Blog, Conservation, Stewardship, Texas, Travel, Water

This might be the prettiest body of water in Texas – from Texas Highways magazine

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https://texashighways.com/things-to-do/on-the-water/rivers/shhh-this-just-might-be-the-prettiest-body-of-water-in-texas/

By Joe Nick Patoski

Photographs by Kenny Braun

Ranch Road 337 offers great views in the Hill Country

Ranch Road 337 leads to Camp Wood

View of the Nueces Canyon

Sweeping vistas of Nueces Canyon abound along RR 337

A young woman looks down into a swimming hole on the Nueces River

A swimming hole south of Camp Wood off Riverview Road.

Last summer, I drove into the Nueces Canyon
from Leakey on Ranch Road 337,

one of the storied Twisted Sisters drives favored by weekend motorcyclists. I was looking for what I suspected was one of the most pristine bodies of water in Texas, a Hill Country river hardly anyone ever talks about.

A map showing the roads and towns around the Nueces River in Texas

Illustration: Alan Kikuchi

I arrived in Camp Wood, population 736, a century-old town originally known as a hub for raising sheep and goats. Most of the storefronts along State Highway 55—the main drag dually known as Nueces Street—were occupied, but this did not feel like the Hill Country most tourists experience. None of the businesses were gussied up, and there wasn’t a winery or distillery for miles. The newest structure was a Family Dollar. The shuttered two-story hotel, the faded sign identifying the mohair business, the empty Lindbergh Park, and the mysterious point of interest with seven flagpoles on SH 55 just north of town serve as testaments to events that transpired here on the western edge of the Hill Country over the past 250 years or so.

These spots exist expressly because of the Nueces River and its adjoining creeks, springs, and tributaries. The river is why people settled in the remote Nueces Canyon and why they remain. It’s also why a growing number of intrepid travelers are passing on popular Hill Country destinations to play in Camp Wood, as well as Barksdale, Montell, and points in between.

I’m a spring-fed freshwater swimming nut. Rivers and creeks are my thing, as long as they’re unspoiled, untamed, and unchlorinated—the clearer, the better. The sweetest water I’ve ever seen was on a ranch near the headwaters of the West Fork of the Nueces, out in the middle of nowhere. The water, fresh and infused with ozone, even smelled amazing, like a crashing wave at the beach, minus the salt. I wanted to know if the main channel of the Nueces River, about 20 miles south of its headwaters, was as clear, clean, and dreamy to swim in as the neighboring Frio and Devils rivers.

My guide was Jim Holder, a chirpy, suspenders-wearing board member for the local volunteer group installing exhibits and signage for Mission San Lorenzo de La Santa Cruz, a public archeological site near the banks of the Nueces. Holder is a retired school teacher and businessman whose kinfolk go back to the 1880s around these parts. He attended elementary school here before moving away and returned as a retiree eight years ago. Holder enjoys life in Camp Wood.

Various people wade and swim into The Quince on the Nueces River

Chilling in The Quince

“The smaller the town, the more people want to visit,” he noted, as we headed north of town to Camp Wood Springs, aka Old Faithful Springs, a couple hundred yards from the river. “Until two years ago, this was the sole source of drinking water for the town,” Holder said of the gin-clear water in the small pond.

Holder guided me to Barksdale, four miles north of Camp Wood, to look at more springs. We took Ray McDonald Ranch Road off SH 55 past a low-water bridge and across a field of white rubble deposited by the October 2018 floods. The actual river was a thin channel maybe 20 feet wide in the rubble, wedged against a low limestone shelf. As the westernmost Hill Country river, constantly rechanneled by big floods that periodically tear through the basin, the Nueces’ riparian landscape is minimalist: white rocks of all sizes, with occasional stands of hackberry, sycamore, oak, and pecan. It reminded me of the Greek islands.

Holder told me this was one of his favorite places on the river to visit. We parked and I had a swim. The water was brisk for a Texas river in August and practically see-through with almost unlimited visibility. A few small bass and cichlids congregated around rare patches of vegetation.

If I lived here, I’d swim laps every day I could, I thought, as I chugged down and up the narrow channel. The water was that close to perfection. While I swam, Holder read Paul Horgan’s book Great River, about the Rio Grande. “I can spend two hours here every day, easy,” he said.

Compared to Hill Country rivers to the east, the Nueces is relatively unpeopled. The dearth of attractions beyond the water is no liability; it’s an asset.

The next stop was the former site of Mission San Lorenzo de La Santa Cruz, just north of the Camp Wood town limits on the west side of SH 55. Situated on a small ridge above the east bank of the Nueces River, the empty but overgrown grounds sandwiched between two rural residences would have been easy to miss if not for seven flagpoles by the highway. “Those are the six flags over Texas,” Holder said. “Plus, the Lipan Apache had their own flag.”

The water was brisk for a Texas river in August, and practically see-through with almost unlimited visibility. If I lived here, I’d swim laps every day I could, I thought, as I chugged down and up the narrow channel. The water was that close to perfection.

Jim Holder stands by the water of the Nueces

Jim Holder knows the ways of the Nueces

The outside of Two Fat Boys BBQ

Two Fat Boys BBQ on State Highway 55

Lush growth near Old Faithful Springs, which feeds the Nueces

Old Faithful Springs feeds the Nueces and nurtures riparian habitat

The site was originally excavated in 1962 by Curtis Tunnell and a Texas Memorial Museum field crew from the University of Texas at Austin. Over the past two summers, it has been reexamined by Tamra Walter of Texas Tech University along with the Texas Archeological Society, which had 300 volunteers camping near the location while doing excavation work. Interpretive signage will be installed, Holder
promised, as a manner of explaining the site’s deep connection to the river.

Young men jump off of a rock cliff into the water of Lake Nueces

Jumping from a cliff into Lake Nueces

Back in Camp Wood, we turned west and followed a dirt road maybe a half-mile to The Quince. This is the town’s sparkling swimming hole, hollowed from a bed of gravel by the sycamore-shaded banks of the Nueces and named for its 15-foot depth. Heading south on SH 55, we hit water crossings for the next 19 miles. On the dirt path of County Road 416 South, the southern extension of Wes Cooksey Park Road, Holder suddenly cautioned, “Slow down, slow down. STOP!”

The road abruptly ended. A 50-foot-long low-water bridge, built five years ago, had both ends washed out by the October 2018 deluge. The route was impassable. The washed-out bridge is now a choice slab for river swimming.

Nine miles south of Camp Wood, we stopped at a clearing on the east side of the highway with four historical markers, three of them faded and tilted. The markers identified the second Spanish mission in Nueces Canyon, Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria del Cañón. Unlike Mission San Lorenzo, Señora de la Candelaria completely disappeared as the adobe eroded into the terrain.
Holder turned around and pointed across the highway. “That’s Montell,” he said.

Back when I conjured my first “Top Ten Swimming Holes in Texas” list, for the June 1985 issue of Texas Monthly, I had one major omission. Liz Rogers, then a hard-charging attorney in El Paso, told me I should have written about her family place on a creek that fed the Nueces in her hometown of Montell. It was the best swimming hole anywhere, she contended. I couldn’t include Montell, I told her, since it was on private property. More than 40 years later, making my way downriver from swimming hole to swimming hole, I appreciated Rogers’ passion for the water.

The heart of the settlement of Montell is a stout, rectangular old stucco building identified as the Montell Country Club. Built as a one-room schoolhouse in the early 1920s, the building was converted into a community center after the school closed. “That country club is the reason I had no idea that country clubs usually connote wealth,” Rogers told me. “The canyon can be insular,” she allowed. “But it was a beautiful place to grow up. We were surrounded by people that pushed us and cared about us.”

Holder and I drove 9 miles south to Nineteen Mile Crossing, where Nueces Canyon flattens. We then looped back to Camp Wood and Leon Klink Street, just west of Nueces Street. Leon Klink Street was named for the pilot and airplane owner who flew with 22-year-old Charles Lindbergh when their Canuck biplane accidentally landed in a field north of Camp Wood in 1924.

“This was where the plane landed, crashed, and took off,” Holder explained while slow-cruising Leon Klink Street. He pointed out the vacant site of Warren Puett’s hardware store, which the biplane crashed into while attempting takeoff. Lindbergh and Klink were forced to stick around and wait for a propeller replacement and materials for wing repair. “That was the two-story Fitzgerald Hotel where Klink and Lindbergh stayed,” Holder said, pointing to a one-story, blue-green house behind a white picket fence. Three years after the Camp Wood ordeal, Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

The past in Nueces Canyon remains shrouded in a tangle of overgrowth and mystery. But I didn’t spend too much time wondering about it. There was more swimming to do.

People lounge in shallow areas along the Nueces River

Lounging in the shallows

A view of the hills upstream from the Camp Wood Hills low-water bridge

Upstream view from the Camp Wood Hills low-water bridge

The Nueces River winds and snakes through the hills

The river as it emerges out of the hills

A young women snorkels in the clear blue water of the Nueces River

Snorkeling in glassy water

The naming of rivers, along with mountains, valleys, and other natural landmarks, is often a perk reserved for their conquerors. That’s why you never hear about the Chotilapacquen, as the Nueces was known to the Coahuiltecan-speaking locals. They were defeated by the Spanish, whose name prevailed.

The Spanish explorer Alonso de León named it “Nueces” for the abundant pecan groves he observed along the river’s banks. Other Spanish explorers mapped the river upstream from Corpus Christi Bay across the Brush Country of South Texas to the westernmost canyon of the Hill Country and its headwaters, 2,400 feet above sea level and 315 miles away. Along the journey upstream, the river disappeared for stretches. Around present-day Uvalde, the water was startlingly clear and surprisingly abundant. Upstream, the river frequently vanished under piles of gravel and rocks, again and again, only to reappear a few hundred yards later.

The early Spanish explorers chose a location 30 miles downstream from the headwaters, just downstream from Camp Wood Springs, which provided a constant source of water. There, in January 1762, Mission San Lorenzo de la Santa Cruz was founded by a Spanish commander with the help of a Franciscan missionary. The mission aimed to spread Christianity while offering shelter and protection to the Lipan Apache, who were being harassed by Comanche and other hostile tribes. The establishment of the mission—at least 14 adobe and limestone structures—came four years after Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá near present-day San Saba was destroyed by the Comanche. The Comanche were angered by the alliance the Lipan Apache, their enemy, made with the Spanish.

Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria del Cañón, a companion mission 10 miles south, was established two weeks after San Lorenzo. Within seven years, both were abandoned. Two smallpox epidemics, Comanche attacks, and the realization that the Lipan Apache weren’t interested in converting to Christianity prompted the retreat. The closings in Nueces Canyon marked the beginning of the end of the Spanish empire’s expansion into Texas from Mexico.

Following the end of the Texas Revolution, in 1836, Mexico regarded the Nueces River as the southern border of the breakaway territory. That is, until the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, formalizing the southern boundary as the Rio Grande. In 1857, the U.S. Army established Camp Wood, near the site of Mission San Lorenzo, as a deterrent to Native American raids. But the camp was abandoned at the start of the Civil War. The town of Camp Wood was eventually founded in 1921 as the railhead for logging cedar.

The past in Nueces Canyon remains shrouded in a tangle of overgrowth and mystery. But I didn’t spend too much time wondering about it. There was more swimming to do.

A person in a floppy sun hat looks out over the still water at Lake Nueces

Kayaking on Lake Nueces, south of Camp Wood.

I returned to Nueces Canyon a few weeks after visiting with Holder. I wanted to drive from the headwaters down toward Camp Wood, a dramatic drop of 1,000 feet in elevation. I came this time to meet the River Whisperer.

Sky Jones-Lewey, a chestnut-haired 60-something whose steely eyes portray a no-nonsense demeanor, lives on a ranch at the south end of Nueces Canyon. I call her the River Whisperer because she has spent most of her life learning about the Nueces River and all things riparian. She shares that knowledge as resource protection and education director for the Nueces River Authority. Her publication Your Remarkable Riparian: A Field Guide to Riparian Plants Within the Nueces River Basin of Texas is a bible of information about Texas river sedges, grasses, ferns, woody plants, and trees.

The Nueces is Jones-Lewey’s river. She took me to its edge, just downstream from the low-water crossing in the Camp Wood Hills subdivision west of Camp Wood. We parked in a cleared lot she said used to be a dumping ground—“trash, animals, everything”—but is becoming a county park. I was surprised to find such a great spot to take a swim, which I promptly did after she offered her mask and snorkel. As I immersed, I thought back to the detailed explanation of the Nueces’ immaculate state Jones-Lewey emailed me in advance of my trip.

“Nueces basin headwater streams (Nueces, Frio, Sabinal, etc.) are so incredibly clear because they are naturally carrying almost no nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus,” she wrote, “and so far, no nutrient-rich wastewater has been allowed to be added to any of them.” According to Jones-Lewey, the towns and camps across the Nueces headwaters utilize the soil, via land application, for their wastewater disposal, with zero discharge into the river.

The clarity of the Nueces, she continued, has to do with the river’s unique underwater landscape. “The base of the aquatic food web in this desert is a delicate community of periphyton (algae, bacteria, and other microbes) that have found ways to prosper on bare rock. These plant-like organisms are harvested by teams of tiny specialized May and Caddis fly larvae, beetles, and snails that are in turn eaten by the Nueces plateau shiner, Spring salamanders, and other endemic species.”

Between dips in the river, we discussed water, riparian habitat, and humans’ relationship to and impact on the environment. The good news is, while some rivers and waterways in Texas are either polluted, compromised, or threatened, the rivers of the Nueces basin—the Sabinal, Frio, and Nueces—don’t attract near the number of visitors that the Guadalupe and Colorado river basins do, although prime swim spots get crowded on summer weekends.

“This is the last of the pristine rivers in Texas,” Jones-Lewey said during one swimming break. “It’s extremely clean.”

Robert Mace, a hydrologist who is executive director of The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment in San Marcos, agrees. “Due to its rural and remote locale, and the perpetual gnawing of water against the limestones of the Edwards Plateau,” he said, “the headwaters of the Nueces are among the most pleasing in the state.”

This is in large part due to the work of Jones-Lewey, who led the Nueces River Authority’s efforts to help persuade the Texas Legislature to ban driving in riverbeds. Sitting on the rocky beach at water’s edge, she illustrated why, scraping away large, dry rocks at our feet to reveal pebbles of wet gravel underneath. “The river’s here, too,” she said. “We just can’t see it with all these rocks in the way.”

The Nueces was all that I thought it would be: some of the best swimming around, with calm and cool waters, free of debris and with clear visibility. Hovering below the surface, rhythmically reaching one arm out after the other, steadily paddling my extended toes, I felt like I was floating in a state of suspended animation. Locals are cautiously optimistic the river will continue to allow a magical experience. Awareness about respecting and protecting it has been raised, slowly but surely.

“The river’s in good shape because there are miles and miles of undisturbed streambed,” Jones-Lewey said. “People have not done anything to it. So far.”

The love for the river is deep and wide, and lives on forever in Nueces Canyon High’s school song:

Down below the plains of Texas, /
where the hills arise, / there’s a land of
sparkling waters, / canyons and blue
skies. / Ring ye Nueces High with music, /
we praise your power and might. / Hail
to thee Nueces Panthers, / hail to Blue
and White. / FIGHT PANTHERS! / FIGHT
PANTHERS! / FIGHT! / FIGHT! / FIGHT!

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Chicano Soul, Conjunto, Features, Music, Tejano, Tex Mex, Tex Mex, Texas, Texas music

Conjunto: The Soul Music of South Texas

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https://www.texascooppower.com/texas-stories/life-arts/soul-music-of-south-texas

My story on Conjunto music in Texas Coop Power magazine

Soul Music of South Texas
Conjunto, built upon a polka rhythm, turns accordions and 12-string guitars into a unique sound and subculture

By Joe Nick Patoski
March 2020

 

El Flaco

Esteban “Steve” Jordan began playing accordion at the age of 7.
IMAGE: John Dyer

Flaco Jiménez brought the conjunto accordion to Amsterdam in 1989 and Dwayne Verheyden answered the call and learned to play like Flaco

Eduardo Garza of Mission was one of the big winners at the 2019 Big Squeeze youth accordion competition.
IMAGE: Courtesy Texas Folklife

Joel Guzmán at the Alamo.

IMAGE: John Dyer

Teenage conjunto performer Darren David Prieto with Santiago Jimenez and Luis Almanza, Carnitas Uruapan, San Antonio,  2015.

Santiago Jiménez Jr., who gave accordion lessons to Prieto.
IMAGE: John Dyer

Los Texmaniacs have taken conjunto as far as China.

With her 12-string guitar, Lydia Mendoza became the first female star of Mexican American music.

San Antonio’s Eva Ybarra is known as the Queen of the Accordion.

Narciso Martínez was one of the recording pioneers of conjunto.

 

Darren David Prieto played the accordion in Carnitas Uruapan, a meat market on the west side of San Antonio, one Sunday morning in 2016 while customers lined up for tamales and carnitas. Back then, the market hosted a weekly residency with accordionist Santiago Jiménez Jr., younger brother of accordion legend Flaco Jiménez. The gig was practice for Jiménez, but for Prieto, it was an apprenticeship and a steppingstone to a career performing the soul music of South Texas.

Jiménez introduced the shy teenager from New Braunfels, then 16, as “mi protegido”—his protégé—and, blushing, Prieto nodded toward Jiménez and added, “Mi profesor.” This unlikely venue and early start time was a very big deal for the slight, quiet young man because as part of a new generation of conjunto accordionists, it was his opportunity to learn from a master.

As Jiménez played his diatonic button accordion, accompanied by a sideman strumming chords on a 12-string guitar called a bajo sexto, pounding out a rhythm to propel the sounds from Jiménez’s accordion, the meat market’s owner occasionally walked out from behind the counter to harmonize with Jiménez in vocal duets. “Margarita, Margarita,” they crooned, faces inches from each other. Sit-ins from the neighborhood were part of the weekly routine. Grammy Award winner Max Baca of Los Texmaniacs walked into Carnitas wearing a football jersey and shorts rather than his western stage outfit and sat in with the band, playing bajo sexto.

Conjunto’s bouncy rhythm, typically a polka, is why it is also known as música alegre, happy music. Like blues and country, conjunto—pronounced cohn-hoon-toe—is indigenous, only regionally specific to South Texas, with mostly Spanish lyrics. In South Texas, and anywhere conjunto’s influence extends, the term is applied to both sound and subculture.

Conjunto has two key instruments: the diatonic button accordion, which, like a harmonica, changes notes as air is pushed or pulled past vibrating reeds, and the bajo sexto, which provides the rhythm and backbeat. Most modern conjuntos also include drums, guitar and bass.

At a time when most American roots music’s popularity is on the downswing, conjunto’s roots are spreading. Public school programs in La Joya, Los Fresnos, Brownsville and other towns across the Rio Grande Valley have added conjunto to their curricula, and bajo sexto classes are taught weekly at the Conjunto Heritage Taller and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio. “We get them from 8 to 80,” said Rodolfo Lopez, Conjunto Heritage Taller director. “Conjunto is us, la gente. This is a unique music form.” Kids from the taller (workshop) have dominated the state-wide Big Squeeze youth accordion competition sponsored by Texas Folklife since its inception in 2007.

Conjunto was born in the late 19th century when German immigrants introduced the button accordion to South Texas. In part because of its rural roots, it was known as cantina music. Conjunto made its commercial debut in the 1920s and ’30s, when Columbia and Bluebird joined other labels in the fledgling recording business, setting up studios in rooms at San Antonio’s Gunter and Bluebonnet hotels as well as at local WOAI radio to record musicians solicited by talent scouts. Conjunto accordionists were recruited to San Antonio alongside bluesman Robert Johnson, western swingsters Bill Boyd & His Cowboy Ramblers and the Tex-Czech sounds of Adolph Hofner as well as Texan Mexican singer Lydia Mendoza.

The instrumentals by those conjunto accordionists sounded Mexican with additional Bohemian, Czech and German elements, reflecting the influence of the immigrant communities of South Texas.

Texas conjunto recording pioneers Bruno Villarreal from Santa Rosa, Narciso Martínez of La Paloma and Santiago Jiménez of San Antonio all eavesdropped on Czech, German and Polish dances in South Texas and incorporated what they heard into their own music.

Conjunto follows neither mariachi nor ranchera traditions, nor is it norteño, the accordion style popular in northern Mexico. “It’s a melding of European music and the Mexican bajo sexto,” Rodolfo Lopez explained, noting that Czech redowas, Bohemian schottisches, waltzes and polkas all came from Europe. “We just added our jalapeño chiltepin flavor to it.”

Flaco Jiménez, the older of conjunto pioneer Santiago Jiménez’s two sons, expanded awareness of the genre in 1973, appearing on the album Doug Sahm and Band, featuring the rock musician from San Antonio and an all-star lineup that included Bob Dylan. Sahm sought out and played bajo sexto with Flaco Jiménez in his backyard on San Antonio’s west side. “He could groove,” Jiménez said.

Flaco Jiménez would ultimately take conjunto accordion around the world, recording with Ry Cooder, Peter Rowan, the Rolling Stones, Dwight Yoakum and Emmylou Harris before joining the Tex-Mex supergroup Texas Tornados.

Esteban “Steve” Jordan of Elsa, a dashing figure with an eyepatch known as the Jimi Hendrix of the accordion, also worked as a conjunto innovator. One record label described Jordan’s style as acordeón psicodélico. If Jiménez was the standard-bearer, Jordan was the experimentalist—always pushing the envelope until his passing in 2010.

Another notable exporter of conjunto accordion is Joel Guzmán of Buda, who performs with his wife, Sarah Fox, as Aztex; plays and records with country rocker Joe Ely; and joined Paul Simon on his Homeward Bound tour. One of few professional female accordionists, Eva Ybarra earned a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2017.

Conjunto is no longer exclusively a Texas thing. Japan has several conjuntos who were inspired by Flaco Jiménez’s appearance in their country with the Texas Tornados. Dwayne Verheyden from the Netherlands mastered Jiménez’s playing style, then mastered Spanish to better communicate with Jiménez and conjunto audiences. After his performance at the Tejano Conjunto Fest in San Antonio in 2014, fans patiently lined up to have their picture taken with him, as if he was the Justin Bieber of conjunto.

Conjunto’s crossover appeal comes to life in the music of Conjunto Los Pinkys, an Austin band led by octogenarian Isidro Samilpa; a middle-aged Polish import from Saginaw, Michigan, named Bradley Jaye Williams; and Mark Weber, an accordionist from San Antonio. Another crossover success is Stevie Ray Vavages of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona, who learned the bajo sexto playing the native sound called chicken scratch.

Darren Prieto is part of the next wave.

Typical of most Texas kids, he grew up listening to rock, country, jazz and hip-hop. Not typical of most Texas kids, he chose to play accordion when he was 14. “I was always with my grandfather,” he explained. “Around our house, conjunto music was always on. I listened to all types of conjunto, from Los Pavo Reales to Ruben Naranjo.” The summer before he entered high school, Prieto picked up his grandfather’s accordion, just as his own father once had. By that September, he’d learned some polkas. “I started falling in love,” Prieto said.

Web Extra: Where To See and Hear Conjunto

KEDA-AM (1540) in San Antonio, which streams online.

Rancho Alegre Radio’s sampler playlist.

Texas Folklife presents Big Squeeze competitions in the spring. The Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg hosts the semifinals, and the finals are staged at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin. Big Squeeze champions all perform at the Texas Accordion Kings and Queens concert and dance at the Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston the first Saturday in June.

The Tejano Conjunto Festival in San Antonio, sponsored by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, is conjunto’s biggest bash of all, staged at Guadalupe Theater and in Rosedale Park May 13–17.

Rancho Alegre Conjunto Music Festival in May in Austin, plus weekly tardeadas in the spring and fall.

Narciso Martínez Cultural Arts Center Conjunto Festival in Los Fresnos in October.

Two documentaries tell the story of conjunto: 1976’s Chulas Fronteras, by filmmakers Les Blank and Maureen Gosling, and Songs of the Homeland, filmed in 1995 by Hector Galán.

Conjunto Musicians, Their Lives and Their Times is an audio program in the Onda Latina Collection at the University of Texas featuring Esteban Jordan, Flaco Jiménez, Santiago Jiménez Jr. and Tony de la Rosa.

The Texas Conjunto Music Hall of Fame and Museum in San Benito is one of the cradles of conjunto. It’s open Thursday–Saturday at 210 E. Heywood St. Call (956) 245-1666 for more info.

Janie’s Record Shop is the go-to shop for conjunto 45s, CDs and 12-inch vinyl, with a store jukebox and loads of autographed photos of conjunto stars. It’s at 1012 Bandera Rd. in San Antonio. Call (210) 735-2070 for more info.

Del Bravo Record Shop, run by the family of conjunto composer Salomé Gutierrez, is as much a museum as a record shop. Don’t miss the Lydia Mendoza tribute display, which includes one of her stage dresses. It’s at 554 Old Highway 90 in San Antonio. Call (210) 432-8351 for more info.

Those Sunday morning performances on the small stage at Carnitas Uruapan, where he learned from Santiago Jiménez Jr., stoked Prieto’s creative fire. “He helped me learn to get over stage fright, how to talk to the crowd and even how to be a humble musician,” Prieto said.

The gigs at Carnitas Uruapan stopped in 2018 when the owner retired. But Prieto remains tight with Jiménez. “You can hear a little bit of Santiago Jiménez Jr.’s style in my own playing,” Prieto said. “Playing conjunto music is so fun. It isn’t like any other music. It has that beat that makes you want to dance. It makes you feel alive.”

Web Extra: Joe Nick Patoski’s Conjunto Experience

Writer Joe Nick Patoski, a self-confessed conjunto addict, offers this playlist of some of his favorite conjunto songs and artists. He has been writing about conjunto music since 1975 for Texas Monthly, Oxford American, Rolling Stone, Country Music and other publications. He hosts the Texas Music Hour of Power, 7–9 p.m. Saturdays on Marfa Public Radio and Wimberley Valley Radio.

Writer Joe Nick Patoski, a confessed conjunto addict, lives outside Wimberley and is a member of Pedernales EC.

This appeared in the March 2020 issue

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#TexasPsych, Austin, Chicano Soul, Features, Music, Radio, Tejano, Tex Mex, Texas, Texas music, TexasPsych

The Many Threads And Generations Of Chicano Soul, All In One Place

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My story for National Public Radio Music’s webpage on Adrian Quesada’s Look At My Soul show at Lincoln Center, along with Black Pumas, Grupo Fantasma, Brownout, Brown Sabbath, and Johnny Hernandez and Ruben (El Gato Negro) Ramos

NPR Music’s story

More than half a century after it crept into the DNA of young Mexican-Americans in the southwestern United States — particularly in Southern California and Texas — Chicano Soul endures. Chicano Soul in California has been well-documented, in Ruben Molina’s book Chicano Soul and in several documentaries. The Texas version happened away from media and music limelight as a wonderfully provincial scene unto itself, and persists through events like the Friday Night dances at Pueblo Hall in San Antonio, retro bands like Eddie and the Valiants and the San Antones, and through DJs such as the Austin Boogie Crew, Jason Saldana’s El West Side Sound in San Antonio and the Fistful of Soul collective in Houston — all spinning vintage tracks in clubs across the state.

Three Songs That Define California Chicano Soul

Cannibal and the Headhunters, “Land of 1,000 Dances”
Thee Midnighters, “Jump, Jive and Harmonize”
The Blendells, “La La La La La”

No look back, though, is as far-reaching and ambitious as The Look at My Soul: The Latin Shade of Texas Soul album project, hatched by 42-year-old, Austin-based producer-writer-arranger-guitarist Adrian Quesada. Released late last year on Nacional Records/Amazon Music, the album will be performed live for the first time at Lincoln Center in New York this Saturday (July 27), with a cast that includes first-generation Chicano Soul stars Ruben Ramos, El Gato Negro (The Black Cat) and Johnny Hernandez from Little Joe and the Latinaires.

Three Songs That Define Texas Chicano Soul

Sunny and the Sunliners, “Talk To Me”
Little Joe and the Latinaires, “Ain’t No Big Thing”
Royal Jesters, “Meet Me In Soulsville”

Quesada will also be performing with one of the opening acts, the Black Pumas, his new band with lead vocalist Eric Burton. Black Pumas are standard-bearers of the psych soul sound buzzing around Austin; dominated by mid-tempo ballads, along with tinges of psychedelia, funk and groove – a sound that could easily pass for a new version of Chicano Soul. But in no way is this your parents’ Tejano.

Three Songs That Define Modern Texas Psych Soul, a.k.a. New Chicano Soul

Black Pumas, “Colors”
Grupo Fantasma ft. Tomar Williams, “Let Me Be Me”
Los Coast, “Monsters”

The mothership of this Latin-funk-soul-R&B mashup is Grupo Fantasma, a nine-piece horn band founded by Quesada, Greg Gonzalez and Beto Martinez in 2000. All three had grown up in the border city of Laredo, each smitten with modern music, like any American kid in the ’80s. “[In Laredo] we listened to the radio, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Nirvana,” Gonzalez tells me. “People in Laredo listened to mariachi, rock and roll, heavy metal and funk.” Cumbias, the dance rhythm that dominates Latin music globally, were also an unconscious part of their border town upbringing. Teenagers could party and drink alcohol across the river in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. “The best live bands [in Mexico] were Colombiana bands with keyboards and guitars and accordion,” Gonzalez says. “It was cumbia played with a full ensemble, almost a Tejano instrumentation with Colombia music.”

Grupo Fantasma.
Sarah Bork Hamilton/Courtesy of the artist

Gonzalez and Martinez became friends in eighth grade in public school as fellow metalheads. Quesada was a year older and attended St. Augustine, the Catholic school. After graduating, they all met in Austin in 1996, where they were chasing the music muse.

“We were playing funk, rock and roll, hip hop, psychedelic, fusion,” Gonzalez tells NPR. With Martinez, he started a band called the Blimp. Quesada had a jazz group called Blue Noise. The two shared bills, then started playing together as a funk band that liked to test limits. The common bond was their new shared obsession with cumbias.

We wanted to be a party that everyone was invited to.

“We rediscovered Colombian cumbias through some compilations some friends had,” Gonzalez said. “There was a Latin music scene in Austin, but it excluded people who weren’t part of that scene,” Martinez recalled. “If you didn’t dress right and go to the salsa club, then you couldn’t appreciate that music. That turned us off. We wanted to be a party that everyone was invited to. You didn’t have to understand any dance moves or know Spanish. We wanted to make a sound that incorporated all our influences and didn’t exclude anybody. ”

Their response was the Night of Cumbias, performed every other week at a small Sixth Street club called the Empanada Parlor. By the third gig, a line outside the door was the norm. Their debut album, Grupo Fantasma from 2002, was followed by relentless roadwork, beginning in the southeastern and northeastern United States, helping put Grupo Fantasma on the map. “These cumbia rock shows in these divey punk rock clubs covered in stickers were rowdy,” Beto Martinez says. “We started pulling people in places like Hattiesburg, Mississippi and Atlanta. When we got to New York, there was this big packed house waiting for us.”

A year later, Grupo Fantasma formed a second band. “Brownout was a respite,” says Gonzalez of the project. “After we had delved into the cumbia, and started expanding our palette of Afro-Latin music all sung in Spanish, Adrian and I wanted a funk band like we had before. We wanted to play that too, minus the cumbias and the Grupo Fantasma style. We were playing so much with Fantasma, it was a much-needed outlet. We came up with a list of our favorite breakbeat and funk 45s and started doing parties. It was freakier, funkier and all instrumental.”

Grupo Fantasma’s cumbia obsession would be followed by further explorations — into salsa, merengue, bomba, and other Afro-Latin ritmos — after Jose Galeano, a Nicaraguan living in Austin, joined three years into the band’s life as singer and timbalero. “He chose a lot of music and opened our eyes to some of those sounds,” Gonzalez said. “He’s the nephew of Jose Chepito Areas, the percussionist for the original Santana who was part of that taking the Latin style and incorporating it into rock and roll and blues genres. He brought to us the concept how you blend those sounds. That was sixteen years ago. Since then, everybody has become a lot more sophisticated.”
Grupo Fantasma Masterfully Adapts Funk On Its Vision Of ‘American Music Vol. VII’
First Listen
Grupo Fantasma Masterfully Adapts Funk On Its Vision Of ‘American Music Vol. VII’

Late in 2006, Grupo Fantasma got a call. From Prince. Well actually, it was Prince’s management, relaying the message that Prince would like to fly the band to Las Vegas to play at his 3121 Club on Thanksgiving night. The band didn’t see Prince that first gig, but he was watching and listening — and subsequently invited Grupo Fantasma to play the club every Thursday. Grupo did the gig for six weeks before meeting its benefactor. One evening in the middle of a set, His Purple Majesty walked onto the stage with his guitar, asking “Is it cool?” before launching into a Hendrix-style jam and enigmatically departing again. “He knew all the lines,” Beto Martinez recalls. “He’d practiced what we were playing.” In a matter of weeks, Grupo Fantasma became Prince’s go-to horn section, flying to Vegas every Thursday, playing with Prince at a Golden Globes party in Los Angeles (with sit-ins from Mary J. Blige, will.i.am and Marc Anthony), at a Super Bowl party in Miami, another party in London, at Coachella — over the course of a year, wherever Prince asked, they were there.

We’re from here. We’re a product of all these influences. Ultimately, it’s American, in the sense that jazz is.

Grupo Fantasma was no longer just a Latin funk band. With the Prince connection, they were the funk. Through it all, the band has resisted labels and being pigeon-holed, evidenced by the title of the latest album, American Music, Volume 7 (Blue Corn), its seventh.

“Everybody wants to put us in this nice category,” says Beto Martinez, fresh off a three-week tour of Russia and Turkey that included stops at the Mongolian border, Siberia, Moscow and Istabul. “That’s what’s behind the title of the record, being lumped into this Latin music category, dismissing all the various influences. We’re from here. We’re a product of all these influences. Ultimately, it’s American, in the sense that jazz is.

“In Russia, people asked us, ‘Where you from,’ ” Martinez continues. “We’d say, ‘We’re from Texas.’ ‘But where in Texas, like what’s your ethnicity?’ I’d say, ‘Mexican-American’ and have to explain that. Then it would be, ‘Texas is full of cowboys, it’s the capital of country music. How does it feel to be a strange band in Texas?’ We had to talk about how Texas is huge and very diverse, how Texas shares a giant border with Mexico. We’re a good representation of that diversity — a few of us are from the border, a couple guys are from California, our drummer John [Speice] is from Oklahoma and wears a cowboy hat.”

“We’re more well-received outside the United States,” says Greg Gonzales. In America, “we’re a Latin band that sings in Spanish. There [in Russia and Turkey], Spanish and English are both foreign languages. They’re just hearing the music. They’re not thinking, ‘This is Latin. I have to dance salsa.’ It’s more like, ‘Wow, this is awesome music.’ They see us as an American band. A lot of people thought it was jazz. We’ve got a horn section. We’re American. The music borrows heavily from African music, funk, soul, rock and roll that all essentially came from jazz. Seventy-five percent of our songs are in Spanish.”

In 2013, as Grupo Fantasma changed management and its record label Nat Geo Music folded, Adrian Quesada left the band, burned out from the road and wanting to pursue studio projects and produce. It was time for an extended break. During the downtime, Brownout, which had gained a vocalist, did a residency at Frank in downtown Austin, playing a different theme each night. The final night’s theme was Black Sabbath, an idea that took hold, then took off, as Brownout morphed into Brown Sabbath, playing Black Sabbath songs with a Latin groove — and finding their biggest audience yet, practically eclipsing the whole Grupo Fantasma juggernaut.

Last year, Brownout applied the Brown Sabbath concept to one of their favorite groups growing up, Public Enemy, for the album Fear of a Brown Planet.

The Money Chicha project followed Brownout and Brown Sabbath. “We discovered this style called chicha from Peru from the ’60s and ’70s,” Gonzalez says. “Peruvians wanted to play a blend of their indigenous music from the mountains with the song form rhythms of Latin America, cumbias, salsas, stuff like that, along with fuzz guitar and psychedelic effects, lots of reverb. It was all guitars, no horns. We got so obsessed with chicha that we started another band. The joke was, lets book some gigs, because that’s how we normally force ourselves to learn something like this. We booked these gigs and needed a name. Our other bands had nine people, this had only five, so we’ll finally make some money.”

Even though Quesada had left Grupo Fantasma, he continued playing with Brownout and Money Chicha until a couple years ago, when his plate was full. He was looking back with one project, the Look At My Soul album, and looking forward with another, the Black Pumas.

Eric Burton had arrived in Austin in October 2015, after busking on the street in Santa Monica. After six months of playing farmers’ markets, open mics and solo shows, he met Quesada. They instantly clicked. “He had a few instrumentals he was working on that he wanted to see if I could sing on,” Burton says. “I was expecting that if it was a success it would turn into some publishing deal for both of us. I didn’t realize he had 17 instrumentals he was sitting on after our first session. We kept at it until we filled most of those instrumentals he had. The songs almost write themselves.”

Black Pumas brought stability into the 28-year-old singer-songwriter’s life. “When you’re busking, or playing music in general, you have to have thick skin,” Burton says. “You’re always moving, shifting, trying to get by on the power of the song and the generosity of the people. Austin has given me a home where I can develop as a singer-songwriter and be rooted.”

Quesada had been looking for a voice for music he’d composed that didn’t fit into the Look at My Soul concept he was working on. “I went off on a tangent,” he says. “Those were the Black Pumas songs. I’d met Eric. He was originally writing and singing on my songs, and then he started bringing in his songs. That’s what really kicked it into high gear – my production and his songwriting.”

The two recorded together for several months. “The intentions were pure,” Quesada says. “I didn’t show anybody any of this music for half a year. I didn’t even know Eric was an incredible front man.”

Look at My Soul had been on Quesada’s radar ever since Grupo Fantasma did a taping with Ruben Ramos for the Austin Latino Music Association, 16 years ago. “That’s when Adrian and I started talking about what we’re doing right now,” the 79-year-old Ramos says.

“I heard Ruben talking about growing up, listening to rock and roll and soul music, Little Richard and Jimmy Reed and blues,” says Quesada. “In my head, I imagined somebody like Ruben Ramos grows up singing mariachi music and regional Mexican music all their life. I saw the parallels. For us, back in the Grupo Fantasma days, we grew up listening to hip-hop, rock and roll, heavy metal. We didn’t really embrace [Latin sounds] until we were older.

“I realized all these guys – Ruben, Little Joe – opened doors for us. Our story was similar to theirs. We discovered who we were a little bit later, musically. That planted the seed way back when. I thought it would be interesting to make that connection.”

Quesada collected classic recordings by Ramos, Little Joe and the Latinaires, Sunny and the Sunliners, the Numero Group’s reissue of the Royal Jesters, and the Texas Funk compilation featuring Latin Breed, and studied them. “You can hear the progression, where the music turns into Tejano music, but early on, these bands always had a soul song or funk song, right after a cumbia. It would be common to hear the Meters’ ‘Cissy Strut’ after a mariachi or ranchera. I was fascinated by the history, learning my own roots, what came before my friends and me started doing this music. I had enough information to connect my generation with theirs.”

In this time, in this era, where there’s more and more division happening, especially in Texas and along the border, even though Chicano Soul sounds like people would be excluded from it, it’s actually an inclusive scene.

Listening to Little Joe and the Latinaires records, he realized Little Joe’s brother Johnny Hernandez sang the soul numbers. Hernandez came to Austin to add his vocals, singing lead on “Ain’t No Big Thing,” which he’d sung with the Latinaires. “I hadn’t recorded live in the studio like we did in the old days for decades,” he says. “It was a thrill getting into the studio [with Quesada, Charlie Sexton and Michael Ramos]. It took me back to my roots. When the horns came in on the introduction, I was right back there in 1965.” Saturday’s gig at Lincoln Center will be the first time Hernandez has performed in New York.

Look at My Soul is just the start. “I need five volumes to tell the story I want to,” Quesada said. “I feel like this is episode one of a Ken Burns miniseries. Originally, my idea was to revisit the old songs and re-record them, but I spent a summer writing a bunch of songs inspired by the styles I was listening to. This is now a lifelong journey to explore. In this time, in this era, where there’s more and more division happening, especially in Texas and along the border, even though Chicano Soul sounds like people would be excluded from it, it’s actually an inclusive scene.”

Black Pumas, on the other hand, are not a Chicano Soul band, at least as far as Eric Burton is concerned. “I don’t feel like it’s Chicano music at all. It’s black music.”

Then again, Burton wrote the title track for Look at My Soul, and sings lead on the title song.

These old and new strands, along with the Grupo Fantasma legacy, will converge on Saturday — Greg Gonzalez joins the Look at My Soul band on the heels of a Money Chicha gig in Austin; on August 2, a week after Lincoln Center, Gonzalez joins Martinez, fresh off some European dates with Golden Dawn Arkestra; then a reconvening with the rest of the Grupo Fantasma/Brownout aggregation in Johnstown, Pa. for a Brown Sabbath show at the Flood City Music Festival.

“We’re kind of schizophrenic,” laughs Gonzalez.

Black Pumas will be on tour through the end of the year. “I’ve been doing this long enough not to get too excited,” says Adrian Quesada. “As much as I like to multitask and stay busy, I feel like I’m too old to jump from one thing to another. But it’s worked out. Black Pumas were on the Billboard charts the week the album came out. That’s a first for me. I’ve been looking out at the crowds and people have been singing along with the songs.”

And he knows when the Black Pumas tour wraps, those four unfinished volumes of Chicano Soul will be waiting.

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Events, Features, Film, Music, New Orleans, Texas, Texas music

Mac Rebennack, Doctor John the Night Tripper: a conversation

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Back in 2014, we ventured to Mandeville, across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans, to interview Mac Rebennack, Doctor John, for the documentary film Sir Doug & The Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove. It was a suitably strange setting: suburban tract home on an anonymous street with an interior that looked like Mac had just moved in, and might be fixin’ to move out.

The gentleman was charming, accommodating, and told great stories, especially about working with Joe Tex, Joe Scott and the Duke-Peacock hit machine, and knowing Doug in San Antonio before he became Sir Doug.

Here’s the raw manuscript of the interview. Someday I’ll clean it up for accuracy and spelling.

J: Joe Nick
P: Producer
D: Dr. John

[0:52-1:18 playing piano]
D: I think Doug loved that song and I remember I was gonna learn it for him and he was gone. That’s just how fast things went but I remember also when I first got out of Fort Worth.
[1:48]
And I was federal ??? one of a few that I was in, but that was a long time ago, but I think that was in maybe ’59. But I know that I was in one, in Lexington before that [laughs]. And I was in Texarkana after that [laughs]. But that’s, anyway –
J: Name and what you do.
[2:28]
D: Alright, well they call me Dr. John the Night Tripper but my real name is Mac Rebennack. And there that is.
J: What do you do for a living?
[2:39]
D: I play the piano and the guitar.
J: Where’d you grow up?
[2:45]
D: Right here, well in New Orleans.
J: Did you grow up around music?
[2:53]
D: Yeah my father sold records and also my sister, she played the piano, she played but she always knew a lot of Pearl Bailey songs. And she used to go, she’s ten years older than me. And she used to go sing with Fats P Shaw’s[3:19???] band. And they was very popular in them days. I never forgot, my pa told me to wait in the car, kid.
[3:30]
And I saw Danny Barker and Blue Lu Barker and I said I’m gonna go meet ‘em [laughs] and that was that. My pa came out of that joint and saw me joking with Danny Barker and Blue Lu and that was, I was in trouble [laughs]
J: Your parents knew you were into music.
[3:54]
D: Oh yeah well my pa told me, he gave me some really good advice when I was, I got kicked out of three schools in 9th grade. And I never went back to school but my pa told me, he said, take that job with them old men on the Chitlin’ Circuit. That’s what I did.
J: You’re out there performing, touring, recording. You’re not even 21 yet.
[4:30]
D: No, I was a teenager.
J: It came pretty naturally to you then.
D: Mm-hmm.
J: You have any guides? I know you had at least one piano ??? tour.
[4:43]
D: I had Professor Longhair, I had Huey Piano Smith, I had Allen Toussaint, I had James Booker, I had Albert Franks, a lot of ‘em. And they were all great piano players. But my second guitar teacher AJ Gomer taught me first, then a guy named Walter Papoose Nelson, played with Fats’ band. He was my second teacher. And then I had a third guitar teacher Roy Montrell.
[5:18]
And he was, he took me, he had every kind of music I had never heard. He took me to hear Flamenco music and all kind of music that was very hip to me.
J: New Orleans music isn’t one sound or is it?
[5:39]
D: No, it’s, they, they say this is the, the of the Caribbean. And I think they, Jelly Roll Morton said if it’s New Orleans it’s gotta have a little Latin tinge. And I always agreed with Jelly Roll. I, somewhere I might have a picture of him put up [chuckles] ‘cause it’s ??? pa??? right?
J: So you were a success as a teenager. You’re making money playing music.
[6:22]
D: Well I was, I was doing my, my damnedest to keep everything floating and, uh, due to lifestyle I was living, which was a lot of problems, uh, with drugs and a lot of stuff like that, but especially heroin, that was my big problem in life.
[6:58]
And I got 24 years clean and I feel blessed.
J: Is that part of being a musician, you’re just exposed to a lot of things regular folks aren’t exposed to.
[7:17]
D: Hey, when I remember Sonny Lee and Slim taking me to meet all these guys. He introduced me to, uh, uh, my ??? played Pookie’s daddy??? when he was singing with Goodnight Sweetheart, well it’s time to go do-do-do-do-dooo. Anyway, uh, but I met Willie Mabon, that made I Don’t Know.
[7:52]
I met Memphis Slim, I met, uh, Ro-Roosevelt Sykes but I had met him before because he used to send me to get cigars for him when I would be working a session at the studio. And, uh, I met oh just so many cats from Sonny Lee and Slim.
[8:22]
And he, he was back then, he was a special cat. But you know life was all over the place and out there on that Chitlin’ Circuit and, and you’re doing that and then come back here and it’s like we’re doing sessions and doing, and everything was always something.
[8:46]
And then when we had a gig, we’d be working like strip clubs. That was the main hustle for a musician back then ‘cause you got better tips at a strip club then you got and they didn’t pay you too much money back then. That was not a musician’s forte???, you know. I was into a lot of things that was not cool. But that was my lifestyle then and I feel blessed to not be there now.
J: I know there was some Texans that showed up at least in some of your recording early on ‘cause Huey P Meaux, he used to talk about Malcolm Rebennack, the man with the plans from the get-go.
[9:42]
D: Yeah [laughs] I was gonna tell you this story where I pulled a piece on, on Huey and I said Huey came back to the dressing room and says oh man, it’s, it’s really good hearing your band and blah-blah-blah. And I said well just wait here a minute.
[10:13]
And I went out to the car and got a piece. And I said now if you give me the money you owe. I, I would dig it [laughs] and I, and I cocked a piece. So he says well I don’t have much money on me but I could get you some. I said no. I said I want you got right now.
[10:45]
And he said ahh, you know, he didn’t know what to say. His brother had just got busted for short eyeing a girl and then he had got busted for short eyeing a kid. It was like what is this, but I, I was working for Irving Green at Mercury Records back then. I was a spy for them.
[11:14]
I was a spy right in Houston Texas at, at Don Robey’s Studio. And I was spying on Johnny Majors and Tye??? Ching who was operating pay table for Don Robey in those days. But I got to do a lot of session work for them and was making a extra hustle on the side from what Mercury was paying me back then.
[11:45]
And but I got really disgusted because they paid me more to be a spy than they did to be a record producer. And I didn’t like that.
J: So you mentioned Don Robey, Huey Meaux. Is this the type of people you had to do business with when you’re a musician?
[12:14]
D: Well yes listen I started working for Johnny Vincent Imbragulio at Ace Records in Jackson, Mississippi. That’s the first job I had and I was a talent scout for them and I was also whatever else Johnny might a wanted. And, uh, uh, I remember Johnny was alive when I, when my book came out.
[12:48]
And I must’ve really badmouthed him in the book ‘cause I, I don’t even have a clue what it said but I know that Johnny wasn’t too happy about whatever. But I was telling the truth and that was that and [laughs] I remember Earl King, myself, Huey Smith, all of us, we had to turn Johnny upside down, hold him by his pants so all the stuff in his pockets would fall out.
[13:22]
And then take his shoes and socks off and then actually strip the guy ‘cause we couldn’t trust him. But this was the first guy I worked for in, in, in the studios. But Cosimo Matassa, he was a good guy.
[13:46]
Cosimo always kept everything straight up and, and he was a good man like that. And I, I have a deep appreciation for Cos ‘cause he was a great engineer in the studios and he was a good man. Second job I got was for Joe Ruffino and that was at Ric and Ron Records.
[14:15]
And he was not that cool because I remember when Henry Glover and Morris Levy came to New Orleans ‘cause they owned, uh, uh, Joe Jones’ record of You Talk Too Much.
[14:40]
And [laughs] they actually, uh, my boss Joe Ruffino said, I don’t know who you guys are but you can get the hell outta here. And it almost started a gang war between New York and New Orleans. But back in those days the, the Black Hand was the local mafia.
[15:18]
And that was what the hell was going on you know. I mean, uh, Carlos Marcello and all those guys was like that. They, his brother Pascal, he looked out for my band. But Pete Marcello [other brother] Looked out for Sugar Boys Band. And that was how it was.
[15:47]
You know there were certain guys that looked out for certain people. And you were stuck with that. And I’ll never forget working at the Wego Inn on the Hill, that was in Westwego Louisiana. And when Happy Cuchero, who was running the joint, start shooting his club up.
[16:18]
Now it’s, you’re not gonna keep a audience too long when you’re shooting a club up. Well, uh, back then we used to get paid and there was guys behind bars that was counting the money.
[16:46]
And you know every nickel and dime they, they made was put on, into the machines and you got paid. But it was not a easy thing to do [laughs]
J: It sounds like in this environment the musician was the last one to get paid.
[17:12]
D: Well yeah, even though the Marcellos used to take us to this place that is now a restaurant Oscar’s???, and that’s where they used to pay us at back then. Now it’s a nice restaurant [laughs].
[17:34]
But I was told back in the game that if all the guys that was buried in the swamps behind there would do something, uh, that there would be a lot of people that know something different.

[17:59]
But that’s life I went in. But you know we’re gonna get back to Doug.
J: We’re getting to him. I was going to say coming out of Orleans and working for Robey and running, going to Houston, was Houston different than New Orleans?
[18:20]
D: Actually, uh, I remember the club where Lightnin Hopkins used to play at was packed. And you could smell the weed all in the street. And the club where Johnny Clyde Copeland worked at was another, he didn’t have that many people in there but they had some people in there.
[18:47]
And where I was working with Joe Scott’s band, there wasn’t nobody [laughs] but they just had Al TNT Braggs fronting the show. And without somebody like a Bobby Bland or Junior Parker or somebody else fronting the show, they ain’t gonna draw no people [laughs].
J: That’s hard to believe. Joe Scott though I’d think people would flock to him. You’re right he’s as good as his front man is. Was there a difference in the horn sound New Orleans horns and Houston horns?
[19:30]
D: Well, they didn’t use as many horns on a New Orleans session as, as like Don liked to use on those sessions. And he, we, we all did the sessions in what was formally Johnny Ace’s pad. And he had the horns play against this wood thing that was the, the, the, the brass section.
[20:00]
Would play against this wood stuff and all of the reeds would play anywhere that they would just be facing different ways. But I never forget, uh, Joe Scott and Edward Franks was doing shots. And the most thing I remember they were both drunk as a skunk.
[20:30]
And never made one mistake in those shots. And I, I couldn’t believe that there was not one mistake.

J: They knew what they were doing. What other name before we get to Doug, in New Orleans do you run across Freddy Fender at all?
[20:56]
D: I haven’t seen Freddy in years. But you know what? I remember when he first come out of Angola and, for growing weed in his yard. And Freddy came and sat in with our band somewhere in, in Houston. And that was maybe one of the last times I saw Freddy.
[21:27]
But I haven’t seen him in a gang and a half a years. I, I actually have seen a couple of the guys who used to be with Doug. I, I seen, well I seen Augie Meyers somewhere but I saw, uh, I used to sub for Augie on some gigs with Doug.
[21:54]
And out in California when I got shipped to that state, it was like wow, I couldn’t believe that they actually would use two studios and have the string section in one studio and then the rhythm section in another studio. But it was for Phil Spectrum or Sonny and Cher.
[22:28]
And I thought these guys is padding the payroll ridiculous. And I couldn’t get that right. And back then I used to write a little shorts??? and stuff, do stuff for the band. I can’t even write shorts??? no more. But it’s life, how it goes.
J: How did you get to California? Why did you leave here?
[23:01]
D: Well you know what, it was weird. I, I, I got shipped to that state and it was not somewhere I really wanted to be. But my sister, my mother and, and my brother-in-law was all living out there. And I had like a nephew and a niece out there.
[23:33]
And it, you do the best you can with what you got. And you gotta roll with anything in this racket. And I will call this a racket til the day I die. I don’t think of this is a business [laughs].
J: Was Harold Batiste out there when you went out there?
D: Yeah.
J: Was that kinda your connection to get work as a musician?
[24:05]
D: Well, actually, Harold did get me some work. Earl Palmer got me some work. Players Johnson got me some work. All these guys and I mean let’s face it, Earl Palmer played on the Pink Panther movies and Players played on ‘em, too. And they were like featured guys in the movies.
[24:31]
But you know, they was special in, in their way ‘cause Players played all the solos on all the things out there and Lee Allen played all the ones here. And maybe Herbie Hardesty played some of ‘em here but mostly Lee Allen played ‘em. But those were different kinds of days.
[24:56]
I mean you know it’s like I think the first recording session I saw when I was a little kid and I remember this, Dave Bartholomew reached over and just played the last note to make a fatter chord at the end of this song. And I thought wow, he’s the producer and he’s sitting out there just gonna play the last note of the song.
[25:32]
That’s kinda cool. But those were in those days you know.
J: It was a different scene in California. This was LA I take it.
[25:45]
D: Right and that, I actually through Doug I was supposed to go meet Junior Parker in San Francisco and Junior wasn’t really there when I got there. But he said oh he’s staying but he’s not here right now. But Irving Green from Mercury was, sent me to, to do some stuff with Junior Parker.
[26:24]
Which I wound up, I, I gotta a song to ???, I got, I got songs to other people but I didn’t get ‘em to Junior. And that’s who I was aiming for [laughs]. But life is all over the place.
J: Where did you meet Doug Sahm?
[26:52]
D: Well I think I first met him and I think I met him first when I was working a gig in San Antonio with Donald Wilkerson. And Don and him, no I was playing guitar with, let’s see, yeah, Wayne Talbert was playing the keyboards. He was from Texas. He’s from Houston though.
[27:28]
But all these guys were like, we always just knew each and other from, from the streets but we also knew each and other from the studios. So it was like a good thing. But I, I’m sure I met him, Doug at the, at one of those gigs I did with Donald Wilkerson there.
[27:57]
It was just so, that’s so back in the game but it was, it’s hard, it’s hard for me to really remember that but I know there was a lot of other times we was doing stuff. I know he, Doug turned me onto a guy in Houston that was, used to play guitar on a trapeze.
[28:29]
And that was, uh, I’m trying to remember this guy’s name but he was on that same block where all these joints was back then in, in –
J: It wasn’t Curly Mays was it?
[28:45]
D: Mm-mm, but this guy was so off the hook. He, he, he just was special [laughs]. I mean anybody that would have the heart to just go play on a trapeze is off the hook.
J: Did you run into Doug out in California?
[29:14]
D: Yeah I ran into him a lot of times in California. And then that’s when I started doing them gigs for him, subbing for Augie. Augie was passed out in, in one night and Doug called me and says listen, Augie’s not gonna be here tonight. Can you make a gig? And I said yeah. I’m always was on top of making a gig.
[29:44]
That, uh, but I wouldn’t play the guitar, I mean or, the, the, the Farfisa Organ that Doug had the hits on other than on the two hits that he had then.
J: That wasn’t your favorite style of playing I take it?
[30:07]
D: No, it was not my favorite instrument to play. I, I really didn’t like those suckers but he had a hit record and I respected that. But that’s about as far as it went. I played the piano on the rest of the gig.
J: You were part of the Sir Douglas Quintet.
[30:26]
D: Well, I was just subbing for Augie. And I, I, I did whatever gigs we did that was, and it was probably five, ten gigs or something over the years you know.
J: By the way Doug’s son Shawn has a canceled check for you for 60 dollars that Doug made for you. We’re gonna get it to you. He wanted you to get it. Maybe pay you again. Those two songs, She’s About a Mover, Rains Came, Mendocino, that’s Doug’s pop sound you heard. That ain’t that cat though.
[31:15]
D: I know listen, I knew Doug good enough to know he was like into the Gene Allison songs. He was into the good music. I knew that about Doug from the minute I met him, he loved all the stuff. The only other guy I know that loves all that music is Aaron Neville. He loved the same stuff because they both sang in like something spiritually hip that they, they couldn’t deal with it no other way.
J: Take away the arranger, the musician, was he a good singer?
[32:00]
D: I loved the way Doug sang. I loved the way, I loved, when he cut Bobby Charles song, the Tennessee Blues, and I think it was on that record that I’m talking about Fathead was playing on and I can’t remember all the who else was on that session. But I loved that. I thought man, Doug is really coming around now. Doing some different stuff and that was a special thing.
J: Bobby Charles was pretty special too when you get down to it.
[32:39]
D: Well, Bobby was my partner. They got pictures of Bobby all over this place, somewhere. And but Bobby is a good person and he, he just, I, I was producing his last record that he made.
[33:02]
And I thought that was some good songs on it but it’s life how it goes. It did, it didn’t sell a gang and a half of records but Shannon McNally made a tribute to Bobby and that’s a good thing.
J: I’m thinking you went to Cali and based in LA, did you go see Doug? Was he in San Fran or in LA?
D: He was in San Francisco mostly.
J: Wayne Talbert, George Rains, hanging out, how weird was that? I mean you’ve been to Cali but San Francisco is a kind of different thing.
[33:43]
D: Well I, I kinda liked it better than, than LA. There was just a different kinda scene there. And I liked it. ‘Cause it was kinda off the hook but it was, it was and I, I had met guys like Bryan from the Diggers and all these guys up there.
[34:11]
And back then you could say anything on a radio show and Brian and, and some of the Diggers always took me to these radio shows. And I could do whatever the hell I felt like doing. And that was a blessing.
J: Sounds like you were a hippie.
[34:35]
D: Well, listen, there was a little kid that said and I’ll never forget this little kid. He says you guys are outmoded. You guys are like passé ??? or something. But whatever this kid said, he said yeah you guys are junkies. Nobody’s doing junk out here.
[35:04]
Everybody is taking whatever, acid, they were taking whatever. And that was then, but you know listen, I didn’t, I, I, felt kinda like towards a lot of the people that, that was straight up people. They, they cool.
[35:30]
But you know everything shifts a gear somewhere and all of a sudden you’re where you’re at.
J: I like you said there was this freedom there, this guy from Texas you knew from San Antonio and Houston, Doug was he buying into it?
[35:54]
D: Doug was off the hook and a half anyhow. And do you know the first gig I heard and I went by to hear Doug band and there was another act playing and I couldn’t take ‘em and that was the Byrds. And I didn’t like the Byrds then. They, later they got a little better but I didn’t like ‘em too much at all in them days.
J: Doug, did you play on the Honky Blues album with him and Wayne Talbert?
[36:33]
D: I probably, I don’t have a clue. You know what, I don’t remember a gang and a half of stuff that, that’s one of my big defects of character.
J: You know what? You’re busy living. That’s the way I look at it. If you can remember stuff great. When you’re living you’re not always taking notes, oh I gotta remember this later.
[36:56]
D: Hey listen, you know something, one of the things that I always felt blessed with was just knowing guys like Doug. Wayne was a character. You know listen I was staying with Darlene Jenkins the ho, I shouldn’t say her last name, Darlene the ho.
[37:20]
Anyway that and Wayne just got out of jail and I had offered Irving Green, I said well I’ll put him up. I didn’t even have a pad. I’m staying with this girl and it was like what does Wayne do? He jacks a guy up in a parking lot right around the corner from, from this hotel.
[37:57]
And takes this guy off whatever he had. And I say well Wayne, I could fence some of this stuff off but I don’t think I could fence most of it off. But I can fence this and this, this. And Wayne says like a threat, he says, eh, just make sure I get all the lace.
[38:31]
And then that was that. But Wayne was a character just like Doug. I mean listen these guys was very special to me.
J: Doug seemed, he had to leave Texas ‘cause he got popped for pot. He liked weed.
[38:54]
D: Oh he loved that herb. Listen, Doug was a special guy. I mean he’s like, he was like the Willie Nelson of that day. And Willie’s gotten popped all over the country. I mean he even got popped in this state. But I love Willie. I loved Doug. You know these are guys that’s the real MacGillycuddy.
[39:27]
And it’s just a, a, a, some of the stuff that happened along the way just is weird. It’s like I remember when ??? brought this girl that was gonna be a singer. And she became a very well-known singer and her name was, I can’t remember now.
[40:00]
But, uh, Janis Joplin, I thought, me and Wayne both told, don’t give up your day job. And we were serious. And we didn’t think this girl had any shot of pulling anything off.
[40:27]
And all of a sudden she became like a humungous star and Albert Grossman was managing her and all kinda ridiculous stuff. But then again Albert was managing me at one time and then he was managing the Band, he was managing Bob Dylan, he was managing all kinda people back then.
[40:54]
But this guy that me and Shawn, or Alvin Robinson, got his pictures up there, he’s, he, him and me used to go put all this voodoo stuff all over this guy’s front of his office. And we knew when he came to work he would see all of this stuff. We’d make veves in the bottom and just all this stuff all over, like a hand of, of glory, whatever you know.
[41:35]
But we do this stuff to this guy and his name was Bennett Glotzer. And he continued the suit with me after Albert Grossman was dead. They were suing me for about 15, maybe 20 years. And that’s the kinda people managers is.
J: So in Cali the businessmen weren’t any more honest than they were in New Orleans.
D: Eh, listen that’s why I call this a racket and I’m, I’m gonna stick with it.
J: Tell me about Irving Green, I know he gave Doug a lot of leeway, hiring production and hiring you.
[42:25]
D: Yeah, well he, look, like I say he paid me more to be, for, for, for, to be a spy than when I was working as a record producer. That’s something shaky right there. And then I called Irving Green after he retired and he was into the construction racket then.
[42:54]
He didn’t know who the hell I was after working for this guy from 1953 or ’54 ‘til, for a long, long, long time. And he actually gave me a, a, a, me and Harold Batiste he gave us both a thing to produce records. And I insisted Harold do this thing with me.
J: You worked with Sonny and Cher as well?
[43:28]
D: Yeah I was, I was with the, uh, road band, I was with the whatever they are. That’s how I met Jackie Kennedy at a gig. And at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.
J: What about John York, he played with the quintet out in California after Doug went out there ???.
D: I didn’t, listen, I don’t remember all of the guys names.
J: That name don’t ring a bell at all.
[44:05]
D: I can’t remember, listen there was so many shifts in that band in the days I was there that I, Doug sticks out and the rest of ‘em, I, I can’t says I remember any of the guys. But that, I do remember Doug had one little drummer that, that I used to like.
[44:35]
And, and he was living somewhere, uh, around, with where Al Hurts??? pad used to be in, in, in a section of LA that my old partner Charlie Stein used to live in. And this was like off the hook stuff, but that guy –
J: Johnny Perez.
D: That’s the guy.
J: Johnny Perez?
D: Yeah, that’s the guy I can remember. I really liked that guy.
J: He was a boxer, old boxer.
D: Yeah.
J: Pretty good drummer, too.
D: I thought he was cool.
J: Tell me Doug, when the Quintet was first happening they were trying to pass as British.
[5:14:49]
D: Oh yeah they, they had that look. They, they was so, uh, uh, off the hook and then some that yeah they was special.
J: You think dressing up British, was that different then when you started putting on beads and feathers?
[5:15:13]
D: Hell I don’t know, you know what, look, I don’t think like this is over here and this is over there. I just looked at everything was like, that’s what it is. And you know around the time that some guys started taking all the stuff I was doing and taking that, uh, like the, the glitter and all of the stuff that they was doing.
[5:15:52]
Eh, I started thinking about it, thinking I’m gonna do something else ‘cause that was what they was doing. And I didn’t like what they was doing anyways. Nah, but what, it was, I remember this one band Iggy Pop and the Stooges.
[5:16:18]
And this guy was swinging a mic around me and Sun Ra and Dittimus was standing on the stage looking at this guy. And he swung this mic around and he hit the drummer in the face and the bass player in the face. And I’m thinking it’s not a good way to keep a band.
[5:16:45]
But Sun Ra was making me laugh and Dittimus was making me laugh so I, by the time we got through we were just rolling. And that was crazy stuff but that’s how life was going then.
J: Doug comes back to Texas, first to San Antonio then Austin. Jerry Wexler enters the picture. Did you see Doug in Austin before you saw him in NY for that Atlantic recording session?
[5:17:27]
D: Yeah I probably did. I’m sure, I know me and Fathead was doing some productions on some of the people that, uh, Cliff Antone’s joint in Austin. But I had saw Doug somewhere else before that. I think I went to see my old trumpet player in San Antonio. And, uh, uh, uh, oh god I can’t think of this guy’s name.
[5:18:00]
But, uh, it, oh he’s, he, he was a bad, he played the trumpet on, on Mongo Santamaria’s Watermelon Man. But he’s from San Antone.
J: But not one of Doug’s boys. He had Charlie McBurney and pretty good horn players. Hell I can’t remember –
[5:18:29]
D: This guy was, he was bad. He played on that original Watermelon Man with Mongo Santamaria. And but I got to hire him after for a while. And I remember the saxophone player with my band, he punched Ray out on the stage.
[5:19:00]
And, and then, uh, oh Louie Gasca.
J: Louie Gasca, of course.
[5:19:09]
D: And Louie, uh, uh, stomped Ray when he hit the ground and so I called a band meeting. I said look why you, why’d you punch Ray out? And the saxophone player said, uh, well, uh, he beat me for some money. And I said look I tell you if you put your money in Ray Draper’s hands you’re fired.
[5:19:40]
And I said and Louie why did you stomp him when he hit the ground? He said I couldn’t help myself little daddy. And so that was a blessing to me. Man, just that he said that, I said you still got the gig.
J: It’s one thing to play piano, guitar be a musician, another to be a singer and leader of a band. It’s a whole other thing to be an arranger and lead a band. You have that, Doug has that. I’m just wondering, was it a connection there? You both knew how to do that.
[5:20:26]
D: Well, look we was always, me and Doug was like a good combo. That we had fun doing no matter, like as long as I didn’t, when I was playing them Just About a Mover and the other damn songs, that was it but for that. But when I could just play the piano, I was happy.
J: I remember hearing this recording after you’d done the Atlantic session you’re in Austin and Doug’s trying to teach you a Charlie Walker song, Pick Me Up On Your Way Down, old country song. How’d you get on with the country stuff he knew?
[5:21:15]
D: Hey listen, I loved any, listen, I, from back in the days in the school where, I worked at the Louisiana Hay Ride with Hank Williams and I worked there also, and I worked that gig with, uh, uh, with Elvis Presley. Now this was, we was in a band with Werly Fairburn.
[5:21:44]
And that was an opening guy for the, for the gig. But you know what? Elvis Presley stole the guy’s name, the Hillbilly Cat. And I thought I don’t like this guy already. But that was, I thought that was jive you know. ‘Cause this guy had ducktails and he had like a pencil in his ducktail.
[5:22:17]
And those were like in them days when guys wore ducktails in they head, zoot suits and stuff like that. I remember our band used to have zoot suits, that we all wore that. That was a long time ago but it was like until Paul Gayten says nobody’s wearing a zoot suit no more.
[5:22:46]
And, uh, and we were working for Paul at the Brass Rail here in New Orleans. And it just bothered me, and so one day we, we, we just was, uh, uh, we tried to get some other kinda suits but we couldn’t do it. We didn’t make enough money to do that.
J: I think Doug was 12 when he played the Louisiana Hay Ride. You all talk about that?
D: Oh listen I just worked those two gigs with Werly Fairburn long time ago.
J: But you know how to play country.
[5:23:31]
D: Hey you know what? It’s like, the old studio musicians always used to tell me you better play any kind of music and play it right. And that ain’t nothing that you, if you don’t know how to do that, so I was open to anything.
J: Did Wexler come along, were you already working with Wexler when you did this recording session with Doug in NY?
[5:24:04]
D: Yeah, I had been, I had been cutting records for Atlantic for, let’s see, I cut from 1960, I think the first record I had came out in ’68. And then I don’t know how many years it was until we did that thing with Doug.
J: Who’s Jerry Wexler?
[5:24:40]
D: Uh, listen, he, he was a character and I, I got along, uh, uh, better with him than I did with Ahmet Ertegun (pronounced “Omelet”), but I got along the best with Nesuhi Ertegun . He was alright. And he hired this guy Joel Dorn and that guy was the masked announcer [laughs] and he was a good producer.
[5:25:20]
But, uh, I do remember stuff that Joel and TK? did.
J: I remember one time I got to visit with Henry Roeland Byrd I brought up Jerry Wexler and I got a look like don’t bring that man’s name up around me.
[5:25:45]
D: Hey well you know what Atlantic, they don’t have the, the original record of Big Chief that was Fess like trademark, they never reissued that record. And that’s kinda jive.
J: So this recording in NY there was David Fathead Newman, you knew Fathead, you worked with him. He fun to work with?
[5:26:19]
D: Oh yeah and Fathead, all, all, whether it was Hank Crawford or Hog or Marcus Belgrave or John Hunt, any of them guys from the original section from, from Ray’s band, I knew ‘em all. I went to meet the band when they were cutting here.
[5:26:46]
And, but that’s when I think Donald Wilkerson was playing the, uh, uh, uh, the tenon??? alto and Fathead was playing the bari and I can’t remember what, who was playing the alto beside Donald then. But I, it was a long time ago.
J: I want to go back to NY Atlantic session. I think everyone was thinking it would make him break out international star.
D: Right, we thought that.
J: There was Fathead Newman, David Bromberg, Wayne Jackson, Memphis Horns, Augie, Flaco, Jack Barber –
[5:27:43]
D: Flaco Jimenez, yeah, that’s another guy I was trying to think of Flaco’s name ‘cause he was a good partner of mine, too. And I thought he was special.
J: Why?
[5:28:00]
D: Just because he did things that was really, really a cross of musics that he was special.
J: Still is special.
D: Oh man I think he’s very special.
J: You and Doug and Wexler were all talking about Chicano polkas being the next big thing. In fact there’s a line you’re saying, yes kinda like the second line back in my hometown. What’d you make of that? Chicano polka Doug’s cooking up. That ain’t rhythm and blues.
[5:28:39]
D: Hey listen no matter what it was, I love Doug enough to say one thing, Doug was my partner and we went through a lot of crap. We went through a lot. That was not cool but we went through it. We came out the other end and we still kept going. We was trying to pull a lot of stuff off.
[5:29:17]
But who knows what, where we could’ve went but that’s what I always think about with Doug.
J: I think you both did pull it off. You went through real, that’s rough college there. A lot of people get shaken up, they don’t come out of it. They go in but they don’t come out. You all came out on the other side. Both wise for it. I don’t see many people, your contemporaries, able to come out the way you did.
[5:29:53]
D: Well, I was blessed, you know, I was blessed.
J: You kept in touch with Doug over the years. The Atlantic album didn’t work. He was onto something else.
[5:30:07]
D: You know what? That’s when I, I loved Doug’s spirit, ‘cause man he just had spiritual hip things in him that always like it didn’t matter to him if this sucker is selling. If this sucker is do, whatever that record ??? thinking is.
[5:30:36]
Nothing’s gonna always be right. And we, we kinda got the idea a long time ago that we gotta roll with whatever we can roll with ‘cause you know, when, when some of the stuff that we got hit with was really lowdown.
[5:31:03]
I’m a tell ya, some, some of the stuff, Huey and I’m talking about Huey Meaux and when he started that, got the studio in Texas, I was gonna, uh, uh, me and one of my songwriting partners, we was gonna rip him off for some stuff that belonged to us.
[5:31:43]
It wasn’t Huey’s. And it’s the kinda thing that I’d pull a piece on for, you know? It’s, it’s just all part of certain things that wasn’t cool at all [laughs]
J: I think of music being a happy thing but in order to do it you gotta pull pieces out on people. That part of it people don’t know.
[5:32:12]
D: Hey, listen, if you knew how many times we had to pull a piece out on a club owner to get the money, this is typical and back in the days of the Chitlin’ Circuit, you had to have ‘em ready, willing and able to go all the time.
[5:32:38]
And you, you couldn’t, you couldn’t, it’s like when Willie Jones, I was on the road with him a long time ago, and he had a shoulder piece here, he had a shoulder piece here. He had two pieces back here and two in his, on his feet, I mean on his ankles.
[5:33:06]
How could anybody shoot that many guns? That’s ridiculous! But this is, and every night Willie Jones would do this really cockeyed thing with Charles Brown and Amos Milburn, and Amos was coming out the closet then.
[5:33:37]
And it was strange thing but Billy Diamond took this, took this tour on the road and it was like, I thought, what am I doing here? And this was one of those kinda roles that I thought, this, these guys are crazy, way, way crazier than my ass.
J: Over your career do you like playing in Texas?
[5:34:13]
D: Yeah you know listen I used to love, I used to love Doug’s hometown. I got my old partner August living there. Him, Louie Gasca and, and one of my old partners, it was a little lockdown situate with me but he, all three of them, the, the, the, we at the, uh, uh, I can’t remember, but it’s like the St. Francis Hotel or something like that.
J: St. Anthony.
[5:34:51]
S: St. Anthony Hotel, yes, that’s right. And [laughs] oh god, that, that hotel, said if you’re gonna be with these three guys, you’re gonna have to go outside. And I said why? And the guy said well this guy pulled a, he was selling dope in this place and some, this guy was dealing, and this guy was dealing hot stuff here and this guy was doing this here.
[5:35:24]
And I’m thinking oh okay. We’ll go outside [laughs]. But it’s a long time ago but you know what? That, those were things that kinda, I had fun with.
J: St. Antonio not like New Orleans. People say New Orleans is exotic and different.
[5:35:47]
D: Hey listen, I think San Antonio, Guadalupe Street, you’re gonna see some characters. I don’t give a damn what it is, you’re gonna see a gang and a half of characters and maybe every now and then a ??? car’s gonna be in between ‘em.
J: When Doug came back to Texas did you visit him in Austin when he lived next to the club?
[5:36:15]
D: Yeah, I, I, I remember just seeing him a couple of times though but, I can’t remember this, this girl, she said she was gonna come sing at this, uh, thing, god damn, anyway.
[5:36:38]
But I just, I just, it’s like when Doug was around, he, he was a special guy. He, he had an interest in all kinds of music. And he had that flow for all kinda music. That, was special.
[5:37:07]
And then he had a complete picture of something in his spirit that was like, hey, we, we, we all on the same page length and that was Doug. That was the Doug I dug. And you know –
J: There was already a lot of music in Austin but he got the country people to talk to the blues people to talk to Tex-Mex people and to him it was all the same thing.
D: Right.
J: Otherwise these musicians wouldn’t hang out with one another. He was a real organizer.
[5:37:50]
D: And he was a special type of organizer ‘cause Doug had all these kinda people working with him at different times. And he didn’t like he never failed to do whatever he did ever. He, he, he could work a house.
[5:38:15]
He could sell his business and he knew how to work his show. And that’s magical.
J: Not even Willie can play rhythm and blues authentically like Doug could. Doug played steel guitar. Link Davis he played Cajun fiddle. Then Louie Ortega out in California says he turned me onto swamp pop. I never heard of swamp pop. I know the ??? and all those guys are always talking about Doug. I don’t understand how he connected so well –
[5:38:53]
D: Hey listen he was a guy that spiritually was on like a balanced feel. And he had that understanding like nobody else. Nobody had an understanding like Doug. And this was a little bit later, but this was a balancing factor for Doug that I thought was very hip.
J: Did you keep up with the Texas Tornados?
[5:39:36]
D: Yeah, I remember, I re-…the guy that, where he got that name from, uh, who was the Texas Tornado originally? It was a, it was a saxophone player.
J: I’m trying to remember, you’re right, Houston saxophone player.
D: Mm-hmm, or maybe somewhere right around Houston. Might’ve been in, in the Heights but it might’ve been –
J: No, Arnett Cobb was the Texas Wild Man.
D: Right, uh, but it was, it was one of those slamming guys that was the Texas Tornado and –
J: Do this for me, how does Texas sound different than New Orleans?
[5:40:37]
D: Well there’s a lot of different things but there’s elements that crosses borders all the time. Look I went, I first met Joe Scott, he was coming here to New Orleans to hear me play on Miss Lavelle’s session.
[5:41:00]
And all of those days that I played on some other sessions for him, whatever, he was coming here. And then I got to make a hustle with him in Houston. And I felt really good ‘cause he remembered me. And that’s important.
[5:41:26]
It’s like a guy like Johnny Cash remembered me and he, he remembered me pretty good from the old, the old days when he was out there doing the same thing I was doing on the Chitlin’ Circuit. And people was all working in those days but we wasn’t getting paid too much but we was working.
[5:41:52]
But the, the thing that like Doug had that was the best thing was he had opened this for everything and everybody. He, and just like you were saying he could communicate with everybody. His spirit was open like that. His spirit was wide open like that.
[5:42:21]
And that’s one of the things you, you gotta feel from people. You can’t just say hey well that’s this or that, the other thing. It ain’t, it’s something special in certain people.
J: Doug always talked about the groove. How do you understand the groove? What is the groove?
[5:42:47]
D: Well, if you don’t gotta groove, I’m gonna give you a little thought here. Like, uh, [plays piano] –
[5:43:54]
That that’s one kinda groove. But there’s a million other kinda grooves that could’ve played any one of. I’m just gonna give you a idea of another kind of groove like [plays piano]
[5:45:07]
Anyway but that’s another kind of little groove. But there’s, Doug had that understanding that any way you can pull a groove together is gonna be better. If the band don’t be grooving, you ain’t got much of a band [laughs].
[5:45:30]
And if the guys that’s in the band ain’t feeling the groove you ain’t got much of a band. You gotta have every aspect working together.
J: Doug ever play piano around you?
[5:45:55]
D: I never heard him play but you know what? I’m sure he could play anything.
J: I noticed on the recordings whenever triplets was involved Augie wasn’t playing, Doug was playing. He could play the triplets pretty well.
[5:46:12]
D: Oh yeah Doug, Doug had a lot of off the hook knacks that he was pushing into one zone, pulling out of the another zone and make it go.
J: One guy I forgot to ask you about at the Atlantic session, Bob Dylan. Did you know him before or hang out with him?
[5:46:37]
D: Well Bob is kinda been a pain in my ass but you know he’s, uh, I can’t say I don’t like the cat even though he fired me in Houston off of the, the, the Night of the Hurricane tour. And it was okay ‘cause I, I had, I had a couple gigs lined up in Houston anyways.
[5:47:10]
So it was alright [laughs]. But Judge Eddie Sapir from right here, and I told Bob that this guy, Ruben Hurricane??? he talked to some of the convicts that was with him and said he did that.
[5:47:39]
And they didn’t like that especially while they’re doing all this thing to help the guy. But I told ‘em what I had, they didn’t like it and they fired me.
J: He didn’t bring much to Doug’s session. I guess if he was the star, the record should’ve sold a lot more. If sales was where it was at.
[5:48:07]
D: Hey listen I, I, I look at some of the cats that’s off the hook, but he’s one of them guys that like he’ll tell me something like see me off the stage for a minute and say let ‘em film this gig or something. I said no, I ain’t letting nobody film this stupid gig.
[5:48:36]
And he would be really insistent upon that. And I’m thinking this guy’s, he’s just whatever he is, I don’t know.
J: Not easy man to work for. Producer?
P: How would you describe Doug to someone who never knew him?
[5:49:01]
D: Well I think Doug was a great guitar player but he had vibes about him that stretched past anything. And even though listen I can’t say that I loved his hit records, I loved his music.
[5:49:28]
That was the Doug I thought was the pure manure. And he was like special. And I, I remember, I remember Doug came here one time and it, and I know this was with Huey.
[5:49:55]
And one of the things Doug told me early on and I’ve, and I’ll, I’ll always remember this lyric from him but it, it, it’s not really a lyrical but it, it’s a, it’s just Doug’s feelings. But he said something about, we’re gonna just try to make this thing work.
[5:50:26]
And I said, and how am I to suggest we do that? And he said look you done been there with Joe Tex, you been there with these guys and all of that. He says, use them tactics. And you know what? We was able to pull the thing together by using some tactics that we may not a used.
[5:51:02]
That was Doug. He had a way of opening things up and that was a good thing. I love the guy you know. He was a special guy in my spirit. Nobody was like that.
J: I know he felt the same way about you. It’s the highway 90 connection. You two are on opposite ends of highway 90 but connected by all that music in between.
[5:51:41]
D: Hey we was, we was both destined some kinda which a way to hook up. And we was destined to hook up in weird places that we never thought we was gonna be. We wound up doing things that we never thought we was gonna do. And that was all part of what Doug, me was like trying to pull off.
[5:52:13]
You know, I, I remember I had, Doug found this guy for Wayne Talbert’s album that, that, and he had this guy play a saw. And I had never heard anybody play a saw before. But the guy played it with a violin bow and really made it sound like something.
[5:52:43]
Now Doug found that guy for Wayne but he, you would’ve thought, he went out for like two or three days looking for that guy. And finally found the guy and brings him to the studio. And just happened that we was still cutting this record on Wayne. And that was like wow and the guy played beautiful.
J: I think about Flaco Jimenez, everybody says white boys didn’t go over to the Mexican side of town. Doug did all the time and he pulled Flaco out. You think about he recorded with Dwight Yoakam, Buck Owens, the Rolling Stones, put a sound on Nashville music. It’s Doug but he didn’t get the credit for it. If Doug hadn’t done it Flaco would still be playing the west side of San Antonio.
[5:53:49]
D: Hey listen man, Flaco Jimenez was a bad sucker and no matter what, Doug had a ear for people that was bad. As long as Doug had that, felt that in his spirit, he’d roll. Nobody could roll like that. Doug could roll like that.
J: I like he took you to see a guitarist that could work a trapeze. Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top said oh yeah he took me to San Antonio where a guy played guitar with his feet.
[5:54:30]
D: Hey you know what? All of them guys that I know, the ZZ’s and the Tops and all of that, they, they, they come from a different space of time but it’s okay. We all part of something. And that’s, that’s what we’re part of.
J: You know dancers here in town, Pork Chop and Kidney Bean?
[5:55:00]
D: Pork Chops and Kidney Stew and Spoonman used to pick pocket along with a good lord lift her??? And they was picking pockets while Pork Chops and Kidney Stew was dancing to the Hambone Kids.
J: I don’t know if it was Pork Chop or Kidney Stew or a separate Curly Barefoot Miller? You ever hear, he danced barefoot on the street.
[5:55:30]
D: No, I, I, I don’t remember this cat but I do remember all of them guys, Cousin Joe and Google Eyes turned me onto back in the game ‘cause they was, but I, I have this great memory of Good Lord the Lifter and Spoonman just picking pockets like nothing was.
[5:56:09]
But they had a guy who’d come up in the front of these people and distract them from just that minute. And then their pockets were empty.
J: Takes a lot of talent.
D: Well you gotta, if you know something about picking a pocket [laughs]
J: If you don’t it’s not gonna turn out well for you.
D: That’s correct.
P: One last thing, what was Doug like as a person?
[5:56:43]
D: I tell ya, I think Doug was cool as people and he was a sincere cat. That was one of his little things that he knew worked in a better way than most people. His sincerity came out of something that was really on the one.
[5:57:14]
That Doug, he didn’t just feel things, he knew things but he had a way and when, I don’t know if Doug was like this when I first met him ‘cause I didn’t know him that good. But when, when I later met him, this guy was on the one. And he just was like that all the time.
J: Kinda jacked up or a quiet guy?
[5:57:50]
D: Oh yeah, Doug, Doug had about four sides to his personality that was all whatever was going on at the time. And he could see this or that or the other thing or the other thing and say well this is cool, this ain’t cool, this is really not cool and this ain’t cool at all or whatever.
[5:58:21]
You know it’s certain little things that Doug could see that made me feel like this guy’s special.
J: He had good judgment then to determine what’s cool, what’s not.
[5:58:36]
D: Yeah ‘cause look, he, he was open to things that a lot of people ain’t open to. He was spiritually hip to a lot of things that people ain’t hip to. But basically he was somebody that was easy to get along with and easy to deal with.
[5:59:02]
And that’s pretty good. In, in, in this world today where everybody’s about computer machines and we’re living in a world of machines, that, hey, it’s, it’s alright. But it’s not maybe sensible.
J: One more question and it’s kinda going way back, to strangers who never heard of Doug. How would you explain the Louisiana Hayride? What was the Louisiana Hayride?
[5:59:47]
D: Well it’s funny but you know what? It was some part of Shreveport that, that was just it. That was whatever the hell it was, I think I actually played a gig back there with a guitar player that was, worked with Elvis.
[6:00:26]
And I think they got his statue up with Elvis statue and I don’t know why they don’t have one of Hank Williams but just –
J: James Burton?
[6:00:38]
D: James Burton, yeah he gave me a guitar at that gig. And I still got that sucker.

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Austin, Blog, Features, Music, Texas, Texas music, TexasPsych

Roky Erickson

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Roky Erickson, founding father of Texas Psychedelic Music, lead singer for the trailblazing 13th Floor Elevator, and the most famous dropout William B. Travis High School in Austin has ever had, departed for a higher plane recently.

Back in 2013, I wrote extensively liner notes for three Roky reissues from back in the 80s for Light In the Attic Records – The Evil One, Gremlins Have Pictures, and Don’t Slander Me. Light in the Attic has graciously allowed me to publish those liners notes here, with the reminder that all three reissues are still available for purchase. Light In The Attic Records

The Evil One

Gremlins Have Pictures

Don’t Slander Me

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Austin, Barbecue, Big Bend, Books, Boots, Events, Film, Music, Radio, Tejano, Tex Mex, Texas, Texas music, Travel, Western swing

The Texas Standard on Austin to ATX: How Austin Became Weird

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July 20, 1981 Sam’s BBQ East Austi
The radio newsmagazine of Texas – The Texas Standard – covers Austin to ATX with David Brown asking the questions

The Texas Standard on Austin to ATX

Earlier this year, renowned Texas writer Joe Nick Patoski released his 10th Texas-centric book titled “Austin to ATX: The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers & Geeks Who Transformed The Capital of Texas.” It’s an in-depth look of some of Austin’s most influential figures.

Patoski uses the term “alternative Austin,” which refers to the businesses that have been shaped by outsiders, musicians, freethinkers, artists and entrepreneurs who didn’t want to follow the status quo. These creatives, drawn to Austin for its counterculture and music scenes in the 1970s, developed communities and institutions that have paved the way for film, food and tech to become the cornerstones of life in Austin today.

Patoski says he wanted to understand why Austin has the reputation it does, and why some longtime residents have what he calls a “navel-gazing” love for the city.

“I wanted to … see what happened way back when, and the ‘Big Bang’ in the early ’70s, when people quit leaving Austin, and they started coming,” Patoski says.

In the 1960s, he says young people left Austin for bigger and better things, including famous musicians like Janis Joplin. Patoski says in the ’70s, the city’s distance from media centers on the East and West Coasts made it attractive to artists of all kinds.

“We make our own stuff up,” Patoski says. “My story is all these creation myths … of these outsiders who had to come to this place and work out their ideas and make something up out of nothing.”

He points to filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez, and to Whole Foods Market founder John Mackey, too. Now, Austin-based global brands include the world’s largest chain of organic food stores and the South by Southwest Conference and Festivals, among others.

“All these things were started, usually for the wrong reasons,” Patoski says. “People just wanted to get together and do something because it was cool.”

Patoski points out the differences between Austin and the rest of Texas. He says that while the rest of the state’s economy is based on extracting resources like oil and gas, Austin’s culture and economy are based on creativity.

Much has changed in Austin, though, since the 1970s. People in creative fields struggle to afford to live there, and the city’s population and physical size is much larger. But Patoski says new arrivals continue to view Austin as the kind of city those who live there imagine it to be.

“[Austin] continues to speak to people in a way that separates it from everywhere else,” Patoski says.

Written by Shelly Brisbin.

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Austin, Barbecue, Blog, Books, Features, Land, Music, Radio, Texas, Texas music, Travel

National Public Radio Music: How Austin Got Weird

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NPR Music link

Music Features
How Austin Got Weird
March 15, 20199:26 AM ET

Joe Nick Patoski

Austin is a lot more than just the annual stampede of South By Southwest currently enveloping it, which the event has done with ever-increasing intensity since 1987. But how did this city, one that has such an ineffable but palpable personality and spirit, become what it is — for better and worse? Joe Nick Patoski’s recent book, Austin to ATX: The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers & Geeks Who Transformed the Capital of Texas, answers the question both empirically and spiritually, tracing the many people and the many places they built along the way towards establishing this weird, idiosyncratic, flat little planet. Patoski’s book covers a lot of dusty ground — too much for a simple excerpt. Instead, we’ve put together a series of smaller pieces from the book that, taken together, help explain what went on, and is going on, down there. — Andrew Flanagan

Land, cattle, oil, and gas built Texas.

The creative mind and a strong sense of place made Austin Austin.

It was always an outsider’s city, contrarian and tolerant by nature, a refuge apart from the state surrounding it.

Physical location had everything to do with it. Austin was about as pleasant as Texas could be in its rugged, semiarid, sun-scorched splendor. A river ran through the heart of the city, several lakes spread out upstream, and the urban grid was laced with still-abundant creeks and springs winding through forested hills pocked with hidden valleys and canyons. Stunning overlooks tantalized the eyes. The natural beauty was obvious.

The landscape in and around Austin could be described as pretty, an adjective not often used to describe the natural surroundings of Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, Midland, Lubbock, Port Arthur, or other Texas cities — even San Antonio.

Austin looked like nowhere else in this particular corner of the world because it was where five distinct eco-regions converged — the Edwards Plateau, South Texas Brush Country, Western Gulf Coastal Plain, Texas Blackland Prairie, and East Texas Woodlands. The Balcones Fault uplift, where the landmass rose abruptly out of the coastal plain, began less than a mile west of the capitol. Oaks flourished in the thin layer of soil that covered the limestone and granite subsurface of the region. The Hill Country’s Swiss-cheese-like karst topography harbored an abundance of caves and underground pools that emerged at the surface in the forms of artesian springs that fed the region’s extensive system of creeks and rivers. Whenever heavy rains fell on the rocky undulating hills west of Austin, the steep terrain transformed in a matter of minutes into Flash-Flood Alley, one of the most dangerous flood-prone areas of the United States.

Overall, the climate was tolerable enough — and the hills, woodlands, creeks, rivers, and lakes of Austin were inviting enough — that locals responded to the environment in a manner that seemingly escaped folks living elsewhere in Texas. People in Dallas and Houston worked harder, Austinites liked to reason, because those places were so butt-ugly; there was nothing worth looking at, much less playing in, so a person might just as well keep their nose to the grindstone. Compared to those places, Austin sometimes felt so downright idyllic that work could be distracting. Why slave and toil in the blazing July heat when you could be immersed in the clear, cool sixty-eight degree artesian waters of Barton Springs, the soul of Austin and its wellspring of cool?

Don Hyde traded mescaline for the last of the high-quality batch of White Lightning LSD that had been made for the Human Be-In in 1967, one of several events where crowds converged to hear live music and trip on hallucinatory acid. He decided to try to replicate what he saw going on in San Francisco by opening the Vulcan Gas Company in a former dry goods store at 316 Congress Avenue, the low-rent part of the grand avenue, in the fall of 1967. The Vulcan featured live music and psychedelic light shows with the unspoken understanding that the music and the lights were a whole lot more fun under the influence of LSD, which Hyde had plenty of — particularly the Clearlight, or Windowpane, variety. Joining Hyde in running the Vulcan were Houston White, Gary Maxwell-Scanlon, and Sandy Lockett. Doug Brown and George Majewski helped set up concessions.

The Vulcan became home to a wide array of bands, including the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the first psychedelic band anywhere, led by a Travis High School dropout named Roky Erickson and Tommy Hall, a UT philosophy major who played electric jug. Their slash-and-burn single “You’re Gonna Miss Me” actually snuck onto the Top 40 pop music chart, and they sold out the club three nights in a row before the band fell apart.

Touring bands such as Steve Miller and the Velvet Underground, and bands that rarely toured, like the Fugs, an obscenity-slinging New York street band led by poet Ed Sanders (who were barely known outside Greenwich Village), played the Vulcan in front of full houses. Hyde brought in blues players Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Big Joe Williams, and John Lee Hooker— who requested Mexican food when Hyde picked him up at the bus station. The Texas blues institutions Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb appeared so frequently they were regarded as family.

The Vulcan functioned as more than a music venue to the regulars who frequented the place. It was a touchstone of all the things they heard were going on in California and in a few other hip pockets of the country, a cool place to hang among like-minded people, maybe score some drugs, and have a good time. Authorities in Austin viewed the Vulcan as some kind of den of iniquity crawling with dirty hippies zonked out on dope. They were half right.

Willie Nelson planted roots in Austin after his house outside of Nashville had burned down. People were still leaving for various reasons, but just as many were filtering in. Only these weren’t the traditional instate malcontents for whom Austin was the only place in Texas tolerable enough to live in, but increasingly, interesting people from outside of Texas.

The rest of Texas would derisively refer to the People’s Republic of Austin, a label that locals wore as proudly as the Keep Austin Weird bumper sticker they later embraced. Those same detractors streamed into Austin to party whenever the occasion called for it, because even rednecks, peckerwoods, bulletheads, and reactionaries recognized that Austin people knew how to have a good time.
The Follow-Up
The Record
The Follow-Up

They were all cut from the same cloth: Jacob Harrell, Mirabeau Lamar, Angelina Eberly, Elizabet Ney, O. Henry, the Lomaxes; the academics and philosophers Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb; the yodeler Kenneth Threadgill; Hattie Valdes, whorehouse madam and friend of state legislators; Chano Cadena, Cowboy Donley, Lonnie Guerrero, and Johnny Degollado, the fathers of Austin mexicano music; Hemann Sweatt, the first black man to attend the university; professional football’s first black defensive star Dick “Night Train” Lane; Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, the Houston orator and legislator who chose to spend her post-politics life in an Austin bungalow; the Negro Baseball League Hall of Famer Willie Wells; the blacklisted storyteller and humorist John Henry Faulk; the cartoonist Roy Crane; the jazz trumpeter Kenny Dorham; bootmaker Charlie Dunn and saddlemaker Buck Steiner; the photographer Russell Lee; the sculptor Charles Umlauf; and B. L. Joyce, the L. C. Anderson High School marching band director and future arranger and writer for Motown Records. They were outsiders, even if they grew up in Austin, so set in their own peculiar ways that this was the only place where they could work out their ideas and put them into action. They were all part of the prequel of what was to come.

Music was considered a hobby. Musicians had day jobs. A cover charge higher than two dollars was considered excessive. Writing was a pursuit for the well-educated, highly refined, and sufficiently bankrolled. The mid-century-modern thousand-seat Americana Theater with a seventy-millimeter screen was the coolest thing going in film. H-E-B supermarkets did not sell beer or wine, and closed on Sundays. The Made-in-Austin IBM self-correcting Selectric typewriter was the latest technological innovation. The wave of change that swept through San Francisco in the late sixties didn’t reach Austin full on until the early seventies. In the tradition of the African-American celebration of Juneteenth, when news of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves reached Texas two-and-a-half years after the fact, at the end of the Civil War, change often came a little bit slower in Texas. But once that wave finally did crash ashore, it did so with dramatic flourish, spawning new, not-necessarily-obvious institutions, starting with the Armadillo World Headquarters that eventually reimagined Austin into the all-purpose Alternative City.

The peace and love experiment that started in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in 1966 didn’t turn out all that well, considering the violence that broke out at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont and insipid, indulgent rock bands such as Journey and Huey Lewis that came along after the Summer of Love. What began with the Cosmic Cowboy in Austin in 1970 was still playing out well into the twenty-first century in the forms of Americana and roots music, with an eternal constant named Willie Nelson. In Austin, everyone was either in a band or knew someone in one.
The Struggles Of Austin’s Music Scene Mirror A Widened World
The Record
The Struggles Of Austin’s Music Scene Mirror A Widened World

Music, not politics, defined Austin’s counterculture. After the hippies and pickers came the slackers, overeducated deadbeats who approached film and life in general with the same enthusiasm that music clubbers had for rock shows at 2:00 a.m. The geeks who arrived next overwhelmed and outnumbered them all, shapeshifting the culture, the economy, and the city. All these outsiders built their own alternative communities and institutions.

Their cumulative vision of Austin represented the Other Texas that was progressive, forward-thinking, innovative, and environmentally aware, with an abundant population of smart, creative minds, built upon a tradition of tolerance and openness to new ideas and new people, and a strong attachment to place.

The people and institutions here made an impact in spite of Texas, and in spite of the business and political establishment. Artists, creators, and entrepreneurs were by nature outsiders. The hippies, pickers, slackers, and geeks who made Austin Austin fit right in because they didn’t fit in anywhere else. Politicians, dealmakers, insiders, and bigwigs were beside the point; those were folks who largely resisted creative change, rather than fostered it. But they served a purpose by giving the creators something to rebel against, providing motivation and permission to paint outside the lines.

Music mecca, film industry hangout, source point of the retail organic food movement, high-tech hub and game development hotbed, noncorporate tourist destination, and, for at least a fortnight every March, the Coolest Place in the World.

A bird’s-eye view of Austin, the new capital of Texas, circa 1840.
Historical/Corbis via Getty Images

Andy Langer arrived in 1990, during what he described as that brief window where old Austin and new Austin intertwined before high tech, money, and hubris overwhelmed everything.

“There was this three-year lull before the clubs in the Warehouse District started catering to the tech money,” said Langer, a native of New York’s Long Island, during a break in his KGSR radio program. In fact, there were no clubs in the Warehouse District south of Fourth Street and west of Congress Avenue at the time, except for Liberty Lunch. The blocks between Liberty Lunch on Second Street and Ruta Maya Coffee on Fifth Street were either dark or parking lots.

The fast money that accompanied high tech explained all the bars that had sprung up west of Congress and south of Sixth. Oilcan Harry’s, Waterloo Brewing Company, Lavaca Street Bar, and the Bitter End catered to this new high-tech crowd, followed by the openings of Fado, Speakeasy, Ringside at Sullivan’s, the B-Side, and Qua, with its translucent dance floor built on top of a shark tank. They were all chasing “the first wave of young people coming to Austin who didn’t give a sh** about music,” Andy Langer said. “These guys were working twenty hours a day and had four hours to party. They didn’t like music. Music got in the way. They just wanted to get laid.”

Spoon, Austin’s most popular band of the late nineties and early aughts, came out of the tech world. Lead singer, guitarist, and main composer Britt Daniel had been a sound designer and composer for Richard Garriott’s Origin Systems, creating sound effects and music for computer games. Daniel was BOI — Born on Galveston Island — and grew up in Temple, about an hour north of Austin. The son of a neurologist, Daniel came to Austin in 1989 as a freshman at the University of Texas. He worked as a DJ on the student radio station and played in bands. Lean, lanky, and laconic in a studiously detached, indie rock kind of way, Daniel packed an emotive, gritty voice that sometimes slipped into a falsetto that could effortlessly wrap itself around intelligent, kicky lyrics like a comfortable slipper.

Daniel met drummer Jim Eno, his principal collaborator, in a band called the Alien Beats. Eno had worked in microchip design for Compaq in Houston before hiring on with Motorola in Austin. Daniel and Eno started recording together as Spoon in 1992. They built a buzz that extended far beyond Austin with an EP and then with a full album Telefono, released in 1996 on Matador, a beloved New York–London rock indie label whose principal owner, Gerard Cosloy, would relocate to Austin in 2004. Nothing about Spoon adhered to Austin or Texas stereotypes (especially after Daniel moved to Portland, Oregon). No one wore cowboy hats or bothered to invoke Willie. Spoon preferred performing in suits.

The openings of Emo’s in 1992 at the corner of Red River and Sixth, with three separate stages among a warren of rooms, and Stubb’s, two blocks north, an outdoor concert facility with an inside music room and barbecue restaurant in the former location of the One Knite, fostered a vibrant scene of alternative bands, punk rockers, and a hodgepodge of fringe music, occasionally interspersed with touring acts, which usually played the big stage at Stubb’s. Within fifteen years, Stubb’s and other clubs would be shadowed by residential high-rises occupied by tenants including a few who did not enjoy hearing loud music at night, much less care about living in the Live Music Capital of the World.

The city embraced music as part of its civic image and made it a prime selling point by voting for a new official motto for Austin in 1991: The Live Music Capital of the World. Now the same City of Austin was kicking out one of Austin’s most popular music venues from city-owned property deemed too expensive for a music club.
Margaret Moser, Queen Of Austin, Is Dancing In The Light
The Record
Margaret Moser, Queen Of Austin, Is Dancing In The Light

The marginal economics of operating a club poorly reflected music’s impact on the city and its culture. Frequently cited as being one of the best places for jobs in the nation during the early twenty-first century, and as an urban environment with a high quality of life, Austin’s unlikely stature circled back to music. The first thing arrivals saw stepping off their flight at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport was a sign identifying that official motto: “The Live Music Capital of the World.”

No city in the United States had so much music in its DNA. Local music played on the airport’s sound system, and bands played live at Ray Benson’s Roadhouse in the terminal. Musicians gigged at the H-E-B Central Markets, Whole Foods Markets, and city council meetings. While hardly anyone was making a full-time living from their craft, on any given day or night, hundreds of people were standing by, ready to break out instruments and play for the fun of it.

You could say Austin was primed for the arrival of the sandy-haired kid from Plano in 1989, as much as the kid was primed for Austin. At the suburban high school he attended north of Dallas, football was everything. A student competing in triathlons and bicycle races was considered, well, exotic, if not a freak. So he didn’t mind spending part of his senior year training in Colorado with the US Olympic development cycling team, preparing for the Sprint Triathlon National Championships, which he would win later that fall for his first national title, while planning his exit from Plano. “The day after I graduated, I had a U-Haul loaded up, and headed south,” [Lance] Armstrong said.

In 2015 Live Nation, the biggest concert promoters in the world, paid $125 million dollars to acquire a 51 percent share of C3 Presents, the promoters seeded by Lance Armstrong to create ACL Fest. The three Charlies would never have to work again, if they didn’t want to work.

Festivals were the thing now, not clubs, more evidence of Austin’s scaling up. ACL Fest expanded to two weekends in 2012. Residents living near the park complained of festival fatigue and demanded the city return the space to its original intended use as a park. But the crowds kept coming. A whole lot of them had seen Austin City Limits. Now they wanted to see for themselves.

The first South by Southwest Music and Media Conference almost didn’t happen. The registration system set up for the event failed, causing lines to back up. Instead of the anticipated 150 registrants showing up, 700 queued up to pay for credentials admitting them to 15 panel discussions, the clubs where bands were playing, a backyard day party at the residence of punk rocker Jean Caffeine, and the keynote address by Huey P. Meaux.

After Meaux spoke, a young man approached him in the hotel lobby to ask, “Is it true that payola is dead?” Meaux shot him a puzzled look. “Dead?” he said. “I didn’t even know it was sick, little bruddah.”

That night, the Tailgators, Doctors Mob, LeRoi Brothers, Wagoneers, Dino Lee, Lou Ann Barton, Walter Hyatt, Two Nice Girls, Leroy Parnell, Ray Campi, Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Bobby Bridger, Vince Bell, and Angela Strehli, and half of the 177 acts booked for the festival performed in 13 clubs in and around downtown. The audience was a mix of locals familiar with the club scene, joined by music lovers from around the state and around the country, many of whom paid ten dollars for wristbands that would admit them into SXSW-sponsored clubs. Even the odd A&R record company person, has-been record producer, hustling publicist, and wan- nabe music industry executive could be spotted in the crowds. The music industry had come to Austin.
YouTube

All in all, the response was positive, considering it was spring break week, when the University of Texas usually emptied out and thousands of students headed to the Texas coast or to the mountains. Student-oriented businesses in Austin typically shuttered during spring break. Antone’s, the Continental Club, Liberty Lunch, Texas Tavern, and Steamboat would have otherwise cut back their schedules or closed for the week. Instead, almost every one of the sanctioned clubs was crowded, some at capacity.

Like just about everything else in alternative Austin, it started with music.

For several years, Roland Swenson attended the New Music Seminar, which started in 1980 in New York as a means of connecting indie bands with the music industry. He was part of an official delegation from Austin attending the New Music Seminar in the summer of 1986 that led to the announcement that a regional version of the NMS would be held in Austin in the spring of 1987. It would be called the New Music Seminar Southwest.

But the New Music Seminar organizers dropped the idea, citing internal organizational challenges, including, according to their critics, way too much partying. Roland Swenson, the Austin Chronicle, and the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau picked up the ball and ran with it. Screw New York. They’d do their own music conference.

The Chronicle would sponsor the regional seminar. Publisher Nick Barbaro got on board when Swenson suggested ending the gathering on Sunday afternoon with a barbecue and softball game, two of Barbaro’s favorite activities. Black, a hardcore cinephile, came up with the name South by Southwest, a riff on the Alfred Hitchcock film North by Northwest. The Austin CVB kicked in funding to make the conference happen.

By the fifth year, when 2,833 registered for the music conference, South by Southwest hit its first ceiling. The Austin Fire Marshall strictly enforced capacity limits in clubs. Wristband holders, theoretically guaranteed admission to all participating music venues, couldn’t get in venues because capacity had been reached, and music conference registrants with their platinum badges were getting priority access.

Some bands got angry about where and when they were booked. One club, Abratto’s, charitably described as a “disco meat market” by writer Michael Corcoran and not a live music venue to begin with, withdrew from SXSW after its first night of showcasing bands. Abratto’s had been designated as the site for hardcore punk bands from Houston, per SXSW schedulers. The music and venue did not mix well. Acts scheduled to play Abratto’s on the following nights, including a hot female country ensemble known as the Dixie Chicks, ended up performing in hotel conference rooms instead. Somebody somewhere got so pissed off by something SXSW did that they set fire to a stack of copies of the Austin Chronicle at the entrance of South by Southwest offices on Fortieth Street, causing extensive smoke and water damage.

Backlash had been part and parcel of SXSW from the very beginning, per the SXSWsux and South by So What? epithets bandied about by the whiners.

SXSW 1995 marked the first year the event was acknowledged as the biggest alternative music gathering going. Its inspiration, the New Music Seminar in New York, folded. Still, for all the hype focused on Austin, its vibrant music scene, and the outsider spirit permeating South by Southwest, no significant acts had been discovered and signed to a big record contract at SXSW, which supposedly was what the conference was all about.

The appearance of Willie Nelson, Austin’s music icon, performing for Microsoft’s sponsored closing party spoke volumes of the merging sensibilities. Willie wasn’t interested in playing SXSW for $250 or six wristbands. But he was willing to play for Microsoft in exchange for a substantial five-figure fee.

SXSW directors made a conscious decision to allow corporate sponsors and record labels to present music showcases of their own choosing. That brought in bigger, established name acts, but it came at the expense of unknown music acts trying to get their foot in the door and stand out among the noise. SXSW critics pounced, accusing the indie music festival of selling out. Maybe so, but the move helped widen SXSW’s appeal. Foreign music delegations, sponsored by their countries, became draws unto themselves. Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Japan, and Australia all had their own showcase nights, as well as their own day parties.

South by Southwest Interactive, the stepchild afterthought to music and film when it had been rolled out in 1994, turned into SXSW’s driving force. Registration numbers blew past music and film. Like music and film, SXSW Interactive was the alternative to mainstream technology conventions and meet-ups such as the COMDEX Show in Las Vegas that big tech companies dominated. At SXSWi, an independent developer or a startup had a chance to network, be heard, learn something from a panel discussion, make an impact, and maybe even cut a deal. From an Austin perspective, high tech was the new punk rock: it bothered and sometimes upset people who didn’t understand it. Those who did understand dove in full-on without hesitation, like a stage-diving, mosh-pit tumblerocker.

Louis Black pinpointed 2008 as the year South by Southwest reached critical mass. Registration reached 12,651. Among them was Jeff Bezos, founder of online retail giant Amazon, who bought a walkup registration badge and grazed SXSW minus an entourage. Standstill traffic, over owing sidewalks, and venues filled to capacity were the new normal. The crowd counts were up everywhere, with even more events, more venues, more parties, and more everything, from TV food personality Rachael Ray’s day party to Airbnb’s launch with two customers — one being Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.

… a thin, well-tattooed German and a hulking Englishman with a shaved head and multiple piercings stood toe to toe. They both clutched cups of beer as they studied a small booklet while talking animatedly. They seemed to be having a good time, heads nodding in unison, a smile now and then, until the German suddenly stood back, shaking his head and waving his hands while muttering “No, no, no,” in thickly-accented English. The two weren’t arguing about music, their competing meet-ups and agendas, their countries, or which bands to see that night. They were arguing about the best breakfast tacos in Austin.

Back at the convention center, a passel of geeky kids kept their eyes on their smartphones, trying the new app that let them know where all the free food and booze parties were that afternoon, and which parties had good bands playing. Several raised their heads from staring at the devices in their hand long enough to nod in agreement over another’s comment about how a talk she’d just heard was life-changing, before eyes returned to phones and thumbs typed out a shorthand tweet.

Pop-up stores sponsored by Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, AT&T, Levi’s, and CNN appeared on vacant lots, in empty storefronts, and in leased restaurants. The global brands showcased their newest products to their target audience’s tastemakers, who had conveniently appeared from all over the world specifically to sample the latest in music, media, film, technology, and culture.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama in Austin during South by Southwest conference.
Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images

The event had come a long way. The keynote speaker at the first South by Southwest in 1987 was the independent record producer/hustler Huey P. Meaux, a twice-convicted felon.

The keynote speaker for the thirtieth edition of South by Southwest in 2016 was the President of the United States Barack Obama, who addressed the Interactive conference. The First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama delivered the keynote for the music conference.

“How do you top that?” a friend asked Roland Swenson at the softball tournament that closed out every South by Southwest.

Swenson, who appeared less tired than he did at this juncture in previous years, smiled inscrutably.

“We were working on the Pope.”
Austin to Atx
Austin to Atx

The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers, & Geeks Who Transformed the Capital of Texas

by Joe Nick Patoski

Hardcover, 367 pages

Agents of creative change in Austin were neither obvious nor conspicuous. They weren’t attached to an institution, and their influence and impact could be dismissed as minimal. But those little things and those unsung people added up to cumulatively define and distinguish alternative Austin, which had become a tourist attraction unto itself.

For a half-century, creative minds altered and reshaped a bucolic, semi-sleepy, laid-back state capital city in the middle of America into a dynamic city-state of global importance and appeal.

Accompanying Austin’s ascendance was a significant spike in population, traffic, rents, and housing prices — the usual stuff that comes with economic growth. More and more newcomers didn’t care where they happened to be. Austin’s unique qualities, amenities, and attractions had nothing to do with them being where they were. They just wanted work. The city that had the lowest cost of living of the one hundred largest cities in the United States in 1970 happened to be the hottest jobs market in the United States during the aughts and teens.

Could a creative ethos continue driving the culture in a boomtown where money was held in higher regard than ideas? Wasn’t Austin becoming just like everywhere else?

The 2016 departure of Alejandro Escovedo, a hometown music hero since his arrival in 1983, was neither unusual nor much noticed. Escovedo simply found a more welcoming housing situation in Dallas. Half a year in, he said North Oak Cliff, a historically blue-collar part of Dallas where he resided, seemed more interesting and diverse than Austin. The time had come to move on.

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Austin, Barbecue, Blog, Books, Boots, Events, Film, Texas, Texas music, Travel

Austin to ATX @ SXSW – Waterloo Records Fri Mar 8/ Who and What Makes Austin Austin panel Sun Mar 10

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Waterloo Records details here

SXSW Sunday panel details here

I will be talking, reading, and signing copies of Austin to ATX: The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers & Geeks Who Transformed the Capital of Texas this Friday, March 8 @ 7 pm at Waterloo Records in Austin, co-sponsored by Still Austin Whiskey.

Sunday, March 10 at 12:30 in Salon K of the Hilton, I’ll be moderating the Who and What Makes Austin Austin panel at SXSW. Panelist are Heather Brunner, CEO of WP-Engine; film editor Sandra Adair, director of “The Secret Life of Lance Letscher;” and Aaron Franklin, owner-operator of Franklin Barbecue. Each will tell their own Austin start up story, then we’ll mix it up.

Sunday, March 17 at 3:30 pm @ Monroe “Lefty” Krieg Field, Sun Radio broadcaster Kevin Connor and I will be calling the championship game of the SXSW Softball Tournament, a time-honored South By tradition. Plus, barbecue! I will have copies of Austin to ATX for sale and autographing.

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Austin, Blog, Books, Events, Music, Texas, Texas music

Michael Barnes/Austin Statesman on Austin to ATX

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Full story with images here

No nostalgia zone: Author Joe Nick Patoski grapples with ‘Austin to ATX’

By Michael Barnes
@outandabout
Posted Mar 1, 2019 at 1:11 PM Updated Mar 4, 2019 at 2:49 PM

Longtime Austin journalist and author Joe Nick Patoski recently launched his much-anticipated book “Austin to ATX,” a history about the waves of outsiders who have transformed our city, mostly since the 1960s.

Along with the hippies, musicians and activists widely associated with what Patoski calls the “Other Texas,” he nimbly links together those familiar tribes with other networks of writers, movie-makers, tech geeks and food innovators who make up Austin’s vaunted creative class.

“Their cumulative vision of Austin represented the Other Texas that was progressive, forward-thinking, innovative and environmentally aware,” Patoski writes, “with an abundant population of smart, creative minds, built on a tradition of tolerance and openness to new ideas and new people, and a strong attachment to place.”

Along with chapters about each identified group, Patoski provides thorough histories of South by Southwest, “Austin City Limits” and other cultural brand names.

One of the things that sets this history apart from standard Austin nostalgia, however, is that Patoski does not judge. Not newcomers, not even tourists, whom he calls the “Looky-Loos.”

“It would have been very easy to take the ‘Old Fart/Austin Was Better Way Back When’ approach,” says Patoski, who recently drew a lively crowd of 250 to the Austin Central Library for an Austin Public Library Foundation book party. “Because no matter when you arrived, you likely think it was better then, and in many respects it was — because it was all new to you. The fact that good people continue pouring in, despite money becoming a thing, and despite some new arrivals coming here for jobs, not the lifestyle, was not lost on me.”

Patoski moved to Austin in 1973 — he has lived in Wimberley since the 1990s — so his view is long. All along, he keenly observed the connections within the Austin experience going back far before his arrival.

“Back in the ’70s, I rented an $85-a-month hovel in Swede Hill in East Austin from Annie Stasswender,” he says. “Her family had the headstone business adjacent to Oakwood Cemetery. Two or three times a week, Annie, who was in her 80s, would drive over to Scholz Garten, where she was a member of the Saengerrunde, and would enjoy her German soda pop, as Statesman columnist Nat Henderson used to describe beer. That ritual was her lifeblood.”

That dovetailed with Patoski’s childhood memories of Austin.

“When my father and stepmother took my sister and I on family vacations to South Padre Island, back when there were two motels, a gas station and two restaurants on the island, they would always stop at Scholz to enjoy a schooner of beer, and sneak sips to my sister and me,” he says. “That scene of sprawling oak trees strung with lights and these long tables filled with people drinking beer, laughing and enjoying conversation stuck with me.”

Trying to figure out what is this elusive mojo that Austin has, he kept flashing back to Scholz.

“Of course! Our oldest business is about singing, dancing and drinking beer,” Patoski says. “This refined pursuit of pleasure is baked into the city’s DNA. I arrived in 1973 and it wasn’t but a week or two being here when someone said, ‘You should have been here two years ago.’ And over the years, I have concluded Austin in the ’60s was pretty cool, but Austin in the ’30s, when (writers J. Frank) Dobie, (Roy) Bedichek and (Walter Prescott) Webb had Barton Springs practically to themselves while they philosophized in their bathing trucks, must have been some kind of paradise.”

In Patoski’s version of the story, the University of Texas and state government attracted folks that “needed work but still wanted plenty of leisure time for beer-drinking, bullshitting, hell-raising and thinking.”

Austin was also the only place in Texas during the 1960s where hippies were relatively safe from violent suppression. Patoski goes into great detail about how the countercultural crowd coalesced, how early on many of them left for greener pastures in San Francisco, then how that out-migration became an in-migration because of music, specifically a form that combined traditional country music with rock ‘n’ roll in venues like the Armadillo World Headquarters with musicians such as Willie Nelson at the head of the parade.

“Throughout the ’70s, musicians poured into the city, especially once Willie became a one-name superstar,” Patoski says. “By the end of the ’70s, with the addition of venues like Antone’s and Liberty Lunch, all kinds of musical tribes had formed in Austin. No matter what kind of music interested you, there was a community of that music in Austin. The pickers started the whole migration, which has never stopped. Following music came film and food communities, and it continued building up until high tech kind of took over the culture in the ’90s. Still, music remained this underpinning that informed all these fields.”

Two of the best chapters — ones on literary Austin and culinary Austin — are organized around one or two special interviews each.

“The literary chapter was the most surprising to me,” Patoski says. “I’d kind of dismissed the idea of a writing community. But I always loved the stories (author) Steve Harrigan used to tell in his self-deprecating way when we were both at Texas Monthly. I really identified with his tales about mowing lawns to get by so he could write. I love the Zen of lawn-mowing and do a lot of my deep thinking while cutting grass. So Steve graciously sat down and told me his story, which led me down all kinds of rabbit holes to writers before him, and how Texas Monthly played a role in cultivating a real literary community.”

Patoski says using Whole Foods and Aaron Franklin as the main culinary characters was an easy choice.

“I shopped the original Whole Foods on 10th and Lamar — and its predecessor SaferWay, and Good Food Store, which provided the blueprint,” he says. “I’d interviewed John Mackey for Texas Monthly just as (Whole Foods Market) had started expanding to Houston, New Orleans and Dallas. But I also knew Patty Lang Fair, who managed the original store and stuck with the company until the Amazon sale. She told me stories that Mackey, as corporate CEO, could not.”

Patoski, a longtime barbecue connoisseur, had helped hatch the idea of a Texas Monthly top 50 barbecue joints list with Pat Sharpe. So a focus on Aaron Franklin seemed natural.

“I’d met Aaron when he was working for John Mueller, who brought Central Texas-style ‘cue to the city,” he says. “I was an early regular at Aaron’s trailer and was drawn to his storytelling as much as his brisket. Aaron is the same cat I met ‘way back when.’ It is telling that he didn’t come to Austin to do barbecue. He came to Austin to play in bands. These were easy choices to tell these stories.”

Patoski writes accurately that Whole Foods was a “cool hang.”

“The cool hang is part of the secret sauce,” Patoski says. “People do things in Austin because it’s cool and fun. All these origin stories are rooted in what I call the alternative Austin business model, doing things for all the ‘wrong’ — but really right — reasons. ‘Hey, let’s get together to build a concert hall’ was the motivation behind the Armadillo World Headquarters. There was no business plan.”

Patoski does a good job of including the tech talent and game-makers among the outsiders who molded today’s Austin economy. Yet the great wealth they produced also completely transformed real estate, philanthropy and retail.

Can the Old Austin of those who are still trying to eke out the low-cost lifestyles that attracted them here live alongside the New Austin of towers, traffic congestion, outrageous rents and high-price restaurants?

“I continue to grapple with the idea that Austin’s success and the wealth being generated here are marginalizing creatives, who are moving to the suburbs along with police officers, firefighters and teachers because they can no longer afford to live in Austin,” Patoski says. “You can’t really create and slack like you used to. You have to bring your own money or have an entrepreneurial streak to be able to afford to live here now. The response of organizations like HAAM, SIMS and Black Fret are trying to address that, but I think the next 20 years will tell the tale whether or not we killed the goose that laid the golden egg.”

One of Patoski’s most generous observations involves the context in which newcomers have perceived the Broken Spoke.

“If you were here in 1973, when the Broken Spoke marked the southern limits of South Austin, you probably have a difficult time reconciling all the condos surrounding it,” he says. “But if you just arrived and are tooling down South Lamar and all of a sudden you see this genuine honky-tonk among this strip of condos, you probably think, ‘How cool is this? A honky-tonk in the middle of all these low-rise living spaces.’ And Barton Springs! A spring-fed pool within eyeshot of downtown skyscrapers. OK, I don’t like to pay for parking, or waiting in line, like you have to do to go to Barton’s, but those springs are still those springs. It’s all about perspective. And my sense is, new arrivals are just as dazzled as I once was. That ‘cool factor’ — whatever it is — remains.”

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