The story of The Loafin' Hyenas first club gig at Raji's in Hollywood when Lux Interior & Rob Ritter showed up

 This photo that came up in yesterday’s Memories is from when the Hollywood, California band that I was in, The Loafin' Hyenas, played our first club gig at Raji’s, the epicenter of Hollywood underground bands at the time. I think this was 1988. At that point the band consisted of myself on vocals, former Cramps guitarist Click Mort, a wild cajun gal from Beaumont named Dionne Sparks (now Neva Trejo) on fiddle, & the former rhythm section from the band Blood on the Saddle, Ron Botelho on bass & Hermann Senac on drums. This is the lineup that recorded our first single “Scatter” (about Elvis’ chimpanzee) b/w “Move It!” (a reworking of one of my earlier songs from Tex & the Saddletramps days) that was one of the early releases from Long Gone John’s Sympathy For The Record Industry label (SFTRI 008). Hear the song "Scatter" here: https://at.tumblr.com/t-tex-edwards/t-tex-edwards-ch-dld-bft-brit-omm-audio/riw8sqxa1sfx

And what a night it was. I don’t remember much from our performance, but I do remember who was there in the audience that night. In the photo below just to the left of the speaker cabinet (& darkly in the first photo), you can see original Gun Club bassist Rob "Graves" Ritter in sunglasses (yes, after dark AND indoors) sitting on the floor with his friend Tim Farris from the band Celebrity Skin. Rob was our favorite & the first bass player Click & I recruited for The Loafin' Hyenas & he jammed with us once when we were in the early stages of writing songs & putting the band together. But Rob was too busy at the time playing reunion gigs with 45 Grave & soon joining the band Thelonious Monster, to have enough time to devote to our project. He did return toward the end of The Loafin' Hyenas & contributed some beautiful bass lines to our only album, THE LOAFIN’ HYENAS on Patrick Mathè’s New Rose label out of France.

Also that night Click had invited his old bosses from The Cramps, Lux Interior & Poison Ivy Rorschach, who surprisingly showed up & crowded into the stuffy basement room at Raji’s where the bands played. I remember Lux pointing out in conversation afterwards in his humorous goofy manner, “Hey, we’re both lead singers with three letter names that end in ‘x’ Lux & Tex!”. I had invited Chip Kinman from Rank and File, a band that I admired & had opened shows for a couple of times back in Dallas at The Hot Klub, who also showed up.

The next photo is still-my-sweetie Karen Kritter & I, in one of Raji’s booths.

Then this last image is a flyer made by Click Mort. I don't remember if this was the same night as the one that I'm describing in this post. But it would make sense since Lux produced the first Mad Daddy's LP...

The Nervebreakers flyer with the fetish model & the story of DJ's & The Hot Klub in Dallas

 

Pat Blashill posted this old Nervebreakers flyer yesterday with a note that said: “Nervebreakers show at DJs, Dallas, 1980. The much beloved Nervebreakers pre-dated punk in the Big D, and are said to have had a quasi-New York Dolls phase. DJs was one of the first punk clubs in the city, although not as well known (or funded?) as The Hot Klub. Poster by Nervebreakers singer T. Tex Edwards. The woman in the photo is Tana Louise, who was once known as the Cincinnati Sinner, and like Bettie Page, was also a fetish model for Irving Klaw (ID courtesy of the lovely Mae Barone.)” 

My two cents: DJ’s was before the Hot Klub. There was a very short period of time where they overlapped. "Better funded" is an understatment. Punk stumbled upon Delores Nolley, DJ’s proprietor (who had some sort of Jack Ruby connection in her younger days). When some punks in a band called The Infants (ex-Dot Vaeth Group members David & Doug Townsend on guitar & drums, Linda Shaw on bass, who later played with me in Tex & the Saddletramps ’79-’82 & the early version of Out On Parole ’84-’85, & a limey cat named Jeff Westley on vocals, who hung out at the clothing store next door on lower Greenville Avenue, approached Delores about letting them set up & play in her tiny bar, a scene was born. She was ill-equipped to be booking bands above the local punk level, who just wanted any place to play that would let them come in & bash away for tips. Eventually, bands from Austin would come up to play DJ’s. I don’t know what payment they were promised, someone from one of those bands would have to chime in on that. But I do know that the first time The Cramps came to Texas, they played Austin & Houston, but no-showed DJ’s in Dallas because the word had gotten around that she didn’t always come up with promised guarantee She also promoted what I think was the first “punk festival” in Texas, ‘DJ’s First Annual New Wave Retreat’ at the historic Yello’ Belly Speedway in Grand Prairie.

The Hot Klub was a venture run by much more experienced Dallas musicbiz guys, Mark Lee (who had managed & promoted Dallas garagebanders Kenny & the Kasuals in the late 1960s) & Danny Eaton, formerly of Eaton-Page who ran The Palladium, up on Northwest Highway in Dallas, where The Nervebreakers had opened shows for John Cale, The Police, & The Clash on their first run through Texas. Coincidentally, The Clash show was the same weekend as Dolores’ New Wave Retreat (October ’79?) & Joe Strummer referenced it onstage into the microphone on that night. Just months later Lee & Eaton astutely saw where music was headed, & opened up The Hot Klub on Maple Avenue in a building that had formerly been a good sized Hispanic Disco, right across the side street from a Jack-In-The-Box drive-through burger joint. Local bands now had a bigger, more organized room to gig at, with a built-in good sound system & soundman. And every new wave, ska, neo-rockabilly, post-punk, up & coming touring band that came through Dallas in that 1980-83 period played at The Hot Klub. From Jeffery Lee Pierce wailing on his bugle, to the Stranglers’ roadies tossing Bobby Soxx out of the upstairs dressing room & down the stairs & Soxx subsequently slashing all tires on their rented Ryder truck parked out front. It was always hopping at the Hot Klub…

Above is the original image of Tana Louise I recently ran across, that I swiped from Andy Warhol's Interview or another of those New York City rags for this flyer & was later used for The Nervebreakers' first album coverart...

Also, check out Pat Blashill’s great ‘Texas Is The Reason’ book, plus he is currently working on an oral history of Lone Star punk for UT Press.

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)

The Very First Out On Parole Gig in 1985 at Austin's Continental Club

I’ve been trading comments with Cowboy Hank whose been posting his reactions to a bunch of George Jones albums he snagged ”recently at an antique mall in Cabarrus County” on his @just_record_stuff page on Instagram. I was telling him about George & Melba Montgomery’s great tune, “Feudin’ & Fighting” (https://youtu.be/znoBWksdyTo) about bickering couples.

It reminded me of the very first incarnation of Out On Parole right after I’d moved down to Austin in 1984 or ’85. So I dug out this photo, don’t remember who shot it, at the first OOP gig ever, at The Continental Club opening for the LeRoi Brothers.

To the left is the ‘Hillbilly Intellectual’ Joe Dickens on guitar, Mike Buck somewhere back there on drums, me & Alice Berry (AKA Lorena Jo Bodine) upfront in almost matching outfits, Linda Shaw on bass, swigging a last minute beer before the show started, & lurking in the shadows someplace, Wayne Buckner AKA the Reverend Ottis Moon on pianer. Included in the set was a version of the aforementioned “Feudin’ & Fighting”, where Alice & I had to spit that wordy song out at the breakneck pace we played it at. Yes, some of the lyrics got mangled…

Alice Berry (Lorena Jo Bodine) commented on the Facebook version of this post:
"Definitely matching outfits. I even wore a black wig and painted on a gap in my teeth to match my feuding partner LOL
Such a great band. I'm really proud to have been part of that."

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...

"Formerly Street Queen" the first Nervebreakers original song...

"Formerly Street Queen" was the very first song I wrote with my Nervebreakers songwriting partner Mike Haskins. I am guessing that was perhaps 1975 or ’76, when I was around 21 years old. “Formerly Street Queen” is an excellent example of it’s time & what is now referred to as “proto-punk,” with alternating fast & slow parts topped off with an epic-sounding final long section, building up to a resolution with a spaghetti-western turn at the end.

My old band from that era, The Nervebreakers, have a new/old album (FACE UP TO REALITY) released last year by Freddie Krc’s SteadyBoy Records, filled with original songs written & performed during the band’s late ‘70s heyday, but never documented & recorded until a 2009 band reunion. Got that? New in 2022, but recorded in 2009, but composed before 1980. "Formerly Street Queen" is included on this release.

Please check your local record store to see if it’s in stock. If you don’t find it there, I have some available here on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/155359139433

The ‘street queen’ illustration included here was one I lifted from a social media post, with no attribution listed for it’s source, that I ran across recently. Since we had a song with that in the title I posted it to Facebook with a link https://youtu.be/OHUHncPED2w to the song. Lo & behold, the wonderful Miriam Linna of Norton Records commented & informed me: “That image was hacked out of Bad Seed mag!” Bad Seed was a famous groundbreaking fanzine she & her late husband, Billy Miller, put together many years ago. So I quickly inserted in my posting the real source for this image that you see here, with apologies. Miriam’s one of the coolest, cutest dolls around but I know you don’t wanna get on the bad side of the original “bad seed."

T. Tex Edwards & Out On Parole - Pardon Me, I've Got Someone To Kill

 T. TEX EDWARDS writes: 

Way back in the 1980’s, Mr. Mike Buck gave me a cassette mixtape he made called THE RUBBER ROOM, comprised of old C&W songs about murder, madness, jails etc. but mainly about murder. Nowadays it’s a whole genre of it’s own. But back then it was just tapes of weird old tunes that record collectors like Buck shared amongst friends.

I had a friend named Danny Whittington back in Austin with some recording equipment at his house & on a lark, I suggested we record some of those songs next time I was back in town visiting from my then-current home in Hollywood, California. That was how this album came about. What started out as a kind of sick joke turned into a semi-serious music project.

As it turned out, the songwriting on the most part was strong, the musicianship of the friends & friends-of-friends who were recruited was sure, & somehow my drug-sick, mumbled warbling fit right in & some minor magic was created.

Weirdo Austin artist Bob “Don’t Call Me Robert” Frye, another friend-of-a-friend was tagged with coming up with some coverart. Something along the lines of Porter Wagoner’s COLD, HARD FACTS OF LIFE (one of the songs included) & this fantastic creation of Bob’s was the lynchpin in convincing Long Gone John, indie record guy & collector of transgressive art, to release a vinyl LP of the project on his Sympathy For The Record Industry label.

Much, much later, after the century turned & I had moved back to Austin, Jeff Smith of Saustex Media, consented to re-releasing a CD version in 2007.

Which brings us to the present where I still have some of those CDs left to peddle to you here on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/155359257397

AMAZON BLURB:

'Pardon Me, I've Got Someone To Kill' is a re-issue of the classic 1989 Sympathy For The Record Industry release (also New Rose in France, 1991) by T. Tex Edwards & Out On Parole. T. Tex is a true Texas Punk pioneer dating from his work in the 70's with the Nervebreakers and his later Hollywood outfit the Loafin' Hyenas. 'Pardon Me,...' is a collection of obscure C & W 'murder' songs rendered in Edwards' singular style. Top-notch backing on the disc is provided by Austin Roots luminaries Mike Buck (Fabulous T-Birds, Leroi Bros.) on the drums, John X. Reed (Doug Sahm, Jesse Taylor, Lucky Tomblin Band) on a variety of guitars, and other lesser-known but equally talented weirdos. 14 tales about drinkin', cheatin', killin' and prison rendered in high Texan fashion for your listening enjoyment. Includes the previously unreleased 'Last Will and Testimony (of a Drinking Man)' by Tex and the Affordable Caskets.