Getting A Band Together

Around 2015, I had made a couple recordings at my buddy’s Tom’s house in Fort Worth. Just a couple mics thrown up but with some great mixing. I sold these homemade albums I burned and glued an actual photo to at my gigs from 2013-2015. Not only did Tom help me with recordings but he also got me a job with him as a sound guy. After seeing me perform at Jody Jones’ Songwriter night in 2013 at The Grotto, he came up to me at the end of the show and complimented me on my songwriting. I told him I was going to quit my job as a teacher in north side and go full time at the music thing. Tom advised against that, but when I did it anyway, he was there to bail me out. Instead of making just $50 a night on the weekends and needing to go find another job, I worked at the Basement Bar for $150/night as a sound guy a few nights a week and shadowed Tom at other venues when he needed me. Over the course of that time, we made three album attempts; my first Texicana Blue, which features a Folsom Prison Blues and Fort Worth Blues covers along with 8 originals. I also blew the harmonica while singing and strumming. The harmonica was probably the best part. My second, Songs for Hannah White, a collection of 9 songs I wrote while chasing down a woman in Spain during the summer of 2013. and the third effort, More or Less a Folk Odyssey. This was the best of the three, but still a very simple recording and I didn’t have to pay for any of it. I’ve tracked down a couple copies of these albums and one day I will add them to Bandcamp or destroy them. I have yet to decide.

I was very lucky to meet Tom, and our friendship is still a daily reminder we are meant to meet the people we come across. Like molecules looking for a partner to form an atom, like hydrogen seeking its couple of oxygen counterparts. They come together and form something greater. I’m not sure what my life would be like without Tom, but I don’t wanna know either.

So, in 2015, I was pretty burnt out on drinking and gigging and the genral gossip train that accompanies the bar scene. Although the bar scene was fairly new to me, or drinking at the same bars night after night rather, it quickly lost any pizazz it initially possessed. Todd, who owned the basement bar, would walk in and dump a bag of coke out on the sound board in the booth on occasion. I only showed up toward the end of Todd’s life in 2014. Musicians drank for free at The Basement Bar in the stockyards, so you’d see Scott Copeland, Scott Boland, and many of the who’s who of good Fort Worth music hanging down there back then. We’d go to the alley and take bumps and listen to Copeland talk about how Cross Canadian Ragweed covered his song and then take girls to the sound booth for more bumps. After Todd died suddenly, it was like the party stopped for good. I continued on for about 4 years drinking and druging with the crew from Como Mansion, but Todd’s death changed a lot of things for the people I was hanging with. Tom hung on to his job as a sound engineer at The Basement for a few more years, but when Todd’s dad, who had taken over managing the bar and grieving staff, suddenly died as well, the bar was sold to Tattoo-Johnny, and we were all fired one way or the other. The place doesn’t even look or smell like the old Basement Bar, and that was a smell I was certain would stain those walls and booths for ages to come.

During this same time there was a guy named Cal hanging round Fort Worth. He’d just finished audio engineering school and was working at a place called the Live Oak. Back then a few of the engineers worked all the clubs and as things grew, one house gig just wasn’t enough for some of those engineers. Bars like Magnolia Motor Lounge were offering 50% pay increase over what they were making to come work their sound board, and with Friday on the Green offering $500/day rates, the race was on to be the most sought after and respected sound team in the city. I worked as a stagehand for two years with Friday on the Green and the TCU shows on the commons, and during my 3rd year I became stage manager, which is basically lead stagehand except you have to wrangle anyone due to perform who is unaccounted for. It paid $200/night and sometimes bonused.

This was my first taste of steady money and good money in the music business. Since I wasn’t where Tom was, I didn’t lose out during the ‘sound guild wars’. What I was saying about Cal is that before he moved to Dallas and went on the road with Paul Cauthen, he spent his time trying to sew up the sound gigs in Fort Worth. He was doing a pretty good job at it too, and had enlisted not only Tom in his guild, but a few other predominant ears on the block. Cal had an air of, “I’m taking over this town” that some people loved, and others hated. Regardless, it caused a lot of turmoil for those qualified to matter. I was just in the right spot at the right time and continued to work the stagehand gigs and was only referred to as “that dumbass tech” by Cal to my face once over beers at an after party. Combine that with my few gigs, that were growing as I met more and more people who were already solidified in the scene, not to mention the other small amount of money I made selling pot, and I was able to save up about 4K cash over those first few years after quitting my job with Fort Worth ISD.

For me, when I’m Go-smacked, or served up a real nice Epiphany with a side of shame, I tend to recluse and go into a bit of a metamorphosis. I’ve been accused at times of shedding my skin, “like the snake [I am].” So, with all the changing dynamics in the sound gigs and a leveling off of the hype I was receiving as a local performer, I spent my savings on a 1983 Chevy Jayco RV and headed off to Colorado, Oregon and California with the vague goals of writing new songs for an album, visiting some friends on the West Coast and maybe even never coming back home.

During those travels I ended up writing most of the tunes on Songs Worth Singing. I came home to Fort Worth after about 6 months on the road, sold the RV, got a credit card and made the album at Eagle Audio. Getting home I stayed on Tom’s couch for a few days, and we chopped it up over the process of making a real album. He’d made one up to that point, and in my opinion, I Was Just Thinking is a damn fine body of work. Not receiving much notice for his effort, he warned me of being too proud of my project that I overlook its worthlessness. He was a little jaded.

I went about forming my band from some people that hung out at the Chat Room Pub. Andy Pickett, a talent causing in me extreme intrigue as his performances had the crowd wrapped around his finger, was my first recruit. He agreed to tickle the ivories for me in what I had envisioned was him soloing for days like the old upright barroom players of old. I approached Trey Ownby who formerly played with Whiskey Folk Ramblers and who spent some of his drunken Saturday nights at 3am after closing time talking with me about my lyrics and helping me find that one word that would seal the deal. He also agreed and even convinced his friend, Alan Brown, to let us rehearse in his backyard. Alan was a booking agent, and it seemed everything was lining up perfectly. I got my buddy Tommy Luke to play base. He had the PA if we should ever score a real gig.

This was December 2015. We had a few rehearsals a week at Alan’s that first month, and despite my inexperience, unbeknownst to me of course, everyone went right along with everything. I suspect it was mainly because I wrote my own tunes and had a shit ton of them. My lack of talent and experience were not important at this time when originality and ownership of the music was the most important factor on the scene. From Scott Copeland to The Unlikely Candidates, no one did cover songs, and if you did, you’d be laughed out of town carrying tear-soaked set lists from your shows full of someone else’s music. If you were a somebody, you could get away with doing a few deep cuts from Bob Dylan, J.J. Cale or Dean Dillon. I’m fairly certain one would have been hung from the light post if you didn’t credit the songwriter of a cover you did play. Local covers were cool though and co-writes. So that’s how I got a band, and that’s how I got a cool band and one that made people around the bars talk about me and what I was doing. Leon Bridges had just spent a year doing a world tour and his bandmates spent their drunken nights spewing knowledge and experience to all us would-be’s standing around them like a warming fire in a desolate tundra.

I hired any of them I could to play on my album. I traded an ounce of weed each to get Jeff Dazey and Andrew Skates to come play on a few tunes. It was amazing to be around them. To be one person removed from the big break. But with all these big expectations and a high price tag on the project, stress quickly filled air. It was hard on me. Later that month on a New Year’s Eve show I was billed to open for Charley Crockett, who at that time was about to boil over and break out. Everyone knew it and I was so stoked to be on the bill. My bass player, Tommy, who also kind of did his own thing around the scene, went and set up to open the show instead. He thought since he was more closely connected to Charley through some of his old bandmates, he should be the one to open the show. Because he hosted the open mic there, no one said a thing. He ended up getting called up to stage to do a song with Charley at the end of the night and it was as if I wasn’t there at tall. Funny thing is, in the paper I had been billed as headliner. At that time in Fort Worth, I guess my name was worth more than the guy from Dallas, but that might also just be some rivalry stuff that played out in my favor.

Even though me and Tommy remain friends till this day, I kicked him out of the project. I was hurt he’d overshadow me, and despite the fact he was a better musician, more seasoned act, and had closer ties to Charley, I thought what he did at that time was the end of my career. Leon Bridges showed up there as well and while Tommy was up on stage with Charley and his band and I was out on the back patio sulking, Leon came out back and talked with me. I was too upset with everything to say any more than, “Man, I’m thinking I’m getting out of here,” to which Leon replied, “Normally people wait around to the end of the show.” I had a bad attitude. Still upset and with something to prove. I was blind to see how far away Leon was from me in that moment. It had only been a year since he signed the big contract, and it just didn’t seem real to me yet. During that conversation, Leon was just the same ol guy I’d shared a bill with countless times, but I figure he was viewing me from a different perspective. From a higher vibration, if you will. My attitude stunk.

After getting rid of Tommy, Andy quit the project by not showing up to our first performance at The Grotto. “Tommy is hawt! Hawt. Hawt Hawt!. Why’d you get rid of him?”. We ended up having an argument that played out over the next few years with terrible repercussions like ripples in a still pond. Trey hung on for a while and we got Mark, a bartender and childhood friend of mine to join on bass. He’d never played bass before but was talented enough. I’d blown it anyway, what did it matter at this point. Charley and Leon hated me, Tommy was gone, Andy wanted to kill me, I had no money, and the only real source of income was my lame ass attempt at recouping my weed customers I’d lost by being gone for 6mo. I was putting the album on the credit card at this point and showing up to all the sessions on Xanax, weed and alcohol. There wasn’t much for me to do in on the project after that first day Mark, Trey and I hammered out the 10 songs we did together live. I sang all those tracks live and with a live band. Jeff and Jerry went to doing the over dubs, and since I didn’t know really much about song structure or how things are going to sound after an instrument is added, I left most of the decision making to Mark and Jeff. I just got fucked up and tried not to go crazy.

The studio is a weird place. At the same time, the space can fill you with an unrelenting urge to talk, to gab on and on, to tell your life story plus all your new song ideas, and in the very same moment demand you sit down and shut the fuck up. It’s maddening. And when you are allowed to talk, and I say allowed because everyone will look at you while listening with this face of, “Goddammit, can you just shut the fuck up and let us work!”. You have to take into consideration they are working on your stuff as well, and on top of that, it cost about $1/minute for those babblings. Over my course of experienced I can now pinpoint the exact moment when the engineer gives up for the day and just lets you ramble. When the time is over, they simply stop you mid-sentence, “Okay, times up,” like a therapist who’d rather be listening to their nagging spouse than a patient. They all mean well, but at some point, you have to admit that some people can’t be helped.

Despite all the drawbacks that can come into a project, we got it done. That’s the most important thing. After around 7 days in the studio (once a week), Jerry took me down to Terra Nova studios and we mastered the album. Walking in there was amazing. Townes Van Zandt mastered his last few albums there. I didn’t have enough data to place Jerry Tubbs anywhere on any map, but at $700 for the album, which I now know is reasonable as hell, I was desperately looking to find where the money was going. Jerry and I dropped the tracks off, sat for a little bit and watched him ‘master’ one of the tracks. It was a lot of buttons and knobs, slowing down the track rapidly and identifying something, and then moving on. Tubbs would switch out other albums on his CD changer and compare the sound. After he did one, Jerry looked and me and said, alright, let’s go eat.

We left and hung around Austin all day before collecting the masters and driving back to Fort Worth. Jerry finalized the song order, Tommy took the photos, and Nation Wide printed 1000 copies of the album somewhere around March 2016. Not counting the first failed gig at The Grotto, we played our first real show at Shipping & Receiving, now closed. I’d met an accordion player named Abel while doing some gang vocals for Tommy at Cloudland and he ended up coming over and doing quite a lot of playing on Songs Worth Singing, so he was in the band now. I’d also brought in Johnny, Tone and Danny, who I’d met at the Keys Lounge Blues Jam and during my time as a Saturday matinee sound guy at the basement, and they all played parts on the album too, and so in turn, were now in the band. It was a pretty cool line-up and we had stickers made and a big fancy poster that cost $100 for the CD release show.

As the first dates grew closer, players had other commitments or higher paying gigs and so that first show consisted of Mark Weger on Bass, Trey Ownby on drums, Johnny Mack on washboards and vocals, and Abel Cassias on accordion. We sounded like a zydeco band, but we played original music. Before we could get to the CD release show, Trey had quit the band for the first time, but I managed to get Garrett Peltier, who I’d played some even earlier renditions of the band with back at The Cellar when he was in my half-brother’s band, to take Trey’s spot and even added Glenn Mcglaughlin to play electric guitar opposite Abel and his accordion. So, we played Lola’s with Garrett on drums, Glenn on electric, Mark on Bass, Johnny on washboards and vocals and Abel on accordion. The bar was packed, and that was largely due to Mark’s influence on the scene, cause after all and as I’ve mentioned before, I was not too good at singing. The hype didn’t last, and I got angrier and angrier at the band for being so loud I couldn’t hear myself over the monitors.

I was yelling the entire show. There was nothing good about it, but it paid, we had hype and so people kept playing with me. For our next big show at the Chat Room Pub, Trey came back, and Tone Sommer joined on guitar. The rest of the line-up stayed the same and we had a good show and good crowd. I couldn’t hear my vocals and the singing was terrible. The hype dwindled even further and my friendship with Mark also strained. I brought Tommy back on bass and kept Tone on the guitar. Luckily for me the album got me in with an agency in Dallas and I went to work playing gigs 3-5 nights a week. It was everything I’d dreamed. There were plenty of well-paying band gigs and we played them all. Soon I dwindled down the band to Me, Tommy and Tone. Tommy had the PA, played upright base and despite his drunken shenanigans, was easy to get along with and the best slap player I’ve ever heard, and Tone is a wizard on the electric guitar. With those two I got really good at rhythm and my repertoire grew out of necessity. I would hire the other guys when needed and my roster of possible subs has grown and grown.

Tone, Tommy and I recorded No Fear in mid 2017. It’s still my favorite. The tracks are live in Tommy’s living room with SM Beta 58s for vocals and 57s for the amps and acoustic. We mixed it and mastered it ourselves. It really sounds like what my first real band sounded like live. It took a while to get there, but because of the time it took, I love it that much more.