psychedelic music is the Methodist Student Center, formerly located on Guadalupe St. The Meth early on had a beat-style coffee house, the Ichthus, where poetry was read and folk guitarists tried to raise money for their pot busts. There was also a large open auditorium with a stage, where folding chairs could be set up, or tables, or whatever was needed. Political meetings were held there. Plays were performed. People got married. Guided gently by Rev. Bob Briehan, the Meth was a popular, trusted gathering place, with the advantage of having a wise man on premise should one be needed. It is there that I remember first dancing to Shiva's Head Band, and being totally happy and free.

No one who was around in those days could possibly think that the Elevators, for all that they were and all that Roky has become in the years since, were the only thing happening musically. In 1965 and 1966, somehow, the idea of making music and the ability to make music seemed to spread exponentially, so that people who'd never thought of themselves as musicians, or of music-making as accessible to the musically untrained, came to feel that "everything we do is music", and an enormous amount of creativity was unleashed, and is still spreading ripples around the world.

Alex Chilton, Big Star, and Austin 1975

2010-04-26T08:01:00.003-05:00

photo by Michael O'Brien

from Andrew Bennett:

Everyone has a Chilton story. It was 1975 and I was hanging my hat in Austin, with a sweet red head named Maggie Mae, about 3 blocks off of S. Congress near the Continental club. We were sitting around listening to KOKE FM, and this killer playlist that went something like, Dylan's " When dogs run free" and Peter Tosh's " Steppin Razor" and then the "The Ballad of el Goodo" from #1 record. I thought it was the Byrds/ McGuinn/Hillman, but something told me it wasn't. It was clearly a continuation and a departure simultaneously.

Im not sure of the time of day or night, as was to be expected in those days. I cannot even remember who was spinning records, it could have been Candy Kicker, Dr.Dinger, the Perfesser or Joe Nick Potoski ( Joe Nick has written a biography on Willie Nelson that is sensational and a real schooling on country music in general and Tx music specifically), Anyway, I remember waiting patiently for the playlist to be announced as was customary in those days. It was Big Star and I was dead set on finding it at the record store- nada zero copies anywhere.

I followed Chilton / Big Star off and on over the ensuing years and fell in love with "Radio city" and especially " Sister lovers". I remember a huge boost in popularity in the 80's after Ivo's 4AD compilation's ("This mortal coil/It'll end in tears") with reinvigoration of versions of Chilton's "Kangaroo" and "Holocaust" 1984 ( covered by Howard Devoto/ Buzzcocks/Magazine) along with Bell's "I am the cosmos" and "You and your sister"( kin Deal) from the later "This Mortal Coil /Blood" 1991.

On a side note, a great version of Rodney Crowell's "Till i gain control again" and Spirit's "Natures Way" are also on "This Mortal Coil / Blood" - worth a listen.

I just came across some tangentially related esoteria. The SF / TX connection is always an interesting musical journey. I knew about these guys, but never really investigated their music, On the heels of the 13th floor elevators, and almost contemporaries of Chilton was Cold Sun, they were making some great psychedellia with autoharp/ harmonica combo as a lead instrument. ( a harmonica brace fastened to the autoharp)

“There was a mythical Austin that is the root of all subsequent myths about it being such a ‘cool place’. That time was so magical and wondrous that the memory of it still fuels the fake scenes there, today.” Patrick Lundborg, 2003

Far West Texas Under the Clouds

2010-04-18T11:11:00.013-05:00

Still a bit of the winter nip in Far West Texas in mid April, although it warmed up enough to sneak in a swim at Balmorhea. The deer and the antelope played.

hanging with the old pros

2010-04-13T21:09:00.008-05:00

Abner Haynes of the Dallas Texans of the American Football League, Dallas' first pro football star in 1960

Tony Liscio and Jerry Norton, two pioneering Dallas Cowboys. Jerry played for the '61 Cowboys when they weren't very good, as well as Philadelphia, Green Bay, and the Chicago/St.Louis Cardinals after high school ball for Texarkana, Texas High.
Tony started with the Cowboys in '63 when they were bad and was with the Cowboys in '71 when they won their first Super Bowl. He knows good from bad.

Letty De La Vega and Band filmed by Hank Sinatra

2010-04-13T21:05:00.002-05:00

at the Austin Outhouse Reunion at Giddyups

Ross Avenue, Dallas, Texas

2010-04-13T20:58:00.003-05:00

one way to sell ice cream

Swamp Pop - What it is, Where to hear it

2010-03-31T14:27:00.016-05:00

In a sweet bit of serendipity, I stumbled upon the online version of KMRC AM from Morgan City, Louisiana, the Swamp Dog. It's a pretty great local radio station that plays nuthin' but swamp pop, which is sorta like rhythm n blues and rock n roll as interpreted by Cajuns and Creoles, only more soulful and sentimental. It's the Highway 90 sound that Larry Lange & His Lonely Knights are championing - songs like Cookie and the Cupcakes' "Mathilda," "Going Out With the Tide" by Jivin' Gene Bourgeoise and the Jokers, anything by the Fabulous Boogie Kings, "Sometimes" by Gene Thomas , "Sweet Dreams by Tommy McLain -you get the drift. It's belly-rubbing slow dancing, getting down and dirty in the heat and humidity. Tune in, turn on, and have a drink or three.

Ray Wylie Hubbard's Lowdown Greasy Enlightenment Hour

2010-03-31T08:52:00.008-05:00

As I said previously, the highlight of my 2010 SXSW (besides calling the SXSW Championship Softball game in Kevin Connor, won by the staff this year) was hanging at Casey's shed with Ray Wylie Hubbard, Danny Barnes, James McMurtry, Gurf Morlix, Roky Erickson and his son Jegar, Will Sheff and all the Okkervill River gang, along with Dallas Wayne and Jeremy Tepper from Outlaw Country on Sirius/XM satellite radio.

Ray conducted some great interviews over the course of the afternoon, but you don't have to take my word for it.

This Saturday, April 3, you can hear it for yourself with a free listen on Outlaw Country on Sirius/XM at 4 pm central, and again on Sunday, April 4 at 8 pm central, Tuesday, April 6 at 7 pm central, and Thursday April 8 at 11 pm.

Just paste this into your URL
https://home.sirius.com/sirpromosetupview.do?utm_campaign=SIR30DAYTRIAL&utm_source=HNSI&utm_medium=web

or click on the headline above.

Details here:

Ray Wylie Hubbard’s Lowdown Greasy Enlightenment Hour

SIRIUS XM’s Outlaw Country (Sirius 63, XM 12)

Description: Texas Hill Country hero Ray Wylie Hubbard hosts an hour of music and conversation recorded during the recent SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX, in the shed behind the home of Texas Music Office ambassador Casey Monahan. The “Lowdown Greasy Enlightenment Hour” will feature stories behind the songs on Hubbard’s latest album A. Enlightenment, B. Endarkenment (Hint: There is no C); an exclusive interview with Lone Star legend Roky Erickson and Will Sheff of Okkervil River; and down and dirty chats with fellow Texas musicians James McMurtry, Danny Barnes, and Gurf Morlix, along with author Joe Nick Patoski, the dean of Texas music journalists.
On-Air Time: Saturday, April 3 5 pm ET
Rebroadcast: Sunday, April 4 9 pm ET; Tuesday, April 6 8 pm ET; Thursday, April 8 12 am ET

South By Casey's Shed

2010-03-19T20:02:00.016-05:00

Jeremy Tepper and Dallas Wayne put together a little SXSW get together at Casey Monahan's shed in historic Swedish Hill in East Austin on Friday for some Q and A for the Outlaw Country with Ray Wylie Hubbard asking the questions and getting answers from Gurf Morlix, James McMurtry, Danny Barnes, Roky Erickson and Will Sheff - the cream of cool when it comes to music from Austin Texas.

It was a stone groove and a sweet way to spend the day. Heard lots of good BS including Danny talking about growing up in Belton, his new album for ATO, his love of John Cage and other contemporary classical music. Ray weighed on his new writing project while riding his stunning recorded work A) Enlightenment, B) Endarkment Hint: There Is No C. Gurf played tracks from his forthcoming album of Blaze Foley songs (until today, I considered Jimmy Pizzitola's version of Blaze's "Cold Cold World" to be the best cover version of that song; being second to Gurf's version is not a bad thing). Roky and Will talked about their new collaboration True Love Cast Out All Evil with Will's band, Okkervil River which is nothing short of stunning.

Visiting with engineer Stuart Sullivan, shooting the breeze with Andrew Halbreich and George Carver, meeting Lauren Gurgiolo of Okkervil River, talking Anderson Fair with Gurf's Significant Other Brendy, comparing Paul Westerberg and Jim Dickinson notes with Darren Hill, and giving props to Jegar Erickson made my day. I hope yours was as sweet and rewarding.

The interviews will be aired on Outlaw Country on Sirius XM directly, if not sooner.

Danny Barnes and Casey Monahan

Roky and Will

The Roky/Okervill River project team

Gurf and Ray

Will Sheff

Mark Alan Stamaty and Elvis

2010-03-07T10:07:00.007-06:00

(click to headline to go to Mark Alan Stamaty's website)

Maybe it's because I'm an inveterate doodler at heart and a failed Jimmy Hatlo, but I've been a fan of Mark Alan Stamaty since I first beheld his intensely detailed work in the Village Voice back in the 1970s. I've followed him through his Washingtoons, the New Yorker and his spate of children's books. But I haven't really appreciated him or considered his work seriously until some shed time with my pal Casey who is also a fan of the Stam and actually knows him.

Casey gave me this book SHAKE, RATTLE, AND TURN THAT NOISE DOWN! HOW ELVIS SHOOK UP MUSIC, ME, AND MOM (Knopf Books For Young Readers) in which Mark Alan Stamaty reveals all - his childhood obsessions with Elvis, the transistor radio, and teen culture, as filtered through the eyes of a Greek-Jewish kid growing up in New York.

The story line is engaging, even if you don't feel the same way Mark does about the Big E. But what grabs the eye is the artwork. Call the cat a cartoonist if you must. I tend to see him more as a (ahem) visionary artist, aka an intuitive artist. His extreme sense of detail may strike some as obsessive (the lettering is one tip-off) and was once associated with "folk art." Indeed, he shares many of the same artistic qualities as Howard Finster in his rendering of human portraits, minus the het-up religious fervor of the late Mr. Finster, a Born-Again if there ever was one, but plus a true passion for the people he draws, especially his gallery of music heroes (James Brown! Jackie Wilson! Fats! Little Richard! Buddy Holly!).

Bottom line, no one - not even Crumb - can tell a good first-person story through drawing like Mark Alan Stamaty does, and Elvis once again serves as a great vehicle through which a great American story can be told, although I'm more enraptured by the renderings of other icons such as Davy Crockett, Roy Rogers and Gabby Hays on the television, the radio, a turntable, and dancers.

Dig it.

Conjunto 101 reviewed

2010-02-26T08:14:00.002-06:00

for more, check out conjuntoislife.com

''Conjunto 101'' goes far beyond the rudimentary
By
Hector Saldana
on Feb 25, 10 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At a fundraiser at Instituto Cultural de Mexico on Wednesday aimed at encouraging young Hispanics to consider the health profession as a career, a presentation called "Conjunto 101" was in no way as rudimentary as it sounded.

Author Joe Nick Patoski and photographer John Dyer entertained and educated a crowd of about 60 people with stories about their long involvement in the conjunto music scene.

Both men have documented, in their own ways, the pioneers of the Tex-Mexican folk music idiom. They aren't trespassing on the sacred bones of Narciso Martinez or Santiago Jimenez Sr.

"What are two gringos doing up here?" Patoski said in his opening remarks. The truth is he is among a handful of journalists giving the subject any respect.

His credentials -- 17 years at Texas Monthly, best-selling books about Selena ("Selena: Como la Flor"), Stevie Ray Vaughan (Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire") and Willie Nelson ("Willie Nelson: An Epic Life") and managing the True Believers - are unmatched.

Likewise, Dyer's photo books "El Vaquero Real: The Original American Cowboy" and "Conjunto" capture the true essence of the region.

Patoski has always hailed San Antonio as one of the great American cities. Tonight was no different. "San Antonio is one of the few places in the U.S. with a sense of place," Patoski said.

Dyer immediately began documenting conjunto when he moved to San Antonio in 1990. "It hit me that something had to be done," Dyer said.

About conjunto: "The sad thing is that most people that live outside of here have never even heard the word," Dyer added.

At the heart of conjunto is the accordion. Mexican musicians were drawn to the European instrument and the polkas played on it. They soon invented "musica alegre."

"It's the instrument that travels best," Patoski said. "Accordion, to me, is the national instrument of Texas. Conjunto is Texas specific.'"

Patoski shared many stories (he hung out with Esteban "Steve" Jordan" in Corpus Christi in 1977). Likewise, Dyer delighted the audience with a tale about Mingo Saldivar and how the musician, a former paratrooper, wanted to parachute into the conjunto festival at Rosedale Park.

Equally enlightening was the authentic and heartwarming music program at the top and end of the session.

Bajo sexto player Rudolfo Lopez played songs with Conjunto Heritage Taller student Rito Pena, a clean-cut, 11-year-old who plays a Hohner Panther accordion.

"It's a labor of love," Lopez said about keeping traditions alive. "Conjunto music is not concert music, if you hear it, you want to dance." Sure enough, a couple danced.

Those interested in making a contribution to the scholarship fun of the nonprofit Mexican American Hispanic Physicians Association (MAHPA) may call (210) 340-8824 or contact online at www.mapa-sa.org.

A Walk Through El West Side of San Antonio

2010-02-19T11:08:00.004-06:00

On Wednesday night, February 24, photographer John Dyer, Rudy Lopez and Bene Medina and students of the Conjunto Heritage Taller will present Conjunto 101 at the Instituto Cultural de Mexico in downtown San Antonio.

John's book Conjunto (University of Texas Press) is the definitive photo book of conjunto and Rudy and Bene are carrying on the tradition by teaching the music to kids in San Antonio.

Click on the headline to watch John's film tour of El West Side de San Anto.

Joe Nick on the Rio Grande for Texas Highways

2010-02-19T10:23:00.007-06:00

Click on the headline for a short vid

photo by J. Griffis Smith

Floating the Canyons: A Rio Grande Restorative

By Joe Nick Patoski

Maybe it’s the exhilarating sense of isolation, or the feeling that you’ve fallen off the edge of the earth into another world. But floating the big canyons of the Big Bend by raft, canoe, or kayak is an experience like none other in Texas or the world beyond. Some folks take to the Rockies or New York or somewhere overseas for vacation. I prefer the exotic charms of a trip on the Rio Grande in the Big Bend any day.

Extreme southwest Texas looks like nowhere else: a pure desert and mountains landscape with uninterrupted vistas and a sprawling sky overhead. Each deep gorge —Santa Elena, Mariscal, and Boquillas canyons inside Big Bend National Park, Colorado Canyon upstream, and the Lower Canyons below the park—exudes the kind of majesty the Texas myth was built upon. Only in this case, these are the real deal, towering like skyscrapers as much as 1,500 feet above the river, rendering insignificant those few humans floating through. It’s a setting as surreal as any dreamscape. No matter what kind of expedition you embark on, just remember: Once you’re on the Rio Grande, there’s no turning back, because you’ve left the rest of the world behind.

People like you and me have had the chance to enjoy the extreme beauty of this most unusual place ever since the company then known as Far Flung Adventures started organizing Big Bend river excursions in the early 1970s. Since then, whenever the Rio Grande is flowing (which isn’t always a given), river outfitters have been guiding visitors into the canyons for short day trips and overnighters, as well as longer expeditions that can last for days and weeks.

Some trips are rudimentary, straight-up river runs with no more than a boat, paddles, life vests, and a guide. Other trips are full-immersion experiences where you can enjoy gourmet meals, lectures, seminars on photography, geology, astronomy, and writing, or with singer-songwriters or classical chamber groups providing the entertainment. On some deluxe trips, you don’t have to pick up a paddle or pack up a tent unless you want to.

No matter what kind of expedition you embark on, just remember: Once you’re on the Rio Grande, there’s no turning back, because you’ve left the rest of the world behind.

Cell phone service and roadside assistance are nonexistent. The nearest hospital is 100 miles north, and it’s more than a day’s hike to a convenience store. In exchange for such remoteness, you’re rewarded with constantly changing scenery that few others have been privileged to see as your boat floats between sheer walls rising above the water. Around every bend, the senses intensify. Revelations are served up on an abstract palette with otherworldly visuals emerging from water, rock, and sky. On a clear night, the starlight can be so bright you can see in the dark. Smells become sharper in the Big Bend’s canyons, especially around whitewater rapids, when rushing water churns into froth. When it rains, wet creosote in the surrounding Chihuahuan Desert emits an aromatic scent that seduces the nostrils like perfume. Absolute silence is broken only by voices, the sounds of water flowing and wind blowing, the steady stroke of a paddle, the distinctive descending trill of canyon wrens and the occasional screech of a hawk, your breathing, and your heartbeat.

When you your voice echoes three or four times, bouncing off distant rock walls. The daily ritual emphasizes relaxing recreation and fun: Pancakes, eggs, and hot coffee or hot chocolate for breakfast, breaking camp, paddling, the careful scouting of rapids and the adrenaline rush of running them, stopping for sandwiches and drinks for lunch, some more paddling and trail exploring in the afternoon, making camp, enjoying Dutch-oven delicacies for dinner accompanied by stories told by river guides (who are a breed unto themselves), casual conversations between river trippers, and personal revelations. Every moment is a Kodak moment,even when the winds kick up and the dust blows.

I’ve had the pleasure of doing all five canyons in and around Big Bend National Park, from half-day power paddles to more leisurely week-long passages with time to hike into side canyons and soak in hot springs. Every trip remains vivid in my mind. Camp on the left side of the river going downstream and you’re in Texas. Camp on the right side of the river and you’re in Mexico. Note the absence of humanity, including no air traffic overhead.

Granted, some Big Bend river trip memories include not-so-pleasant moments, because river trips are unpredictable. Like the time we almost made it into Santa Elena Canyon before the heavens rained thunder and lightning upon us, forcing us to move our tents to higher ground twice in the dark (the upside was peeking out of the tent to see waterfalls gushing out of every pouroff along the rim whenever the sky lit up).

The next day, my son and I tumped our inflatable kayak as we entered the canyon,
forcing us to swim to safety. It was almost an hour before our party of nine fetched the boat downstream. When we reached Rockslide, the one dangerous rapid in the canyon, our group lost another boat and we spent another two hours retrieving it. Both efforts required the kind of teamwork and coordination that brought out the best in our group. The skies cleared and we camped on a grassy vega by the river, watched Mexican free-tailed bats flitter about in the gathering dusk, enjoyed a warm meal by campfire, and went to sleep watching satellites and meteors. My son and I still talk about that trip, and smile as we recount even the more perilous parts of our adventure.

Someday, I hope to budget a month or so and do the whole 250-river-mile run from Colorado Canyon upstream of Lajitas to the Lower Canyon takeout near Dryden, as one man in a canoe told me he was doing when we met in Lajitas a few years back. Whether or not I take that on is almost beside the point. All I know is I’m way overdue for a Big Bend river trip. I get that feeling whenever the last trip ends. River running on the Rio Grande is a restorative I didn’t know I needed until the first time I did it. Now I can’t live without it.

For his next book, Dallas, the Cowboys (and even the Texans)

2010-01-30T13:06:00.009-06:00

from Robert Wilonsky's Unfair Park book club blog in the Dallas Observer (full story and comments if you link on the headline).

This morning, Friend of Unfair Park PeterK sent me the photo at right -- quite the bargain on eBay, especially since it's got Hall of Famer Hank Stram's signature and remains at the low, low price of $9.95 thus far. I then forwarded it to my old friend and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Willie Nelson biographer Joe Nick Patoski, since he just so happens to be working on a book about the Dallas Texans, the Dallas Cowboys and Dallas itself.

"It breaks my heart to see that picture and think of the game that wasn't," says the former Texas Monthly writer, who left the magazine in 2003 after 18 years on staff. "The Texas death match, loser leaves town."

Joe Nick's latest tome doesn't have a title yet, only a publisher (Little, Brown again) and a due date (November). He's been in and out of town in recent months interviewing, well, you name it -- from the great Abner Haynes to Mike Rhyner. The book spans 1960 to 1979 and covers everything: "race, politics, assassinations, high school football, SMU, the Southwest Conference and the 1952 Dallas Texans, which everyone's forgotten and had to leave town before the season was over because they were so awful and and became the Baltimore Colts."

But, ultimately, it's about the two men -- Dallas Cowboys founder Clint Murchison Jr. (who, 50 years ago today, was granted the NFL franchise) and AFL co-founder and Dallas Texans owner Lamar Hunt. And it's about one Fort Worth native's fascination with Dallas.

PATOSKI-Joe-Nick.jpg
Joe Nick Patoski
"The nice way of putting it is: This is a cultural history of the Dallas Cowboys focusing on 1960 to 1979, and it's as much a cultural history of the city as the team," Joe Nick says. "The Willie Nelson book was my Texas book. Yes, it was about Willie, but also about Texas and Texans and who are these people are and what is this place. This is the next chapter. It's part of my lifelong attempt to figure out Texas and Texans, and it's been in front of my face my whole life -- growing up in Fort Worth and looking at Dallas.

"I was talking to one player's ex-wife, from Fort Worth, the other day. I said, 'Did you grow up looking at Dallas with hate?' She said, 'I loved Dallas. It had Cinerama.' This is personal. I have been trying to figure out Dallas my whole life, and sports, especially the Cowboys, are so much a part of the culture. I am making the case: America's Team, the most valuable sports franchise in the world, couldn't have happened anywhere else."

Reason I sent Joe Nick the photo is because, well, I know how much he loved the Texans. Because his book may be about the Cowboys, more or less, but I sometimes think Joe Nick wishes the Texans had remains Dallas's sole pro football franchise -- if nothing else, because they had the cooler uniforms. Hence, his decision to use Hunt and Murchison as his central protagonists.

"The book's about this great oil baron scion pissing match," he says. "Hell, yes, the book's about the Texans. And about what happened when they left. You've got one city where two sons of oil barons -- and these are two of the richest men in America -- and they grow up smitten with football and they butt heads for three years, and what a glorious time to love football. People they have these issues with Jerry, and all I can say is he may be a rich owner, but he's in the shadow of the richest owner to ever own a pro franchise, Clint Murchison. Well, and Lamar Hunt."

The sound of a frightened young mountain lion

2010-01-25T21:02:00.004-06:00

calling for Mama (listen close)

Keep San Antonio Lame

2010-01-25T20:31:00.021-06:00

from a San Antonio Spurs fanblog, a very spot-on ode to San Antonio (although I would've included Steve Jordan at Salute on Friday nights and listening to Guero Polkas on Radio Jalapeno, KEDA, 1540 AM, the only full time conjunto radio station in the nation; bonus points for mentioning the Ghost Tracks):

KEEP SAN ANTONIO LAME

The_big_four_tiny by bellasa on Jan 25, 2010 1:57 AM CST Comment 57 comments

Proud Texas Citizens. Kinky Friedman, on the left could have been our Governor. You gotta love a guy who's campaign slogans are "How Hard Could It Be?" and "Why The Hell Not?" The legend on the right is Willie Nelson, who once smoked pot on the White House roof. Texas Proud, Baby!

So, in honor of LD's upcoming epic journey, I promised myself I'd write a few words about my hometown. What? He's already in town? Bummer. So, OK, I guess I'll post this anyway. For the rest of you peeps. Here's the short and not so sweet lowdown on San Antonio. It's the 7th largest city in the nation. It's boring. It's hot. There's nothing to do here. So that's pretty much it. David, I'm so sorry you have to spend a week in this city. I've lived here a long time, but I'm thoroughly medicated so it doesn't really affect me anymore.

(Just want to give credit where it's due... here's the Keep San Antonio Lame myspace page and facebook page.) Learn it. Live it.

Thanks for coming, please tip your waitress on the way out.. More after the jump if your masochistic self is up to it.

Did the part time viewers leave? Is it just us? Good. Because now I'll give you the real insiders view of San Antonio. But keep it to yourself, because I'm doing my damndest to move SA back to #10 on the population list. It's not gonna be easy. I understand people are migrating to this state at an average of 1000 people per day. (And I don't even want to think about the percentage of Laker fans in that number).

Damn it Lyle, you're not helping me out here!

Alright, first and foremost, I absolutely love my town. Love. It. It's quirky, there's a nice cultural mix and most folks are very friendly. As a matter of fact, it has the feel of the ultimate small town. If you placed 10 random San Antonians in a room together, by the end of the night those folks will have discovered some common connection. OMG, I went to school with your cousins sister. Or your neighbor is my dentist. Wow, didn't we once sit next to each other at a Santana concert? And so on and so forth. This kind of thing happens all the time. All the time. Trust me someone on Monday night will say, "You look familiar". Seriously.

Let's move on to the name, it's San Antonio. San Anto is also sometimes acceptable if you're a local and in the know. Never, ever is it permissable to use San Antone. Unless your name is Bob Wills or Patsy Cline or you're singing San Antonio Rose. That's it. The only exception. So, don't do it. That's right... I'm looking at you, Marv Albert.

Contrary to popular belief, the Larry O'Brien trophy does not live here full time. Unfortunately. Let's face facts, that's a beautiful shot.

Right about now you're probably wondering about the title of this post. I borrowed it. And it totally epitomizes the perception of the city. Those that get it embrace it, those that don't... well, they embrace it, too. In the words of the creator of the Keep San Antonio lame movement, "A movement which requires no effort. We are lame and we love it... or leave it. Remember: Lameness, like all else, is just an illusion. Be the Lameness". Like I said, we're quirky.

Here are a few facts to get out of the way or if you want more in depth info, you can head over to the Official City Website or the City Wiki page. People (that would be the Native Americans) have gathered around this area for about 12,000 years. For the most part, the Native Americans lived at the San Antonio Springs, which they called Yanaguana which means "refreshing waters". San Pedro Park (home of the Springs) is the second oldest municipal park in the nation. The oldest? That would be a lovely park called the Boston Commons.

Huh... would you look at that? Where are the Native Americans?

San Antonio wasn't officially named until 1691. It was the feast day of Saint Anthony of Italy, so Spanish explorers and missionaries named the city in his honor. Actually, there are some reports that another Spanish Explorer, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca visited and documented the city by the river in 1536.

There are four major industries that support the economy in SA. Financial Services, Government, Health Care with a strong Bio-Medical Industry and Tourism. For your information, the number one tourist destination in Texas is the San Antonio Riverwalk followed very closely by the number two destination, the historic Alamo.

The San Antonio Riverwalk was in danger of becoming a paved over sewer system after the great flood of 1921 killed over 50 people in the downtown area. Instead, an architect / conservationist by the name of Robert Hugman convinced city leaders that flood gates could regulate the flow of water. With monies from the Roosevelt New Deal WPA program, Mr. Hugman's dream become a reality. And may I say thank you, thank you, thank you Mr. Hugman! The Riverwalk is now home to dozens of Hotels, Bars, Restaurants, Nightclubs and Shops. However, my favorite parts of the River are those that are not commercially developed. I like walking by the cypress trees and especially enjoy the new museum reach extension of the Riverwalk.

Just one little thing about the Riverwalk, we drain it during the first week of January. Yeah, you heard that right and no, you don't want to know about all the items that have been found in that river. So don't come during that time period, unless you want to be disappointed. However, we even turn that into a party and we crown a Mud King and Queen. Once again, we bring the quirky.

My favorite use for the Riverwalk, a championship parade!

Enough about the riverwalk, let's talk about The Alamo. Approximately 250 Texians (the numbers are still in question) held off approximately 2400 Mexican soldiers for 12 days. All the Texians (some of which were of Mexican descent) died, although they were able to kill 400 - 600 before perishing. The battle of the Alamo, instead of quelling resistance helped Sam Houston and increased the number of soldiers willing to fight for their freedom and the future Republic of Texas. The final battle over Texas took place a little over a month later at San Jacinto, where the rallying cry was "Remember the Alamo." Supposedly that battle lasted less than 20 minutes and Texas was on it's way to being a Republic. That's the basic story, but I'm sure this guy (Phil Collins) could defintely tell you more. Wait... what? He's British? That's weird.

So let's move on to some of my other favorite things in the city. Icehouses. Yep, a place to congregate, watch a game and have a cocktail or a long neck. Whichever.

One of my faves, is La Tuna. I don't know about you, but I'm willing to flirt with the danger of contracting tetnus in the name of a good time. Aren't you?

The ground covering for La Tuna... pretty, isn't it?

Next up? Good eats. Where to begin and where to end? The list is endless, but I guess we begin with Rosario's. Site of the first PtR get together and our meeting place on Monday night. Their sister restaurant on the Riverwalk, Acenar is also a winner. And we can't forget about the leaning building that is the Liberty Bar. If figs are in season, order the appetizer... it's delish. True story, I once saw Tommy Lee Jones drive up in a smart car to enjoy lunch at Liberty Bar. I'm glad he's environmentally conscious, but that was just strange. By the way, he's a Spurs fan.

Please don't move Liberty Bar, Dwight. I'm begging you!

I understand Mr. Parker loves Bistro Vatel and Damien Watel does the French thing right. He also has a number of other lovely culinary options for your eating pleasure.

If you're out after a long night, then I'd recommend Mi Tierra where every day is like Christmas. This is an SA institution. Chris Madrid's and Timbo's for Burgers. Il Sogno Ristorante which is owned by Andrew Weisman, one of the best chef's in the state. Shaq's favorite dining option, Lulu's which features a 3 pound cinnamon roll. Yes, 3 pounds. O.K. enough with the food. I'm sure some of my SA peeps will be sure to add all their favorites that I wasn't able to mention.

Museums/Places if Interest: In San Antonio, we don't tear things down. The people of this city have long had a strong conservation streak and you can see it all around. Especially in the downtown area. Without these citizens of great vision, we would have lost the Alamo, the Riverwalk, the Majestic Theatre, the Empire Theatre, La Mansion del Rio Hotel, the Spanish Governor's Palace just to name a few. While other Texas cities were tearing down their older buildings to replace with the shiny and new, San Antonio was preserving and nurturing.

The Institute of Texan Cultures, I love this place... it features all the cultures that helped make Texas unique.

The McNay Art Museum A former home turned wonderful Museum.

San Antonio Museum of Art, it's a wonderful Museum and it's also part of the new Riverwalk expansion.

Barney Smith's Toilet Seat Museum technically in Alamo Heights, but the 09er's help to bring the quirky.

The Spanish Governor's Palace the National Geographic Society has labeled this the most beautiful building in San Antonio.

The Majestic Theatre this was built in 1929 and we're lucky to have it.

Were people dropping acid on a regular basis in 1929? Just asking. And another thing... where do you get a white peacock?

Blue Star Arts Complex In the heart of the city. In South Town or the King William area, whichever you prefer. Love first Friday... especially since they're refocusing on the Art/Artists instead of the drunkenness.

The King William Historic Neighborhood One of the loveliest neighborhoods in town with so much character.

Brackenridge Park where San Antonians can congregate and picnic. The San Antonio River runs right thru the center of the park and it's next to the SA Zoo. Also the lovely Japanese Tea Gardens are located within the park.

San Antonio Botanical Gardens Wonderful Jazz concerts and Shakespeare plays in the Spring and just an all around gorgeous site.

The Ghost Tracks. You can not call yourself a San Antonian if you have not driven across the Ghost Tracks.

The Gunter Hotel Home of the famous Robert Johnson recordings. Wow, did that floor you? That's right... the Robert Johnson arguably the greatest Blues man of all time.

Wow, one album and countless musicians and singers felt his power. A-mazing.

La Villita San Antonio's first neighborhood and witness to thousands of overindulging Fiesta goers. And yes, NIOSA totally rocks!

Although I'm truly just scratching the surface of the San Antonio experience, I can't leave you without mentioning the wonderful Missions and the San Fernando Cathedral.

Besides the Alamo, there are four Missions and I believe all of them are still active Catholic parishes. They include Mission San Jose, which is probably my favorite. It's especially nice to attend the Mariachi Mass at that location. Also, Mission Concepcion, Mission San Juan and Mission Espada which is right next to the Espada Dam and the Aqueducts.

Mission San Jose... too bad I couldn't find a Wedding photo. Those are fun.

The famous Rose Window, supposedly created by a Stonemason to honor his dead fiance', Rosa.

Finally, the San Fernando Cathedral. It's beautiful and you can participate in a Mariachi Mass or a Spanish mass. Supposedly the Ashes of the Alamo Defenders were laid to rest in the cathedral, but in all honesty they were probably buried on the Alamo grounds.
This is the heart of San Antonio.

Oh, shoot... did I get the heart of San Antonio all mixed up again? Hmmm?

You decide.
Have fun, David!

The Big Squeeze 2010 Is On

2010-01-10T16:11:00.007-06:00

2009 Big Squeeze finalists

photo by David Dodd

Accordeonistas!

Better stretch out those bellows and get your reeds cleaned. The 2010 Big Squeeze is on with more prelim sites than ever, beginning at Casbeer's in San Antonio February 25 and running through April in San Angelo. All styles are welcome.

The details are below and at texasfolklife.org where you can also get your DVD of Hector Galan's excellent film The Big Squeeze. I get to deliver some soundbites but the main reason I'm touting it is the footage Galan shot in the Valley and in Houston at the finalists' homes. It's real folks folklife that I thought only Les Blank could shoot. Check it out

TEXAS FOLKLIFE’S 2010 “BIG SQUEEZE” ACCORDION CONTEST “ON THE ROAD” ANNOUNCED

Fourth annual competition invites young Texas players to compete for $1000 cash, recording sessions and other prizes

Finalists perform at the 21st annual Accordion Kings & Queens festival June 5 at Houston’s Miller Outdoor Theatre

Austin, Texas – Texas Folklife announces its fourth annual “Big Squeeze” accordion contest for up-and-coming Texas musicians, 21 years of age or younger. You may have seen “The Big Squeeze” film about the contest on PBS, or seen and heard the many stories on the news and in the papers statewide about the amazing young contestants these past three years. We are looking for great players in any genre of accordion-based music, including Cajun; German, Czech, and Polish polka; Tejano, Conjunto and Norteño; Western; and Zydeco. This year the contest goes on the road to go meet the talent. Auditions will be held throughout Texas and finalists will perform at Texas Folklife’s highly acclaimed “Accordion Kings & Queens” festival at Houston’s Miller Outdoor Theatre on June 5th, 2010, where the “Big Squeeze” winner will be selected.

The “Big Squeeze” 2010 auditions sites are:

· San Antonio: February 5th at Casbeers in partnership with Conjunto Heritage Taller;

· Rio Grande Valley: February 8th through the 12th (La Joya ISD, Edcouch Elsa High School, and the Narciso Martinez Cultural Arts Center);

· Austin: February 28th at the Mexican American Cultural Center;

· Dallas: March 6th at the Latino Cultural Center;

· Schulenburg: March 13th at Senglemann Hall;

· Houston: March 27th at Talento Bilingue and March 28th at The Big Easy Club in partnership with the National Zydeco Foundation; and

· San Angelo: April 3rd at San Angelo Museum of Fine Art.

The “Big Squeeze” is open to non-professional accordionists 21 and younger. Contestants will be judged by a panel of esteemed music professionals on song interpretation, technical skill, originality, execution, and stage presence. Interested players are encouraged to reserve an audition slot at a venue in their region by contacting Texas Folklife. Those who cannot attend an audition may also mail or e-mail their entries to arrive at Texas Folklife by April 5, 2010. The complete contest rules and entry forms are available online at www.texasfolklife.org or by calling (512) 441-9255.

Semifinalists selected from the audition and mailed in tapes will be given travel stipends to take part in the Semi Finals held on May 1st at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. At that time, up to four finalists will be awarded $300 each and an expense-paid trip to Houston to compete before an enthusiastic audience of 6,000 accordion fans at the “Accordion Kings & Queens” on June 5th. The “Big Squeeze” 2010 grand-prize winner will be selected at the concert by the panel of judges with help from the audience. The grand prize winner will receive a prize package valued at $3,000, including a $1000 cash prize, travel expenses to Houston, a brand new Hohner accordion, and a day-long recording session at the historic SugarHill Recording Studios in Houston, as well as promotional support from SugarHill, Hohner, Inc. and Texas Folklife, and other professional opportunities.

“The “Big Squeeze” contest allows us to fulfill our mission to preserve and celebrate Texas culture in a very real way,” says Texas Folklife Executive Director Nancy Bless. “By supporting these young musicians we encourage them to continue playing the accordion, an instrument that is so central to Texas traditional music that it’s been dubbed, ‘the national instrument of Texas.’ It is so exciting to see a new generation carry on this heritage and to see the thrill that their mastery and extraordinary talent give to audiences.”

The “Big Squeeze” is supported by the members and Board of Texas Folklife, the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs, the City of Houston through the Miller Theatre Advisory Board, the Houston Endowment, the Cogburn Family Foundation, the Still Water Foundation, the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. Additional support is provided by regional businesses including Hohner, Inc., SugarHill Recording Studios, Embassy Suites Hotel, and Sign Effects in Austin.

Texas Folklife

Texas Folklife is a statewide non-profit organization dedicated to presenting and preserving the diverse cultures and living heritage of the Lone Star State. For nearly twenty-five years, Texas Folklife has honored the authentic cultural traditions passed down within communities and explored their importance in contemporary society. Texas Folklife has been called “one of the state’s true cultural treasures” by the Austin American-Statesman for the accessible, joyful arts experiences we provide.

Located in SoCo just south of downtown Austin, Texas Folklife can be found next door to the Continental Club, at 1317 South Congress Avenue. For more information contact (512) 441-9255, info@texasfolklife.org or visit www.texasfolklife.org.