BOOKS / Ivan Koop Kuper : Vicki Ayo's 'Boys From Houston' Documents a Thriving '60s Music Scene

Vicki Welch Ayo's 'Boys From Houston'
describes a thriving '60s music scene

The book is a real eye-opener for those who would have never believed that the city once known as 'Baghdad on the Bayou,' referring to its oppressive climate and its brackish waterway, was anything but a cultural wasteland.

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / August 15, 2013

[Boys From Houston: The Spirit and Image of Our Music by Vicki Welch Ayo (2013: Create Space); Paperback; 450 pp; $89.95.]

Author Vicki Welch Ayo and I have never actually met, but we share a similar adolescent experience. The very first rock concert we both attended as teenagers was a performance by a local group called The Sound Investment, a garage band from South Houston fronted by a charismatic vocalist named Ray Salazar.

The year was 1967, and in the high school semester before the "Summer of Love,” Houston, Texas, was experiencing a cultural renaissance. This was a period of creativity and progressive thinking that was reflected in alternative lifestyles, hippie fashion, visual art, and most important, the music.

Vicky Welch Ayo at 17.

Three years had passed since the “Fab Four” first appeared that eventful Sunday night on the Ed Sullivan Show, and from that point on, in the living rooms, basements, and garages of America, boys and sometimes girls were hard at work, on a grassroots level, honing their craft in an attempt to emulate their mop-top heroes.

This was also an era in Houston, Texas, when music was everywhere, and on any given weekend, local bands were performing for their peers in high school gymnasiums, fraternity houses, and neighborhood shopping malls.

These bands were comprised of mostly “waspy” teenagers with a smattering of Italian, Jewish, and Hispanic kids in the mix, who, in the laboratories of their parents' suburban homes, borrowed from the British Invasion, California surf music, and their own Texas blues roots to create what would be referred to as the “Gulf Coast Sound.”

The soundtrack to this special era was provided by Texas bands with the names of A-440, The Coachmen, The Coastliners, The Clique, The Crabs, The Sixpentz, The Fun & Games Commission, The Children, Thursdays Children, Lost and Found, Red Krayola (with Mayo Thompson), The 13th Floor Elevators (with Roky Erickson), Fever Tree, Bubble Puppy, The Moving Sidewalks (with Billy Gibbons), and Zakary Thaks, to name just a few.

Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators at the New Orleans Club, 1966. Photo © Robert Simmons. Image from Boys From Houston.

Although not all of these bands originated in Houston, they all performed in Houston clubs, recorded in Houston studios, and their records were played on Houston radio. Their music was embraced by Houston teenagers, and some of these bands and band members even went on to make a name for themselves in the national music arena.

First-time author Ayo speaks to those baby boomers who, like herself, share a collective memory of coming of age during the 1960s in Houston, in teen clubs like The Living Eye, Love Street Light Circus, La Maison, and The Catacombs, and in “head shops” of the era like The Electric Paisley, Dirty Jim’s Dry Goods, and Houston Blacklight & Poster Company.

Boys From Houston is a real eye-opener for those who would have never believed that the city once known as “Baghdad on the Bayou,” referring to its oppressive climate and its brackish waterway, was anything but a cultural wasteland.

The Moving Sidewalks: From left, Dan Mitchell, Tommy Moore, Don Summers, and Billy Gibbons. Photo courtesy Rick Campbell. Image from Boys From Houston.

Ayo chronicles the time period from 1965 to 1970 with near-encyclopedic accuracy, and explains what key ingredients contributed to this creative and historic time in a town not necessarily known for tolerance or for having an enlightened outlook toward social change.

Houston musician and songwriter, Neal Ford (of The Fanatics), puts this phenomenon into perspective ever so poignantly in the prologue of this publication:

Up and down the streets of the neighborhoods of Houston the sound of bands practicing in their garages and living rooms could be heard day and night. New sounds, fun sounds, and exciting sounds of guitars, basses, drums and keyboards that claimed we are here and we have something to say.

Ayo does have a tendency to overly romanticize this time period and eschews writing about those musicians we lost due to their fascination with the dark side who were added to the roster of Houston’s rock & roll casualties. These were individuals whose promising careers were cut short, and who left us wondering where their talent would ultimately have taken them had they lived.

Bubble Puppy. Photo courtesy of Dave Fore. Image from Boys From Houston.

Tragically, three prominent guitarist/songwriters of this era with ties to Houston -- Steve Perron of The Children, Stacy Sutherland of The 13th Floor Elevators, and Michael Knust of Fever Tree -- all died prematurely, and their all-too-early deaths were unfortunately linked to reckless behavior, an excessive lifestyle, addictive personalities, and substance abuse.

Still equally sad is how some of the key players of this era grew into adulthood and abandoned their musical ambitions only to buy into the trappings of the generation they strived to become an alternative to. Some were lured by Houston’s petrochemical industry, some by the promise of riches in real estate development; and still some have been seen over the years pandering to conservative Texas politicians and other special interest groups.

Ayo reveals how this special point in time could not have occurred without the help of rival AM radio stations, KILT and KNUZ, who made a commitment to the community to provide radio airplay to records produced by local talent, as did Houston’s first progressive free-form FM station, KFMK. This was a time before corporate greed and radio programming consultants redefined the concept of broadcasting into one of “narrowcasting” by creating new radio formats that restricted the quantity and genre of music introduced into the marketplace.

Ayo also gives accolades to local music columnist Scott Holtman, whose weekly column, “Now Sounds,” in The Houston Post, gave invaluable print exposure to the city’s burgeoning music scene and youth culture. Holtzman, with his wife, Vivian, would go on to produce and manage Houston’s psych/pop export, Fever Tree.

Another Houston Post music columnist who is referenced by Ayo is Larry Sepulvado. Sepulvado is recognized as one of the first to write about the Texas music scene in a national publication. In December, 1968, Rolling Stone magazine issue #23 published Sepulvado’s comprehensive expose, “Tribute to the Lone Star State.”

B.J. Thomas and the Triumphs. Photo courtesy Don Drachenberg. Image from Boys From Houston.

This was the issue with the iconic photo on the front cover of the late Doug Sahm and his toddler son, Shawn, who is seen wearing an oversized cowboy hat. It is also the issue, thanks to Sepulvado, that first exposed the nation to Beaumont native and guitar virtuoso, Johnny Winter.

Ayo also acknowledges the contribution made by disc jockey-turned-TV-host, the late Harry Lieberman aka Larry Kane, who hosted a teen dance show Saturday afternoons on KTRK-TV for more than 11 years. The Larry Kane Show broadcast both local Houston and Texas bands lip-synching to their new 45 rpm singles on the air while adoring fans in the studio audience danced to the infectious backbeat of the music.

Vicky Welch Ayo, who now resides in Southern California, spent eight years researching this self-funded labor of love, and after shopping her unfinished manuscript to both UT Press and Texas A&M Press for their “Texas Music Series,” she opted to self-publish, under the company name, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, in favor of editorial control.

Boys from Houston is a fun read and is recommended to all those who ever wondered about Houston’s once-glorious musical past. It was a special time in the most unlikely of cities whose once-thriving music scene vanished as mysteriously as it appeared.

My only burning question is, “What happened?” Perhaps Ayo could address this issue in Boys From Houston, Volume II, which I understand she is in the process of researching.

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a a drummer and a real estate broker, and is still a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. He can be reached for comment at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog.]

• Also see "Houston Was an Unlikely '60s Hotbed," by Thorne Dreyer, originally published in Boys From Houston.

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Ivan Koop Kuper : The Maharishi's Bad Houston Karma

The Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: The late Houston real estate mogul.
The Heaven on Earth Inn:
Bad Karma in Houston

The Guru’s utopian vision somehow took a turn in the wrong direction.

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2012

HOUSTON -- The 1970s were a time in Houston’s history when the population began to boom and employment opportunities in the petrochemical arena saw no limits as a result of the Arab Oil Embargo.

To accommodate this influx of mostly northerners to the “Bayou City,” developers borrowed large sums of venture capital from lending institutions hoping to cash in on the new-found prosperity, and new construction could be seen rising from the barren landscape from the suburbs to the inner city. In addition, several mid-rise hotels were erected in the immediate downtown area.

By the mid-1980s, as oil prices fell, Houston experienced its first major recession which put a halt to job growth and adversely affected the city's real estate market. It was a time when businesses closed and a significant portion of the population left town in mass for job opportunities elsewhere. It was also a time when investors simply walked away from their mortgage commitments and their real property holdings.


Heaven on Earth

An abandoned hotel on the southern fringe of downtown Houston with the physical address of 801 St. Joseph Parkway began its life as a Holiday Inn in 1971. By 1984 the Holiday Inn was sold to the Days Inn, a hotel chain created by eccentric real estate mogul and Christian philanthropist, Cecil B. Day. It was sold again 1992 to the Maharishi Global Development Fund for a price tag of $2 million and reincarnated into the Heaven on Earth Inn.

The Maharishi Global Development Fund is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization owned by the 1960s Indian mystic and former spiritual guide to the Beatles, the Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The 600-room hotel was purchased with the intent of having a spiritual sanctuary and a learning center for members of the Transcendental Meditation movement, complete with an upscale vegetarian restaurant, in downtown Houston.

The Guru’s utopian vision somehow took a turn in the wrong direction over the next three years, and by 1995, and in need of extensive renovation, the HOE evolved into an extended-stay residential shelter for Houston’s homeless and the underemployed. It also became a magnet for individuals with backgrounds in petty crime and drug abuse.

By 1998, the city of Houston forced the hotel to close its doors for safety reasons and building code violations. The hotel has been vacant and for sale for the 14 years since it ceased operating. Due to the need for extensive renovation, including asbestos abatement, the sale of this 33-story mid-rise edifice has become cost prohibitive and the building remains an eyesore on Houston’s skyline.

Maharishi's legacy : Heaven on Earth no more.

Beirut Hilton

Timothy Bleakie, a former resident of the Heaven on Earth in the mid-1990s, remembers what life was like living in this unusual extended-stay hotel where the elevators seldom worked and room break-ins were a frequent occurrence.

“Seven to eight of us bicycle messengers occupied the entire 14th floor back in 1995,” said the former HOE resident and well-known downtown Houston bicycle courier. “We paid $275 per month with double occupancy and our utilities were included. We mainly kept to ourselves because, believe it or not, there was a lot of crack and heroin use among the tenants back then and there was a lot of crime as a result.”

“The owners thought they would attract a higher caliber of resident by offering on-site lessons in Transcendental Meditation, but that wasn’t the case. Very few of the tenants took them up on the offer. It was an ill-conceived business project. The average stay was about one month but I ended up living there for six. I became a model tenant and I even ended up maintaining the swimming pool on the 7th floor.”

The Heaven on Earth was one of several investment properties purchased by the MGDF throughout the United States in the 1990s that included other vacant hotels in Chicago, Tulsa, Detroit, Hartford, and Avon Lake, Ohio. Like the one in Houston, these spiritual sanctuaries and learning centers were christened “peace palaces” whose mission was to “improve humanities’ global consciousness” as well as realize a substantial profit.

Ironically, near the end of its demise, the HOE became known as the “Beirut Hilton” by its residents and downtown neighbors because of its rundown appearance and its resemblance to the infamous, bullet-riddled hotel in war-torn Lebanon. According to Houston Police Department records, by 1998, the HOE had been the scene of multiple drug busts, assaults, and one homicide.

“It got rougher toward the end of my six month stay,” Bleakie said. “Most of the tenants didn’t have any money and were substance abusers. By the time I moved in, the vegan restaurant had already closed. They were still offering classes in TM on the top floor but very few tenants took them up on the offer.”

“There was a lot of paranoia among the residents regarding break-ins. The room keys were very easy to duplicate and you could easily enter a room with a credit card or driver’s license. There was a man who lived there with his daughter and he was a junkie. The man used to trick out his daughter just to pay the rent.”

Because of the Maharishi’s strict eastern religious beliefs and the fact that he subscribed to the principles of Vedic architecture, the residents were not allowed to use the actual entrance to the building. These architectural principles govern the orientation of a building and designate from what direction one may enter. “The residents were forbidden from using the main entrance on the building’s south side,” Bleakie explained, “so we used a small service entrance facing west on Milam Street instead.”

“My biggest fear was that one day there would be a fire and we wouldn’t be able to get out. I remember that all the elevators quit working for two weeks one time and there weren’t any phones in the rooms, only in the lobby. There was also a woman in a wheel chair that lived on the 25th floor. She had to have her food brought to her until they were fixed. I remember that the cops and the fire department were there quite often.”


Spiritual default

In 2004, the Houston Business Journal reported that the hotel was sold to LandCo Investments, LLC, for $8.5 million. However, by 2005, the Colorado-based investment group defaulted on its promissory note to the MGDF, thereby reverting ownership of the hotel back to the Maharishi.

On February 5, 2008 the Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died leaving his investments and his spiritual movement in the hands of his multiple family members and business associates. The Maharishi Global Development Fund reported that at the time of his death, the Guru’s United States real estate assets alone were valued at more that $300 million.

According to the Harris County Appraisal District, effective October 4, 2011, the Heaven on Earth Inn changed hands once again, and has been renamed the Beanmont Medical Center Hotel, LLC. It is still vacant and in need of extensive renovation.

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a real estate broker and a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog.]

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Ivan Koop Kuper : Huey P. Meaux Was the Crazy Cajun

Huey P. Meaux was the Crazy Cajun

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / September 22, 2011

One Friday evening in 1973, a burly looking biker entered the control room of community radio station KPFT FM, the Pacifica station that broadcast from the second floor of the since demolished Atlanta Life building in downtown Houston.

He was there to visit "The Crazy Cajun Radio Show," and to ask host Huey P. Meaux to play a track from an old Eddy Arnold album that he brought with him. The biker told Meaux the record was the only possession of his late father's that he owned, and that it was also the anniversary of his father's death.

In his thick Cajun-French accent, Meaux dedicated a selection from the album to the memory of the biker's father, and as the scratchy vinyl record spun on the turntable, the biker stood in the corner of the room and wept. It was from personal experiences like this one that Meaux developed his keen sense of reading people and knowing how music can trigger an emotional response.


Huey Purvis Meaux made his living as an independent record producer. It was a talent he honed in the 1950s while working as both a barber in Winnie, Texas, and a disc jockey at KPAC-AM in Port Arthur. It was there the naïve Meaux was first introduced to the magic of magnetic recording tape and analog reel-to-reel tape recorders.

Meaux's mission in life was to discover local musical talents, take them into the recording studio, manufacture phonograph records from the master sound recordings, and promote the records to regional radio stations in hopes of receiving the much-coveted radio exposure necessary to make a record into a hit.

Similar to the East Texas "wildcatters" of days-gone-by who drilled oil wells on speculation of striking it rich, Meaux would also speculate on the abundance of homegrown talent, of all musical genres, he found in the night clubs and road houses of East Texas and Louisiana.

Raised "dirt poor" with barely a high school education, Meaux would leave his mark on the music industry and become a significant contributor to popular American culture.

Meaux followed a specific business model that he perfected over 30 years. He learned that after first breaking a single regionally, and with the right amount of radio exposure and sales from independent record distributors, he could then have the leverage necessary to license both the master sound recording and the copyright of the composition to the larger independents and the once prevalent major labels.

Meaux was no novice to this process or to the business of music. Between 1959 and 1985, his name would be associated with 55 gold singles and albums, and eight platinum albums that were produced in recording studios primarily in New Orleans, Houston, and Pasadena, Texas.


"I was so nervous and my hands were shaking as I was fading out that song," Meaux would always recall when discussing "I'm Leaving It Up To You," a track he produced from the Louisiana singing duo known as Dale and Grace, "because in my heart I just knew I had a hit on my hands."

Meaux's intuition was on target because by October 1963, the remake of the composition originally penned and recorded by California's Don "Sugarcane" Harris and Dewey Terry, reached the No. 1 position on Billboard Magazine's Hot 100 chart, and remained on the chart for 12 weeks. The selection that Meaux chose for the Louisiana duo to record resurfaced nine years later when it charted again when it was recorded by America's "squeaky-clean" brother and sister singing duo, Donny and Marie Osmond.

"My records are so bad that the only reason people buy so many is to keep them off the market," Meaux would always boast to those held captive by his bravado and flamboyant personality. With his gift for gab, Meaux could charm both his small town radio audience and the most jaded of big city music industry veterans. If you were to ask Huey Meaux how he was doing or how he was feeling at any given time, his stock comeback would be, "If I felt any betta' bruddah, I'd run for gouvna,' you betta' sho' believe it."

Huey P. Meaux and Doug Sahm at Sugar Hill Studios in Houston, 1974. Photo by Hank Lam.
Meaux would become close friends and business associates with many of the music industry's power brokers of the era, including the late Shelby Singleton of Mercury Records, the late Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, and Aaron Schechter, the low-profile New York-based CPA who Meaux affectionately referred to as "Junior." The unlikely team of Schecter and Meaux, reminiscent of Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison from the Neil Simon stage play, The Odd Couple, maintained a successful professional relationship and a personal bond that endured for more than 25 years.

"I saved his neck many times from the IRS and on many other occasions and there was never any appreciation shown from him," said the 85-year-old Schechter who has made a career of keeping the books for a who's-who of rock royalty.

I quit Huey twice but he chose to ignore me.

I first met Huey way back in 1969 after he got out of jail. He came to New York to visit his lawyer Paul Marshall and he asked Paul to find him a "Jewish New York accountant." Marshall referred him to me and he came by the office and I began doing business for him. Our first order of business was an audit of Scepter Records owned by Florence Greenberg who owed Huey back royalties.

Huey was a real character. He was fascinating, yet he could also be repulsive at times. The last time I saw him was in 1996, right before he went away to prison again.

Born March 10, 1929, in Wright, Louisiana, and raised in Kaplan in the heart of "Acadiana," Meaux always recalled a time growing up when only French was spoken at home and English was his second language." My teachers used to whip your ass if they caught you speaking French in public school," Meaux would say about his grade school days.

Meaux's family settled in East Texas in the town of Winnie, 23 miles south of Beaumont, in 1940, when he was 12. Winnie was in the rich, culturally fertile region of East Texas near the Louisiana border known as "The Golden Triangle." This region incubated the musical talents of Aubrey "Moon" Mullican, George Jones, Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, "Barbara Lynn" Ozen, Janis Joplin, Johnny Preston, Barbara Mauritz, and J.P. Richardson aka "The Big Bopper."

Meaux came of age at a time when commercial "terrestrial" radio stations were still independently owned and music programming decisions were made based on local sales figures. It was also a time in history when the frequency of a particular record's radio airplay could be monetarily manipulated by independent record producers and radio promoters.

"Is it true that payola is dead?" a young man asked Meaux in the lobby of the former Marriott Hotel in downtown Austin after he delivered a colorful keynote address at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in 1987. A puzzled-looking Meaux stared at the young man and replied, "Dead? I didn't even know it was sick, little bruddah."


Meaux's special talent in the music business was mastery over the discipline of A & R, or "artist and repertoire" as it was originally known. He had an uncanny knack for selecting the right musical material for the right recording artist to elicit the right vocal interpretation in the recording process.

The objective of this equation was to maximize the greatest profit potential for the master tape owner, the music publisher, the distributing label, the artist manager, and the booking agent. Then as now, it is to one's financial benefit to wear as many of these "hats" as legally possible, a business philosophy that Meaux subscribed to and practiced throughout his professional career.

Not all of the musical groups Meaux had under contract always agreed with or trusted Meaux's choice of material. A young, unknown singer from Rosenberg, Texas named Billy Joe Thomas who fronted a band called the Triumphs can still be heard complaining on the eight-track master recording to the studio engineer one evening: "Let's get this over with and record that damn song just to get Huey off my ass."

The selection he was referring to was "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," a song penned and originally recorded by Hank Williams. The B.J. Thomas version, released on Meaux's Pacemaker label and then licensed to New York's Scepter Records, reached the No. 8 position on Billboard's Hot 100 by March 1966, and stayed on the chart for 10 weeks before its demise.


Although Meaux was the proud father of an adopted son, he was known to brag about all the musicians and singers he nurtured throughout the years -- whom he also referred to as his sons. He especially spoke highly of Douglas Wayne Sahm and August "Augie" Meyers of San Antonio, and would always say, "I raised those boys."

Meaux would often recall the story of the hyperactive, multi-talented teenage Sahm who was always "pestering" Meaux to record his compositions. This relationship ultimately produced Texas' contribution to the "British Invasion" in the early 1960s with the creation of the Sir Douglas Quintet and the release of the single, "She's About a Mover." It was originally titled "She's a Body Mover," but Meaux believed the title sounded too sexually suggestive and made Sahm change it.

The Tribe/London release of this single reached the No. 13 position nationally by April 1965, and remained on Billboard's Hot 100 chart for nine weeks. "I love Doug like my own son," Meaux would always say about the late Doug Sahm, "but he was so mean to Augie. Doug used to make Augie carry all the equipment to the gigs and with his bad leg too," referring to Quintet collaborator and organist Meyers who was afflicted with polio as a child.

Left to right: Huey P.Meaux, Joe Nick Patoski, and The Rag Blog's Ivan Koop Kuper at KUT-FM in Austin, 1975. Photo by Kirby McDaniel.
Life and business were good for Meaux during the 1960s and many of the records he produced became hits. However, in October 1966, the winning streak was interrupted after Meaux and his then business partner, Charlie Booth, attended a disc jockey convention in Nashville accompanied by a 15-year-old girl. Their underage passenger was brought on the trip for the purpose of entertaining the conventioneers with whom they intended to network.

One year later, Meaux and Booth found themselves charged in federal court with conspiracy to transport a minor across state lines for the purpose of prostitution in violation of the Mann Act. Meaux and Booth appealed their case, and although they were represented by high-profile Houston attorney Percy Foreman, their rehearing was denied by the United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

In February 1968, Meaux was sentenced to three years in prison. He would only serve eight months at the low security Federal Correctional Institution in Seagoville, Texas, near Dallas, before being released for good behavior.

In January 1981, at the end of his term as 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter granted Meaux a full pardon for his transgression. "That's when I went away to college," Meaux would always tell those who asked him about the time he spent in prison during this period.


Not all the hit records that Meaux is associated with were a direct result of his personal production efforts. Sometimes he acted as middleman and brokered the licensing deal to larger labels on behalf of other independent producers, as in the case of a track called "Tighten Up" by Archie Bell and the Drells.

Produced by legendary Houston DJ "Skipper" Lee Frazier, this track was licensed to Atlantic Records with Meaux's help after first being released in Houston on Frazier's Ovid label. Frazier, like most independent producers, would first sell his records on consignment to retailers "out of the trunk" before they were picked up for distribution by a larger label.

However, with the help of Atlantic Records, while Meaux was serving time in prison, this R&B crossover hit simultaneously reached the No. 1 position on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Billboard R&B charts for two weeks by April 1968, and remained on the charts for 13 weeks.

"I first met Huey when I was a disc jockey with KCOH-AM radio in Houston," Frazier recalled.

He had a relationship with most the DJs in Houston and throughout the country for that matter, and Huey was always promoting his records to all the DJs. He was a very personable man and he would bring his records around to the station and ask me to play them.

We had a personal relationship, so when I recorded a record by a band I was managing and it started selling locally, Huey came to me and said, I think can get that record placed with Atlantic Records but I want a piece of the action. I told Huey I wouldn't mind that because I knew Huey had a good relationship with Atlantic because he recorded "You'll Lose a Good Thing" by Barbara Lynn, and I also knew that he knew everybody in that New York office.

So Atlantic took the record and boom, it went to number one on the R&B charts and then, boom, it became a million-seller. I found out years later that Huey knew how many records I was selling locally when he contacted me because he kept up with how many records I was ordering from the local record presser.

After Meaux was released from prison in 1968, the magic of producing another hit record eluded him for several years. Music industry insiders told him that he was "beating a dead horse" when he informed them he was thinking of recording "El Be Bop Kid," Baldemar Huerta from San Benito, Texas -- aka Freddy Fender.

"Before The Next Teardrop Falls," written by the Nashville songwriting team of Vivian Keith and Ben Peters, had been recorded more than a dozen times throughout the years, but had never struck gold. By the mid-1970s, Meaux's intuitive A&R talent was on target once again with his production of the sentimental bilingual ballad with its Tex-Mex flavor. Originally released on Meaux's Crazy Cajun label and then licensed to ABC/Dot, "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" would become a No. 1 crossover single on both the Pop and Country charts by March 1975, and would remain on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for another 15 weeks.

The single not only revived Fender's career, but it also won "Single of the Year" at the 9th Annual Country Music Association Awards in 1975. In addition, the composition also earned nominations for "Best Country Song" and "Best Country Vocal Performance" at the 18th Annual Grammy Awards in 1976.

In 1985, Meaux brokered his last major licensing deal for long-time friend and business associate Floyd Soileau of Ville Platte, Louisiana. Meaux had produced sessions for Soileau with artists Soileau had under contract beginning in the 1950s. In 1984, Soileau brought Meaux the single, "(Don't Mess With) My Toot Toot" that had broken out in New Orleans when recorded by Zydeco/R & B artist Rockin' Sydney Simien on Soileau's label, Maison de Soul.

Meaux arranged a licensing deal for Soileau that year with multinational Epic Records. Although never breaking into Billboard's Hot 100 Pop chart, the single did reach platinum status and peaked in the No. 19 position on Billboard's Country chart. "My Toot Toot" would also win a Grammy Award for Soileau and the late Sydney Simien for "Best Ethnic and Traditional Folk Record," in 1986.

1986 was also the year Meaux surprised friends and industry associates when he appeared on the big screen in the David Byrne feature-length movie True Stories. Meaux made a brief cameo appearance during the "Wild Wild Life" segment of the film, playing the role of a patois-speaking "Crazy Cajun" disc jockey.

Always generous with his time and advice, Meaux was also known to mentor aspiring young music producers because he believed his good deeds would be reciprocated and the relationships he developed would prove to be mutually beneficial. That was not the case however with ZZ Top personal manager and producer, Bill Ham.

Meaux was disappointed that Ham never booked studio time at his Sugar Hill Studios in Houston, choosing to record in Tyler, Texas, and Memphis instead. He would repay the snub in 1986 by suing Ham and ZZ Top for copyright infringement on behalf of Houston songwriter and former rock DJ, Linden Hudson.

Hudson's composition, "Thug," found its way onto the multi-platinum ZZ Top album, Eliminator, without the proper writer credit or music publisher credit which, coincidentally, was Crazy Cajun Music. With the assistance of Houston attorney David W. Showalter, Meaux and Hudson (and Showalter) were awarded a $600,000 out-of-court settlement in compensatory damages from Ham and that "Little Ol' Band from Texas."

Huey Meaux, Winnie, Texas, April 2011. Photo courtesy of Nick de la Torre.
In 1996, Meaux experienced his second major brush with the law. No one expected what a January 29 raid by Houston police on a backroom of Sugar Hill Studios, which Meaux now leased from its new owners, would reveal. There, HPD found incriminating evidence, including a gynecological examination table, illicit drugs, and photos and videotapes of underage girls in compromising positions.

Meaux would plead guilty to five felony charges including possession of cocaine, possession of child pornography, sexual assault, and jumping bail. The Honorable Judge Michael McSpadden of the 209th District Court of Harris County would assess his punishment at 15 years for cocaine possession and sexual assault, and 10 years for possession of child pornography and bail jumping, to be served concurrently.

However, before Meaux's criminal trial would begin, the two daughters of Meaux's former girlfriend filed a civil lawsuit for alleged sexual abuse and emotional distress they were subjected to during the seven years Meaux lived with them and their mother. In mid-February, the now adult McDowell Sisters, represented by attorney Dick Deguerin, brought a suit against Meaux in Harris County's 61st Civil District Court for the sum of 10 million dollars in punitive damages in their request for relief.

By October, the plaintiffs agreed on a final judgment of $900,000, and to dismiss all further claims against defendant Meaux.

In June 1996, Meaux was sent to prison for his criminal offenses and would remain incarcerated for the next six years. Meaux served time at both the privately owned Lockhart Work Facility near Austin, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Ellis Unit in Huntsville.

In September 2002, he was paroled to the Beaumont Center Halfway House, and was then placed on "house arrest" with his mobility restricted and was electronically monitored by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). Meaux was looking forward to freedom after four years of enforced detention on the rural property he owned on the outskirts of Winnie -- where he had been living in his double-wide mobile home.

"I go to Beaumont every month now to see my probation officer and go shopping, but I'll be getting my ankle bracelet off March 4th," Meaux said during our last telephone conversation in January 2011. "The first thing I'm gonna do is go to New Orleans and get me some gumbo, and after that, I'm going to Austin to see some friends."


Meaux never made it to New Orleans or to Austin, and on April 23, 2011, at 82, after four months of poor health, Meaux died from multiple organ failure. Meaux was found in his double-wide trailer and scattered about the floor in no particular order were old boxes of magnetic recording tape and photographs that chronicled his 40-plus years in the music business.

Many friends and music industry associates chose to distance themselves from the controversial Meaux, and his funeral service at Broussard's Funeral Home was attended mainly by immediate family members.

However, even after death, the defiant self-proclaimed "producer extraordinaire" still had the ability to surprise and even shock those in attendance at Winnie's Fairview Cemetery. Inscribed on the back side of his "supersized" tombstone was a list of underwriters that Meaux had solicited during the time of his incarceration to help defray the cost of his funeral.

On the front side was inscribed an epitaph of Meaux's personal life philosophy: "Did It My Way - No Regrets - Love Ya - Bye Now - Huey." Once more Meaux was able to get in the last word, prove he was still an innovator and a proponent of crass commercialism who to the very end never showed any sign of remorse.

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. From 1973-1975, Ivan worked with Huey P. Meaux at KPFT-FM in Houston. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog.]

Photos courtesy of Hank Lam.
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Ivan Koop Kuper : Stacy and Bunni: A Montrose Love Story

Stacy Sutherland tombstone, Center Point, Texas. Image from Mindspring.com.
Stacy and Bunni:
A Montrose love story

If Stacy Sutherland of the 13th Floor Elevators were alive he'd be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / March 31, 2011

HOUSTON -- On the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in the east Montrose section of Houston is a vacant lot with an untended vegetable garden. The lot was the previous site of a Craftsman-era bungalow that was recently demolished due to neglect. In this house lived Stacy Sutherland, lead guitarist of Texas’ legendary psychedelic music pioneers, the 13th Floor Elevators, and if Sutherland were alive, he would be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

Known as the soft-spoken member of the band, when the introspective Sutherland did choose to express himself, he did so not only with his thick central Texas drawl, but also with his reverb-drenched leads that cut through the band’s wall of sound, and whose sustained notes seemed like they would never end.

His signature guitar style appeared on four 13th Floor Elevator albums and countless live performances from Austin to San Francisco. But Sutherland had another side of his personality he kept hidden deep inside and that was known only to those close to him.

Stacy Sutherland. Image from Emerald Wood Archives / Flickr.

Montrose is a neighborhood still in transition whose early 20th century architecture has all but vanished. Once considered a “hippie neighborhood,” by the late 1970s this inner city community was approaching the eve of gentrification, with each neglected bungalow soon to be torn down and replaced with several modern townhouses per city lot with no particular continuity regarding their style or design.

Long time Montrose resident and small business owner Robert Novotney recalls a Montrose in the 1970s when rents were “cheap” and a party atmosphere prevailed in the neighborhood seven days a week. He also recalls a “repressive” police force that was always on the lookout for “longhairs” to harass and search, as well as a neighborhood where home invasion by the criminal element was a common occurrence.

“I was broken into once and I had friends that were always getting broken into because they had these nice stereos that you could hear from the street because nobody had air-conditioning back then and they always kept their windows open and it invited burglaries,” Novotney said.


Stacy Sutherland’s all too short life journey can be traced back to his early days in central Texas, when he used to skip high school and practice guitar all day on the banks of the Guadalupe River that flowed through his family’s ranch in Kerr County. Sutherland also spent a brief period in Port Aransas one summer performing with the Lingsmen, a band that included future Elevator drummer John Ike Walton, as well as future bassist, Benny Lynn Thurman.

When Sutherland joined the 13th Floor Elevators, his personal journey took him from the live music clubs of Austin in the 1960s, to the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium of San Francisco and eventually to Houston, where he found himself out of money, out of luck, and on the skids.

The 13th Floor Elevators performed together from 1965 to 1969. The band’s core membership and songwriting collaboration always included Sutherland on lead guitar; Roky Erickson, vocalist and rhythm guitar; and Tommy Hall, electric jug, lyricist, and spiritual advisor.

They were just your average Texas rock band that openly proselytized the use of the psychotropic drug LSD as a vehicle to higher consciousness, and who spread their message through their music and lifestyle. They were also one of the first bands of their era to use the term “psychedelic,” and when the 13th Floor Elevators were guests on “American Bandstand” in 1966 promoting their breakout single, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” a naive Dick Clark asked Tommy Hall, “Who is the head man here?” Hall then smugly replied, “We’re all heads.”


Sutherland was a survivor. He survived the turmoil of being in a band signed to a record label whose owners engaged in questionable business practices, numerous arrests for drug possession, an addiction to heroin, and seven months of incarceration in the Eastham Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections near Huntsville. In exile from his central Texas home of Kerrville, in 1975 Sutherland decided to find refuge and a change of scenery in Houston.

Houston was very familiar turf to Sutherland. The 13th Floor Elevators recorded in Houston studios, as well as performed countless concerts in Houston nightclubs. The band also lived communally for a time in an old mansion located on Old Galveston Road owned by their record label and known as “Funky Mansions.” However, what really drew Sutherland to Houston after the demise of the Elevators was the fact that it was home to Ann Elizabeth “Bunni” Bunnell.

Ann Elizabeth "Bunni" Bunnell. Photo courtesy of Jim Hord.
“She was brilliant and a member of MENSA,” said longtime friend and former Montrose neighbor, Jim Hord, “but she couldn’t handle the everyday little things in life. Bunni displayed bad judgment in men and had a lot of slimeball friends.”

Bunnell was a New Jersey transplant to Texas whom Sutherland initially met in the late 1960s during the time he lived in Funky Mansions. She was an “exotic dancer” who took the name “Bunni” when she danced at the “Boobie Rock” on Houston’s lower Westheimer Road. Bunnell was now working as a typist supporting herself and her two children from a previous marriage, and studying to be a court reporter at night.

Sutherland and Bunnell rekindled their relationship in the summer of 1976, and settled into east Montrose where rents were affordable, drugs were plentiful, and crime was rampant. The next year, on Sutherland’s 31st birthday, May 28, the couple married, traveled to central Texas to visit family and friends, and then returned to Houston to resume their domestic routine of volatility and substance abuse.

“Stacy had a very bad temper and the alcohol brought out the worst in him,” said Hord who now resides in Waco, “but Stacy and Bunni brought out the worst in each other. The house was always dirty, and it was infested with roaches. Bunni wasn’t the best housekeeper. Every time I went over to visit, the condition of the house used to really bug me. Bunni had some really bad times in her life, but the time spent with Stacy was the worst.”

516 Pacific Street, The Montrose, Houston. Photo courtesy of Paul Drummond.
Hord remembers Sutherland as someone always toying with the idea of putting another band together, but who went to extreme measures to forgo actually playing music during this unproductive time period. As a frustrated Sutherland sat on his front porch, neighbors were known to come up to him and ask for an autograph, which served as a reminder of by-gone days in the spotlight.

“I don’t remember ever hearing Stacy play guitar when I went over to visit. He used to talk about drugs a lot. He had a fascination with drugs, and he would do anything that came his way. Bunni once told me that when she and Stacy used to go out bar hopping in the neighborhood, Stacy would bandage his hand before leaving the house, and when people would buy him drinks and ask him to play guitar with the band, he would have an excuse not to play and sit in with them, choosing to drink all night instead,” Hord said.

By 1978, the Sutherlands were at an all-time low in their on again, off again relationship, and in the early morning hours of August 24, after a full day of drinking and arguing, Bunnell shot Sutherland in the kitchen of their east Montrose bungalow. The bullet severed a major artery causing massive internal bleeding. Later that day, the Houston Chronicle included the following story:

A Montrose resident was shot to death today in his residence at 516 Pacific Street. Police identified the victim as Stacy Keith Sutherland, 33. Shot once in the stomach with a .22 caliber rifle, at 3:30 a.m., Sutherland died at 5:07 a.m. in Ben Taub Hospital.

Officers arrested a 34-year-old woman at the scene. No charges have been filed.

Hord believes that Bunnell’s actions were taken as a measure of defense to protect her teenaged son who was staying with them at the time from an irrational acting and inebriated Sutherland.

“Stacy was making threatening remarks and acting belligerent towards Bunni’s 15-year-old son,” recounts Hord, “and when Stacy lunged at Bunni in an attempt to enter her son’s bedroom, she pulled the trigger to the .22 rife that the couple kept in the house for protection against burglars.”

On April 10, 1981, after seeing evidence and hearing arguments from council, the Honorable Judge Frank Price of the 209th District Court of Harris County issued a motion for dismissal to Ann Elizabeth Sutherland for the murder of Stacy Sutherland.

More than two years had passed from the time Bunnell was indicted for the felony offense by a Houston grand jury, and according to Bunnell’s attorney, Audley H. Heath, “because more than 120 days had passed since the commencement of the action, the defendant was entitled to a dismissal of the indictment filed in the cause in accordance with the ‘Speedy Trial Act of 1974’ of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.” This statute was later repealed by the Supreme Court of Texas in 2005.


Sutherland died before experiencing the worldwide recognition and the accolades now paid to him and the 13th Floor Elevators from adoring fans, musicians, and the music press. Their music has found a new audience from an entirely new generation, that discovered the band and the body of work they recorded, from that brief moment in time they performed together.

Sutherland is buried at Center Point Cemetery near his family’s ranch in Kerr County, not far from where he used to practice his guitar on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Bunnell eventually became a court reporter, remarried and continued to live in the house at the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in east Montrose where she died of cancer in 1987 at age 43.

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog]

Also see:

• Mesmo's Reflections on the Sixties by Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008
• Roky Erickson to Houston: Return of 'Two-Headed Dog' by Andrew Dansby / Houston Chronicle / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2009
• Long Strange Trip: Austin's 13th Floor Elevators and Still Trippin' Tommy Hall by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2009
• Austin Rock Musician Benny Thurman Dead at 65 by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2008

The 13th Floor Elevators -- Tommy, Bennie, Rocky and Stacy -- at the New Orleans Club in Austin, 1965. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.
Roky Erickson, Stacy Sutherland, and John Ike Walton perform at La Maison in Houston in May or June, 1966. Image from last.fm.
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Ivan Koop Kuper : Ken Kesey's Houston Acid Test

The original "Furthur," the magic bus of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, on the road. Photo from NoFurthur.
Paying Larry McMurtry a visit:
The Merry Pranksters' last acid test

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / December 1, 2010

HOUSTON -- In the heat of a July Houston morning in 1964, residents of the quiet Southampton neighborhood woke up to find a strangely painted school bus parked in front of an unassuming two-story brick house in the middle of the block.

The vintage 1939 International Harvester with its passengers of “Merry Pranksters” drove half way across the United States and was now parked in front of the house of novelist and Rice University professor, Larry McMurtry. The Southampton neighbors would learn that the brightly painted bus whose destination plate read “FURTHUR,” with two u's, was filled with strangely acting and even stranger looking people from California.

The leader of the Merry Pranksters was author Ken Kesey, whose novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, had just been published that summer. Their cross-country road trip to New York City was in part a celebration to commemorate the publication of his second novel, as well as the fulfillment of a request by his publisher for a personal appearance and an excuse to visit the World’s Fair taking place in the borough of Queens.

Fueled by the then-legal hallucinogenic drug LSD, Kesey and the Pranksters stopped in Houston along the way to visit McMurtry, who Kesey knew from their days at Stanford.

McMurtry lived with his 2-year-old son, James, on the oak-lined street near Rice University, where he taught undergraduate English.

Larry McMurtry and son, James, 1964. Photo from The Magic Bus.
McMurtry was also experiencing success in his life during this time. His inaugural novel, Horseman, Pass By, had been adapted into a screenplay and released as the feature-length movie, Hud, staring Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas, the previous year.

“I remember walking down Quenby Street one afternoon and seeing the school bus parked in front of the McMurtry’s house,” said Kentucky-based artist Joan Wilhoit. “It was very atypical and pretty damn psychedelic with lots of colors. The Pranksters were very accommodating and invited us on the bus. They were very different, sort of proto-hippies, and I remember they painted their sneakers with Day-Glo paint. My parents befriended them and brought old clothes and hand-me-downs to those who needed it. My parents weren’t rude like some of the other neighbors were.”

Wilhoit, who was nine at the time, remembers that not all the neighbors were as welcoming as her parents and that some made sarcastic remarks about the Pranksters.

“’Do you have a bathroom on that bus?’ I remember one our neighbors asking the Pranksters through the school bus window,” the former Houstonian recounted. “I also remember hearing about the ‘naked girl’ and I thought it was the strangest thing how the police were called and how she had to be admitted to a psych ward of some Houston hospital.”

“Stark Naked,” as she was referred to in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the novel that chronicled the exploits of Kesey and the Pranksters in the 1960s, was a bus passenger apparently “tripping” throughout her bus ride to Houston, who discarded her clothing in favor of a blanket that she wore for the duration of the journey. Upon her arrival in Houston, she experienced an episode of “lysergically-induced” psychosis, and confused McMurtry’s toddler son with her own estranged child, “Frankie.”

"Stark Naked" (aka "The Beauty Witch") wore nothing but a blanket. Photo from The Magic Bus.
Three years later, the brightly painted bus was parked once again in front of McMurtry’s house on the oak-lined street near Rice Village. Kesey and the Pranksters returned to Houston in March 1967 to visit their old friend and to conduct what is purported to have been the last “acid test.” The social experiment was staged in the dining room of Brown College, a residential facility on the campus of Rice University, with McMurtry acting as faculty sponsor.

“I would have been 14 years old when they returned,” said Pricilla Boston (nee Ebersole), an employee of the department of state health services in Austin and the mother of two teen-aged sons.

I remember getting off the school bus from junior high one afternoon and seeing that the painted bus was parked in front of Mr. McMurtry’s house again. It was immensely colorful and there was no missing it, that’s for sure. All the kids in the neighborhood used to play street games at night a lot and it was almost like there was another set of kids in the neighborhood.

They had a youthful, fun vibe about them. I remember this one skinny guy in particular who would interact with us; he was younger than the others and he showed us the inside of the bus. He once asked us to go home and look in our parents’ medicine cabinet to see if they had any bottles of pills and bring them to him. I was asking myself "Why would he want those?"

Boston recounted following the skinny Prankster’s instructions and looking in her parent’s cabinet. “I don’t remember whether I brought him anything or not,” she said, “I just remember having a sense of what I was doing as being a little bit naughty.”

Although Kesey’s arrival and the ensuing acid test were promoted as a “concert” in the March 9 issue of the Rice Thresher, the campus student newspaper, this non-event turned out to be an acid test in name only. The promise of a reenactment of the “tests” conducted in California between 1965 and 1966 never materialized. Absent was the liquid light show, the live, amplified rock music, the pulsating strobe lights and movie projector images on the walls.

Also conspicuously absent was the mass dispensation and ingestion of psychotropic drugs by the Rice student body and other “assorted weirdos” in attendance. Instead, the Pranksters indulged the more than 200 attendees with a “madcap improvisation” of toy dart-gun fights, human dog piles, deep breathing demonstrations by Kesey himself, and rides on the “magic bus” around the Rice campus.

“The great Kesey affair was an absolute dud,” reported the Houston Post on March 21. “Some of the kids hissed while he [Kesey] read some kind of incantation, and others just left talking about what a drag it was.”

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog]


Merry Pranksters in the news, 1964. Top, in Houston, and below, in Springfield, Ohio.
Prankster Hermit and the original bus. Photo from Lysergic Pranksters in Texas.
Top, Ken Kesey with restored bus, by then renamed "Further" with an "e". Below, the 1939 International Harvester, before restoration, at the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, after being stored in the swamp for 15 years. Photo by Jeff Barnard / AP
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Ivan Koop Kuper : KFMK-FM Was Houston's 'Mother Radio'

Bumper Sticker design for FM radio station KFMK. Graphic © Joel R. Cheves 1965 - 2008. Image from OmegaGraphix.
Progressive Radio Roots:
KFMK-FM was part of a radio revolution

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / September 22, 2010

Long before the Internet provided user access to virtually every genre of music ever recorded, before the advent of multi-channel satellite radio, and before corporate mergers and buyouts created today’s mass media monopolies, Houston’s first commercial 24-hour FM rock station provided free-form music with an anything-goes format.

The forerunner of all rock-formatted radio stations to follow in the Texas marketplace, independently owned KFMK-FM promoted itself as “Mother Radio,” and targeted Houston’s burgeoning baby boomer counterculture in the late-1960s.

“We were starving for music and information back then,” said Bill Bentley, director of A & R for Vanguard Records in Los Angeles and former Houstonian. “When the station went on the air, it was a real godsend. I bought an FM radio for that very reason. Houston was no longer a desert wasteland because up until that time we only listened to AM radio on our transistors.”

Broadcasting at 97.8 on the FM dial, Mother Radio was one of many radio stations that sprang up across America during the summer of 1967, just as the colorful new underground papers were popping up all over the country. These stations were all inspired by San Francisco’s underground flagship alternative, KMPX-FM, whose format was the creation of California radio visionary, Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue.

According to Bentley, KFMK was not only a media innovation, it was a lifestyle and cultural phenomenon that influenced a generation of Houston listeners. “The radio station was our beacon,” Bentley said. “It was a soundtrack for the new counterculture, a place we could listen in. Back-to-back, every song was great. It was like we died and went to heaven. The format fit the music, and it was cultural evolution. The DJs had the power to pick the songs, and treated the music with total respect. They believed in the music as much as the audience did.”

Up to this time, mainstream “terrestrial” radio historically broadcast on the AM frequency and only in less-than-glorious monophonic sound. Early FM stations broadcast in stereo but were limited to classical music, easy listening or “elevator music,” and foreign language broadcasts.

Listeners tuned in to Top-40 AM radio to hear contemporary pop music. Then as now, the disc jockeys were loud and chatty, the music was repetitive, and the medium catered to listeners with short attention spans.

Graphic from ad for KFMK-FM in Larry Sepulvado's underground music publication, Mother Magazine, Issue #3, 1968, Houston, Texas.

Mother Radio changed all the rules, according to former KFMK production director, Stephen Nagel. “We called ourselves ‘free-form radio’ and ‘progressive radio’ because the term ‘album-oriented radio’ hadn’t been invented yet. The whole thing was completely DJ-programmed. I don’t ever remember attending a programming meeting where I was told what I had to play. That was the whole idea; it was ‘free-form’ and there was no format I had to follow,” said Nagel.

KFMK and stations like it created a new kind of relationship between radio and listener. The announcer’s delivery was relaxed, the spinning of album tracks was innovative, and the multi-genre music was programmed in a manner that the songs segued and flowed into each other, attracting listeners who tuned in for hours.

“This is how we approached it,” explained Nagle. “We were going to play the tracks from the albums that AM radio didn’t play that we thought were just as cool as the tracks that AM radio was playing to death. We also weren’t going to yell at our audience but talk to them like they were our friends that knew something about the music we were playing and we weren’t going to play the same songs over and over again or limit ourselves to the ‘hit’ singles.”

A typical KFMK broadcast hour consisted of uninterrupted rock, blues, folk, and jazz music of the era, as well as Indian sitar ragas. At the top of the hour, the station played several commercials, followed by the daily horoscope, and a rip-and-read newscast that always ended with the DJ telling his listeners: “And the war drags on,” a line borrowed from a popular folk song that referred to America’s on-going involvement in Indochina.

All good things must come to an end and Mother Radio was no exception. Handicapped by a failure to attract a substantial market share of the Houston audience, an ineffective low-power transmitter and the bottom-line economics of inadequate advertising revenue, Mother Radio ceased broadcasting by mid-1969 and closed its doors. (According to the historical website, 1960's Texas Music, pressure from the Houston Police was also a factor in the station's closing.)

“KFMK was ahead of its time but under-capitalized for the Houston marketplace,” said Nagle who now makes his living practicing law in Austin. “The station owners misjudged what a cultural impact and profit-making potential commercial FM stations like KFMK would have in the future.”

By 1970, a new era of rock radio activity swept over Houston’s media landscape. Privately-held and substantially funded KLOL-FM competed with ABC Radio owned, KAUM-FM, for positioning and a slice of the new demographic pie with their versions of free-form formats. KILT-FM ("Radio Montrose") as well as KRBE-FM also experimented briefly with progressive rock programming before transitioning into safer and more pop-oriented amalgamations.

(KAUM-FM, unique among the progressive radio stations, also had a large and innovative news department, rivaling even the AM news stations.)

1970 was also the year that Houston’s new listener sponsored, community radio station, KPFT-FM, signed on the air. The Pacifica radio affiliate came the closest to duplicating Mother Radio’s original concept, but only late at night, after prime time when its news and public affairs programming ended.

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog]

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