A new 1981 version of Tex & the Saddletramps record "Slave Lover" in Will Clay's Cumberland Avenue basement

Todays Memories confronted me with an old youtube from Tex & the Saddletramps. "Slave Lover” is a great song written & originally sung by George Jones on his 1963 Mercury Records album ‘The Novelty Side of George Jones’. An album that I ran across & immediately loved, early in my fandom of the Possum. Once Mike Haskins & I reassembled Tex & the Saddletramps, which had started out as a rockabilly/C&W-sideband from The Nervebreakers in 1979, a couple of years later with original drummer Russell Fleming, Key Kolb on guitar, & Donny Ray Ford on bass & backing vocals, this is one of the first tunes I wanted to do. A very uptempo tune with lotsa stops & starts about a poor henpecked guy forced to cater to his lover’s every whim & command.

Tex & the Saddletramps - Slave Lover

‘The Novelty Side of George Jones’ on Mercury Records 1963

A short while later, five or six songs were recorded by Will Clay, a saxophonist & all round funny guy who loved to laugh & crack jokes, who Mike & I had known since he was one of the younger guys that used to come hang out at rehearsals for the pre-Nervebreakers band we were in called The Idiots, circa 1974. The other 3/5 of The Idiots went on to form a local band called The Toys. Will had set up a little recording space down in the basement of a house on a hillside on Cumberland Avenue, just down the street from the Dallas Zoo in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Coincidentally, right down the street in the other direction from Lee Harvey Oswald’s famous Beckley Avenue garage apartment. Where “the shadows pointing every whichaway” photo of Oswald holding the rifle allegedly used to kill the president was taken. A photo whose authenticity had been questioned by the first wave of conspiracy theorists for decades.

Here is a photo by Vern Evans of saxophonist Will Clay sitting in (actually standing) with Tex & the Saddletramps at a Lower Greenville Avenue Street Dance. There's Ron Gulley & Michael Brown leaning on a vehicle, with me singing & James Flory on bass & Paul Quigg on guitar & Russell Fleming's drums...

"Slave Lover” was the first tune we recorded there & it turned out the best, with right on the money playing & strong backing vocals from Ford. That version of the band soon splintered & our original bassist, Linda Shaw came back into the fold. But the raw, tinny sound captured on Clay’s ancient analog equipment had a certain charm to it. Years later in 2009 long after Will’s passing, Mr. Bobby Beeman, onetime bassist of the legendary Stick Men With Ray Guns band, ran across a third generation (maybe that’s why it sounds sort of tinny) copy of the sessions & contacted me about posting them to youtube. Which is where they’ve sat until the present. With the ease of uploading & posting old tapes to Bandcamp that I recently discovered, Mike Haskins & I are working on a Tex & the Saddletramps collection featuring the tunes from the Cumberland sessions, plus several more from a session that produced “Move It!” at the late Songbird Studios on lower Greenville Avenue in Dallas, & a few songs that Rocky Langston (RIP) recorded for release on his ‘Steel Rok Presents’ cassette. Sort of the Tex & the Saddletramps album that never was…

Here are some photos of the lineup on "Slave Lover" at a Flykiller party in a warehouse in downtown Dallas (not sure who took these photos). First here's Mike Haskins with Donny Ray Ford in background:

Next, here's me with Key Kolb in the background:

Russell Fleming under the Flykiller logo:

The "Slave Lover" lineup of Tex & the Saddletramps at a Lower Greenville Avenue Street Dance in front of Curtis Hawkins' Stack O' Tracks record store:

Tex & the Saddletramps find a home at The Lyon's Pub in Dallas

Ahhh, the Lyon's Pub!!! Tex & the Saddletramps straddled some eras. First gig as a rockabilly/C&W side-band from The Nervebreakers was opening for Joe King Carrasco and The Crowns at Big D's little punk hangout, DJ's. Then lots of gigs followed at The Hot Klub. As that fizzled out, alot of the Hot Klub bands transitioned over to the new wavey Ground Zero, off Upper Greenville Avenue, (DJ's had been at Lowest Greenville Avenue), but not us. Somewhere in the middle of all this Mike Haskins & Bob Childress left The Nervebreakers & the Saddletramps to form Bag Of Wire with Curtis Hawkins & Clarke Blacker. Paul Quigg & James Flory (from the band Superman’s Girlfriend) replaced them in both bands, & then both bands ceased to exist. Sometime in 1982, I met & started jamming with a cat named Key Kolb. Well, one thing led to another & we got together with Mike Haskins again & started a new Tex & the Saddletramps, recruiting the supremely talented Donnie Ray Ford to play bass & bringing back Russell Fleming, the only Saddletramps drummer through all these incarnations. Ford was more self-destructive & an even worse drunk than I was. So one Sunday after a gig at the tony 8.0 bar in which Ford had repeatedly grabbed the microphone slurring & cursing, BOTH guitarists called me separately & said, "we gotta find another bass player." The original Saddletramps' bassist, Linda Shaw, was given a call & she consented to return to the fold. Kolb soon left too & it was back to the original Mike, Linda, Russell & I. Sshhuuw! Enough background info...

Tex & the Saddletramps at Zebo's "Rockabilly Night"...

So we bounced around playing gigs wherever our manager, Curtis Hawkins, could scrounge one up. Out of town we played in Denton, at The Bowery in Oklahoma City, or Steve Dean's AusTex Lounge in Austin. In-town, at the aforementioned 8.0 Bar, "Rockabilly Night" at Zebo's, & the old Circle Theater on the infamous Harry Hines Blvd, a spectacular old movie theater, where I had attended movies on Saturday afternoons as a child, that had been converted into a massive hard rock/metal bar. Where after one set, they asked us to not play our scheduled second set, just take a less-than-agreed-upon amount of pay & leave...

Tex & the Saddletramps posing in front of the Circle Theater on the infamous Harry Hines Blvd. (Left to right) Mike Haskins, me, Linda Shaw, & Russell Fleming...

Finally we ended up at the Lyon's Pub, in a kind of shabby older building on Yale Blvd. across Central Expressway from SMU. There, we found a home. A place that actually liked us, ALOT. At our first gig there, we learned the local Rugby team, the Dallas Harlequins, drank there after practices & games. They whooped & hollered with wild abandon, & swung from the light fixtures hanging down from the ceiling during our set. It was there I met some really fun gals who both worked & hung out there, a redhead named Carol Box & Dallas Alice, whom I'm still friends with & correspond with to this day. It was at the Lyon's Pub that I first met Bubbles Cash's wild offspring, the mohawked Keiley, that I ran with for awhile back then. She was probably then underage, but I never asked. I remember one night she & Bobby Soxx & I were stopped by the cops, with me driving. Bobby & I were experienced enough to "yes sir/ no sir" to all their questions, but Keiley was pissed off that we'd gotten pulled over. They found a tomahawk in her purse & arrested her on-the-spot. Which left Bobby & I to have to drive over to Keiley's mom's apartment & inform her, "Bubbles, your daughter's been hauled downtown for a concealed weapon." 

Things were going well with our regular gigs at the Lyon's Pub. We got some of our old punkabilly crowd, but also regular folks too. Add in some bikers & rugby players & we generally had a good time. Until one night right in the middle of one of our sets, a gentleman in a suit approached the stage, flashed a badge & cut us off mid-song. He was from the TABC, the state alcoholic beverage commission & they were closing the bar down. He informed us that "this gentleman here," pointing at one of his cohorts, "will watch you unload your equipment from the stage & out the back door. Do not remove anything else from this bar, just your own belongings. Do not finish your beers or take them with you." I later learned we were lucky. When they shut down a bar, they generally padlock the doors & can confiscate everything in there. We were lucky they let us leave with our gear. I later heard that Chris, the bar owner, had been passing around one alcoholic beverage license to several other bars at different locations, to have on hand for scheduled inspections. How that worked, I don't know, but that was the end of the Lyon's Pub...

(Special thanks to Curtis Cottrell for brightening up the first & third image)

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...