You Cheated
Austin Chronicle
BY JOE NICK PATOSKI
November 8, 2002
There’s an inherent flaw to creating a Texas Top 40 using Billboard as the source: Billboard didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a clue. According to Billboard, Mouse & the Traps, the Tyler, Texas, band that paid homage to Bob Dylan with “Public Execution,” later immortalized on the Nuggets punk retrospective, didn’t even exist. In Austin, Ray Campi’s “Caterpillar,” the Slades’ “You Cheated,” and Roky Erickson’s first band the 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” also acknowledged on Nuggets, Vol. 1, were all radio hits. The Moving Sidewalks, Billy Gibbons’ first band, garnered loads of Houston AM radio airplay with their psychedelic single, “99th Floor,” alongside the Elevators and Fever Tree’s “San Francisco Girls.” Rene & Rene’s bilingual belly-rubber “Believe Me” got so much South Texas airplay that they were radio gods. So, my Texas Top 40 is offered with considerable hesitation. You may think Christopher Cross was somebody because Billboard recognized “Ride Like the Wind” and “Sailing.” I find another local San Antonio chart-topper, Sonny Ace y Los Twisters, who was doing Rock en Español before there was a name for it back in the mid-Sixties, far more significant, not to mention spiritually nourishing. Any chart that doesn’t have room for Jimmy Dee’s “Henrietta,” the Triumphs’ “Garner State Park” (before B.J. Thomas went solo), Bruce Channel’s follow-up to “Hey Baby” — “Going Back to Louisiana” — isn’t really an accurate barometer at all.
[You Cheated in the Austin Chroncicle]