There was this kid I knew from grade school who got arrested for breaking in to storage units when we were about 19 or 20 years old. He and his cohorts rented a unit to stash their stolen goods in the same complex where one of my half-assed bands “rehearsed”. He was a tough little dude who had a hardened, detached attitude even when we were young kids. His parents were older and obviously struggled to control him. Today he’d probably come with at least a couple diagnosis, back then he was just a little bastard. A life of crime was no surprise.

At that time “rehearsal” was code word for party. We played a little bit through the drinking, enough to learn some songs and slog through a performance or two but very little action, musically or commercially was to be had at that time. No matter how good of friends we were then and how much love for one another we may have stashed in the corners of our hearts today, we were probably all looking at that band as a temporary thing. A place to test out the individual flash of genius we were certain was inside ourselves, until we each could find the real situation to apply our talent to. We did have good times in those storage unit practice spaces and somehow that kid left our Peavey Bandit amps and Squire guitars alone.

It wasn’t because he and I were friends. In sixth grade playing basketball I came down with a rebound and elbowed him hard in the temple as I turned to pass the ball. He tumbled over, sprung up and punched me square in the nuts. I caught my breath and proceeded to throw the absolute dumbest punch of my life. With all my weight I swung a roundhouse right haymaker that missed my intended target, his eye, landing nothing but pinky knuckle on the hardest part of the human skull, snapping my metacarpal in two places. The coaches separated us and we got back to playing until my hand began to swell up and I had to take the long walk of shame three blocks home and show my parents what I had done.

Most likely he and his criminal cohorts left us alone because our hours were highly unpredictable and as rehearsal parties spilled out in to the drive way our soberest members could probably identify the vehicles they used to transport their stolen goods. We were lucky no matter, as there was larceny all around us, we’d later learn from the police when they started to investigate.

During these highly confusing, difficult years stumbling out of adolescence and in to adulthood, one of my friends and I concocted a “What would Johnny Cash do?” credo. We’d read a book about Cash and how he’d done a lot of dangerous, destructive and impulsive things, so we mostly used him to justify our reckless behavior. One evening on our way to rehearsal we passed a traveling carnival in the Montgomery Ward’s parking lot on Lohman Ave. My friend, who was not in the band, suggested we stop off and check it out. When I put up a protest about having to rehearse he countered with the assessment that Johnny Cash would know that this band sucked and he’d go to the carnival instead. I could not argue that logic. With Sonic cups full of generic vodka and sticky sweet soda pop we walked through the midway, people watching and trying our drunken hand at the various games.

I fixated on a Harry Dean Stanton-looking carny with tattoos on his knuckles and scars on his face. His flannel shirt was half unbuttoned and his jeans were covered in grease. Watching him hustle the last dollar off customers by alternately challenging, insulting and teasing their hopes, I felt like I was watching a maestro. A dirty, drug addicted, law evading maestro who was no stranger to sleeping on the ground or walking in the rain. With his gaunt cheekbones and gold capped tooth he was complete outsider to polite society. If he played guitar he could start a band with Keith Ferguson and Hunt Sales.

At the end of the 1980’s in the midst of Reagan’s Cold War, several of the kids ahead of me in school enlisted in the service. The guys who were sort of my punk rock mentors, who taught me about politics and music and relationships, were all gone from Las Cruces leaving us to create excitement and figure things out on our own. The future was staring us right in the face. Standing there in the midway with a cheap vodka buzz, watching the master carny and contemplating the value system of Johnny Cash, I felt some sort of epiphany about my own maturity and independence. There were a lot of stories out there and I wanted to make it my job to live them and tell them. I would continue to trip and fall and plod through life before finding any consistent way to do the things I wanted to do musically but I remembered that night well enough to write a song about it the day Johnny Cash died.

I saw the kid from school again about five years later. He walked in, shoeless, to a bar in Las Cruces I often played with my much more organized band, some members veterans of those same storage unit practice spaces from years earlier. The tall blonde jock bartender immediately began telling him to leave as he’d been banned for stalking one of the regulars. Apparently he’d been caught peeping in her windows and lurking in the bushes around her home. The kid obediently turned to leave but stopped before reaching the door and began hurling a string of obscenities at the much larger bartender, challenging him to fight. The bartender picked up an axe handle and started for the shoeless kid who stepped out the door. The bartender followed, as did everyone in the club. In the parking lot the bartender was waving his stick and telling the kid to stay away when the little dude rushed him and in some move far too quick for my eyes, wrestled the axe handle away effortlessly and stood crazy eyed threatening the stunned and humiliated bigger man. After a tense moment of standoff the kid took off at a full run for the street smashing the axe handle on a fire hydrant breaking it in half, tossing the remnant in the air as he disappeared in to the night.

The following song was released on a record I put out in 2008 called Nature of the Blues. I poured my heart and soul in to making the album. Many of the songs were conceived while I was driving a delivery truck back and forth to Houston. I had no radio and would have to sing to myself to stay entertained. Ron Flynt, Vicente Rodriguez and I played most of the instruments with a few guest spots by Ponty Bone, Jud Newcomb and Larry Tracy. We play a few of the songs live with my current band but not this one, although I’ll do it solo every so often. The groove was influenced by the Band’s take on “Long Black Veil” and the words just evolved from wanting to write something about Johnny Cash, who never made it in to the song.

Not long after arriving in Austin I met some girls at a Will Sexton show at Scholz’s Garden. In a moment of questionable judgement my 17 year old self had gotten tattooed in a small town Louisiana biker tattoo parlor with some pretty generic “rockabilly” images. One of the girls broke the ice by lying and saying those tattoos were cool. In the ensuing conversation I was tipped off that the real action in town happened at a bar on 6th Street called The Black Cat Lounge and Monday night when Rick Broussard and Two Hoots and a Holler played was thee night to be there. Still about two and a half years shy of my 21st birthday, I inquired about the ID situation and they assured me that it was wide open.

The 1990 Black Cat Lounge was the second incarnation of the club. It had been in an even smaller space a few doors down. The expanded version was tiny in it’s own right, looking more like a partial roof and loft built in an alley between two proper buildings. The sides had bleacher seats and the middle was a dance floor. The relatively high stage split the space in half, with an open air yard more or less taking up the back. My first night there I paid the three dollar cover, bought a dollar Pabst Blue Ribbon and took a seat up on the bleachers. It was like a cowpunk psychobilly dream come true. The guys were slicked back in black leather, girls in sleeveless western shirts with cow skull tattoos. On stage was the coolest human being I’d ever seen. Blond pompadour piled high, wielding a white telecaster (outfitted with a Bigsby tremolo) plugged straight in to a sparkle blue tuck and roll Kustom amplifier. He marched the band into a hard hitting no frills version of Johnny Rivers’ “Poor Side of Town”, the class struggle anthem stripped of the original’s soft rock trappings. This was everything to me, everything I imagined could happen in mythical Austin, Tx.

I lurked around the corners and shadows of Two Hoots and a Holler gigs until I finally got invited to an after show party somewhere in South Austin. I picked up a battered Stella guitar in a mostly empty room and played a Lefty Frizzell song. Rick sat down across from me, expressed approval of my repertoire and played back for me a bit of Rank and File’s “Sundown” with the “number one in ’53 and old Lefty got around” line. He told me a few stories about going to LA as a teenager and growing up playing Cajun music. After that we were friendly enough that I hung around a lot after gigs, one time getting in to an old fashioned Greasers vs. Soc’s standoff in the alley behind the club with some fratboys while the band was loading out.

The combination of influences that Rick drew from made perfect sense to me. I grew up in a small town surrounded by agriculture. Country music was a dominating cultural force, impossible to ignore. Southern New Mexico is full of farmers, ranchers and rodeo riders. I got to hear a lot of country music in it’s natural environment and developed a love/hate relationship with it, as any free thinking person would. I loved the drive and power of Johnny Horton, the heart wrenching sadness of Hank Williams and the bad ass bravado of Waylon Jennings, but I hated the simple minded redneck sloganeering and the overly sentimental cliche ridden heart string tuggers that the radio preferred. My parents listened to a lot of country music, the middle of the road Ronnie Milsap and Barbara Mandrell songs on the radio in the morning, Merle Haggard and George Jones hard honky tonkers when friends were at the house in the evenings. My dad also played a lot of early rock’n’roll exposing me to Ritchie Valens, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and especially Elvis. This is the music that first hit me and drove me to play. Punk rock was one step over and the New York Dolls, MC5, Heartbreakers and Stooges music that a record store clerk sent me home with fit right in with those oldies. Throw in some cut out bin cassette tapes of Freddie King, The Yardbirds and Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, and my vision of a seamless blend of American music came together. As long as it had some twangy guitar and a bad attitude it was good with me.

When I first started seeing Two Hoots and a Holler their four hour set list jumped around from Rick’s Orbison and Holly inspired originals to covers of the Cramps “Garbage Man”, Webb Pierce’s “No Love Have I”, The Clash’s “Career Opportunities”, The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” and Motorhead’s self titled basher all rendered in unmistakeable Two Hoots style. Rick’s ultra clean telecaster sliced bar chords while Vic Gerard’s bass lines danced over Chris Staples steady groove. It was a magic sound. On special occasions the great guitarist Johnny X Reed would add a layer of texture and sheen, never changing the dynamic of the trio, just taking licks out of Rick’s own bag and adding bits of flourish and finesse to the sound without interrupting the drive. For where I was at that time of my life they made perfect music and created a perfect scene.

We did a show with Rick’s new band the RB3 and our friends the Soulphonics the day after Roky Erickson passed away. Rick told a funny story about playing his version of “Starry Eyes” for Roky before he recorded it. It was a really fun night of playing rock’n’roll for nothing but the sake of playing. We cranked our amps up loud and chased the day drinkers out while our wives and girlfriends danced in their seats and the scattered friends and band members leaned against the bar talking about guitars and telling war stories, downing as many Topo Chicos as Pabst Blue Ribbons. Rock’n’roll 2019 still feels just as good. At the end of the night I hollered to Rick to get a picture, noting “I’ve known this motherfucker 30 years and there’s no photographic evidence!” I don’t see my old friends nearly as much as I used to but I still think of guys like Rick as my rock’n’roll big brothers. The people who opened up the doors of possibility right before my eyes.

I was looking for an email address for another rock’n’roll big brother Ron Flynt, when I found a mix he sent me of this track. We recorded it in 2015 with Neal Walker on bass and vocals and Ralph Power on drums and Ron applying some tasty B-3 work. It is a song about two small town juvenile delinquent brothers who plan to fix up an old truck their uncle left behind and run off when one falls in love and decides to stay. I really liked it when I wrote it but never played it much as it has a lot of words and kind of needs the three guitar parts to really work. It is an extension of what I was going for on the record I made in 2011 called Ghost Stories. I made this slide show so it can finally be heard. I think it fits right in with talking about big brothers and wide eyed eighteen year old adventurousness.

They still had a little rock’n’roll in their presence but now they looked really worried and sad. For some reason in those faces I saw my future if I didn’t get out of there. My life would be about cams and headers, a trailer house full of dirty babies and river parties on weekends when we didn’t have to work and could afford a babysitter, and of oh yeah, a guitar that I used to play.

I was full of music and wanderlust. I could not let the trappings of small town life keep me down. I didn’t clearly assess what opportunities were out there though and after leaving with no plan I was subsequently back in Las Cruces within six months. I fell back in with my old crowd. They had made some new friends who were a bit older than us who had a party house. Ramones Mania had just come out on the relatively new CD format and the first night i was there as “The KKK Took My Baby Away” was blasting the disc skipped and jumped back almost imperceptibly to the middle of the song. The drinks and smoke had taken it’s toll on the party goers and no one had seemed to notice the song had been playing for about fifteen minutes when I made eye contact with a kid I vaguely knew from high school. We were looking at each other when the perfectly timed skip hit and we both started cracking up. After about 6 or 7 more room temperature Schaefer beers and two continuous hours of the “The KKK Took My Baby Away”, he and I walked out in to the sunrise. When we’d had math together he was solidly in to Led Zeppelin and Motley Crue but Guns’n’Roses had pulled him in to the sphere of the New York Dolls and the Stooges. We talked about playing some music together and headed our separate ways in to the frosty morning.

My step father got me a job in Anthony about 18 miles south of Las Cruces right on the Texas border. I’d head down there early every weekday morning to sand and paint propane tanks or drive out to a site to set posts around a tank or chop weeds. I had to work my way out of the hometown doldrums. Steve Earle’s Exit 0 was my soundtrack. It was pretty good fun work but hard on my hangovers. Every night we were playing music in the storage sheds and drinking lots of beer. Kenta became my constant guitar playing buddy. We were digging in to Johnny Thunders and the Rolling Stones and also getting into the Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons. We drove to Austin for a weekend and saw Junkyard play with The Black Crowes opening. From working all spring I was able to save enough 1990 dollars to move to Austin. Kenta came along with two other friends and we discovered all kinds of stuff together like Two Hoots and a Holler’s insanely great gigs at the Black Cat Lounge and Alejandro Escovedo’s cool trashy rock band Buick McKane. We’d go see Lou Ann Barton on Mondays at the old Antone’s where one night she began to admonish me for not asking my date to dance. From under the lights Kenta’s soft Japanese features and long silky black hair, and probably the eyeliner, had led Lou Ann to think he was a beautiful girl. We had a little band going that wasn’t much to listen to but had some heart and soul. Our crowning moment was opening up for Hand of Glory at the Hole in the Wall. Eventually all the hard living and youthful lack of direction broke up our crew and we scattered our separate ways.

In 1997 I was in Las Cruces for the year playing in a band with some good musicians who were back home after crashing and burning in Albuquerque and LA. We played a show one night at Wildhare’s in El Paso and Kenta unexpectedly showed up. In the course of putting together a really good psycho-billy punk band called the Johnnycats he had gotten himself very strung out. After catching up at the gig we decided the party wasn’t over and slipped over the border to Juarez. We took seats at a bar I’d never been to and Kenta revealed to me his ulterior motive for wanting to go over. He needed medicine and he needed it bad. He’d been tipped off to a pharmacy and left me and the two girls who followed us over to go score. A few minutes after he left the lights in the crowded bar shut off and bouncers and bartenders were yelling for everyone to put their heads down on the table. I’d had a lot of drinks at Wildhare’s and a couple more since we hit Juarez. It was a surreal moment. It could have been a minute or twenty later when the lights came on and the proprietor was walking around telling everyone it was okay and to keep drinking. Like everyone else we headed as fast as we could for the door and freedom from whatever the hell was going on in there, now met with the challenge of finding our friend on the crowded streets. Luckily there weren’t many six foot tall Japanese punk rockers walking around Juarez and from the line at the torta stand I saw him stumbling through the crowd. I can’t remember if we hit another bar but I doubt it as everyone was pretty shaken. When it came time to cross the bridge I asked the girls to go first, then Kenta a few people back, then myself a few more people back. That way if he got stopped I could at least call his parents to get him out. Somehow we made it back to the safety of the El Paso sidewalk without incident and headed our separate ways in to the night.

In the last few years I saw Kenta in Albuquerque when passing through playing gigs. When I was touring with Zoe Muth he put me up for a couple nights and we had a great adventure in downtown Albuquerque that ended with us push starting his Ford Galaxy in the parking garage while he had a stolen bottle of champagne in the waist of his pants. He also showed me some LP’s he’d managed to hold on to through all the junkie years, some of which he thought may be mine. When I moved away from Las Cruces some of my friends would go over and drink beer on the porch with my dad and listen to records. A few walked off like my copy of the Plugz Electrify Me and a really rare soundtrack album for the independent film Border Radio. Much to my excitement both records were there. When he handed me the soundtrack he said “check it out, I got Dave Alvin to autograph it.” He told me that he’d forgotten he had it until a few months back when Dave was playing in town and he’d dug out some stuff to get signed. He brought it to Low Spirits and in over eager fashion tracked Dave down in the bathroom. When he asked for an autograph Dave barked at him “I’ve already signed it!” Kenta said he was confused, he’d just gotten there. Dave told him to turn it over and look. “I signed it like ten years ago!” There weren’t too many copies of that album around and there were no other people like Kenta. It adds up Dave would remember signing it.

Kenta’s body finally gave out last year after a rocky few years. He was a guy who lived and breathed rock’n’roll whether anyone outside his immediate circle ever knew he played a note or not. We had some great times at the very most formative time in our musical lives. The song posted below is something I came up with to record with my pal Eddy Best for submission for a movie soundtrack. Eddy was looking for something acoustic and I always wanted to do something along the lines of Dave Alvin’s cool work on the Border Radio soundtrack or a Paris,Tx inspired piece. When it got rejected I decided to make this slide show and put it out there to be heard. The pictures are either family photos, photos my wife or I took and one picture our friend Deanna Olivarez took for our engagement.

I first heard Jesse Taylor, like most everyone else, in the Joe Ely Band. They were the opening act when Linda Ronstadt played the Pan American Center in Las Cruces, NM sometime around 1981. I was too young to remember much about the show but I do recall them playing a balls to the wall version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” so it had to be around the Musta Notta Gotta Lotta album. Joe told me he actually first met Jesse in Venice Beach, California. He woke up from a night of sleeping on the beach to the sound of some guys talking in the unmistakeable Lubbock dialect. He walked over and introduced himself. He already knew who Jesse was from his tenure in Krackerjack, the great, mysterious, unrecorded blues rock band formed by Johnny Winter’s rhythm section which featured a slew of pre-fame guitar heroes including Gary Myrick, Robin Syler, John Stahaley and even Stevie Ray Vaughan. A few years later Joe began his band in Lubbock with a different guitar player but when Jesse settled in next to steel guitarist Lloyd Maines the group created innovative and tightly arranged instrumental trade offs that set them miles apart from any other country-rock combo. Ely had been all over the place on his folk singer trip and he knew if he were going to tie himself down to a band, it would have to be something very special, and this certainly was.

When I first moved to Austin, maybe because of my stocky build, people often asked me if I was related to Jesse Taylor. By the time I arrived in mid 1990 the Sunspots, the powerhouse band that backed Butch Hancock in a West Texas styled approximation of circa 1965 Dylan and the Hawks, had run it’s course and I didn’t see him much in the clubs until he and Billy Joe Shaver began playing happy hours together at the 311 Club and the Hole in the Wall. A little later Brad Brobisky formed the Keepers with Jesse, Ponty and the Waddell Brothers and played consistently around Austin. Though I attended a lot of these gigs, I was a very shy kid and would only occasionally get my courage up to ask him dumb questions from time to time. In 1999 I began making my first record at Don McAllister’s studio at the same time Jesse was recording his Texas Tattoo album. Don formally introduced us and we became pals. The first ever “Eric Hisaw Band” gig was opening for Jesse at Cibolo Creek Country Club outside San Antonio. I’m sure we were a total disaster but Jesse was very encouraging and inscribed a copy of his Last Night CD “to my guitar pal”.

Around the mid to late 90’s Jesse and Lloyd got back in the Ely Band and probably made the best recorded example of their magic with Live at Antone’s. It was a good run that included some national TV appearances and videos and the 2nd Clinton presidential inauguration. In a lot of ways though Jesse was not a career oriented musician, he was really a bluesman. There aren’t many real bluesmen left. I’m talking about the kind of players who were doing it back when no one had parents or society encouraging them to listen and learn from Lightnin’ Hopkins or Muddy Waters. Black or white it was an outsider way of life and a way of life that has taken its toll on it’s practitioners. Not too long ago I saw an ad for a gig at Evangeline Cafe featuring Denny Freeman, Gene Taylor, Gil T, Hook Herrera and Mike Buck. I remember thinking if a bomb hit that night, a good portion of the remaining bluesmen would be lost. It’s a different mentality, a different set of rules and a lot of time these guys don’t stay in one gig for long. They fluently speak a musical language and can get on any stage any night and give an audience something special. Maybe the blues in Jesse’s DNA drove him out of that version of the Ely Band and in time he was gigging with Calvin Russel in Europe and playing some with Billy Joe Shaver around Texas before he backed off gigging to focus on his visual artwork until he passed away in 2006.

I ran in to Jesse’s daughter Chelsea a few months back at a fundraiser for photographer Bill Leissner. I had played acoustic guitar backing some songwriters and I told her that when I do that, I never take my guitar out of it’s case without thinking about how her dad would go about it. Jesse was a monumental influence on the way I approach a lot of things as a musician and as gentleman. Truth be told though, I don’t play guitar anything like Jesse Taylor. We draw from a lot of the same influences, Freddie King and Roy Nichols most obviously, but I don’t ever play particularly fast and those tricky lightening speed licks are what set him apart from other players. What I did learn from Jesse was that as an accompanist it is your job to get inside the song and support the singer’s intention and emotion, no matter what kind of licks you draw on. At least fifteen years ago someone told me that Chelsea could play just like her dad but chose not to pursue it because it was his thing. Lucky for us she is playing now with Texacala Jones in a band called Pony Island Express.

Last month my wife Angie and I decided to ditch the SXSW festivities and go see my family in New Mexico instead. I do have a fairly new record out and may seem crazy for not trying to catch up with the limited number of people who are concerned with such things while they are concentrated in my backyard, but festival time is miserable for day to day living in Austin, in particular since I do a delivery job downtown. So we headed west and spent time with family and driving around Southern New Mexico. I did take time to stop in on two DJ friends for two very different interviews. In El Paso I visited Dan Alloway who has been playing my records on his KTEP radio show Folk Fury since the beginning. Dan has the same Oklahoma Indian roots that I do and standing next to one another we look related. In Las Cruces we stopped in on my friend and former bandmate David Wheeler who owns and operates a very cool recording studio in an old rock house his grandfather built. Dave connected with a radio station KTAL in Cruces who put him on the air for an interview show. We talked about old times and old friends, many of whom have passed on. (Listen to the full interview here.) Dave sent me this recording which I thought came out really nice so I pieced together a slide show video. His studio with it’s Spanish style ceiling and rock walls has a lot of character. So here is a song very loosely telling a story about a great lead guitar player performed solo acoustic with no guitar leads. I recorded this song originally in a kind of JJ Cale meets Johnny Cash fashion on an album that came out in 2008 called Nature of the Blues. It kind of got left out of the setlist back then but has been a staple of our setlist in recent years.

Jason and the Scorchers got me kicked out of my first band. We all went to see them at the Pan Am center in Las Cruces in the spring of 1987. The University was hosting a lot of great shows at that time. Sure they had ZZ Top and Van Halen in the big basketball stadium, but they’d split the building in half and put on shows by people I found more interesting like Joe Ely, Foster & Lloyd, The Alarm and Joe King Carrasco too. I knew a little about the Scorchers before the show from sparse MTV sightings and a few magazine articles. The punk rock meets honky tonk ethos was exactly where my 15 year old head was at. My bandmates on the other hand were in a different place. The guitar genius Eric Johnson opened the show and blew their minds with a dazzling array of fretboard pyrotechnics, which in all it’s brilliance left me completely cold. When the Scorchers hit, I’d ditched my bandmates for my older cousin and his punk rock friends, it was pure joyous rock’n’roll mayhem. I was drawn in to every riff and lick Warner Hodges played. After the show when I reconvened with my crew the divide was immense. They wanted to talk effects pedals and harmonic minor arpeggiated scale runs while my head was in a cloud of pure rock’n’roll. They hated the Scorchers as much as I was bored by Johnson. It was the beginning of the end, or the beginning of a new beginning.

Getting my Telecaster was the first good thing that happened to me after getting dismissed from the group. We had all gone in on some PA gear and me being the hardworking little dude I was at 15, had more money than anyone else in it. So it effectively worked like a savings account when they honorably bought me out. I took the money and went straight to Hubbard’s Music and picked out my dream guitar, a sunburst Japanese Tele with white binding. It looks exactly like the guitar Tito Larriva is holding on the cover of the Plugz Electrify Me album. There was a cocky guy working there who asked me if I was on a Ralph Macchio trip, as the movie Crossroads was freshly out. I retorted “ever heard of Keith Richards?” I went next door to Trax Records and Tapes, where my musical education was rooted, and above the counter was a photo of Keith playing a sunburst Tele affirming my decision.

Getting the right guitar changed everything for me. I’d had an Aria Pro ll and a double cutaway Vantage that looked a little like a Les Paul Jr. Both guitars were playable and I guess stayed in tune but neither had a personality or a soul that I could connect with and find a voice. There is something about an electric guitar that makes such a statement of identity. When you pick one up you have the whole history of players who used that model to draw on. I knew I wasn’t a Hendrix or Clapton type of player, so a Strat didn’t catch my eye. I definitely did not have the Jimmy Page Gibson Les Paul attitude. What I was drawn to were the Stones videos on MTV, the sound of James Burton’s solos on Ricky Nelson records, Waylon Jennings leather covered guitar and that picture of Tito. The Telecaster seemed to me to have a certain ability to cut through a loud band, be it Buck Owens or Green on Red. There was an earthiness to it, a couple chunks of wood bolted together with minimal electro gadgetry. With mine in hand I set about finding where I could fit in. It took awhile before I got in another band, but I practiced guitar ten times more in my room learning licks off Rank and File’s Sundown album and playing around with various blues, country and punk rock ideas. When I did get in another group what I lacked in flash or technique I could make up for in having some vision and a sound.

People often rip on the 1980’s as a terrible time for music. I really can’t agree with that at all. Though most of my favorite groups had ill fated major label experiences and some disastrous productions, it was a time when good hard rocking bands with unique sounds and songs could get signed and out on the road building audiences. I cherish hearing bands like The Blasters, X, Los Lobos, True Believers, Del Fuegos, Cruzados, Royal Court of China, Webb Wilder, Georgia Satellites, Plimsouls, Lone Justice, Long Ryders, The Del Lords, Beat Farmers, Paladins and Jason and the Scorchers on MTV or syndicated radio shows that reached the small town where I grew up. It is really interesting to me to see in the digital age how many players from those bands (or bands in whole) are still active and in many cases doing the best work of their lives now. Case in point Warner Hodges who’s full tilt rock’n’roll impacted me in 1987. Similar to the legendary Faces guitar man Ron Wood joining up with Keith Richards in the Stones, Warner hooked up with Georgia Satellite frontman Dan Baird in Homemade Sin, turning out the best sounding records and some of the coolest songs from their careers. They tour Europe tirelessly and when not doing Homemade Sin they work on a lot of other projects. True rock’n’roll soldiers.

When Warner was in town doing a house concert a few years ago I was able to tap him for a session. He had two guitars, his white Scorchers Telecaster and a Les Paul, and his pedal board. At drummer Patrick Herzfeld’s hill country studio he plugged in to my Fender Deluxe and added some killer guitar work to three songs we’d recorded a few days earlier with Ron McRae on bass. The first being a very early take on “Reservation Radio” (which we recut for our latest album Streetlamp in a slightly different form), another being a run through on the Stooges’ “No Fun”, which came with some great tales of Warner’s association with Iggy and Hanoi Rocks’ Andy McCoy, and this tune called “You Could See Me Coming” that I originally sketched out a a finger picking kind of folky thing while I was staying in a motel room in Idaho. I don’t remember where the idea came from or what I was going for lyrically but it was the most finished thing I had to work on. Right before the session I made up the little intro chord thing and put a chugging beat to it and we came up with this version. Warner is playing his Les Paul and doing the verse fills, we trade off on the solo with him doing the beginning and end while I fill in the middle. I throw in the licks at the end while he chugs on that unmistakable Scorchers rhythm guitar groove. When we were cutting he referenced Paul Kossof from Free being an inspiration for some of his licks. For me growing up in a post Ramones world, I rarely think about those classic rock guys and their individuality and influence on the stuff I love, so that was a lesson to look in to some thing I’d missed. There are a few classic Warner licks in the songs that were a real thrill and education to watch go down as they happened, many of which I’d tried to figure out and had completely bastardized in the wrong positions.

Even though none of these songs have been released or heard much, it was a great thrill to record and spend an afternoon with someone who had such a profound influence on my own musical path. I’m sure if it wasn’t the Scorchers, something would have separated me from my Jr High School band. I was in to Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and Freddie King while they were getting in to “Owner of the Lonely Hearts” and “Rock You Like a Hurricane”. Timing is everything though. The Japanese Telecaster I pulled down off the wall and took home is a beautiful instrument and had been played a lot in it’s then short lifetime. The previous owner could’ve come to buy it back or it could have found a home with some country picker drifting through town. I was lucky to be the one who ended up with it and I still play it everyday.

My grandmother’s sister had one daughter, and with no father around she grew up like a sibling to my dad and his sister. The proximity of the two houses made for a compound like atmosphere and when my cousins would come down from Colorado to stay with their grandma, along with my sister, we would all hang out in the converted garage apartment behind my grandma’s house. I was the youngest of the first four grandkids and endured a lot of typical abuse. The other three would tell me they saw a UFO and I’d look and look up to the sky until I’d just lie and say i saw it too at which time they’d call me out for lying. Sometimes they would get me to line up for a foot race between the two houses and when one of them shouted “go” I was the only one to take off, getting halfway there before looking back to see them going in the house. As we got older my two and a half years behind gave them a heavy influence on my adolescent education and world view. My male cousin had a major impact on my musical taste and political philosophy by turning me on to punk rock. Eventually he’d move to Las Cruces, his grandmother renting him an apartment as a bribe to finish high school, and become a really big part of my circle of friends. Most of my memories though are of those early teenage years, sitting on the trunk of one of the big old American cars our grandmothers drove, watching the sun set across the Rio Grande and over the hills, telling our secrets and trying to figure out what life was going to be like while the adults in our lives tumbled through romantic dysfunction, alcohol and drugs. We all grew in to being quite a handful, even when I was a homeless musician living in a primer grey Oldsmobile Delta 88 I could lay no claim to black sheep status.

I wrote this song about those nights, the line about burying friends or kin being all too prophetic as that is the only time we’ve seen one other of late. I don’t remember much about writing the words. Sometimes I’ll find a notebook with the handwritten sketches of lyrics and it takes me back to the moment, but I’ve never found any drafts of this one. I do remember buying a little pocket sized digital recorder from a box store like Best Buy and making a demo of it. I really enjoyed recording it but I think I struggled so hard getting the track off the recorder and on the to the computer that I gave the thing away. The version from the CD was recorded with Ron Flynt and Vicente Rodriguez at Ron’s Jumping Dog Studio. I remember cutting the basic track in a booth playing my telecaster. I overdubbed the guitars really fast as I had already worked out parts to do on another tele and a Gretsch I had at the time. The intro lick is three guitars playing a variation of the same lick in different octaves which gives it kind of a seasick stuttering feel. I believe Ron played the organ and piano parts that day as well and I walked out with an almost finished track. I remember going to Aranda’s on South First with Vicente after the session and being really excited about the song, having listened to it over and over on the drive. It had all the requisite Keith Richards type licks but at the same time to me felt like something new as it was lyrically nothing at all like a Stones track.

Promoting the record was really hard. I was going through a bunch of life changes and never really put the type of band together that could play the songs. It is pretty easy in Austin to get some super talented cats to back you up if you strum your songs on an acoustic and just let them do their thing. This was much more rock’n’roll band music and required the parts to play off of each other to really do the job. After some gigs that ranged from pretty okay to disastrous, I gave up and went to work trying to make other people’s songs come to life, in particular playing in a real band for awhile with my friend Bracken Hale. I have lots of criticisms and a few cringes now but the CD Ghost Stories did get some good reviews and airplay and I used it as a stepping stone to do other stuff even though I always regret how few people heard it. More importantly I feel like the song “Ghost Stories” got me one step closer to the type of songs I really want to write.

The business end of playing music has changed a lot over my time. I’ve never been attached to anything that could be defined as a commercial success but I have been lucky enough to play all over the world, sharing the stage with lots of people who inspired my choice to become a musician. I’ve played on a lot of records and many have been spun on the radio and television and been favorably reviewed. When I recorded my first album my thought was that if I could just get Larry Monroe to spin one song one time on his Sunday night radio show, I would be completely satisfied. Somehow that very raw, amateurish record found it’s way on to several radio playlists and magazines that at the time were hungry for new roots music, and of course I wanted more, more, more. Now it seems most of the magazines are gone, the radio stations became highly organized mini versions of what they were supposed to be an alternative to, and there is an expensive conference to attend for whatever micro-genre you wish to market yourself as. A good number of people I was friendly with on the journalism and radio side of the business have passed away in the last few years. I feel like a complete outsider and nothing makes me feel like writing and playing music more.

After 6 and a half years of not making a record of my own, a series of events fell in place to get seven songs I wrote and a cover of Doug Sahm’s “Revolutionary Ways”, recorded, mixed, mastered, and released on a CD and in all the digital outlets. The album is called Streetlamp after a song I wrote about an evening out with my then future wife when it became obvious to us both there was no turning back in our relationship. The album was recorded at a studio in Boerne, Tx in the hills outside San Antonio by Shawn Sahm. I met Shawn through bass player Neal Walker. Neal and I crossed paths at a tribute show to Shawn’s dad and found a lot of common ground musically, politically, philosophically and began working together. Neal’s style of bass playing and especially his harmony singing fit perfectly with my style. Drummer Jimmy Milner fell right in step and we had a good 3 piece band that did a lot of gigs and a little tour. Shawn, having been friends with Neal for years offered up his studio for us to record. We cut the songs like we were set up on a gig, after getting a solid take I would go to Shawn’s wall of fabulous guitars and try to find the right counter point. I used his Gretsch, a Les Paul, an old Gibson of his Dad’s and on a couple of tracks my cheap Silvertone to play a rhythm part that would fit with what I did live on my trusty telecaster. My 65′ Deluxe reissue was the amp used on most everything. After we had guitars down I would track a vocal and then Neal and Shawn would work together arranging harmony parts. At night alone when we were gone Shawn tracked his keyboard parts including the extremely authentic Sir Doug Quintet vox organ part on “Revolutionary Ways”. Some songs got a bit of color from Shawn’s J-200 and a few some tambourine. I met Josh Baca at Barriba Cantina on the Riverwalk one night and he sat in with us on accordion. He had all the traditional conjunto style licks down but also really enjoyed taking the accordion in other places. He played everything from boleros and Chuck Berry tunes to “Hey Joe” with us. When the gig was over I got his number in case I needed some accordion on a recording. Josh and his uncle Max Baca have been taking conjunto music all over the world in conjunction with Smithsonian Folkways records. I caught him when he was home on a Monday and had him play on a pair of songs.

After we’d tracked the songs, 6 were stalwarts of our live set, 2 were brand new songs I’d just written, we mixed with Stuart Sullivan at the Mosaic Music compound. Stuart is a top flight pro who cut his teeth working for Willie Nelson at Pedernales Studio. In the 90s he produced and engineered records by big bands like Sublime, Butthole Surfers and the Meat Puppets. Oddly enough one of the first projects Stuart had engineered in the mid 1980’s was an album by longtime friends of mine the Hickoids. When the subject came up he laughed and said the Hickoids had provided a lot of street cred for an engineering nerd with some of the scrappy grunge guys Stuart had worked with. After Stuart weaved his magic with the knobs, we sent it off to the mysterious Richard Dodd who put the final mastering touch. My wife had taken a picture in Las Cruces, NM on Organ Ave facing the backside of the St. Joseph’s Cemetery with the mountains in the background as we were driving off from lunch where we’d run in to my old friend Josh Krueger. The lone light pole to right of the arch captured perfectly the image I was looking for in the song Streetlamp which for me had become the obvious title track. There were a few starts and stops before Lonnie Layman and Jeff Smith helped us get finished files sent off to the manufacturer, and then we had a new record out. I sent as many promos out as I could afford and we had a release party at my favorite Sunday afternoon hangout spot Antone’s Records.

In this week’s Austin Chronicle top ten list issue, journalist Tim Stegall rated the album his favorite of the year. My previous albums have all been quietly honored in small best of lists, usually European and usually in the bottom half. It was nice to get the acknowledgement from someone at the Chronicle, my hometown paper where I got some pretty disastrous reviews a few years ago. I’m proud of Tim, who I’ve known since 1991 as a mutual Johnny Thunders fanatic, for putting someone on his list who doesn’t have any backstage passes or rock star treatment to offer. Tim’s a punk rock guy, through and through, and he puts his words on the line. Like any other acknowledgement, it’s here today and will be gone tomorrow. The goal is to have more music to play, new songs to sing, new places to go, and With the inspiration of my rock’n’roll outsider heroes, I plan to spend the new year getting on that.

Merle Haggard sold millions of records and had as many hits as anyone but his contrarian attitude and musical experimentation make him one of the ultimate guitar wielding rebels. When Neal Walker and I were first getting our feet wet with this version of the band we cut this track with Patrick Herzfeld playing drums and engineering. I put this slide show together on my phone.

Sometimes the most obvious things come to you in your mid forties that you really should’ve always known. As musicians a lot of our inspiration is built on seemingly irrational hero worship. I have a lot of friends and musical influences who are 15-17 years older than me, born in 53-55. I’ve come to understand that I will never get Jimi Hendrix the way these dudes do. People who’s own music has little to no obvious Hendrix influence freaking love Hendrix. It’s all about that thing where one day it was not there, and then one day it was. I never lived in a world without Hendrix, therefore my perspective is completely different.

Over the past three or four years I’ve done a lot of work with original Texas punk rock singer T Tex Edwards. Tex was in the Nervebreakers who opened the Sex Pistols Dallas show, famous for the great Longhorn ballroom marquee announcing the Pistols tonight and Merle Haggard coming up. He spent time in LA in the great 1980’s Hollywood cowboy punk rock’n’roll scene in a band called the Loafin’ Hyenas, before returning to Texas and cutting a pretty well known record as T Tex Edwards and Out on Parole that consists of weird country songs about killing people. We’ve written a bunch of songs together that span a lot of different influences from all across his musical journey. Talking about the LA days Tex mentioned having played with Gun Club bassist Rob Ritter. For me Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Gun Club are mythical mysterious heroes. In the pre-internet days when those records caught my attention I would project my own ideas on what they were like and the impact they had. About a minute in to talking to Tex, hopefully before any motormouth childish enthusiasm got the better of me, I realized that Tex didn’t care about the Gun Club. Sure they were a cool band who played around at the same time but he came to that table with his own experiences, his own vision and his focus was on doing what he did and he could rationally see that Jeffrey Lee Pierce was, you know, pretty much a dick. Now Tex will talk all day about Kevin Ayers, George Jones, Reg Presley or Johnny Paycheck, the things that hit him in his formative years, but there is just no way in hell he is going to feel the way I do about something like the Gun Club. It’s simply obvious.

This realization is a little harsh when you consider how difficult it is to market new music, especially if you don’t have a history that hits people’s nostalgia vein. Is the collective hard drive of my demographic basically full and making inroads in to their souls just no longer feasible? It is possible, but you gotta just do what you do regardless. But on the flip side it is comforting to reconcile that it is okay if all I have is a blank stare when someone talks about the Avett Brothers, Kings of Leon or Robert Earl Keen.

Jon Dee Graham doesn’t give a damn about that Calvin Russell record. Where I hear the poetry and the guts and the soul he may hear the bank teller telling him that last check he got from their management isn’t gonna cash. It was a piece of the greater puzzle. He’d opened for the Clash with the Skunks, been a legendary True Believer and even played dueling lead guitars with Richard Lloyd behind John Doe before that Calvin record ever happened. It’s hard to have perspective when you are standing inside the storm and it’s mostly useless to look back. I can appreciate that now. I’m not sure a lot of music fans and journalists will ever get that but that’s okay too. I saw an interview with Richard Hell once where he was asked about seeing the New York Dolls early shows at the Mercer Arts Center. The interviewer wanted so bad for Richard to tell him it was the greatest thing ever but Hell tried to explain he was too far in to his own thing to give himself over to the Dolls moment. He was there to gauge possibility not as a fan. Through the screen you could feel the kid suffer, it was not what he wanted to hear. For me personally no matter how much or how little there is to look back on and regardless of demographics and markets, the thing to do everyday is try my best to find my way inside a storm.

It was the summer of 1989 in New Orleans. I was 17 years old and on the roam with no direction. I knew I wanted to play music but I didn’t know how to go about it. I’d left behind a pretty good punk rock band in Las Cruces, NM, who’d just recorded a cassette tape of 5 or 6 original songs. I was struggling to reconcile my rootsier musical vision with the joy of bashing out loud music with my buddies. I enjoyed my place in the punk band but I never felt like it was really me. An older friend’s band had moved to the Bay Area and quickly got jobs at the Fillmore, began rehearsing and putting their thing together in a big way. They made a ton of connections and eventually got a record deal. They were insanely talented and even more dedicated and loyal to their project. At the time that seemed kind of Partridge Family to me so I gleamed no knowledge from their success, only jealousy laden judgements on their motivations and willingness to sell out. Instead I took to the road a loner.

I was hanging around New Orleans trying to figure out what went on there. I’d been romanced by what I’d seen in a few movies and books and felt there may be a place for me. A friend and I tried playing on the street but we were far from New Orleans street musician ready, our open chord strumming and out of tune singing making zero impact on the jazz hungry tourists. In those pre-internet days, I’d done little to no research on where bands played or who was making anything happen. Even underage I could get in to some bars but never found the kind of music that turned me on. Most of my time was spent in a new wave disco trying to meet girls who looked like Siouxie Sioux.

One afternoon on the roam in the French Quarter I ran across a pair of middle aged bums who stopped me to ask about the guitar I was carrying. In their flannel shirts and dirty jeans they gave off an Of Mice and Men appearance, one tall and silent, the other short with bright eyes and a touch of charm left in his chipped tooth smile. We got some beer in tall paper cups from a drink stand and I walked with them over to the park benches along the river to show them the 70’s Yamaha I’d been given by my stepdad. The short guy strummed a couple chords on it and asked as he handed it back “do you know who I am?” As I shook my head he proceeded to tell me he was Bobby Helms, a singer who used to be famous. “Jingle Bell Rock Bobby Helms?” I asked. “You know,” he nodded approvingly.

He told me about how he had a bunch of hit records in the 50’s and 60’s before the Beatles ruined everything. He said he loved the Rolling Stones though. “That Mick Jagger could be a country boy from Kentucky,” he said. In the 70’s he gave it another shot, making country records, good ones, but nothing he did ever took. He married an awful woman, the kind who just ruins everything you’ve worked for. So he wound up splitting from Nashville, back in Indiana driving a forklift for the last few years before he came down south to find better work but there wasn’t shit. His money ran out and now he was just bumming around with the silent guy standing next to him.

We sat there in the humid gulf coast sun for awhile, staring at the mighty Mississippi River, full of tourist boats, talking about women and records and what kind of wine was the biggest drunk for your buck. Bobby Helms never asked to see the guitar again or offered to sing a few bars of “Fraulein”. We parted ways when he admitted they were actually looking for heroin and a fresh faced kid like me had no business hanging around with them. He apologized to me for his fall from grace. I was going to make it, he could see, if I’d get the fuck out of New Orleans and stay away from women like the one who took him down.

I always wondered if this guy was really Bobby Helms. Years later looking around the internet I searched for info about him. I knew the hits but the man was kind of a mystery. His wikipedia page says he was born in 1933, making him 56 that year, which is definitely age appropriate. All it had to offer about his later years was that most of them were spent in Indiana before he died of emphysema in 1997. That neither proves or disproves much. I found an interview from 1986 with a website called Classic Bands. Helms seems very edgy and paranoid in the interview, vigorously putting down other artists and saying he was blacklisted from the business. His tone is certainly that of someone who could have gone off the rails over the next three years. The last piece of the puzzle I ever found was an album from 1981 on Phillips Records. Bobby on the front cover is in rhinestones and cowboy garb with a patch over his right eye in every picture. My hobo buddy definitely was not wearing a patch in 1989. As my dad lost an eye in Vietnam I would’ve noticed and thought about that immediately. When the Johnny Paycheck Little Darlin Records got hot again in the early 2000’s there were a couple releases of Bobby’s stuff too in which he also distinctly has the patch over his eye.

I lean towards thinking the guy I met was not Bobby Helms, but I am puzzled as to why someone would lie and say they were. I’m guessing that he operated forklifts with the real Bobby in Indiana and as he played a little guitar himself he decided to take on a more interesting persona when he hit the road bumming. In a way a mysterious 3 hit wonder would be the perfect identity to assume. The average guy on the street would know enough to be impressed but not enough to ask the hard questions. If it could get a man a free beer when he was thirsty or a dollar when he was hungry, why the hell not.

I look back on those directionless times and the sketchy situations I put myself in looking for something I don’t think I ever found. I wanted to do things my way, to be independent and to be an original. I was rebellious and arrogant and could not hear much in the way of worthwhile advice. My cart was pretty far out in front of my horse when it came to my opinion of my musical self and my actual musical ability, and as a result I had nothing going on for a few years. Years where many of my friends and peers were getting educations and developing in more organized ways.

The song posted has nothing to do with New Orleans or Bobby Helms. It’s based on a couple different events that happened in different towns. One where I followed a woman home from a pool hall to discover she had a husband who was in prison and the other where I was shoved out of a trailer house by a giant cajun drug dealer who was pissed off at his friend for bringing me along unannounced. The cover picture is of the Yamaha I handed to fake Bobby Helms. The song was recorded in 2016 at Ron Flynt’s Jumping Dog Studio. Neal Walker plays bass and Ralph Power is on drums. We cut the vocals and telecaster guitar live with the basic track. There is one overdub where I played a big black Gretsch, that I sold to Ron, with a lot of tremolo doing a sparse rhythm part and a couple fills.