Sunday, January 29, 2023

Today in 1983, The story of Tex & the Saddletramps in Oklahoma City, how I became "Tex" & where did I get this saddle?


Today in 1983 in Oklahoma City, we played a Friday/Saturday pair of gigs at The Bowery, a club in the basement of a building, that our manager, Curtis Hawkins had booked to get us out of Dallas.
The Oklahoma liquor laws were interesting. Liquor-by-the-drink could not be sold legally at that time in Oklahoma. So behind the bar, sat rows of liquor bottles with names taped on them, alleging that each patron had brought their own bottle with them for the bar to make them mixed drinks. Which of course was not true, but necessary, for the club to be able to create the facade of following the law. I later learned Texas had been the same way up through the 1960s, but by the time I had turned of legal age, liquor-by-the-drink had been legalized.
In Oklahoma City, we met lots of cool people. Basile & Miho Kolliopoulos, Greek brothers who had a band called The Fortune Tellers. Basile had previously lived in New York City & played with the great band, The Senders, for short period. Wayne Buckner & his then-wife Stava (who was French), let me crash overnight at their home. Much later, in 1984, I would start a band in Austin with Wayne, who became the Reverend Ottis Moon, & named our new outfit Out On Parole.
The photo on the flyer is funny. Because I was a city boy & had never owned a saddle, or ridden a horse more than a few times as a kid visiting a relative's ranch down in south Texas. But one of the girls I ran around with, Barbara LoMonaco, came from a family that was well off & owned horses & saddles. She also dabbled in photography & took the shot used on this flyer. However, I did already own the hat, by the way...
A couple of years before, my fellow Nervebreaker Mike Haskins & I, had started a rockabilly/C&W side band, & named it Tex & the Saddletramps as a joke. Thus I became "Tex" & here I was carrying my saddle...

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