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WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 17-19, 2005

The Road, the Radio and the Full Moon

Texas: Three Days and Two Nights

by SUSAN ALCORN

HOUSTON

Houston, black hole, geographical epicenter of American culture. It is the farthest

point southwest for the prototypical "Southern" culture. In the 1950s thousands upon
thousands of rural farmers from East Texas moved south in search of jobs and found
them, many working in the oil industry. Houston is the farthest northeast of the
established Mexican-American or "Chicano" culture–corridos, norteno mixed with r
and b and country; accordions gave way to keyboards to form the music now known as
"Tejano".

Houston is also the farthest point west of the indigenous cajun and zydeco cultures.
The white Cajuns still meet every Saturday and Sunday at Pe Te’s Cajun restaurant to
eat crawfish, gumbo, and boudin and dance to the (mostly white) cajun bands from
Louisiana. Similarly the Creoles every Friday go to Jax or St. Mary’s Catholic Church
to dance to Marcus Ardoin, L’il Brian Terry and the Zydeco Travelers, Chris Ardoin,
Step Rideaux, or Roy Carrier. Zydeco — the propulsive beat , the washboards, the
black (and white) people all in Western clothes doing a dance that is something like a
jitterbug. The band leader is usually the accordion player, and a washboard player is
mandatory.

And Houston has always had a healthy blues scene highlighted by luminaries such as
Lightnin’ Hopkins, Pete Mayes, Joe "Guitar" Hughes, Martha Turner, and Trudy Lynn.

There is a jazz tradition in Houston. Saxophonist Arnett Cobb, a Houston native,

known for his swaggering "Texas Tenor" style, lived and played here for years (when
he could find work) as did Joe Sample and the Crusaders. Houston jazz, however,
developed differently that it did in the North — the energy was different. The
musicianship was often as good a it was in New York, Chicago, and other northern
bastions of bebop and the avant-garde, and in a way just as innovative, but the jazz

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musicians in Houston channeled their creativity in a more down-home way – a soul

jazz deeply rooted in the blues, funk, Creole, and country of the culture they grew up
in.

There is a thriving rap scene in Houston, which has given the world groups like the
Geto Boys and South Park Mexican, though I know little about it.

Houston had its share of rockers too. In the sixties and early seventies, bands like the
Thirteenth Floor Elevators and ZZ Top would play at Liberty Hall in lower Montrose,
while in the surrounding small towns, blue-eyed soul singers BJ Thomas and Roy
Head with their horn bands performed for dances at ballrooms. The Thirteenth Floor
Elevators split up; Roy Head and BJ Thomas both achieved a modest success in pop
music and then later as country-western singers. ZZ Top is still around and still in
Houston.

Country singers like George Jones, Freddie Fender, and Gatemouth Brown used to
record at Sugar Hill studios off of Wayside Drive near the Old Spanish Trail. The
producer was the legendary Hughey Meaux, the "Crazy Cajun" who did time in prison
in the early seventies for payola and again in the nineties for rape. A room in the back
of Sugar Hill was where he brought teenage girls and plied them with drugs and
alcohol.

Elvis used to perform at Magnolia Gardens on the banks of the San Jacinto River as it
widened before emptying itself into the Gulf of Mexico and at the Harbor Lights club
near the Ship Channel, which, before closing in the mid-nineties, was a popular
watering hole for Norwegian and Greek sailors, drug addicts, motorcycle gangs, and
prostitutes. When I played there, the piano player kept a loaded pistol on top of his
keyboard, and the musicians openly smoked pot on the bandstand. This was one bar
the police never entered.

And then there was Western Swing, which in Houston had a Dixieland flair to it with
steel guitar, hot fiddles, horns, guitar, and piano all improvising simultaneously. As far
as I know, this was unique to western swing in this part of the state. Twenty-five years
ago all the old western swing musicians and those few (like me) who wanted to be
around, play with, and learn from the masters used to congregate every Sunday
afternoon at Frank’s Ice House, an old beer joint in Houston’s "Heights" district
overlooking Buffalo Bayou. Frankie V, the owner, was once a singer with the original
River Road Boys (one of Houston’s more popular western swing ensembles) and was a
lover of western swing. It was an open jam session, and the musicians got free drinks.
Musicians in blue jeans, white shirts, cowboy hats, with grey hair and beer bellies
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would pull up in old pickup trucks, broken down Fords or Chevys, and new Mercedes
with their instrument in hand for these weekly gatherings. Herb Remington and Bucky
Meadows would play twin parts on the steel guitar and the guitar, and Ernie Hunter, a
rancher from Bryan, Texas, played fiddle rides that would be the envy of Joe Venuti.
Once I thought I heard three fiddles playing harmony; I looked up and saw only Cliff
Bruner, one of the founders of western swing, and then still playing in his eighties.
Frank’s Ice House has long since closed down. Frankie, Cliff Bruner, Ernie Hunter,
and Bucky Meadows are all dead. The building was used as a Mexican ice house for
several years, and is now a yuppie bar.

Country music in Houston, as in most of Texas, is first and foremost for dancing, and
it was usually performed in huge ballrooms with eight to ten piece bands. When I
came to Houston in 1981, the current local stars were people like Randy Cornor, Kenny
Dale, Mundo Earwood, and Kelly Schoppa. But this was the beginning of the end for
live country music in the city. The stars of the 80’s, most with only a fraction of the
creativity and originality of the previous generation, wasted their time, money, and
talent on liquor, gambling, and cocaine. They spent everything they had as if it would
never end, but it all came crashing down in the mid-eighties when the price of oil
dropped, turning Houston Houston’s boomtown mentality into its polar opposite. And
it never recovered. Nowadays, there is very little country music played in the city itself,
and Houston’s musicians are only recognized if they leave town (which most do) and
then become famous.

This is the Houston I remember, though it is long gone, by now only a shadow in this
oil-driven megalopolis of heat, humidity, and glass skyscrapers, that exists mainly in
bits of conversations shared by the older musicians and the people they once played
for, sitting in their now-stuffy wood paneled living rooms, showing off their old 45s
and long playing records, eager to share in the old stories filled with names now gone.
People who used to go whip dancing to white Houston bluesman Joey Long now talk
about how he died. The heroin king of white Texas blues, always with a lit cigarette
stuck between the tuning keys of his guitar. Playing a lick, taking a puff, and then
blowing out the smoke in ringlets while he sustained and bent the note. He was
playing at the Cedar Lounge one night, and during break time, he went outside and sat
on the curb and closed his eyes. It was twenty minutes before anyone realized that he
was dead. And they talk about Tommy Williams the drummer who used to have a bowl
of goldfish in his bass drum, but by the end of the night the fish were always floating
belly up at the top. Still older voices will tell of the times when they went to Dance
Town USA up on Airline Drive to dance to Bob Wills, and Tommy Duncan was singing
. Willie Nelson played there too, and his steel player Jimmy Day (one of my musical
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heroes) gave his steel guitar bar to an admirer who gave it to me, and I in turn
eventually gave it to someone else whom I’ll most likely never see again. I remember
the last time I saw Arnett Cobb playing on Allen’s Landing with an organ trio. He
needed a cane to stand up, but stand he did all night. He died six months later.

***

FRIDAY

It is early Friday evening. I start loading my equipment into my van and get ready to
make the 90 minute drive down to Rosenberg, Texas to play at my first country-
western gig this year. It is April. While I load my van, my next door neighbor Juan, a
70 year-old immigrant from Mexico, walks over to tell me, in a mix of Spanish and
English, that last night someone broke into his car and tried to steal it. His car is
usually parked on the street right in front of my van, so I’m a little nervous, both at the
prospect of the van being broken into, and at the prospect of having to come home late
at night and unload my equipment when these people may be roaming the
neighborhood. We talk and commiserate for a few minutes, then I start driving down
Interstate 10, to the Loop 610, and then onto Highway 59 southwest towards
Rosenberg. I pass through the Galleria area, an upscale shopping center surrounded
by the large apartment complexes that are home to extremely poor, illegal, and
sometimes desperate recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Past the
Galleria, the scenery is more suburban. Apartment complexes giving way to ranch
style houses built in the seventies and eighties, each one identical to the other — a
large percentage of them owned by those who could eventually leave the Galleria
ghettos. Forty years ago this was all rice paddies.

I’m driving past Wal-Marts, Targets, McDonalds, and chain stores of unlimited variety
of names and a numbing sameness of concept.

Eventually, the chain stores become fewer and farther between. The sun starts to set,
and I now feel more relaxed. The land is flat and green with few trees.

As I pass the prison at Sugarland, the sign says, "Do Not Pick Up Hitch hikers".

I pass Crabb River Road and the ancient, meandering, red-banked Brazos River

Through Richmond, former home of of BJ Thomas.

The next exit is Rosenberg.

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There’s a sign for the Rosenberg Opry (in the last twenty years or so, opries have
spread up all over Southeast Texas to give people an opportunity to see live country
music without the corrupting influences of alcohol, cigarette smoke, and foul
language.) Ed Junot, the left-handed Cajun fiddler used to play there. Then he had a
heart attack and a quadruple bypass operation. His doctor told him that he needed to
stop playing music, but Ed continued to perform at the opry every Saturday singing in
French, dancing, and playing the fiddle all at the same time. He had another heart
attack and dropped dead on stage. His funeral was held in El Campo, Texas. Frenchie
Burke, with shaking hands, played "Amazing Grace" as they laid him in the ground.

I gaze to my right to see the mist is rising above Rabbs Bayou. It’s been years since I
was here. I take the State Highway 36 Exit. There’s a huge Wal-Mart of the corner, a
billboard says, "Bud Light". On the other corner is a Toyota dealership with acres of
cars. Rosenberg is not as rural as I remember it. An old Silver Eagle Bus with a sign on
it that says "Los Chaves" is parked at the McDonalds. I go south on Highway 36, and
finally for a few miles there is nothing but country. In the fields I can see mounds of
fire ant hills. When there is a flood, these hardy creatures will all lock their bodies
together and form a miniature boat. I pass the American Legion Hall, which is having
a bingo tournament. A minute later on the right is the Fort Bend County Fairgrounds.
It has a new sign. Twenty years ago I played here with James Casey and the Texas
Swing Band. Bucky Meadows was playing guitar. Going south, there is nothing but
cotton fields for twenty miles.

At last I reach the corrugated metal building with a big neon sign that says "Chelsea’s".

Twenty years ago this place would have been called something like "Silver Wings
Ballroom" or "Larry Joe’s Dance City", or "Cowboy Country", but times have changed.
I get out of my van and walk inside. There is a full moon overhead, and a dead possum
next to the back door. On the wall facing the bandstand is a large painting of the Texas
flag. On the wall to the left is an equally large and somewhat menacing looking bald
eagle. The audience, the club owners, and the band are, I’m sure, very conservative, so
I am careful not to talk about politics (which is difficult to avoid at this time in
America).

It’s a Friday night, so there are not too many people in the building; perhaps they will
all come later. After setting up my equipment, I look for a place to sit where I won’t be
conspicuous sitting alone.

Everyone in the band is dressed in blue jeans and "Brooks and Dunn" style western
shirts. Before we start the first song, the singer shouts out "Are there any rednecks out
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there?" A tepid response. He tries again, "I said, ARE THERE ANY REDNECKS OUT
THERE?" A slightly better response. Then he yells, "Can I hear a ‘Yee Haw’?" A few
people shout out "Yee Haw" and the band begins to play. They play the current Top 40
country hits as much like the record as they can. This band, made up of weekend
warriors, gets through the first set. The bass player, playing an old fretless bass (a big
no no in c&w) is hopelessly and blissfully out of tune. Annoyed, I look over at him
while we’re playing, and he just smiles and nods as if everything is going great. This is
a bit frustrating for me because as the player of a different fretless instrument, the
pedal steel guitar, I am unable to find a pitch to lock in to. During break time I broach
the subject with him, but my advice to him to check his tuning falls on deaf ears. "Well,
I think that everybody should check their tuning. The next set he smiles at me less. The
night seems to be going OK even though I don’t know the tunes. I try to play what
seems to me appropriate, and the band seems to appreciate it.

Third set — the band goes into "Old Time Rock and Roll". If you have not had the
distinct misfortune to watch drunken middle-aged rednecks try to dance to rock and
roll, I’ll spare you the details.

Fourth set — they play some Merle Haggard, and I feel more comfortable. At the end
of the last song, the singer announces, "Last Call for Alcohol," and then tones into the
microphone, "You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here." The club owner
starts flashing the lights. At 2 AM we are finished and begin the fun part, tearing
down. The guitar player, who is the bandleader, leans over to me and announces that I
play so well that he’s in love and wants to marry me. I ask him what his wife would
think of that. He shouts to his wife (the drummer) standing behind him, "Rita, you
heard me, get lost!" I chuckled all the way home.

***

SATURDAY

My Saturday night gig is in Cleveland, Texas with my old friend Brian (brother of a
famous country singer) who until 4:30 Saturday afternoon owed me money from a gig
I did with him back in November. He had to pay me in cash, plus the amount for that
night’s gig before I would leave my house. He tells me, "Sound check is at 5:30." I leave
home at six o’clock and drive again on Highway 59, this time in the other direction,
northeast, into the piney-woods of East Texas. Along 59 North through Houston are
peppered dozens of tire shops, discount furniture stores, and also what are
euphemistically called "Gentlemen’s Clubs".

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After Houston comes Montgomery County and I pass through Kingwood, Houston’s
last suburb to the northeast. After Kingwood, there is nothing on either side of the
road but the towering pines, their presence not entirely benevolent. I feel as if they are
watching and harboring a silent dislike for anything human including me. Their old
enemies the timber companies are fading away (I remember playing at dances in East
Texas twenty years ago for loggers who were missing fingers from their work at the
saw mill and missing teeth from god knows what else.) being replaced by bull dozers,
housing subdivisions, and outlet malls.

The sun is beginning to set.

Twenty minutes later I become bored. I fish out a disk and put it into CD player. Albert
Ayler, "Ghosts".

Up ahead I cross the San Jacinto River where my daughter Rose and I once saw a four
year-old girl drown. It was twenty-two years ago at a party/benefit for the victims of a
tornado that had recently passed through the outskirts of Houston. The girl’s parents
were hosting the event and, like most of the people there, were so drunk they could
hardly walk. Roy Head, a neighbor of the organizers, was the main entertainment.
Rose and I watched as they dragged her limp body out of the muddy river, and, a
minute later, when a fight broke out over whether the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation
was being done correctly, we walked away. The girl’s mother, held by two women, was
screaming. Roy Head, wearing a black t-shirt and black shorts, his hair dyed purple,
was standing behind a barbecue pit and sobbing. The next time I saw him was a year
ago on the bandstand. While I was playing, he whispered into my ear, "Play something
sexy", and while I played, he did something slightly unnatural with his microphone.

On the left is a billboard for a tent revival. This, as they like to say, is the buckle of the
Bible Belt. My mind flashes back to my old friends Ronnie Mack and Bucky Meadows.
Ronnie grew up playing at these revivals while his father preached, his family traveling
from town to town through the Piney Woods. In the seventies Ronnie wound up
playing piano with Mel Tillis and writing several of his big hits. But Ronnie had a
drinking problem. One morning he woke up, and his wife was lying next to him dead.
The police asked him if he had killed her, and he answered, honestly, that he didn’t
remember. I don’t think he ever recovered from that, and it gnawed on him for the rest
of his life. He would go on binges, get fired from his country gigs or just disappear for
weeks or months at a time. Then he would re-appear with some Pentecostalist friends
of his driving him to the gigs. He would play beautifully and between sets he would
drink coffee. Then a few weeks later he’d be drinking beer, and then whiskey. Then he

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would disappear again, this pattern repeating itself for years. At his funeral the Holy
Rollers sat on one side of the church, and the country musicians sat on the other. Both
claimed him as their own. The owner of a local beer joint had paid for his funeral,
which did not however include an expert embalming job. I remember it was quiet in
the chapel (provided by the Pentecostalists) and very serious. I was crying and even
the most hardened men were getting tearful, then someone blurted out, "Ronnie looks
like a god damned wooden Indian." We all busted out out laughing.

Bucky Meadows came from Livingston, down the road from Cleveland. When he was
seventeen, in the early 50s, he hit the road with Hank Thompson and the Brazos Valley
Boys playing piano and later guitar. In the sixties he wound up playing with Willie
Nelson (he did the guitar ride on "Remember Me" in Willie’s acclaimed "Red Headed
Stranger" album). When I knew Bucky he owned two pairs of pants, a couple shirts, a
small black and white TV, a dog named "PJ" (Pure Jazz — the dog before PJ was
named Tal) and two old Gibson Super 400 guitars. He could barely write his own
name, couldn’t drive a car, and couldn’t play the same lick twice if his life depended on
it, but he could play "What’s New" for three hours straight without repeating himself.
Ronnie Mack said that Bucky had "seen something really bad" when he was a boy, and
he had never been the same since. In the 1980’s, Bucky could not hold down a job
playing in Houston — they wanted copy musicians playing the same exact things night
after night. When he got evicted from his apartment and his friends got tired of taking
him in, Willie Nelson gave him a condo on his property outside of Austin and a job as
mayor of his Western town. Bucky lived there until he died.

I cross Caney Creek and pass Porter, Texas.

A billboard for a right wing "Christian" radio station announces, "He loves you, yeah
yeah, yeah."

New Caney, Texas where a drummer I knew, Jack Fielder, a soft-spoken man with
shoulder length blond hair, a mustache and a beard, was shot in the chest point blank
by his wife Tara. His last word was "Why?"

As much as this part of Texas repulses me and sometimes scares me, I don’t for a
minute forget that this forgotten murky backwoods is a Cradle of American culture
both black and white. Perhaps it was the forest that shielded East Texas from the
passing of time, allowing culture, both black and white, sheltered in some way from
the stifling influences of racism, fundamentalism and political conservatism, to stew
and mix in its own way producing a mix of blues and country that to a small extent still
exists today. If you’ve seen the movie "Deliverance", that is East Texas too, and
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perhaps more appropriately, "O Brother Where Art Thou." In Texas we chuckle quite a
bit at that movie because those archetypal characters actually exist here. We all know
people here who are exactly like the characters in the film–the same wide-eyed
wonder, superstitiousness, but mixed with a certain anger and resentment, and a
profound suspicion of outsiders.

On the left a billboard announces "Cleveland Chili Cook-off".

Patton Village — speed trap. I slow down.

An old shack by the side of the road. The sign says, "Granny’s Country Antiques".

I pass through Splendora, Texas, which used to be (and maybe still is) a stronghold of
the Texas KKK. Years ago I visited a middle school in Splendora, and the principal,
wearing a black cowboy hat and chewing tobacco, tried to recruit me to teach special
education. "Yup," he said, "there was a little problem with, um, inbreedin’ several
years ago, so we have a lot of special ed kids now. Know what I mean?"

I drive on.

The last of the Texas spring wildflowers–Indian Paintbrushes, Pink Buttercups. The
Bluebonnets (the state flower) have probably been gone for a few weeks.

I enter Liberty County.

On the right a tent with a big sign that says ‘Swords and Knives".

Another sign–"Hog Processing"

Cold Spring–Kent Morrison, a guitar player who had played briefly with Barbara
Mandrell in the 60s used to be the county judge up here until he was convicted of
taking bribes. I had played a few gigs with him–always very proud, very stubborn, and
very serious. Kent died late one night on his way home from a gig when his car struck a
tree. Everyone said it was suicide.

Huge building on the left — "Bethel Assembly of God".

Sign on the right — "East Texas Drug Screening and Consortium"

My directions say to go past the Cleveland cutoff and take a left at the first gravel road
after "Joy Juice". Most of East Texas is still dry, so the liquor stores are located just
outside the city limits. I drive twenty feet, and there it is, another large corrugated

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steel building; the sign on the building says, "Reno". By now it’s dark outside. I get out
of my van, open the door, and immediately, I’m struck by the scent of pine needles,
dirt, and barbecue smoke. I walk across the parking lot and into the door. There’s a
grey haired man standing next to a woman sitting at a table who tells me to pay seven
dollars. I tell them I’m in the band. They don’t want to let me in — a girl playing steel
guitar? Finally someone recognizes me and they tell me to come in, but first I need to
have a membership. It is illegal to sell alcohol in a public place, so all night clubs and
dance halls are private clubs, most of them selling memberships at the door. I fill out
the card.

It is 7:30 and there is no sound check. Another band is playing. I sit around for three
hours while this band plays. Inside it is dark, smokey, and loud. Drunks are falling
down on the dance floor. The singer introduces a song that he dedicates to "our
fighting men in Iraq who are dying so that we can be free at home." A man in a cowboy
hat, missing a couple teeth and carrying a longneck bottle of beer in his hand, runs up
to the dance floor and shouts, "You god damned right! You god damned right!" As I
walk to the rest rooms I notice there is fresh blood on the floor. Two women in front of
the mirror fixing their makeup, "Yeah, it wuz somethin’ else. Did you see it? Billy Ray
told Justin to back off, but he wouldn’t listen." "Well, he really messed up Justin’s face.
I just hope he’ll be all right." I walk out and toward the bandstand. The cigarette
smoke is starting to bother me, and I wipe my eyes which only makes it worse.

Finally we start playing. Brian’s reputation with money is such that he has a difficult
time keeping a steady band, so this gig is done with hired guns — some of the better
country musicians from Houston, but instead of gelling, the feeling becomes
somewhat stiff as the musicians try to prove themselves to each other by over-playing.
The sound from the vocal monitors is so loud that I can barely hear my own
instrument. Brian tells the drummer to "rock it more". The drummer, misinterpreting
this comment as an instruction to turn up, starts banging so hard and so loud that he
breaks the head on his snare drum. Then the guitar player turns up. People on the
dance floor are feverishly two-stepping to the music, occasionally someone falls down.

During the break when I tell the drummer that he really didn’t need to play that loud,
he replies, "Well, if you want me to turn down, you should have Brian talk to me." As
you can see, my frank and opinionated nature usually gets me nowhere.

As I walk back up to the bandstand, I notice a sign for a Bobbie Blue Bland concert,
"Live at Reno’s". During the second set, Brian leaves the stage after the first song to
dance with his new girlfriend, and his brother Kevin comes up to sing. His voice blares

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through the monitor, ". . . I’m proud to be an A-me-ri-can where at least I know I’m
free. Where the fighting men who died . . . blah blah blah ", the Lee Greenwood’s song.
I try turning my head to different angles so that the volume won’t hurt my ears, but
nothing works. The smoke is now so thick that I am playing with my eyes closed.

At two AM we are finally finished. I pack up and load my equipment as fast as I can,
then say good bye to the other musicians sitting around the empty bandstand waiting
to get paid. I walk out the door, get into my van, put the key in the ignition, start the
engine, and pull out onto the gravel road that leads to the highway. My ears are
ringing. Later I turn on the radio to help me stay awake. Art Bell’s late night talk show
is on. A woman from Phoenix is talking about a UFO she has just seen. As I drive,
there is nothing but the road, the sound of the radio, and the full moon reflected dimly
through the pines.

SUSAN ALCORN is one the true masters of the pedal steel guitar. Please visit her
website. She can be reached at: sus453 at sbcglobal net

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