Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Play it loud.  It's got a really lush sonic space.
  

    
I'm trying to think of some other Robert Quine projects. Didn't he
play a tour with Marianne Faithfull? My band Secret Six opened for her
in Houston, and it was a memorable experience. I remember Fernando
Saunders on bass quite well, and he's still playing with Lou also. I
remember Black Mask as being one of those first Lou LPs, possibly
preceded by Rock n Roll Heart (?) that had a few really good or great
songs, and several that really made me cringe. I have to say the cringe
quotient kept increasing over the years, tho I still love the guy. 

Seemed like Quine was playing with all those NY bands for a while.
Guess we need to visit AMG to check.

As for the garageband site, it looks pretty good, tho I must confess
I'm ignorant as to details, how  it works, etc. I'll research it more
but I do agree, it could be a nice way to go in the future. A
clearinghouse or whatever for the lost punk bands music is a nice idea.


There aren't a whole lot of the Skunks live CD's left. If a demand
manifests itself, I suppose I'll order up another pressing. I have lots
of tapes in the closet that could possibly yield more products. For
those of you who didn't know, the Skunks released a CD in 2000 that
collects the best of two 1980 shows, one at Max's Kansas City and the
other at Back Room in Austin. Plus we stuck on our first single,
Earthquake Shake/Can't Get Loose -- the one recorded in a garage on 2
track for nothing.

Now, Rik, I guess I can agree with the comparison of punk to folk. I
dunno. But as to your Steely Dan / Eagles comment -- why no punk band
aspired to that level of sophistication? Well, I don't know how to
answer that in a nice way. To be blunt, I have always detested Steely
Dan and only in the last couple of years have I found the Eagles
remotely interesting. 

To me, punk was clearing the pipes, getting back to basics of guitar,
bass and drums, and playing what felt like rock n roll to me. The
Stooges, Dolls, like the best rockabilly, like Howlin Wolf.  

I'm not feeling especially erudite just now, but that's as close as I
can get to answering the question at the moment. 
  

    
for me, Quine's part on Blank Generation (Richard Hell and the Voidoids)
is a big deal.  I was about 14 in 76 when punk started to get enough
attention to filter down to a junior high student in Houston.  i was
really captured by the whole anti-virtuoso aesthetic of the music.  By
that time, there had been a long virtuoso tradition in rock, which
basically kept it off limits unless you could play long, fast solos. I
was so tired of guitar solos. At the time, i was really into the music
of the early british invasion, the stuff that washed up in the wake of
the beatles--stuff that was catchy but barely competent.  I loved that
that music was so teen centric (as apposed to music for grownups with
money which is what a lot of the music at the time seemed to me).  I
also loved all the pop music of the 1960s, the garage stuff, motown,
stax...all the stuff that focussed on songs rather than concept albums
or rock operas, etc. I was really taken with the idea of singles (45
rpm) and dancing, both of which seemed to have fallen completely out of
favor.

This was all back in the late 70s, before the various strains of punk
became ossified.  There were different types of bands and sounds, people
doing all sorts of different things--but the guitar virtuoso bit was de-
emphasized.  So you had lots of people playing who rejected the guitar
slinger type deal, but who still approached playing rock guitar from
that traditional stance. Although the guitar parts were often raw and
rough, the guitar playing did not sound dramatically different than
anything that had gone on before.  Some of the production was different
but the way that lots of people approached playing the instrument was
pretty similar to what had gone on before.

The first time I heard Blank Generation backin 79 or so (which i'm
assuming was a long while after it first came out) Quine's part
immediately struck me--his guitar playing sounded fundamentally
different.  It sounded like he had actually rethought how to approach a
guitar solo.  This was not someone who was boasting about being barely
able to play, nor was it someone trying but unable to play much.  He had
reconceptualized how to play in this context.  It was a guitar solo for
people who hated guitar solos.  It sounded like he had studied every
incompetent solo on singles from the 1960s-- garage bands, british
invasion stuff, etc. and had developed an insturmental vocabulary from
those gestures.  It was angular, irregular, off kilter, and skittish.
It was not a display of braggadicio or machismo, yet it was far from
incompetent, and it seemd to convey doubt, tension, and uncertainty. I
still love the song and his part on it.
  

    
Free & Simple -- i like your tribute to Quine on Blank Generation.
Myself, I was draw to both schools of guitar playing, the guitar
slingers and the anti-competent kind, and the trash stuff, too.

As to why Patti was cranky that night, I really don't know. She seemed
high, but not in a giddy way. I guess she was just in a foul mood
about something or other. She was a rock star on the road--I seem to
recall that Because the Night was a hot single at the time?-- so you
can imagine whatever. She certainly stayed at the club, because it was
obviously the place to be, and maybe she was friendly to some other
people, maybe not. But she did seem to hold some kind of grudge against
me, for the hat comment, I guess.

Yes, Ed, there was a splurge of demand for Skunks product after your
Fresh Air piece ran. What's the new one going to be about? 
  

    
Somehow I never got into Richard Hell and the Voidoids. What I
remember is that I wanted to write a song called "Love Comes in
Spurts," thought I was really clever, then a punkophiliac friend told
me Richard Hell beat me to it. Ah well. (This was a guy who figured
punk was about style, and I suppose _Lipstick Traces_ sorta puts it in
that context, the explosive blend of art, design, fashion, and music.
All that stuff mixed with social critique & disruptive thinking. Have
we discussed the Sex Pistols yet?

I was trying to dredge up memories from that era in 70s and early 80s
in Austin, and Reagan's death reminded me of one: the day he was
elected president, the Gang of Four played Club Foot in Austin, and it
was the perfect remedy for election blues. I also remember a later
great show that X played at the same venue... they played two nights,
as I recall, to a packed house both nights. (Ed, I think I saw you
there?)  Under the Big Black Sun was just released. Not sure who opened
- Buffalo Gals? They were kind of a fixture.

Jesse, I also remember a Joe Ely show at Hogg Auditorium with the
Skunks opening... that was a great show, and I think Ely had to notch
up the volume to follow you guys.
  

    
The Skunks opened for Gang of Four twice, and one of the gigs was in
NYC, I think. They were an awesome band. What a groove they laid down!
What energy! They were a damned inspiring band to watch and I really
enjoyed playing with them. 

Opening for Joe Ely at Hogg was kinda fun. It's a pretty hall but the
acoustics are so lousy. Ely had the Lubbock band and they were shit
hot. I remember actually training to get in shape for that gig, because
I knew we needed to kick ass. That's when I started jogging, actually,
believe it or not. But another funny footnote is that reading Robert
Parker helped, too, because he made exercise sound really stimulating &
manly. 

Ely's shows seemed like epics back then. If there was any fairness in
the world, he would've become a superstar back then. 

I saw X a few times but you know, they never really clicked for me
until later. I think the Appalachian harmonies rubbed me the wrong way
or something. But I finally got hip to them. I don't think we ever
opened for them but I can't say for sure.

I loved opening for 8-Eyed Spy. We always had fun with George Scott
and Lydia Lunch, and the other guys, too. Pat, Doug, and I forgot the
other guitarist's name. They were another really talented bunch, and
Lydia was a trip. 

We drove George and Lydia to the gig in Houston and I remember Lydia
talking about horror movies a whole lot. She and George had an
encyclopedic knowledge of that stuff. But I didn't know just how wild
her past was until I picked up one of her memoirs. Yikes! She's had
quite the sex life. 

George had a fantastic record collection. boxes and boxes and boxes of
cool 45s from all kinds of genres. He was a real musicologist. We were
staying with him on our 2nd or 3rd trip to NYC one night that we
played somewhere in the city and he had a gig with John Cale. We
arrived home from our gig first and when he came in he was somewhat
drunk with this strange shit eating grin on his face. What's up? we
asked. He said, I quit. Well, how did Cale take it? George smiled and
said, I threw a cream pie in his face, that's how I quit! 

So that's one way to quit a band.
  

    
I never listened much to Lydia Lunch, but you inspired me to find her web 
site. Some MP3s there; I'm listening to one now. Also a great photo of 
Lydia with Exene: 
http://www.lydialunch.org/images/LL%20with%20Exene%20by%20Ken%20Winokur2.jpg

We've drifted from the book, which is about two incredibly painful parts 
of your life. It feels like it was hard to write, but would have been 
harder not to write?  What made you decide to revisit that living 
nightmare in your past, and how was that exploration related to your 
battle with cancer?
  

    
(I don't want to get off of <jonl>'s question, which is, after all,
why we're here, but I wanted to address <rik>'s point about complexity
and punk, in that there was, in my opinion, a virtuosic impulse on the
part of some of the bands, but it got directed towards the emerging
technology of the time, as when Joy Division became New Order. So
complex, virtuosic playing a la Steely Dan was impossible due to the
llimitations of the technology, but a virtuosic handling of what was on
hand became possible, certainly. Certainly there was a punk impulse
inherent in the black Detroit guys who originated techno -- ever heard
the version of "No UFOs" with vocals? --, and that was, I think, part
of what the British and European kids who picked up on it heard.)
  

    
Well, <jon>, you're right, it got to the point where I had to do
something about it.  I used to be a real meat and potatoes guy,
intrinsically suspicious of terms like catharsis, and stubbornly
convinced that therapy was for people with *serious* mental problems.
So, after the 2 years I was a pill-gobbling, carousing rock n roll mess
(that is, until I met Lois who forced me to stop), I suppressed it as
best I could, which meant that, on a daily basis, I thought about
Dianne fleetingly, because as soon as I thought about her, the
flashbacks of the murder, guilt, unanswered questions, and all sorts of
horrors zapped through my brain. I never broke down. Ten years passed
without a single tear -- about anything; I was in a way a different
kind of zombie. Obviously, that's not a healthy response, though that's
the way our culture used to recommend we deal with things -- buck up,
suck it up, keep going, don't look back, accept rape and murder and
serial killers as *god's will*, etc.

Ellroy wrote My Dark Places, the book about his mother's murder,
published in 1996, and I thought it was a great book. I also noticed
that it made him seem more complete. I started thinking about doing
this, and soon after my cancer diagnosis in November 1997, I realized I
had to do it. 

I can't say exactly why. A couple of things resonated about Ellroy's
book. One was his frequent statement: You always pay for what you
suppress. Another was him saying that he wished to do honor his mother.
I wished to honor Dianne. She was more than just a crime victim, and
yet, I knew that's the way she was treated by the media when the murder
hit the front pages. She was an artist, a poet, a comic, deeply
sensitive. She always made a big impression on people, whether it was
in a quiet encounter or just walking through a crowd. 

The first thing was to write about the experience of coming home and
finding her, going from the giddy high of the gig and wanting to tell
her all about it, then dropping into free fall hell, finding her, and
feeling that the universe had just blow to smithereens. Then the
experience with the cops afterward, who naturally assumed I was the
their man, case closed. 

Writing all that stuff was an incredible rush of energy, although for
the first year or so afterward, the results were mostly negative.
Everything got far worse -- the flashbacks, guilt, pain, grief. Like
the floodgates had opened. 

Yet having gone that far, I was committed, and I knew I'd have to do
the rest of it, go back and investigate what really happened, find out
why the charges on the murderer were reduced, why there was no trial,
who the other victims were -- what were their names? Where'd they come
from? How did he find them, etc. And how could I have prevented this?

So you ask how this was connected to the process of fighting the
cancer. One strange aspect was the fact that the cancer attacked my
neck, almost fully enveloping it (48 of 80 lymph nodes on the right
side were malignant, plus the jugular vein, saliva gland, tonsil,
muscle, and other tissue), and after the onslaught of surgery (13
hours), chemo and radiation, I was left with serious chronic pain. I
tried everything to overcome it, including conventional pain meds,
acupuncture, biofeedback, yoga, prayer, etc., and finally settled on a
daily regimen of non-opiate pain drugs. And the pain manifests itself
as a strangling sensation. DIanne was strangled, too.

Going back to *fix* this thing of 25 years ago, I had to admit my
failings as a boyfriend. I had to accept my guilt for allowing a scuzzy
former roomate and best friend to continue visiting us, even though he
was sometimes accompanied by this scuzzy guy we did not like or trust,
who turned out to be the serial killer. And I should've fixed the
window which he eventually used to enter our house. But I also had to
accept that that's the way we were back then -- children of the
sixties, I guess, living a little on the edge. 

Having this thing to fix gave me another sense of mission, I guess, in
that writing the book, which would be about my music career and the
cancer thing as well, was important in other ways. 

Having jumped down this trap door again, I had to figure a way out. As
I said, things had gotten worse once I started writing about it. Then,
as I delved deeper and investigated the investigation into the
murders, and met various cops and Texas Rangers who worked on the
cases, and read all the newspaper stories about it, things got much
worse. I went to Houston and explored Dianne's old neighborhood with
her best friend, Mary McGee, contacted her father and brother. Her
mother had just died. Her brother gave me Dianne's first oil painting,
which she painted when she was 13.  I sank deeper and deeper. Rarely
smiled or laughed. Slept very little.

Finally I went to a psychiatrist who diagnosed post traumatic stress
disorder, and treated me for it with EMDR and some other therapy, and I
started feeling better. The flashbacks decreased significantly, and
the guilt wasn't so bad. I was able to think about Dianne the way she
was, alive, and finally, I was able to think about my own past a little
more clearly, too, since it wasn't all tied up in murder and horror. 

That helped me write about those times and even laugh about them. 

When I first started writing, I approached the book as a How To book,
thinking that might be a good way to hook people into the story, and I
guess I was thinking I needed the justification for contributing to the
over-bloated field of memoir writing. After a while, though, that
seemed silly. Best just to tell the story as simply as possible. So
that's what I tried to do. After all, I don't want to suggest that
people follow my example anyway!
  

    
the whole story is so harrowing, and that is quite a post
  

    
Was their much tension over your investigation of the past vs your current 
life with Lois? It must have been a strain, and hard to support seeing the 
pain you were going through.
  

    
Lois could see that main thing was for me to get well, and that meant
physically as well as mentally. She allowed me the space and everything
else I needed to do what I needed to do. We actually talked about
Dianne at length for the first time. When we first got together, I told
her the story a few times, and after that, she just didn't want to
hear about it. I guess that's what I needed at the time. I shut up and
shut down as much as I could. 
There came a time, especially in the fall of 2001, which I call my
summer of death (besides dealing with Dianne's murder in full again,
several close friends died, one of cancer, another was tortured to
death by drug dealers with a flame thrower; and then 9-11 happened
which seemed like an afterthought, believe it or not), when Lois
thought I should pull back, that I had gone too far and should probably
go no further. I had invested immense amounts of time and money (which
I didn't have, so it was borrowed) to write this book and get to the
bottom of the story. She said screw the book if it's going to do this
to you, you don't have to finish it, move on to something more
pleasant, etc. 
It was a possiblity to consider but I wanted to forge ahead and I
promised not to go eat a gun or something over it. And I rounded the
bend. Finally I found out enough -- not everything, but enough -- and
got to the point that thought I could dig my way out again.
One important thing that happened was that I finally got over my death
penalty wish. I knew in my heart that capital punishment isn't
workable, even if it's the right thing to do in some cases, and I
absolutely believed (and still do) that it's the right thing to do in
the case of this particular monster. I mean, here it is: If I could
have had my wish, I would've wished for this killer to be executed, and
then they could go ahead and outlaw capital punishment forever.
Well, of course that's a pretty selfish wish. I got over it, finally,
after seeing the kind of cynical deals they cut with him to get his
testimony against another killer, and the total ineptitude of the cops
and prosecutors in Kerr County who could have arrested him for the
murder of at least two other girls back in 1975, a year before he
murdered Dianne. But the girls disappeared on a fall day in 1975, and
although their clothes and underwear were found by the side of the
interstate, their shoes and purses in the their locked car, the sheriff
simply shrugged his shoulders and said, Oh, well, I guess they ran
away. At the time, the killer was out on bail for 2 rape charges, a
long haired druggie in a tiny town (Kerrville) at a time when long hair
was enough to get a guy pulled over and harrassed on general
principle. 
So, anyway, those are just some of the things that affected my
thinking. Yeah, pretty harrowing, and Lois is pretty special. I got
lucky in love twice in a row.
  

    

Survival is definetely the utlimate revenge. At what point did you decide to
go public with the story as opposed to writing of a more private nature,
such as journals and how did that decision shape the work?

There are some amazing yet disconcerting passages in the Martin Amis book
_Experience_ where he talks about a female cousin whom he was close to when
young but whom went missing sans trace with her bodily remains being
discovered far too many years later at Fed West's house. Not only does he
talk about coming to terms with the confirmed fact of her death and probable
torture but he talks about coming to terms with her being a victim in such a
public offence. This is not the focus of the book, but it is a recurring
thread.
  

    
It's interesting that you mention that Martin Amis book and its
recurring thread, because as I recall, there's a similar thing in Night
Train, which did not move me at all as a novel. 

Actually, I always intended to go public, once I actually started the
journals. I've never been much of a diarist per se, just as I was never
the kind of musician who just played *for fun*. I always figured that
if I was going to *be* something -- whether it was musician or writer,
it had to be for real, for public consumption, and not something I did
on the side as a hobby with a day job. I know that's a little bit odd,
but that's the way I've always been.

I think one underlying idea behind your question is did I fear the
consequences of making this private hell public. I did think about
that, and I worried that it would disturb Lois, because she's a much
more private person than I am. I also worried about my parents, because
there are lots of things in the book, like all the high jinks related
to getting high in my teens and twenties, that they knew little about.
But in the end, I figured that I'm a writer, I'm a public persona
already, and as such, I owed it to myself to be honest and dig all this
stuff up.

I figured that it might do some other people some good to read about
it, too. It always bugged me to hear people talk about *closure* and
*putting all this behind you* as if a horrible experience was something
that had to have a beginning and an end, that there's some point at
which you smile and say it was all for the best, it was god's will,
etc. This may sound bitter. Whatever. I do think in the post-9/11
world, we've seen that sometimes the public doesn't feel that way. They
do want to keep reliving traumatic experiences. Especially when the
media sees entertainment dollars in it, and politicians can capitalize
on it.

Another motivation, another thing that moved my typing fingers, was
the way the far right kept beating up on the sixties generation, saying
that all those things we did to help change the world -- thru rock n
roll especially -- were a big mistake, it was a tragic waste of time,
etc. That really made me mad. So one thing I wanted to do was to show
the psychic power of rock n roll to heal and inspire and uplift, and
its role as simply a legitimate way of life that has value. You've got
guys out there who are little known across the land, toting their
Stratocasters & Precisions & drum kits who are the Picassos and Dalis
of the new millennium. Know what I mean?
  

    
Yeah, rock and roll is the heartbeat, and great bands just keep coming, 
though I suppose it's harder to find the great stuff since the low-hanging 
channels are filled with hip-hop at the moment (not to denigrate hip-hop, 
which has its own stream of great beats).

You've got a great couple of pages in the book about your swan dive into 
rock and roll, buying your first guitar etc. Could you say a bit about the 
scene back then? (Around the same time I was writing songs for a band in 
Big Spring, Texas, where we'd been rock-saturated since the 50s, when our 
local radio station KBYG went totally nuts over rock, and at night we 
could pick up KOMA in Oklahoma as well as  Wolfman Jack from across the 
border.)
  

    
I bought my first electric guitar in 1968, I believe, the year I
turned 14. My memories of that time and the years just before and after
are very subjective and impressionistic, filled with gaps and
certainly subject to fuzziness and error. I remember Wolfman Jack, of
course, and the odd stations whose signals blasted through from
hundreds of miles away. There were a couple of those on the border, one
in Dallas, and maybe KOMA sometimes, I'm not sure. In retrospect, it
strikes me a s a pretty ecclectic mix of stuff, because you had all the
Texas regional bands with hits, and KTSA-AM in San Antonio played a
lot of them, and that means Sir Douglas Quintet (not one of my
favorites, actually), the Chaynes, Mouse & the Traps, 13th Floor
Elevators, Moving Sidewalks, Playboys of Edinburgh, and a cool band
from nearby Fredericksburg called the Crossfires, who had gone out to
LA and got signed to Capitol Records, of all things.

Brit invasion was still going strong, and Ed Sullivan Show was a
marvel, plus those other shows, too. Most of the bands playing on TV
were lip syncing, but we were either too dumb to notice or too excited
to care. 

Being isolated in a small town in that era was full of little
surprises and mysteries, and for me it's all tied up with the mysteries
of adolescence and early teens, too. The psychedelic records started
coming out after the Elevators debut in '67, so there were all these
drug references in lyrics, or in the sounds, too. You'd get goosebumps
when you heard it, even though you weren't positive whether they were
definitely talking about getting high or not. We were running around in
the woods, smoking various weeds that looked like they resembled pot,
and some that didn't as well. There was a lot of craving for that
experience, to be in that groove. My friends and I wanted to be hip
soooo bad.

Fortunately, they printed the plans for building a fuzz box in Popular
Science or Popular Mechanics, and for five bucks my brother did the
assembly and soldering and viola, fuzztone!! I couldn't play for shit
but I could make that psychedelic noise, and that was somewhat
satisfying.

There's nothing new to the comparison, but the early energy,
experimentation, DIY methods and ethos, of the late 70s punk scene was
very reminiscent of the mid sixties. 

A few years ago, I visited with an old jukebox distributor / repairman
out in Luling who told me lots of stories of those days, when he was
distributing records from his car trunk, promoting them at sock hops
and through his string of jukes. Great stuff.

Writing songs for a band in Big Spring? What's the rest of that story,
Jon?
  

    
I was uncoordinated and stubby fingers, so I couldn't get anything much
like music out of a piano or guitar... but I could write, and I had a
great sense of meter. I would go drinking with my friends (my Dad was a
Schlitz distributor, and I was known to slip an occasional case out the
door) and I would carry a notebook and write poetry, and eventually I was
writing lyrics and passing them to a guy I'd grown up with, Rick McKinney.  
He'd taken guitar lessons, and could play well enough, so he'd started a
band called The Time Machine that was pretty popular in Big Spring
(especially given the lack of competition). He put music to my lyrics, and
we had several songs that were not horrible, though I don't know how well
I remember 'em.  One was called "Strawberry Man," another was "She's Gone
Away."

I hung out with the band, shot a bunch of photos of 'em (I was also 
getting into photography), and had this vicarious rock and roll 
experience. I moved to Odessa during my senior year but kept driving back 
to Big Spring. I met an attorney named Dick Clarkson who worked with 
Warren Burnett's law firm, and he was going to fund a 45 to be recorded at 
the Robin Hood Brians studio in Tyler, where John Fred and the Playboys 
(among others) recorded. He didn't come through, though, because Warren 
Burnett's son Abner wanted to record something, so he put his money there. 
Abner was a folk singer... I think he's the same Abner Burnett at 
http://www.worpt.com/.

At some point the band changed its name to The Mercenaries, then started
working with a great black r&b singer named James Green and became James 
Green and the Mercenaries. I couldn't tell you how many songs I wrote, 
maybe a handful.
  

    
When Ed gets back, I bet he'll have something to say about The Record Shop 
in Big Spring, which he discovered at some point. They always had 
everything, so it wasn't hard for us to find records that we wanted. The 
owner, Oscar Glickman, would carry everything that was released, and I 
can't tell  you how many hours I spent flipping through LPs at that store. 
It was great.

(We also had a newsstand that carried pretty much every periodical you 
could want, so on the writing side I was feeding my head with material 
from all over the world.)

What was it like growing up in Johnson City? I imagine it was pretty 
interesting when Lyndon was president...
  

    
When LBJ ascended to the top spot, the town boomed from population 611
to 1000, which was a big jump. There was an extra glow on life there,
and it was grand to see the Big Man speed thru town in his white slab
sided Lincoln, or to see him at church, or at the ranch. A lot of new
kids in school, and they were from other places, too, including DC,
which was a little educational, and since some of my friends' dads were
secret service, we sometimes went out to the ranch. We were there to
greet him the last time he flew back, his last day in office. Shook
everyone's hand, handed out his gold signature pens.

But really, life there was stultifying and stupid. If you weren't a
redneck you were in for a lot of grief. A lot of fat asses & small
brains there, and C&W was king. So I got in fights constantly for being
a rocker. Rednecks would chase me & try to cut my hair, which was
barely touching the back of my shirt collar & ears, which was as long
as you could get away with under the school dress code. I have NO
nostalgia for small towns, no affection for that way of life. Give me
the big bad city any day. People were mean & ignorant & intolerant.

Like I said earlier, it was isolated and cut off. Radio and Ed
Sullivan were the main pipelines for cool back then, until Rolling
Stone and CREEM, and a  few other rock mags you could get. So I
subscribed. Bought singles at an appliance store in Fredericksburg, 30
miles west, or Austin, 45 miles east. 

There were just a few of us rockers, which forced us to band together.
For the most part, other than a couple of school dances per year, the
only live music in town was at the county fair & rodeo. You can just
imagine what kind of music they had there. Fredericksburg had Pat's
Hall, a serious fucking C&W joint. 

A little bit of the hardcore classic country music still rings my
bell, but for the most part, my exposure to the kind of people who
liked C&W, and all the trappings that went with it -- cowboy hats &
boots & shirts with yokes, etc. --left me with a lasting aversion to
all that stuff. Therefore I despised cosmic cowboy music when it
erupted. My tastes have broaded a little bit over the years. I like a
little Willie Nelson now and then, but for the most part, country
flavored music is not something I care for at all.

Back to JC in high school, though, there was one rock n roll band,
made up of guys 3 years ahead of me. They were called the Vibrations,
and they were a typical garage band of that era. 1968 or 69, I believe,
and they played all the garage band hits -- Louie, Louie, 96  Tears,
Dirty Water, Knock on Wood, Gloria, Steppin Stone, Satisfaction,
Midnight Hour -- hell, I think I can almost remember every single song
they played, and I only heard them 2 or 3 times, but it made a HELL of
a big impression. They were all in my brother's class and friends of
his, but he wasn't involved, not a musician. These guys really lit my
fire. That's probably what sent me to Sears & Roebuck to buy that
electric guitar.

Then in 1970, this hipster accounting teacher moved to JC named Tommy
Sturrock. He had a black pompadour and a real good R&B voice. I think
he may have been from Louisiana. He took over the band and they became
Tommy Sturrock and the Soul Counts. They played a couple of gigs and
shifted into more of an R&B groove. They seemed pretty great to me. 

The tightasses in town were outraged, though, and they gave Tommy the
boot. The band gave it up after that, and none of them pursued music
any further.

I like the story of your friend's band. Mercenaries is a great 60s
band name. And one thing about Abner, I guess whenever he got into any
trouble, daddy could always get him out. 

Odessa's always been a rough town. They must've had some clubs there.
  

    
these are great stories.

My uncle, who grew up in houston, started at UT in 1970.  Even at that late
date, it was dicey to stop at most places between houston and austin if you
had long hair.
  

    
Oh, absolutely. There were a number of places in Austin where redneck
thugs hung out for the pleasure of beating the crap out of hippies
and/or African-Americans. Don Weedon's filling station on the northern
end of the drag (I think it was a Conoco) was one such place. The
unfortunate blacks who happened to stop there sometimes got treated to
shit like the attendant sticking the nozzle inside the car and spewing
gas, instead of the tank. 

In Johnson City and Fredericksburg, hitchhiking hippies who passed
through town would get picked up by the sheriff and taken straight to
the barbershop, where they were shorn BEFORE being taken to the
courthourse where formal charges of loitering or vagrancy or whatever
were filed. No Norman Rockwell bullshit around there for anyone who
looked different than the norm.
  

    
I'd almost forgot how scary it was to drive around Texas back then if you 
had long hair and looked hippie. Interesting that we just kept flying our 
freak flag, as David Crosby put it. We drove a lot to Inks Lake, where 
Marsha's parents lived, and to West Texas to see my parents, and it was 
like living in a video game sometimes, Dodge the Redneck. Mean sullen 
characters who would follow you til you left their town. The only reawl 
trouble I ever had, though, was in Odessa. I visited a friend on the west 
side of town, which was not my usual stomping ground. It was kinda nutty - 
he was smoking bana peels. I was walking to a  phone booth to call my 
folks to pick me up; he didn't have a phone. A group of 5-6 guys stopped 
their car, jumped out, ran to me and knocked me down, pounded my face, 
then took off. I managed to get off the road and hide... saw them come 
back around, and I always wondered if they were going to pummel me again, 
or check whether I was okay. When I reached the phone booth, I was 
spraying blood everywhere from my nose; I thought it might be busted. 
Oddly enough, this didn't freak me out too much. I think I was just 
relieved that I got away. I'll never know what the deal was with those 
guys. I never thought about it being a hair thing, but I guess my hair was 
pretty long for Odessa at that point, though nowhere near as long as it 
was in the early 70s.

I can't recall Odessa having a single place for bands to play, though
there was something in Midland (can't remember the name of it, but I
traveled there once with another Big Spring band called Just Us Four to
take photos. It was a real dive, we had a blast.)  Odessa did have
concerts at the Ector County Coliseum and a few at odd other places. It
blew my mind that Steppenwolf - then one of my favorite bands - came to
town. There were local bands who would play dances, including one that
used the name Zachary Thaks, copped from the Houston band. The best show I
remember was The Music Machine at some youth center... they were great!  
(Sean Bonniwell's recorded great stuff recently, too ... and he's written
an autobiography, _Beyond the Garage_, that I'd like to read...)

Sorry about going off on my own memories, here; those synapses get so 
little use these daze.

What was life on the road like for the Skunks, when you were touring? What 
kinds of venues were you playing? Did you have favorites?
  

    
"Most times you can't hear them talk
Other times you can.
All those same old cliches,
'Is that a woman or a man?'
And you always feel outnumbered,
You don't dare make a stand."
  

    
"Are you a booyyyyy or are you a girrrrrl?" Ah, the Barbarians, from
Bostown!

Jon, I never have been to Big Spring, but I did used to hang out at
Village Music in Mill Valley, CA. John Goddard, who owns the place, got
seriously into dealing with collectors when he and another guy went
out there and cleaned out Oscar's 78s. They lined the bed of the truck
they'd rented with the Patti Page and other unsalable ones, and drove
the rest back to California. The weight of the shellack collapsed the
truck's springs, and it was complete junk by the time they got it back,
but they made so much selling the records that they just paid for the
whole thing. John later made many more trips back there, and I proudly
owned a copy of Roy Orbison's Lonely and Blue album with a sticker from
The Record Shop saying it cost a whopping $3.98.

Wait! I take that back: I must have been in Big Spring the time I had
an assignment to write about the Vaughan brothers, who were playing a
show at the penitentiary for Austin's blues club owner Clifford Antone,
who was doing time there on one of his extraordinarily stupid pot
busts. But I believe the hotel we all stayed at was in Midland. 

I'm also curious about the Skunks' touring circuit. You guys weren't
"fashion punks," ie, slavish copiers of the New York/London styles, nor
were you squeaky new wavers. Now, granted, clubs in those days would
book anything even remotely non-mainstream if they thought it'd draw a
crowd, but what were your hot cities, and which bands did you feel were
your peers and friends?
  

    
First off, I was titillated by Jon's report on seeing Music Machine,
and I'm going to look up that memoir by Sean Bonniwell. I didn't know
about that, and of course I loved that band. What a great sound, and by
the sound of the title, Beyond the Garage, it's a book I want to read.
There's a memoir by a drummer called Confessions of a Rock Drummer, I
think, that's pretty decent, too. If memory serves, the author was from
Okahoma, and played in bands you've never heard of, but the writing is
exhuberant and hits a lot of cool notes. Which reminds me of the rock
memoirs in Sunday's NYTBR, none of which was mine, sadly. Ah well, what
the fuck.

I'm glad you asked about the Skunks' on the road. As you point out,
Ed, we weren't the typical new wave band, as such. The Skunks also
passed as a bar band in lots of venues, because we were a loud guitar
band, and we had a big repertoire that included a dozen or so covers --
Stones, Velvets, Kinks, Dr. Feelgood, Stooges, etc.  Most of the
Austin bands who started out at Raul's could play only 45 minutes or
so, but we could play all night, which meant that a lot of bars out
there, including some blue collar joints (or whatever local
colloquialism might apply), would hire us. Sometimes the gig was a bomb
and we never went back, sometimes it was  hit and we kept going back.

We played workingman's places like the Back Room in Austin, Soap
Creek, Mother Earth, frat parties, even a wedding reception now and
then!  New Orleans was always fun, but the gigs were rarely great.
Jed's was a dump, and the reception wasn't stupendous,  Jimmy's was a
nice joint, and as I recall, the gigs there were OK. Show Place in
Metaire was bizarre, and not fun. The 688 in Atlanta was a great place.
We did some good shows in North Carolina, but I don't remember the
clubs. We would piece together enough gigs between Austin and New York
to make the trip worthwhile. Houston could be very good or very stupid.
We played quite a few gigs in discos. Lots of discos would devote one
night a week as *punk night* and we'd play those, even tho we weren't
all that punkish compared to other bands. We sort of *passed*
sometimes, because we had a good rep with booking agents & club owners
as a dependable, professional band, and we had a following too.

In Houston, we played the Rocksy (a disco) a lot. Rock Island was a
total dump, and some gigs were good there. The scene there was strange.
After Austin, every town in Texas could be frustrating and
disappointing. The scenes in these other cities always seemed to be
just getting off the ground, even into the 80s. We played Fitzgerald's
which was a little stuffy for us, but not as stuffy as Rockefeller's, a
former bank, with the acoustics of a bank, which meant that we were
always WAY TOO FUCKING LOUD!!!

The Escape in Houston was one of our best-paying gigs. It was a new
wave dance club that featured bands but had the mix just right. But the
cops who moonlighted there (and some of the security guys, too) were
extremely brutal, so in a way it was blood money. Houston was a rough
town back then.

Dallas was also frustrating. The Hot CLub was OK, but like I said,
after Austin, you had to downscale your expectations. DJ's was another
good Dallas club. 

Fort Worth had Zero's, which was pretty good. The perfect grimy punk
club, which was OK although we got used to a little nicer type of
venue, which also usually meant more money.

We played all over the state. We wanted to be the next Stones, not the
next B-52s, so we played just anywhere they would pay us. Lubbock was
always bad luck, but we kept trying. We played Fat Dawg's and Rox, or
something like that. We cancelled at last minute our first gig at Fat
Dawg's in early 1980, because Jon Dee quit the band.  This probably
hurt our career a lot. Lubbock was a stepping stone to LA, because of
the vast size of Texas, and playing the standard 3 night stand there
could be very profitable.  After we cancelled, the club took a chance
on a just then rising club act called Stevie Vaughan and Double
Trouble. They went over big and became a regular band there. I'm not
saying that the same thing would've happened for the Skunks, but the
club wouldn't book us again for over a year, and it definitely hurt.

We played Oklahoma City -- the Bowery, located in the basement of a
church -- quite often. It was an 8 hour drive from Austin but playing
there 2 or 3 nights, it was worth it. They  had a pretty good scene.
Like places like Texas A&M, where there was a lot of repression, lots
of rednecks, there were lots of artsy people who were united and
determined to be cool, so there were good scenes in those places.
Places like that always gave good parties for the band after the gigs,
too.

We hooked up with a club manager in Elyria, Ohio, in about 1980 and he
loved the band, and started booking tours for us all over Ohio and the
surrounding region. Pat Costigan was his name. Pat ended up becoming
our road manager and moved to Austin with his wife and a bunch of their
siblings. We played Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinatti, Dayton,
Youngstown, Oxford and Lexington & Lewisville, Kentucky, Indianapolis,
Champaign, Chicago, Erie (PA), Boston, and all over that area. Some of
the gigs were with a band called Erector Set, originally from Cincy but
later of Boston.  They were reggae-dub-power pop-R&B type band and
phenomenally hot live. Their sound man could work miracles with a Space
Echo. A lot of these gigs were hot, many of them college towns, of
course, and even when they weren't, playing with Erector Set was tons
of fun. We consumed huge amounts of booze together, and jammed on
several songs every night, usually Sister Ray and Sex Machine, if you
can imagine that.

Colleges were great sources of gigs. They treated you right -- deli
trays, stage hands, interviews on the college radio station, the works.


I guess I've mentioned playing NYC, but the clubs I remember best are
CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, TR3, My Fathers Place (Long Island), the
80s, and some joint that was open all night. We went on at two a.m. or
thereabouts and someone gave us coke, too, and we were there all night,
and the joint was still going strong when we loaded out at 9 in the
morning. In fact, a whole new crowd of people were just then arriving.
So we load out our shit into the buzzing Manhattan rush hour groove,
and I swear, we all felt like vampires. 

Playing in LA was hit or miss. Blackies was good, BLue Lagoon Saloon
was good. We never played Palomino or Starwood, dammit, though I played
there with Carla Olson and also with Kathy Valentine later on. The
Skunks played a roller disco that was very popular at the time. Right
near Santa Monica Blvd. where the Esprit store is now. It was a stupid
gig.

I did have lots of fun playing with Kathy Valentine's band, World's
CUtest Killers, and with Carla Olson, in the Carla Olson & Mick Taylor
(yeah, of the Stones) Band. We played good clubs, in LA, San Diego, San
Franciso, Sacramento, etc.  

Playing with Kathy was interesting because, especially with Kelly
Johnson (of Girlschool)  in the band, there was a big contingent of
lesbian fans. I was prepared for the shock of being in a band where I
was not the star, but to have a large cluster of women only lusting for
the girls in the band was just a little different. I mean, sometimes
the guys really felt like wallpaper.  

I also had some interesting experience with Mick Taylor. He was still
(and I think, still is) a phenomenally great guitar player. But I
suppose I've digressed a little.

Right now I think I'll go swarm ABE for that Sean Bonniwell memoir.