There was a TV show like 'something' Diner. It was for a Canadian public television or something. We shot it in Austin. I forget what was the name of it. But it was done for some Canadian television program as far as I remember. It used to be shot in Austin and then it was popular in Canada or something like that. because I don’t remember it being around the United States like Austin City Limits or anything. We did have a reunion like 2 or 3 years after that but it was kinda sloppy. You know, it’s not like we’re a real band. We’re four different guitar players, we had like one rehearsal and we didn’t even play like half my songs. We played like Guitar Army, I think, and Shanghai Cobra but we didn’t do The Breakers, we didn't do Chain Saw, and I had to borrow a bunch of equipment. So the reunion was just like so-so. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It's hard to pull it off and sound as good. One rehearsal didn’t quite... it didn’t sound as good as the record, let's just put it that way. But when we did that TV show that was pretty killer.

So basically things were going pretty good in Austin. I got a record deal for my band, but the guy left. We recorded an album, it was the same label as Don Leady of the Tailgators. We were going to be on Wrestler, the guy really loved my band.  We were going to be like one of his top bands and everything. We recorded an album. I didn’t know him that well. He had a record store right there on the drag. Geoff  Cordner. Toward the end of when I was there, right after we did the Big Guitars, we did that and my own album, and Geoff moved to L.A. and he wouldn’t answer my phone calls and I kept going, "Where’s the record and the contract we were supposed to sign?" From early on I had kept going "Where’s the contract?" He kept saying, "Oh yeah, we’ll get to that, we’ll get to that."  So he moves to L.A., he takes the master tape, doesn’t answer my phone calls and everything just kinda fell apart.

I went to the Grammies, but the truth was I was just totally broke and this guy from Wrestler was giving us the run around. This girl totaled my car. I was living on Riverside, Travis Heights, real close to I-35 on Riverside Drive. We had this huge party. We had Johnny Thunders, Dave Alvin from the Blasters and Jorma from Jefferson Airplane. Like everybody that was at the Continental Club, everybody from Austin that was a musician was at our party. Like tons of kegs of beer, but the truth was like people were congratulating me about the Grammies but I didn’t have any money. At that point it was too far to like walk anywhere. I was like in a bad situation. I was really depressed about the way the Moto X album turned out. My plan was to come back to Indiana and save up enough money and come back. But when I got back to Indiana, it was like I couldn’t make any money. All I could get was like $5-6 an hour.

A couple of years went by and then that was it. People were kind of shocked like "What happened to Frankie? He left in the middle of the night." Nobody really heard my side of the story. "Oh man, he left his band and did this and that." I was just in a really bad situation. I mean, it wasn’t like I wanted to leave and I didn’t want to leave anybody high and dry, it was just I had no family down there. The other thing was that I went down there with five vintage guitars. Three of them were stolen and I lost two of them in pawn shops. So it was like everything just imploded on me. It was right after the Grammies so it was kind of a weird time. People were like "Hey man, congratulations!” and I was like, "How am I going to hang on until I get some money rolling in?" and I just didn’t quite make it. Came back to Indiana.

It’s just always been hard. Like I tried to get back into South By Southwest a few of years later and didn’t get in. It’s hard getting back in. I always wanted to get back into Austin. I would go down and visit and stuff. You know after three or four years go by and people don’t remember. Like the club owners didn’t, it was just really hard getting back in there. The main problem too was it’s just like coming back here it’s really hard to find people that are committed and really want to go out and tour for that. It’s not like I have a lot pro of musicians, in Austin you can always find a killer drummer. "Oh, I need a killer drummer," or great guitar player or whatever. There were tons of people like that. But once I got back to Indiana, it’s just always been super hard. I had a band called the Truckadelics and we started playing around. We played in Dayton, Cincinnati, Louisville, all that kinda stuff. But every time I get something going it just can’t quite get going.

I did have a little success in Bloomington, Indiana in the mid 90's. I put out Drag Strip on Shredder Records, and it was mainly like a Surf project, kinda hot rod. To tell you the truth there was kind of like a wave of a lot of Surf bands in the 90's like a little resurgence but I was already kinda at the end of that resurgence, so it’s kinda like, well I kinda did it in the 80's but here I am in the 90's trying to do it. But Drag Strip, we were trying to be kinda like Garage, not just Surf, but the guy from Shredder didn’t like my vocals. He goes, "I’ll put the record out if it's all instrumental." So he kinda changed the vibe of what I really wanted to do but I wanted to put a record out so I did it. It’s actually a pretty good record, but it was really our demo tape. He didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it. But then my drummer moved to San Francisco and so I pretty much had to disband that and that’s when I started to trying to learn Internet programming. I was just sitting there like, "OK, I gotta really do something with my career," so I taught myself how to be a computer programmer basically.

I made this website called visualguitars.com and I started selling it but man that takes so much time. You know being in a band, my girlfriend, having a day job, it's like I can’t really put as much time into it as I want. If you go to download.com and look up "visualguitars" you can download like the free version of it. So in the late 90's until about in the early 2000's all I was doing was programming and that’s what I’m doing right now. I'm working for an insurance company doing programming. It’s mainly like I said so I can finally fund the projects I want to do. I’ve always had a money problem. It’s not like I didn’t want to put things out, it’s trying to keep the personnel happy and there were just not a lot of good paying jobs around here. So a little bit of success and then start over again a little bit, and start over again. I feel like I’ve been playing since I was 3 years old and I’m still doing it. I still really like it. I’m lucky to be able to do it, I guess.

It’s not like I ever gave up or anything. It’s like I just always try to get another project that’s gonna go and my main thing is I never stop writing music and I really love roots music but I always liked, it’s not like I just want to do old music. I toy around, when I was in college with synthesizers. It’s not like Techno but more like Brian Eno, weird stuff like that. I guess I always wanted like futuristic or in the past. It seems to me that that’s part of my problem people don’t have enough of a focused sound or image. People go “Oh, he’s the Rockabilly guy. Oh, he’s a Surf guy. What is he?” What I have always been trying to do is incorporate all the things I like in to my sound and I’m getting there. I think I’m still writing good songs. So that’s about it.

By the time the Internet started coming around, for some reason I made the mistake of thinking I’m not really trying to worry about trying to get record deals anymore, I’m just gonna really work the Internet. And I don’t know, for better or worse, that’s really not enough. You still have to put out CDs and things like that. But a lot of it is just, I’m making pretty good money right now. I just started a new job but it’s been like feast or famine. It’s usually I just never have enough money to put out a lot of music myself or hire the best musicians or things like that. I have a pretty good band right now and I’m gonna cut a new record with these guys and I’m super excited. I love playing and I feel like my chops are really good. And I just talked to Bruce from Jungle Records and we are going to try to do a Big Guitars reunion and I am really excited about that.

I’ve been going through all my old cassettes. I’ve got old reel to reels and stuff like that and bad tapes and I remember that one of my best friends, Eloid Ruiz, Eloid got to be good friends with Dino. Him and Dino really hit it off and he used to be Dino’s MC. This is right after I moved back, like the late 80's. Anyway, Eloid wanted to help me out and so he helped to fund. I wanted to do like a follow up to Big Guitars and just pay for it ourselves. So in '89 I went down there. Just on the fly I called up Mike Buck, Keith Ferguson came, Evan Johns came over for a couple songs, and we recorded, I think it was at Austin Opry House Studios. I think it’s called Music Lanes. It was like real close to the Continental Club, it was called the Opry House. They had a studio in there. We did like 8 songs. This other guy, Mike Vernon, from 3 Balls of Fire, he did a couple of songs. So I have almost a whole album. That was the last time I saw Keith Ferguson. He was nice enough to come. It was really hard to do roots music, if everybody remembers back then. It seemed like it kind of exploded after we were doing it. When we were doing roots music, who was gonna to put it out? We were doing it but it was either Jungle Records, that guy who put out the Leroi Brothers, there was just a handful of people.  And I remember, it seemed like in the 90's there was a big revival of Surf bands, and Rockabilly and stuff like that. I think that the whole independent records movement was more mature, there was more record labels.

I want to start putting on shows with like four or five bands, like a revival kind of thing where we share a lot of the back end equipment. You know, everybody does like six to eight songs. I love that. That’s the thing, it's like I really would love to start playing little theaters like that, getting three or four bands that wanna do stuff like that. I kinda like that more than clubs sometimes. I love theaters. I was really into acoustics, like I said I studied that. Just the shape of the Fountain Square Theater, just a really cool vibe. Yeah, I definitely would love to do that. I could be happy playing in three or four different bands. 'Cause I can play drums or guitar or bass. Sometimes it's fun not to even be like the main guy. All I got to do is play the drums. I don’t have to worry about anything else.

There was this lady, they had a killer record store in Marion. Man they had everything like and they were like real music fans. So after I moved back from Texas and I was really depressed, kind of like a nervous breakdown after the Moto X thing and all that stuff happened. She had moved her record store to Fairmont so I went over there, I walked in there, I started talking to her and she remembered me from me going to her record store in high school and she opens up her drawer and she has a press clipping of me being nominated for a Grammy. In her drawer! I was like, “Are you kidding me?” That was like right across the street from the James Dean Musem. So I had a real connection to that 50's kind of vibe. I wanted to revive that kind of energy. I wanted to see people dancing. I was totally into, growing up, into 50's movies, especially like science fiction, black and white movies. We always had the all-night theaters on Friday night and they'd show like monster movies. So I grew up with all that and there was the Ghost of Drag Strip Hollow, there was this old movie called The Ghost of Drag Strip Hollow. It was before it was Surf music. It was like '61. They didn’t call it Surf but they totally sounded like Surf music. It’s kinda like a funny horror movie and no one had ever heard of it except for Mike Buck. I mentioned it to him and he had the record! I was like “You got to be kidding! You got the record, the Ghost of Drag Strip Hollow?"  I thought I was the only person who had ever seen that movie. Sometimes it’s a small world. You find little weird connections with things.

Another cool thing about Marion, I just found this out, there was a band called The Jiants. They’re in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. And oh my God, they had this killer song. It’s just amazing. They did this song called TORNADO and these guys were from Marion where James Dean was born. It’s killer. The guy has a Les Paul and he has this killer tremolo pedal, that’s like the hook of the song. He starts off strumming in time with the tremolo. Awesome. But I didn’t even know when I lived there that we have a Rockabilly Hall of Famer right from Marion, The Jiants. Man, I love that song. I want to cover it.

That’s where David Loehr started the Rockabilly Rebel Weekend. I went to the one in Fairmont and it was wild. It was like 10 years after we were doing it in the early 80's. It's like I got lost in the shuffle. By the time that stuff took off people didn’t know who I was. It wasn’t like I could just walk in and go, "Hey, I wanna play!" I love Rockabilly There’s a guy here doing it right now, Art Adams. He’s in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. He’s in his 70s. He’s just went to England and played. He lives here in Indy and is playing around a lot.

I’m hoping to put out a really good album that captures the sound I want to get.  I always loved tremolo, too. Just talking briefly about out equipment, I really got into old... like my first amp was like a little Fender Tweed and I always loved tube equipment, even when it wasn’t popular, like in the late 70's early 80's everybody was starting to use transistor amps.  That’s when I would buy every amp I could get. Every Fender amp I could get I would buy them at pawn shops and second hand stores. Man I had like a 1950's blond Bandmaster that was really cool, Super Reverb, Vibralux. Man, I love that kind of reverb. I've always been into really good reverb and tremolo and stuff like that. I think it's a slightly different vibe, cause like I said back in the eary 80's there wasn’t a lot of people doing that kind of stuff. I think that if I did it now it's not like, "Oh look, this guy’s really unique," or anything. I like the ambiance in music. I love the sound of tube amps and I love the sound of a room. I’ve never really been happy with my own demos, like when I go to a studio. It took me awhile to figure out. The modern recording techniques and stuff, it doesn’t sound like the 50's. What is it that they were doing in the 50's and the 60's that sounded so cool? You would think that our equipment would be better and our techniques would be better but people are starting to go back to that. Like John Mellencamp recorded at Sun Studio just using one or two mics with everybody in the room onto a tape machine (No Better Than This, 2010). Yeah, that’s the way to do it, I mean sometimes the modern recording techniques they may be good for Heavy Metal for certain kinds of music but for Rock 'n' Roll, man, you got to have the sound of the room, you don’t need a million microphones, and you want good tube amps and good equipment and it’s that ambience too. I love good lead players. It’s not like I’m trying to be Stevie Ray Vaughan or something. I spend a lot of time trying to develop my techniques and stuff. I built Visual Guitar because I finally wanted to learn scales. Like people would tell me, "Oh do you  know a mixed Lydian scale?" and I had no idea what a mixed Lydian scale is. Now I understand it and that’s why I built Visual Guitar, it was so I could figure out what the different kinds of scales really were. My only scale is always like the blues scale, like Pentatonic. I didn’t even know how to do like major Pentatonic, I would just the minor Pentatonic. Now I understand that stuff. I’m pretty intuitive with music. I just did it by ear, "Oh, this is the way I want it to sound." I just let my fingers just kinda fly. I wasn’t really concerned with like playing exactly this scale or that scale and I don’t ever want to be like that. I don’t want to be the kinda guy, "Oh, now I’m doing this scale and that." But I did want to learn just open up my vocabulary a little bit. So I think that’s what I kinda did for the last 10 years or so. Like I did a lot of Internet stuff but I've realized that you've still got to put out records to get reviewed, to get people excited. Especially if you do like rootsy music. A lot of people just don’t want, it’s a little cheap if you just do it over the Internet. A lot of people say don’t send me MP3s, send me a CD or something. They’re not interested in reviewing your digital albulm online. I think that’s changing a little bit because it’s so big now. I wanna put out some vinyl. Another thing that's kinda popular here now is that people are putting out cassettes. I guess cassettes are kinda making a comeback because of the price. There’s a lot of people that still like analog verses digital and it’s cheap, fairly cheap, to make a bunch of cassettes.

There’s a label here called Joyful Noise. They do more modern kind of Indie Rock and stuff and they’ve been putting out cassettes like crazy. You can either order the download, or cassette, or vinyl, or CD.  That's what my goal would be, to put it out in any kind of format. I definitely still love vinyl but I’m looking into maybe cassettes. It’s not like everybody has a cassette player but I bought one. I bought a real nice used Pioneer cassette deck for about 6 bucks. It works great. 'Cause I’ve got just hundreds of old cassettes from practices and stuff. That’s what I’ve been doing is going through my old tapes, been doctoring them, making them sound better; EQing them, remastering them. As I was going through the stuff I found that thing I did in Texas in '89, so I'm gonna try to put that out, gotta get a hold of Mike Buck. I told him I was going to call him, he finally got back with me a couple weeks ago. And I’m excited about going back to you know, a Big Guitars reunion. Working on a new record with my band here.

The main reason that I’m here is for family and things like that. My girlfriend and I are planning on get married and I probably wouldn’t have met her if I wouldn't have stuck around so that's probably the best reason I stuck around I guess. I don’t know, that’s about it. Still trying to do, like I said, I'm trying to incorporate a lot of things and make it like a funky sound. It's not like I want to go from one, "OK, I'm gonna do a Surf song and then I'm gonna do a Blues song." It’s like I’m trying to incorporate Surf, a little bit of Blues, a little bit of Beatles kind of Pop, and incorporate it into kinda my own sound. That’s my goal anyway.

I love Austin. I thought Austin was probably the best place for me that I’d ever found. I love the town and I love the people. I think I was pretty well accepted into the Austin scene there. It wasn’t like you could just waltz in there and everybody was gonna love you. You kinda pay your dues and I think I did. I mean I played with Poison 13 when they needed a guitar player, I played with the Leroi Brothers, I played with Dino, I got to play with Joe King Carasco, he wanted me to join at one point. But over the years, like I said, things changed so much, so many people moved there and it changed a little bit and it’s super expensive to live there now. And the other thing is like my parents were getting pretty old, it just felt like obligation to be around to help take care of them.

That’s another thing, after it was over I felt like I fell off the edge of the world. Like "Where did Frankie go?" I never got much feedback from it. But it’s good to hear that people liked it.

Yeah, I love all those guys. I mean Don was always a real nice guy and I think the best thing he ever told me was we were talking about how you approach lead guitar and stuff and he said that if you can sing it you can play it. And it's true. So sometimes I try to, instead of just playing random notes, "Am I really playing a melody or am I playing random notes?"  Like I was talking about scales. I really like to build a unique melody and I think Don was good at that too. We always wanted to build something that was full and unique. Yeah man, I love playing with those guys totally excited about getting together with them again trying to put out that '89 thing and my new album.

And one of my favorite things was hanging out with Keith Ferguson. We got to be good friends and he would invite me over to his house. He had this thing he called “Sunday Meeting” and we would go over to his house on Sunday and we would just listen to records, drink a few beers and we' BBQ some chicken with Alex Napier, this other bass player friend of mine. I felt really honored cause he didn’t really talk to everybody. I’d see people go up to Keith and start talking to him and he would just look straight ahead. If he didn’t want to talk to you he didn’t want to talk to you. But it really was an eye opener going over to his house, the record collection he had. I couldn’t believe some of the blues records he had I'd never heard of. And I always thought that was kinda like the Punk of the 50’s. I got to meet some of the cats that were like really from the 50’s but it wasn’t like the 50’s that everybody reads about. It was like, "OK, this is really what happened in the 50's." This one guy, I can’t remember his name, but he told me about him and his friends would go to like Rhythm and Blues clubs like in Houston and stuff like that and it was just like they would go to basically all-black clubs, that was their thing in the late 50's. He always told me he was going to take me to show me how to get to Mexico through these back roads and things like that.

Yeah, it was such a good time, you know. I wish I could have stuck around longer for it and really held my career at that point but it didn’t work out quite like that, like I wanted right then but yeah it felt like a lot of people just moved there right about the same time. Like we all had this plan like reenergize Rock 'n' Roll and bring back, you know, some of the good things about the past. It’s like I’ve always been drawn to music from the past. It’s not like I follow current music and stuff. There's so much good music to learn from. From the past, too. Yeah, there was Rockabilly, there was a little Surf, there was a little Garage. Everything I liked. It was like, "Man, this is awesome." Blues. I would just go from one club to the other, like sometimes three clubs a night. I’d go down to the Continental and catch a couple bands and I’d go up to Antone’s and pretty much felt like I knew everybody and everybody just welcomed me. Still trying to do it. Hopefully we’ll hook up with those guys again.

   When I was a young child there wasn't really any Rock 'n' Roll so the music that I heard was just music from the honky-tonks and white Pop music, whatever was popular, Country. The popular music of my parent's generation an it didn't really have that much of an impact on me. I guess I liked music but I don't have any real memories of it but then when I was becoming an adolescent that's when Rock 'n' Roll was born; Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Little Richard , Elvis and Buddy Holly, and all that stuff. It's really incredible when you think about there was nothing and then there was all of those guys. Within a year or two all of those guys, and of course a lot more, and Rock 'n' Roll really had its beginnings before it hit white radio but when it was actually becoming Rock 'n' Roll from Rhythm & Blues and everything else it's just incredible to think about how much burst on the scene at one time. The an adolescent just kinda being ready for that stuff, it had a terrific impact on me. With the exception of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly & The Crickets a lot of that early Rock 'n' Roll was really was more kind of piano and saxophone that it was guitar and I wasn't really playing anything at the time. I had taken some piano lessons as a kid but didn't really take it very seriously.

   So the first Rock 'n' Roll I heard guitar wasn't that much of a part of it and I didn't really think about it that much but when I was about 13 or 14 I was at a teen dance and they had a band. I don't how old the guys were, they were probably 18 or 19, but to a 13 year old they looked pretty old. I used to go to this teen dance on Friday night in the shopping center in Dallas. The teen dance was called "Teen Timers" and they would spin 45's one Friday and the next week they would have a local band. One of the first times I went to it and actually heard a real Rock 'n' Roll or teenage band it was just a trio with guitar, piano and drums. The guitar player didn't sing but he looked like Elvis, real handsome guy with Elvis hair. He was playing a Stratocaster. Of course I didn't know what that was at the time but I remember sitting there with my friend and we were listening to the music just hearing it up close and personal. They were just playing like Jimmy Reed, R&B kinda stuff, Fats Domino, whatever. This was early on. But we were listening to it just hearing it like that, live, and it was kinda the first time I ever really tuned into the guitar. Me and my friend we looked at each other and said, 'We gotta learn how to do that!' So we started taking lessons. So I was about maybe 13 or something like that when I first heard a little trio at a teen dance playing. I don't know what they were playing but it was just the same kind of stuff we were listening to which was that early Rock 'n' Roll.

   It was just basically R&B anyway, really, just about. Then Rock 'n' Roll started having having its more unique elements to it. But as a youth Blues was mixed right in there just about from the beginning with my Rock 'n' Roll. I knew the difference but living in Dallas at the time we were exposed to Blues so Little Richard and Fats Domino and all of those kind of 50's icons, all of those Rock 'n' Roll icons, were a part of my education but also soon after discovering all of that was Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and Little Walter, Bo Diddley, Chess Records and Excello Records and VeeJay Records. So I was really lucky to where I got hip to all of that stuff right off the bat.

   As a matter of fact is was just kind of understood that when I was in -we called it Junior High School then which was 7th, 8th and 9th grade- and when I was in Junior High here in Dallas Jimmy Reed just kind of ruled. It was like... I remember being in the 6th grade and a friend of mine said -he was older than me and already going to Gaston- he said, "So you know who Jimmy Reed is?" And I said, "Well, no, I don't think so." I was like in the 6th grade or something and he said, "You better find out!" Meaning when I get to Gaston I need to be checked out about Jimmy Reed, so that was just a part of my youth. And then the Rockabilly was there too and you could tell the difference between Rockabilly and just regular Rock 'n' Roll and Rhythm & Blues and Blues, but it was just all mixed up and I was influenced and messed up by all of it.

 

Piano

   I took piano lessons when I was 8 years old before I ever heard any Rock 'n' Roll and I don't even know why I took it. Some woman came into my class in the 3rd grade and said, "Does anybody want to take piano lessons?" And I have no idea why I said, "Yeah, I'll do that." I had really no interest or knowledge in music or anything. I don't even know why I raised my hand but I took for about a year and a half  but we didn't have a piano so I didn't really get very far with it. But then when I started really playing I started on guitar. The we got a piano later on for my sister and I started trying to transfer what I was learning on guitar to the piano so I started banging around on the piano but really guitar was the first thing I took seriously.

   I don't really even feel like I'm a piano player, really. I like to amuse myself with it and I can make people think that I can play the piano but the reason that I -I mean there's some things that I can do OK- but my point is I know what all my weaknesses are on the piano. I've got a few things figured out and there's some stuff I can do pretty good but I have to work too hard at playing piano. I feel like I'm a guitar player that can bang around on the piano a little bit. I've never really had that much access to a piano but anytime I've had access to a piano I love to play it. I can barely walk by one without -I'm sure it's annoying to some people- but if I see a piano it just draws me to it. And so whenever I'd get a chance I would play a piano. I don't really have one now. I finally got a Wurlitzer electric piano, which is a different thing but I love a Wurlitzer electric piano, so I've actually had a piano for a while even though it's not a real piano. But I really like trying to play the piano. Whenever I sit down to play piano what I seem to like to play just to amuse myself -I'm not really a Jazz guitar player or a piano player- but when I sit down at piano I like to try to play ballads and standards and stuff like that. I can bang around on E and G and A, some three chord stuff, I can do that. A working knowledge of the piano to some extent, I guess you can say.

 

First Band

   About a year after I started playing I... I guess I started playing (professionally) about the time I started the 9th Grade and then there were some guys in my neighborhood that I knew that wanted to start a band, and so I guess right before the 10th Grade it would have put me about like 15 years old or something. In he 10th Grade in High School I was playing in a band with some people and I was the youngest guy in the band. So my first band I had I was 15.

Moving to Austin

   I moved down there (Austin) in May of 1970 and Jimmie and Doyle (Bramhall) moved down there like a month later, then Paul Ray moved down there a month later and then Stevie, it took Stevie about another year to get down there. I happened to move down there first but just by about 30 days. I didn't even know Doyle at the time. I'd actually played a couple of gigs with Jimmie but I didn't really know Jimmie very well. I was about 7 years older than Jimmie. I knew who he was and I'd actually played a couple of gigs with him but I didn't know him very well. I moved to Austin with this bass player named Jamie Basset who used to play with Jimmie before we all moved down there. Jimmie and Doyle kind of moved down there together and when they got to town they came over to where Jamie and I were living and they said, "Well, let's play." And so a week after Doyle and Jimmie had moved to town Doyle and Jimmie and the bass player Jamie Basset and I started playing in a band called Storm and Little Doyle -we call him "Little" but I guess the world knows him as "Doyle II" or whatever- he was like about 2 years old when they moved down there and I didn't know Doyle until he moved to Austin. So I've actually know Little since he was about 2 years old.

   At the time, this was in 1970... you know, it's funny to think back. I was talking about how in '55 and '56, even '57, still only 3 years, it's incredible how much stuff happened that was significant for all musical time in that short period of time, and then things kind of fizzled out in the early 60's. Some of the Rock 'n' Roll started getting watered down a little bit and then in the second half of the -it got off kinda to a slow start but it started with The Beatles and The Stones and then Bob Dylan- but by the second half of the 60's, maybe the whole thing started with RUBBER SOUL, I don't know, the psychedelic stuff started happening and guys started growing their hair long and people started becoming aware of Vietnam and getting alarmed about that. I guess it's kind of hard for people to understand or even care about if you weren't there but like I'm old enough to where I grew up in the LEAVE IT TO BEAVER days. For people who are so young they don't know what that is it's like you've seen footage of the old Black & White TV shows with the families where everything seems so innocent. That's actually the America I grew up in as a child and then as an adolescent Rock 'n' Roll burst onto the scene and just kinda shook everything up and everybody thought that was just a teen thing that would go away. It was a teen thing but it didn't go away. But then the 60's -I was barely old enough to pick up on the 50's stuff- but when the 60's exploded it might be hard for young people to understand how radical it was for guys to wear long hair and smoke pot and stuff like that but that was all radical stuff in the late 60's and if you had long hair it was just like walking around with a sign going, "Yeah I smoke pot," and it was, "I'm probably against the Vietnam war and yeah I take drugs too." And the country was very divided and polarized over those issues and some places were a little bit more dangerous to live if you had long hair and Dallas was one of them.

   I had never been to Austin even though it's only 200 miles away, I had never been to Austin until 1969 and I went down there with some friends and I knew some people nobody had really ever heard of Austin really before that. I mean it was the capital of Texas but culturally I don't think nobody really thought much about it. But in those days in the late 60's early 70's, it's a very small -well it's not that small, a couple hundred thousand- but it had a really small town feel; it had the capitol, the University of Texas, and it was not an industrial town. It was just a pretty little town, quaint houses and trees, almost kind of like a sleepy college town. I mean a bunch of smart people but it was a really laid back town. But back in those days the college towns were the kind of haven for longhaired people and all that kinda stuff. It was a smaller town and it seemed like a friendlier town and there were just more... it just seemed like if you had long hair -I mean me and my friends were never like Hippie hippies but we were musicians and had some things in common with people of that generation- and Austin was just a safer environment for people that wanted to live like that. There was kind of strength in numbers or something, it wasn't... seems like hard, industrial -well Dallas isn't so industrial, compared to Austin I guess it is- Dallas was more conservative at the time and the longhaired people in Austin you just felt their presence because it was just smaller and there was a lot of them. There was just so many beautiful hippie girls.

   The first time I went down there, the first day I was there, I said, "I need to be here!" And so it took me about a year after I discovered Austin to get down there, but this was about the time that -I mean it was a totally different time- people were hitchhiking all over the country and just checking everything out. San Francisco obviously was famous for its cultural stuff at that period and there were a few other places like Ann Arbor, MI, probably Cambridge and of course New York, and there were a few towns that were kind of iconic for the culture at that time and Austin was becoming one of a few towns across the country that people that were drawn to all of these happenings started to discover. And so a lot of people gravitated to Austin, especially from Dallas and Houston, and Lubbock and Waco and Texas places, but there were people that were just traveling all over the country at the time and word of mouth got out about Austin and so people started checking out Austin and if they didn't live there permanently a lot of people came there. Austin was just one of those places in those times seemed to be a very happening, friendly, creative place to live so it happened to attract a lot of musicians.

   At the time Austin wasn't really in my opinion any more of a music town than hardly anyplace else. There was music there before we got there bit there was music a lot of places. There was music in Waco, there was music in Lubbock, there was music in Houston and Dallas, there was music kind of all over the place and Austin wasn't really thought of as a music town. They had a few cool venues there and some cool stuff going on but it wasn't really nationally recognized, or even recognized across the state that much, but musicians being like they are and the times being what they were it attracted a lot of musicians and so in the 70's Austin became one of the more important music towns. We went there not because it was a music town, just because it was a cool town. It's like when you think of all these other American iconic music cities like Chicago or Nashville or Memphis, or whatever you want to think of, most of those iconic music cities were iconic music cities most of the 20th Century but Austin -I think you can safely say that Austin's a music town- but it wasn't really put on the musical map until the later 70's or the early 80's so it was kind of unique like that.

Early bands in Austin

   In the 70's and into the 80's, I'm not really sure when it started changing but like in the "older days" back to the 70' s and before it's different from today because back then people didn't really play in that many different bands at one time. I'm not saying that nobody did but for the most part bands were formed however they were formed and people just were in one band pretty much, they were just committed to one band you rose or fell with however the band did, but people weren't playing in a bunch of different bands. So in the 70's I didn't play with that many different bands. I only played with Jimmie about six months in that band and then the next band I played with was called Southern Feeling, I did that for about a year and a half with W.C. Clark and Angela Strehli, and then in '74 Paul Ray and me and some fellas started Paul Ray & the Cobras, and then I played in Paul Ray & the Cobras from about '74 to about '82. That was the band that Stevie joined in '75 I think, played with us a couple years. I might have done some gigs with some other bands but basically in the 70's I was only in about three different bands; first of all The Storm, then Southern Feeling and then Paul Ray & the Cobras.

Gigs and Bands

    I had gone out and done some brief road work but it wasn't really until '79 maybe when the Cobras -it took us all through the 70's to... we were trying to, me and most of my friends, and there wasn't really that many of us, Austin is kind of thought of as a Blues town but there was really only a handful of us that were trying to play Blues and so we just played locally most of the time. I mean we'd play around the state every once in a while but we were just trying to get somebody to come to hear us and it took a while to get that going. But in 1979 Stevie had left The Cobras and Paul Ray had left The Cobras; we kept going and got a different singer, and went on the road. So I guess I started going on the road in '79 with The Cobras. It's not like I stayed on the road but that's when I started going on the road, when you go out for a month or so.

   Your memories kinda get kind of funny and I don't know how you filter out or filter in different things but it just seems to me like we played about four or five nights a week, kinda all the time. I don't know if we did and there were probably some weeks when we didn't, especially in the early days because when we all... when we first got to Austin Jimmie kinda already had a name around the state to some extent and I thought that when we moved to Austin and started over with that thing down there I thought we were gonna be rulin' Austin pretty quick but for some reason it just didn't happen. And we played a lot of gigs where our bar tab exceeded what we divided up at the end of the night. But things were a lot cheaper, we had roommates and lived together and all that stuff, so you could get by on almost nothing which is a good thing because we made almost nothing. But it seems like all those bands that we played in we were just trying to play.

   It's a lot different now than it was then because -seems funny to say "in those days" but it was a long time ago- there were places to play and even though there was a lot of bands in Austin when we got there, and as the 70's progressed other musicians moved there so there was more bands and more musicians. There were still a lot of venues but more important than that, something that's different from today, is that local people were interested in hearing local music and that hasn't seemed to have been the case for a long time. There's just so many other distractions, and there's a lot of other factors that would take too long to go into -I mean I'm still trying to sort it all out myself- but it was a different time and the age span of people that were interested and everything, this age span was much smaller. Like today there's certainly nice clubs or whatever that cater to a certain demographic but there's also other venues and certain music acts that play that there might be three decades of... you know, the fans might span... back in the 70's most people that were going out at night were just in their 20's and if you were in your 30's or much into your 30's you weren't still going out at night, so it was a younger crowd and everybody had more in common but now a lot of us just kinda never grew up and we never stopped playing in clubs and we never stopped going out to clubs so the age span of people out on the streets at night, it's funny, there's people in their late 50's and people in their 20's. That hadn't always been the case.

   So back then there was actually I guess in some ways a smaller audience just because the age span of people that were interested in what was happening, it was a smaller age span. The difference was that back then people didn't have computers and their home entertainment centers weren't like they are (now), there was just different things going on in the country, in the world and in people's lives and going out to hear live music, even if it was local, it was important to people. I'm sure I stayed sometimes but when I think about it back in the 70's it just seems like if I wasn't playing I was going to hear Jimmie or Stevie or some of my friends or just going out every night and hanging out in the daytime. Maybe it wasn't like that but that's the way it seems. So there was a lot of venues, I mean it's not like everybody was making a lot of money but people just went out a lot if you were in the demographic. Not everybody that was of that age was going out at night, there was some -the way we would characterize them- there were 'straight' people and then there were... whatever you want to call them, the other people. And straight people, meaning people that didn't have long hair to over simplify, like maybe smoke pot and have long hair, maybe they had... it's not like everybody of that age group had long hair and smoked pot, and that's not the only way to define them, but to over simplify there was only kind of one main subculture back then in the late 60's and 70's. There was really just kinda two, maybe one subculture. It had it's little factions I suppose but unlike today there's like a hundred subcultures. It's like there's hardly any unity out there. There's so many different factions, so many different subcultures. It was just different, everything wasn't quite so splintered back then.

Making a Living

   Every once in a while somebody would come up with some side project for fun or something but it seems like we all worked a lot. When I'm thinking back I'm thinking, "How much money did we make?" The sad and funny thing about it is like in a lot of ways everybody in the country is making more money doing what they used to do except for musicians. I mean good, professional, even world-class musicians, a lot of them are making $50 a night right now. And of course back in the 70's $50 a man a night might have been pretty good pay but musician's pay hasn't really kept up with the cost of living so musicians are just about as broke as they ever were. But back then when we were younger we were more willing to have roommates and Austin actually in those days everybody was always broke just about. About the only people you ever knew that ever had any dough were the dealers and the difference back then is like the dope dealers, they weren't like criminals, they were just more like outlaws. The were outlaws but it's not like they were criminals, they weren't violent. Eventually things got out of control and got rough, especially after cocaine came into the picture.  But a lot people just didn't have much money but it didn't take very much money. Rent in Austin was really cheap and if you had a roommate or two you were still broke but you could still come up with a Super Reverb and a Stratocaster, and you could drive a '66 Cheverolet, and you could pay the rent and go eat Mexican food and go out and hear music. Compared to now life was fun and easy even though we were broke. The thing is the younger you are the easier it is to be broke. If everybody else is broke it doesn't seem to be as hard. The older you get you don't want to be older and not have any money. That's not good. That's not one teeny bit fun. Or pleasant. But when you're young, and so many of us were just so grateful to be able to try to play music... you just have to play and if you have to sacrifice to play for some reason we do it.

   But back then everybody still, as broke as we were, we could still live somewhere and in Austin I almost never knew anybody that lived in an apartment. Everybody lived in a house. Not by themselves usually but you could afford to live in a house. Sometimes I had two roommates, sometimes I had one. Sometimes I had two roommates but one of them never had any money so it was like having only one roommate. But if you had two or three people you could pay the rent. You could rent a house for $150 or something, $160. Gradually the rent got higher but everybody was broke, that's true, but everybody had a car and everybody had a Strat or a Tele or whatever you wanted and everybody had a gig-worthy amp. $300 for a Super Reverb was a lot of money back then but if you had to have it you could come up with $300 for a Super Reverb and you could get a Strat for $300. And you could get a '66 Cheverolet for about $500. That was more money than it is today, today somebody would like to find a '64 Strat for $300 but that's not gonna happen. It's sad because if you want to play today you can get an amp and you can get a guitar and you can get a car but if you don't have much money to spend the kind of stuff that you're gonna get today compared to what a poor person could get then... there was a time when all those vintage Strats were just used guitars. They didn't cost what it would take to send a kid through college.

 

Cosmic Cowboys, Disco and Punk Strikes Back

   If you were playing Blues in Austin we were just used to adversity anyway because like we moved to Austin and we're trying to play Blues, really there weren't very many of us, but we were trying to play it and it was hard and we were just starting to get a little bit of attraction and then Willie starts coming to town. That's cool and everything but all of a sudden Austin turns into this "Cosmic Cowboy" haven and all these hippies start turning into cowboys and stuff so now everybody's into Country music. We used to call it "The Progressive Country Scare" that came to Austin because we were just starting to get some traction and then Willie comes and changes everything. But we were stubborn and just wanted to play Blues so we kept doing it. The disco thing I don't know if it hurt us or not because we were already hurt. Back then if you wanted to play Blues it was already an uphill struggle but I do remember back then you would get gigs in some unlikely places because there just were no Blues clubs, even white-owned Blues clubs. By then a lot of the black Blues joints didn't exist anymore and if they did you probably couldn't play at them. All the clubs we played at were just nightclubs where all kinds of bands played. Very few Blues clubs. Sometimes we would just come up with gigs and try anything and I remember several gigs where we would play and then we would take a break and they would start playing Disco on our break and that's when the people would rush to the dance floor. And of course the sound system made all those dance tracks sound really powerful and strong and then we'd get up there with our little Blues instruments and probably sound like a car radio compared to that stuff. So Disco hurt us more in certain venues.

   Disco hurt a lot of things but it also caused a reaction to it and I'm not really sure how Blues fit into all that since Blues was already difficult in the first place. I was a little bit too old to be into the Punk thing but even if I didn't understand it exactly, and I never could relate to Punk myself, on one level I understood it. I couldn't relate to it because musically it was not interesting to me, it seemed like it was more an attitude than about good players and stuff. But part of that was just a reaction to how watered down music had gotten. So Disco probably contributed to Punk maybe. And how Rock had gotten so corporate. I think Punk was a reaction to corporate Rock and Punk was probably a reaction to the mindless Disco stuff. Had I been a little younger I probably would have gotten caught up in Punk but I wasn't that angry. And I already knew how to play my instrument. Punk had a certain intensity and attitude that's a part of Rock 'n' Roll so I could understand it, but after hearing the stuff I heard and everything and knowing what I knew I just didn't have the Punk mindset. It's not like I hated it or anything, I just was a little bit too old for it. I wasn't angry about stuff. I kinda understood it on some level but it would have been fake if I had tried to be some kind of Punk. But I think maybe Disco had something to do with causing Punk to exist. Not totally, but it seems to me Punk music, the whole Punk thing, was the reaction to corporate and mindless things in society. I guess the Punks they needed to feel something or just wanted to call bullshit on something they thought was fake and I can understand that.

After The Cobras, into the 80's

   They continued on a couple years after I quit. I left in '82 and they continued on 'til '84. The reason I left, it's a long story I won't go into, we had an album that we thought was coming out and it never came out and that was a big disappointment and so I just got kind of disillusioned with The Cobras and Lou Ann Barton had put out her first album. I didn't play on it but she asked me and The Cobras' sax player, and Doyle actually, and some other people to be in her band since she had an album coming out. She thought that surely she's gonna go out on tour. Glenn Frey and Jerry Wexler produced that album and Jimmie played on it and she was getting some ink in Rolling Stone and this and that so she just assumed, and we all assumed, that she'd be going on tour since she had this label, this album out with that kind of cred to it. And so Joe and I,  the sax player, we quit The Cobras, and Doyle, everybody quit what they were doing and we formed this touring band for Lou Ann and we started rehearsing and then after everybody had quit the band and started rehearsing Lou Ann found out that she wasn't getting any tour support so what we had quit our bands to do was not gonna happen. But since we already had a band we tried playing for a little while to see what happened but nothing happened so we quit doing that. And so then I started playing with Angela Strehli and then, I can't remember exactly when but it was sometime around that time, but Antone's opened up in '75 and when it first opened up that's the same time the Thunderbirds were formed, just coincidentally about the same time Antone's opened up and the Thunderbirds just kinda ended up by default being the Antone's house band. The Cobras played there too a lot but the Thunderbirds kinda ended up being the house band if they needed a band. And then the Thunderbirds played there kinda almost every night that they didn't play someplace else. And then Antone's lost that location and they went to another one and then lost that location and then they went over on Guadalupe. By the time they got over to Guadalupe -I guess this was the early 80's, I can't remember exactly- the Thunderbirds were always on the road by this time and so they needed another house band. And so in the early 80's when I was playing with Angela, I don't remember exactly when, we formed the Antone's house band. And so I was playing with Angela, she was a part of Antone's too, and so from then until the end of the 80's, from the early 80's through the 80's I was playing with Angela and doing the Antone's house band.

   We went out on tour, went to Europe a couple times. We went on the road with Angela in the 80's. We actually did go on the road and to Europe. Antone's was our home base and it was great because there were still a lot of Blues guys that were alive and we would back 'em up. It was a remarkable time to be around Antone's to be able to hear and play with all the people that we played with. But Angela put out an album and I put out a couple albums, Angela went on tour. Not all the time but we went to Canada and the West Coast and the East Coast and Europe. So we did do some touring. And then Antone's, we took some Antone's road shows out and went here and there. So I did do some touring in the 80's with Angela and the Antone's fellas.

TRASH, TWANG & THUNDER

   I can't remember who called me, it might have been Mike Buck, but I think that they... I knew most of those people but it was a slightly different circle of people and somebody, I'm not even sure who came up with the concept of that album and I think that they were already making some plans on it and then kinda at the last minute somebody decided to include me in the project. I knew everybody except I didn't know Frankie Camaro. I hadn't seen him. I didn't know him before that and I haven't seen him since. I don't know where he came from or where he is but I knew Don and I knew Evan and of course Keith and Mike. So that all came about quick but I don't really know who's bright idea that was to start with. But I'm glad they included me. It was fun to make the album. Actually got a Grammy nomination. We were up against I think Stevie and Jeff Beck and I can't remember who won but we actually went out to L.A. and rented tuxes and went to the Grammies and everything. (Mike Buck didn't mention tuxes, a picture of him in a tux would be interesting.) I'm sure that he had one. I can't really remember who all went. I think Evan went, and Don, I don't think Keith went. Maybe Mike might not have even gone actually. But whoever went I'm we sure we got tuxes because you were just supposed to. Everything has gotten less formal these days but whoever went surely would have worn a tux. I know I did. It was fun to go out there and pretend like you were a big shot for a few minutes. I mean we weren't but it was fun to pretend. We got to be there, we were there without having to break in.

   I only had two (contributions) really. We rehearsed one day at The Continental Club, I think we only rehearsed once or twice or something, they were trying to explain to me what the concept of the album was, just kind of a crazy, demented Rock 'n' Roll instrumental album. I can't remember exactly how they described it but that's what it ended up being. So I was thinking, "Do I have anything?" and I thought, well, I could probably come up with something if it's just supposed to be dumb Rock 'n' Roll. I don't mean that to be derogatory either, it's hard to come up with something cool. I thought, well OK, I got this one thing, the first song I ever made up when I was about 14, some minor chord thing. When I first started playing and learned just enough to make up a couple of songs, a couple of minor key songs, I came up with a couple. I said, well, so it sounds like something I wrote when I was 14 might fit into this project. And so I played them a couple of things that I made up, the first songs I ever made up when I was about 14 or 15 or something, and I guess they all agreed on one of them, they said "yeah that'll work" and that happened to be the song called THE LOST INCAS and then I came up with this thing that ended up being, I think the producer Bruce Sheehan or somebody named it, NEAR EAST BEAST. Probably based on some crazy line that Evan played on it or something but I had just kinda came up with a beat and a chord progression, some kind of general skeleton for a song and I don't think that it actually ended up being exactly what was in my mind but it didn't really matter that much. So my only two songs were the one I wrote when I was like 14 or so called THE LOST INCAS and the other one was BEAR EAST BEAST which I just kind of threw together for that session that just kinda took its own shape, so I didn't really contribute that much.

   Actually, I'll tell you what my main contribution I think was. When we were rehearsing these songs, most of them, I mean some of them were just real dumb -not dumb in a bad way, I like dumb- and some of them were just totally three-chord twelve-bar things, just real loud over-the-top, but then some of them had actual chord changes to them, like we did THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY and some other I can't even remember, but we did some songs that weren't just straight out three-chord changes and I think my main contribution to the album was when we were recording it. I loved Keith and everybody loved his bass playing but Keith didn't really like to do a lot of homework and he didn't really like to spend a lot of time learning songs. He didn't even really like to play the kind of songs that you had to spend much time learning. So as we were recording the album -Keith was a good friend of mine, I really miss him, I really liked him a whole lot- but I knew that when we were recording the album I had to be real delicate about it but I could see that it might be a problem for Keith because Keith just didn't have the... Keith just wasn't gonna sit at home and practice these things and work on them and memorize the changes and everything.

   And so as we were recording the album I kinda discretely said to him, "Hey, you know I could kinda stand next to you as we're playing the songs and call out the changes to you if you want me to." Keith said, (in a raspy voice) "Yeah, yeah, that'd be good." I didn't want to embarrass him or anything so I was kinda discrete about it but as we were playing the songs I would -I'm pretty good at that and so I knew how to... so we'd be playing and I'd say, "G, A, D" and he would for the most part follow my little directions there and so we were able to get through the songs but after the album came out some people wanted to play a couple of gigs and I was goin', "Oh no. No, no, no. This will not work. This will not be good." Because I knew that at a gig in front of people I couldn't really stand there with Keith and yell out the changes to him. And so he was just gonna be on his own at the gig.

   And so we tried to play a gig -well, actually when it came time for the gig people just kinda learned their own songs, didn't bother with anybody else's, so when we played a gig my memory of it is it was just a total disaster 'cause we just couldn't remember the songs. I mean, you know, sometimes you go in and record, a lot of times people record songs and then they never ever play them again in their whole life. I mean I've done that, I've recorded songs that I've never ever played again. And I mean a lot of people have done that, they never played them at a gig after they recorded them in the studio. And that was of course the case with this stuff. Even though a lot of the songs weren't difficult, it was really difficult to remember them and Keith didn't know 'em in the first place! So it was pretty tough. But I got him through the recording sessions but I couldn't do that (at a gig). So I think my biggest contribution was allowing Keith to get through the songs in the recording sessions.

Memory Disclaimer

    I mean that's the way I remember it and that's my version but you know what, the thing is it's like when I talk about Austin in the early days, when I talk about this album, and when I talk about the things that I've been talking about -I'm sure that you know this but I just want you to know that I know it too- that this is all from my perspective. It's the way I remember it and it's from my perspective. If you could get Jimmie to talk about this stuff, I don't know, he might go, "Somebody's wrong." Or anybody you talk to about this stuff people would just remember stuff wrong, not wrong but differently or focus on it different. I'm just telling you my memories of that TRASH, TWANG & THUNDER stuff and my memories of all those bands, Austin in those days, it's all from perspective which is as valid as anybody else's but it probably wouldn't be the same as anybody else. So I just want you to know that I realize that.

On my way to pay an overdue bill by bank transfer I was bopping down the street with the iPod in my ears. It was a crisp, sunny day so rather than take a 10 minute bus ride, or walk 10 minutes to the train station to go one stop, I opted for a nice 30 minute walk over to the bank. Some exercise and fresh air would do me good. As I was rounding the last corner before arriving at the bank I suddenly felt dizzy. What was I drinking last night? Was it kicking back in? I should be so lucky! No, seems more like having the iPod in my ear was throwing off my balance, exacerbated by this odd strut of mine that goes into overdrive when I'm listening to something really rockin'. Nope, not that either! People around me were slowing down and stopping, then starting to look up. I looked up to see what they were looking at. Power lines swaying hard. Buildings swaying. Another earthquake. Oh well, bank closes in 10 minutes and this bill is already overdue. If I don't pay it now I have to wait 'til after the weekend and that might be after the grace period.

As I cover the last little stretch people are pouring out of buildings and standing in the middle of the street. An overdone sense of panic. Inside the bank the manager is telling people to remain calm and leave slowly, all that. The machine I need is separate from the regular ATMs. Luckily there's no line and I do my bank transfer while the bank is swaying. I don't read Katakana so well so I grab a guy in hard hat standing nearby, he looks like he works there, and have him read one of the menu buttons to make sure I'm depositing it to the right account. Mission accomplished I set out for my 'office', the Doutor coffee shop on the north side of Chofu station, with my book and some bidis, chuckling at the mild panic, where I'll hang out until it's time for my 5:00 appointment at Chofu station.

Readers who haven't spent any quality time in Japan won't understand my nonchalance about the whole thing so a little background is in order. Most of the people doing the overreacting are either old people or young girls. Old people in Japan are not like old people in the States. Having lived through WWII they're oblivious to anything outside their own little universe. They learned to carry on despite the world a long time ago. Old ladies are notorious for gasping at every little thing and young chicks ain't much different. You learn to not take it too seriously. More importantly, Japan is constantly experiencing earthquakes. Often there's small ones you don't even notice. It's an everyday part of life living here and if you're going to freak out about it you're setting yourself up for some serious misery. On top of that, the high frequency of earthquakes has amped up Japanese architecture to be the most resilient in the world to them. This one as I experienced it in my neighborhood was actually pretty mild compared to others I've been in. The ones that go straight up and down really hard are the scary ones.

A couple aftershocks hit while I'm drinking/smoking/reading and it's getting really annoying having to read the same paragraph 4 or 5 times. The two old bats sitting across from me at the half-circle table suddenly start talking to me, "Wow! That's scary!" Don't think they had even noticed me a minute before. Ten to 5:00 and I'm at the station where the trains have been stopped since the quake. Can't raise anybody on my cell phone, probably the airwaves are jammed since everyone else is on there's either talking or texting. Obviously my appointment is off so I head home where I have a landline and my laptop and can communicate with people. And that's when it gets interesting.

Trains are stopped but buses are running and I'm home in 15 minutes. Landline isn't working though. I get on the computer and that's when I find out what really happened. An 8.8 earthquake off the coast of Sendai in northeastern Japan. Later that number would be revised to 8.9 and eventually 9.0 as of this writing on Sunday. Tsunami on the way and people are in a panic. This is serious.

Before I have all the information Jeremy Gloff and J.J. Barrera have already written to see if I'm OK. More messages trickle in throughout the evening but one in particular stands out, and it was one of the early ones. Kenny Palyola, my antagonist from the infamously cancelled 2010 Southwest Tour, has left a comment on my Blog looking to see if my family and I are OK. Despite having not communicated with him directly since then, or approving pervious comments on my Blogs, I approved this one. Some may raise their eyebrows but I give him the benefit of the doubt. I believe he's sincere. It wouldn't be the first time people have set aside their differences in the face of monumental disaster and tragedy. http://www.jjvicars.com/blog.html/twentyten_in_review/

While updating everybody back home and sharing information for people with friends and family up north it soon becomes apparent that CNN is spinning the whole thing way out of proportion. They portray it as a nationwide catastrophe when in fact the serious damage is in Sendai, Miyagi and Fukushima. Suzi is flipping through news channels as I'm updating Facebook and Twitter and the reports from Japanese news crews on the scene are vastly different from CNN. They're also devoid of the background music and other dramatic effects, though why they're wearing hardhats inside the Tokyo studio is beyond me. My first foray into self-imposed Internet coverage is to let everyone know that very little has happened in Tokyo, and about zilch in my neighborhood. Tokyo is a megatropolis of 30 million people connected by the most intricate train system in the world. When the trains shut down for the evening lots of people were stranded. Some slept at the office, some camped out in the stations. Others walked 3 hours to get home. Bicycle shops sold out in a heartbeat. But there was little to no damage in Tokyo and what damage did occur was to old rickety houses that looked like they could have fallen down without any help. One big difference between Japan and the U.S. is that they don't tear down old homes and buildings here while people are living in them. In one of the most crowded, congested cities in the world it's typical to see a rickety old shack from two or three emperors ago right next to a sleek modern building. Other Americans in Japan will know exactly what I mean. There was damage in Odaiba but I never liked those land-fill areas anyhow.

Water and power were out for a while in Machida and phones were down but all was back to normal in the morning. In my neighborhood of Chofu it's business as usual. Mail deliveries, bumbling pygmies, etc... Tattoo is trying to figure out her first cell phone and her combination of laziness and stubbornness have the old man waving his hands in the air, "Fuck it! I give up! Smash the goddam thing for all I care". The Klumps carry on. Checked in with all my Chiba people over Friday and Saturday and everybody is OK. Mike Buttrick still has his house on the cliff face, despite our jokes to the contrary. Oliver Richter, who lives in Narita and shot my promo photos and video, saw a few rice fields washed away while driving back from Iwate. Barge Inn manager Bryan Harmon was in Hawaii as that tsunami was coming and headed for high ground with a well armed friend. He said he was more worried about the 9mm and the 40 cal than anything else. Farther south in Kanagawa they got shook up real good but everybody's OK.

Suzi has some family up in Fukushima on a plot of land that goes back generations. The roof got knocked off, the walls cracked and the stone wall around the house (typical of old Japanese houses) is smashed all over the street but no one is hurt. Bitch part is they're staring at the night sky in the snow. The next day they head up to an onsen that survived the quake. Now they have a hot bath!

Throughout it all Facebook and Twitter have been lifeblood. First the downed phones domestically then the "nuclear terror" spin internationally. Eventually people in Japan started to notice that international coverage, especially in the States, is way overblown and mentioned that Americans living in Japan are using the Internet to keep it accurate. At http://www.facebook.com/jjvicars and http://www.twitter.com/jjvicars I've been posting all sorts of updates and links since 5:30 Friday. I'd like to go into more detail here but I'm starting to wear down. Please visit me on FB and Twitter and pass around the information. It's very important people know the truth of the matter and don't panic. Also, I've been saying for years that the U.S. media grossly misrepresents the situation. By comparing the firsthand information coming from Japan against the secondhand spin of CNN and other North American news outlets people can see for themselves. As of this writing on Sunday evening the latest scare is from the nuclear plant in Fukushima. Again CNN and other American media have blown it into another doomsday scenario. Yes, it's a serious situation but what they consistently fail to mention is the preparedness and efficiency of the Japanese. There was a great line in AbFab, "Japanese efficiency, sweetie. The land where they haven't got time to let the trees grow tall. Throughout it all the rescue and cleanup teams have been on top of their game. There's no crying "why did this happen to us?!?", the people right away do what's necessary to get everything running smooth again.

Whatever deity or invisible avenger you believe in save your prayers for the survivors in Sendai, Miyagi and Fukushima. They're the ones who need it. The rest of were inconvenienced and that doesn't compare.

If you or someone you know is in Japan during these events please share your stories on this Blog. I want it to be a firsthand document of what really happened.

Also in October were trips to Fukushima and Hiroshima by Bullet Train. All three were a first for me. Fukushima is a gorgeously quaint area with some very friendly people. From Hiroshima we were off by ferry to the small island of Itojima. On the way back I stopped to see the Atomic Dome and took lots of pictures.

Twenty-ten was also marked by a pair of "religious experiences". The first was becoming an ordained Dudeist priest. Dudeism, a religion based on the Coen Brothers' movie THE BIG LEBOWSKI. It's fun to be able to use the title "Reverend" and practice laziness (with touches of Taoism and Buddhism) as a religion. It also reminded me how much I love White Russians, though I had to back off on them for the sake of my girlish figure. The other "religious" experience also started out a bit of a gag but turned out to be much deeper than anticipated. Everyone is familiar with the catchphrase "What would Jesus do?" that adorns so many Right-wing bumper stickers ("They don't want to know so they can do it, they just want to know so they can tell everyone else to do it." --George Carlin) but Jessica Pallington West did it one better with her book "What Would Keith Richards Do?" http://www.amazon.com/What-Would-Keith-Richards-Affirmations/dp/1596916141/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293771451&sr=1-3 Seemingly a poke at self-help books it turns out to be a pretty damn good one! The main idea is to know yourself, including your "evil twin" which she terms "the inner and outer Mick", an idea sorely lacking in today's world of digital gadgets that are supposedly meant to communicate and connect but ultimately distract us from dealing with our demons, especially our inner ones. Joseph Campbell said our myths were outdated and no longer relevant so we need new ones, so why not The Dude and Keef Riffhard? I'll take them over any current political or religious leaders!

The upcoming book started to come together nicely. Tentatively titled "Trash, Twang & Thunder: Austin's Roots-Rock Revival" it chronicles the Blues & Roots revival of the 80's, my formative years, through the eyes of the people who did it. Stevie Ray Vaughan has been written about to the point where nearly every day of his life is documented (see Craig Hopkins book "Day After Day, Night After Night" http://www.stevieray.com) but he was simply one part of a much larger scene that put Austin on the musical map. Jimmie Vaughan and the T-birds set the template before drummer Mike Buck split to form The Leroi Brothers with Steve Doerr and  guitar whiz (and my personal guitar guru) Don Leady. T-birds bassist Keith Ferguson played on their debut for Jungle Records CHECK THIS ACTION and Jungle reunited the infamous Buck/Ferguson rhythm section with Leady, Evan Johns (also a Leroi Brother a time or two), Denny Freeman (a badass guitarist in his own right and something of a mentor to the Vaughans) and  "surf musician from Indiana" Frankie Camaro for the Grammy-nominated guitar orgy TRASH, TWANG & THUNDER which the book takes its title from. Ferguson would later join Leady in The Tail Gators and when he left that group he was succeeded by J.J. Barrera. For all that has been written about Stevie Ray his place in the larger picture of the Austin Blues & Roots, or Roots Rock, scene and his contemporaries has been criminally overlooked. And that's not to discount Stevie or his contributions to popular music. On the contrary, I discovered a lot of the old Blues greats through him as did so many of my generation. But I also discovered his contemporaries through him because wherever he was interviewed he frequently mentioned them and his heroes. So I decided to do something about it and write my own damn book!

As mentioned earlier I interviewed Ronnie James while in Austin http://www.jjvicars.com/blog.html/ronnie_james__living_the_dream/ and then Mike Buck http://www.jjvicars.com/blog.html/mike_buck__texas_drum_legend/ Thanks to Facebook I was able to get in touch with Jungle Records founder Bruce Sheehan whom I also interviewed and has been very generous in sharing his Jungle archives for my research http://www.jjvicars.com/blog.html/bruce_sheeehan__jungle_records/ Along the way, and possibly before getting in touch with Bruce, Frankie Camaro got wind of the project and contacted me. Not only is he from Indiana but he was living in Indianapolis the same time I was (he still lives there) and was at the same Cramps concert at Bogart's in Cincinnati that I was at! All this time he was MIA and we were in the same city on several occasions (including March when I stopped through on my way from OH to TX). Denny Freeman, whom I've been acquainted with for a few years, also gave me an excellent interview that is turning out to be one of the cornerstones of the book as I type it up. After his is typed and posted Frankie's is next. Got my fingers crossed for a late 2011 release.

A few well known people passed away in 2010 but one that hit home was former Skynyrd Honkette JoJo Billinglsey. I had gotten in touch with her a few years back on MySpace and we were going to do an interview when she disappeared from the online world. The article was planned to be one of the few articles on Skynyrd that avoided the plane crash, drunken brawls and all the other cliches and focused on their influences (other than the British Invasion) and work ethic (one of the tightest bands that ever was). Turns out she had major surgery for cancer and was making a shaky recovery. She passed away on June 24th but not before I was able to send her recordings of the original Skynyrd in Osaka, Japan and share a magazine article from that tour as well as some candid photos I stumbled across in the most bizarre of meant-to-be circumstances. See http://www.jjvicars.com/blog.html/skynyrd_in_japan/ for the article translated back into English and links to the photos. Tammy VanZant, Ronnie's eldest daughter, found the photos and magazine article and contacted me and I made sure she had copies of all the Skynyrd bootlegs with her dad. Tammy is also a smokin' vocalist in her own right and was kind enough to send me an autographed copy of her debut EP FREEBIRD CHILD http://www.freebirdchild.com Word is she's working on a full-length follow-up.

Jack Herer also passed away on April 15th. Here's book "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" is considered the definitive book on the true story behind cannabis criminalization. Using the Freedom of Information Act he spent years researching why such a diversely useful plant (paper, plastic, clothing, food, fuel and medicine for starters) would be the center of America's failed Drug War. His book proves with documented evidence what I had guessed by following the money trail- Big Oil paid off the politicians (in '36) to enact a "marijuana scare" claiming it cause blacks and Mexicans to rape white women so industrial hemp would be eliminated from the marketplace (to make way for the newly patented Rayon). Who lobbies the hardest for cannabis prohibition? Big Oil and Big Pharma. The "war on cannabis" is a center-piece of the political and corporate corruption that continues to rape the people and the planet. Jack Herer deserves a fucking medal of honor, to say the least, for his lifetime work of exposing these criminals in office. The text can be read at http://www.jackherer.com but I suggest you buy a copy, the book has lots of good illustrations and you'll be voting with your dollars. And you Americans reading this keep in mind our Constitution is written on hemp paper!

Back on the music front LONGHAIRED LEFTOVERS was finally re-released just after Christmas. There had been a dispute over a couple collaborations so those songs were dropped and two others, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK (co-written with Jeremy Gloff) and RAIN KEEPS FALLING took their place. Again what appeared to be a headache worked out for the best, the new release has a much more Blues/Roots sound (which is hard to do on a digital home studio with preamps and drum machine) and it gave Mark Schwarz a bass and backing vocal slot. Listen to samples and buy CDs and downloads at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/jjvicars4

As they say in baseball, "You win some and you lose some, and some get rained out, but you suit up for the all." A few bumps in the road along the way but that's life. And that's also where the interesting stories come from! Big thanks to everybody who was a part of it and best wishes for health and prosperity in 2011! See ya on down the road...