Mesmo's Meanderings : Bud Shrake, Acapulco Gold, Mad Dogs and the Raw Deal

Texas literary legend Bud Shrake, 77, passed away on May 8, 2009, in Austin. Photo from The Texas Observer.

Bud Shrake, 77, a seminal literary figure (“a lion of Texas letters,” according to the Austin American-Statesman) and an Austin underground icon, died Friday, May 8, in Austin, after a long battle with lung cancer.

Funeral services yesterday in Austin drew an overflow crowd of luminaries and amigos; Willie Nelson sang at Bud’s funeral and Jerry Jeff Walker performed at his gravesite. Shrake was buried next to former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, his long time companion.

For Bob Simmons’ Rag Blog article on his friend Bud Shrake’s life and death, go here.

For an enticing set of rowdy and illicit memories, read Gerry Storm’s account, below.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / May 13, 2009

'Back in '68 Joe Brown and I were stranded in the Big Apple with several suit cases of Acapulco Gold... Bud not only bought a couple of pounds but connected us with his gang at Elaine's, the posh discothèque where we spent the evenings peddling the load by the pound and drinking.'

By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / May 13, 2009

I first met Bud in New York City in the autumn of 1968. He was a sports reporter at the time, one of the rising stars in this field, employed by Sports Illustrated (to which I was a subscriber). I had lived in Dallas in the early '60's and followed his writing in both the Times Herald and Morning News.

I still recall a travelogue he wrote in about 1964 for SI extolling the beauty and virtues of Austin and the Hill Country, not a word about sport but such a work of love for a place that I immediately started thinking about moving there. In 1965 I did so. He was right, it was quite a place. At the time I could not have imagined that I would meet him one day and claim him as a good friend.

But back in '68 Joe Brown and I were stranded in the Big Apple with several suit cases of Acapulco Gold. Our buyer had pulled a cross on us and we were in trouble, far away from home in a strange place, nearly broke, and carrying around a dangerous load. Joe called Bud who invited us to his swank high rise apartment where we stayed for several days as we moved the load. Bud had not only bought a couple of pounds but connected us with his gang at Elaine's, the posh discothèque where we spent the evenings peddling the load by the pound and drinking. One of the lessons I learned was not to get into a drinking contest with pros like Bud and Joe. Needless to say I was very impressed with Bud the man and happy to add he and his lovely wife Doatsy to my list of new friends.

Our next encounters centered on the Mad Dogs, Bud's drinking, doping, and social club in West Lake Hills. This was 1969 and I was playing drums with Shiva's Head Band and renting a house in the super suburb. Members of the club who lived in the vicinity included Gary (Jap) Cartwright, Billy Lee Brammer, and Paula Sarnoff (most often the hostess for the wild parties which brought us together). And there were always visitors at our flings, some of them quite well known in literary circles as well as professional athletes.

During this time there was no public hangout for the likes of us in Austin and our band desperately needed a place to play. Eddie Wilson was the band's manager and he had located the building that would become the Armadillo, but we could not afford to lease the place and convert it into a rock and roll dance hall. I took our plight to Bud, introduced him to Eddie and he wrote us a fat check which enabled us to launch the place. We sealed the deal with a shaker of martinis. Some of you may recall that Bud had a couple of rooms, one with a bar, reserved in the original 'dillo, Bud's private lair, Bubba meets Elaine's.

I turned down an offer to manage the place and moved to Marin County soon afterward. My plans called for me to escape from the rock scene, not manage a club. This adventure lasted there for seven years, mostly in West Marin, one of the best times of my life. While there I met Peter Boyle who had just worked on Bud and Jap's original flick, "Mad Dogs! You're one of the Mad Dogs from Texas? Man, that movie was the most fun I've ever had. Those guys were unbelievable. You don't happen to have any of that Austin weed do you?"

When I returned to Austin in 1976 the rumblings which led to Eddie's ouster from the Armadillo were in place and he was looking to open a restaurant. Sure enough the Raw Deal was born, with Bud's sponsorship and Eddie's drive. Later the place was "sold" to Jim Smitham and Fletcher Boone and Eddie set about creating Threadgill's, a real restaurant but not nearly as much fun.

The Raw Deal evolved into, as might be expected considering the personalities involved, quite a unique place. I especially liked the original little joint down across the creek from the police station. Bud and I spent many a night closing the place and draining whatever bottle(s) he had brought along. I didn't know at the time that he had a degree in philosophy in addition to his English studies. His mind was quite profound. In addition to the obvious, Bud was the funniest man I have ever known.

Ultimately both he and Jap were informed by their physicians that they had to either stop drinking or die. Both of them were in pretty bad shape. You can't have that much fun without paying a price. The ease with which they went onto and stayed on the wagon was remarkable. Give up booze? Nothing to it, only been doing it for 50 years. The quality of their work and their humor seemed to be unaffected. But there was a negative slant to their abstinence as well, as we never saw them around any more and the quality of the parties slid backward. I hadn't seen him for many years although I had read his books and seen his movies.

And so it went. When I heard that he had cancer I thought seriously about driving to Austin to bid him farewell. Unfortunately I too had (have) the disease and was in no shape for such a cruise. Besides, what would we have done? Now that I have had a few days to digest his parting there is no sadness. There goes one of the good ones. I am sure that he handled death the same way he always handled adversity, with a quip and a grin. Although I care next to nothing about golf I am going to read "The Little Red Book" and expect to be entertained royally one more time.

[Gerry Storm, aka Mesmo, is a former Austin musician, activist and union leader who now lives in rural New Mexico where he contributes to The Rag Blog when he feels like it . His interests combine the political with the spiritual. ]

Please see Bud Shrake, 77 : This Texas Tall Tale is a Literary Legend by Bob Simmons, introduction by Thorne Dreyer (with links to other obits) / The Rag Blog / May 11, 2009

Also see

• Remembering Bud Shrake through song, laughter by Jeff Salamon / Austin American-Statesman / May 13, 2009
• Sweetness And Light by Frank Deford / NPR / May 13, 2009
• Bud Shrake, Sportswriter and Author, Dies at 77 by William Grimes / The New York Times / May 9, 2009
• Edwin 'Bud' Shrake: Famed writer remembered as a giant in Texas literature by Jane Sumner / Dallas Morning News / May 9, 2009

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Mesmo's Reflections on the Sixties

Janis Joplin, folksinger. Austin, Texas, 1965, at The 11th Door on Red River Street. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Gerry Storm wrote the following reminiscence on Austin music in the sixties for the Texas Ghetto website in 2000. Austin was a center of the era’s dynamic counterculture and a point of origin for psychedelic rock.

Gerry writes “Mesmo’s Desert Diary” on a reliably irregular basis for The Rag Blog. "A septuagenarian desert rat" who now lives in Southwest New Mexico, Gerry Storm is a former student at the University of Texas in Austin who was a peace activist in the Vietnam era and a noted rock musician during the sixties and seventies. He has added a brief afterthought at the end of this article.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008

The Way We Were
Austin Music : 1965-1969
By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog

There was no great migration to Austin in 1965. New arrivals were usually headed for the University of Texas, a place in the state bureaucracy, or they were new personnel assigned to Bergstrom Air Force Base. Austin had the reputation of being a beautiful, rather colonial place, with no industry and low pay. U.T. graduates used to lament this situation as they packed their bags and headed for promising, good paying jobs in Dallas and Houston.

Those of us with friends in River City liked to visit because it was always a place to have a good time. It was a city of state drones and school teachers, politicos and lawyers, academics and professional students. It was a place that rich kids preferred to congregate as they waited for their inheritances. It was said to be rather snobbish, a city of tea sippers. But on all social levels, it was a good place to party.

Being the State Capitol and home of the state's largest and most prestigious university, there was an underground of irreverent scholars, artists, and politicos--some of them with national reputations--that you don't find in any city. Although they were tolerated in Austin, they hardly dominated the scene. For the most ambitious, Austin was only a stepping stone to the West Coast or the Northeast. That was one of the appealing facets of the town that survives today: It is a good place for a smart kid with ambition and talent but no money to start a reputation.

Night life? No, there wasn't much of that either. The Club Caravan in the Villa Capri Motel was the only place with a full-time band. The few rock clubs in town changed owners and formats regularly and enforced strict dress codes. There was a big country and western joint near Round Rock, Big G's, but you wouldn't have mistaken Austin for Nashville.

You couldn't buy a drink of hard liquor legally unless you were a member of a private club but you could buy whiskey by the half-pint to gallon, bring it into any beer joint and drink it all.

The veterans of World War II and the Korean Conflict who had flocked to U.T. to cash in on the GI Bill, were gone by the early '60's. Their departure had left a definite social vacuum on the night life. The barracks erected for them and other students who couldn't afford a dorm had been razed, and that area of the south campus had been landscaped to feature the oil rig, Santa Rita Number 1.

The University and public places in Austin had been integrated quickly after Lyndon Johnson a few years earlier decided to run for President, without much fanfare or tumult, prompting black residents to ask, "If it was so easy why didn't they do it a long time ago?" But it was still a southern town. The only place with any sizeable mixing of the races was Charlie's Showcase, an East Austin rhythm and blues joint that served as a gathering place for the adventurous.

This was an era when the big happenings were private parties. The times seemed to dictate this social preference, and (as any college-age Texas kid, legislative aide or local dandy could tell you) there were plenty of these. Until a new resident found his or her social group, however, Austin could be a dead town.

Lyndon B. Johnson, longtime resident of the little city and owner of the broadcasting monopoly which controlled the town's major radio and only TV stations, was now President of the United States; his long time crony, John Connally, was Governor of the State of Texas; Frank Erwin, a member of the Johnson team, was running the University of Texas through the Board of Regents. The Johnson machine was housed in Austin and its power players exerted tremendous influence over not only the city and the state, but the world.

Mother U.T. ruled the cultural life by booking virtually all the name, live, entertainment through the Cultural Entertainment Committee. She was showing off her new art building by lining up one impressive exhibit after another. Gregory Gymnasium served double duty as the Longhorn basketball arena and the campus concert hall. The all-white Longhorn football teams were on a long roll under Coach Darrell Royal, necessitating major expansion of the football stadium. In fact "expansion" was a key a word on campus as the inevitable invasion of the Baby Boomer generation which would eventually double the enrollment was in its early stages. There were no women's sports teams at the university and coeds could not wear slacks or shorts or jeans to class but they could and did wear mini-skirts, much to the delight of girl watchers.

There was a fair amount of vice in the little city, presided over by a group of bank robbers and hard-core thugs known as The Overton Gang.

The Hill Country west of the city was still unspoiled and largely undiscovered, although the national press covering Lyndon at home had found it and been properly seduced. They regaled over the rides between Austin, Johnson City, and a Highland Lake called "Lake Granite Shoals" (soon to be renamed "The Lyndon B. Johnson Reservoir"). This was the preferred playground of the Johnson clan.

Although the influence of this political machine on the little city was well-known to and weathered by the populace, chances are the Overton Gang was more popular and, perhaps, more ethical.

Some of the best attended musical events were the "Folk Sings" on campus. These were strictly acoustic events featuring students. The repertoire was primarily traditional folk although some of the performers wrote compelling songs of their own.

Bob Dylan was the hero of the day to most folk music fans. His music could be heard in the neighborhoods around the campus, coming from students rooms and over the little local radio station KAZZ. He had managed to crack the pop music Top 10 with his ballad "Like a Rolling Stone".

The would-be professional rock musicians were playing the "English Sound" and some of them had affected the English look with "Mod" clothing and hair that was a little longer than normal (normal was quite short at the time).

There was a distinct difference between folk fans and rock fans, the former being more altruistic and the latter more animated. It came as quite a shock, therefore, when Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival that summer with a rock group. In succeeding interviews he revealed that he felt like electric music was more suited to the times and that he planned to make all his future appearances with an amplified band as backup.

Folk purists were aghast, they felt betrayed. But young men of his generation got the point, there was a new fear sweeping this group. President Johnson had announced that American forces in Viet Nam would be increased by several hundred thousand, by one million inside a year. The young men understood that they would soon be called upon to put their lives on the line for their country. Many of them did not like the idea of forced inscription to defend a corrupt government thousands of miles away in Asia. None of them liked the idea of dying.

This was the source of the new angst in the music. Folk musicians throughout the country started "going electric", buying pickups for their acoustic guitars and little amplifiers to go with them. They still differed from the rock musicians in that they were usually rank amateurs when it came to playing in bands. But the music most of the rock musicians played was covers of current and past hits-nothing original. And the folk players wrote almost all their own music, the lyrics to which were now reflecting their discomfort with the growing war and its ramifications. With amplification, one could protest louder. The rock musicians were also feeling the cold wind of the draft in their lives, and they heard the voices of protest.

In September of 1965 Bob Dylan appeared in Austin at the Palmer Auditorium. It was a seminal event in the history of music in "River City". So great was the response to this music that hundreds of would be protest rock musicians went home and started trying to write songs for this genre. They also started letting their hair grow. Dylan's attitude and appearance seemed to serve as the signs of the new times and his message was loud and clear: don't go away like lambs to slaughter, stick together, fight the system.

There was a curious scene on San Jacinto street, a block up from the historic Sholtzgarten. On the corner was The Jade Room, a dress code night club which featured English copy bands, go-go girls, and dancing. In mid block was a nondescript little hole in the wall called variously "The Library" or "Fred". It featured folk singers, no dancing. Since these were the days before liquor-by-the-drink was legal in Texas, both places were basically beer joints. The Jade Room was very formal, run like a tight ship by its owner/manager, one Marge Funk. The Library/Fred was barely managed at all and had a succession of lessees and would be impresarios, barely keeping afloat.

On some nights there were dozens of performers who wanted to sing but not all of them made it to the mike before closing time. These performers had at least one thing in common, they were no slaves to fashion. Being unkempt was part of the scene at this club, performers and audience alike sharing this mindset. Performers from Fred did not play at The Jade Room nor vice-versa. But there was talent at both places.

The Thirteenth Floor Elevators -- Tommy, Bennie, Rocky and Stacy -- at the New Orleans Club in Austin, Texas, 1965. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.
Austin's first nationally famous rock band grew from a combination of these two scenes, the English copy bands and the folkies, the boys at The Jade Room and those at The Library/Fred. The driving force behind the marriage was one Tommy Hall, leader of the first Austin band to find success in the rock business. He was originally from Houston, an English major. In the family who hung out around the Ghetto, he was called "Turn On Tommy". He was a fast talker, a hustler, a jive artist, a rapper, a believer, a fanatic, a salesman, and sometimes a bore. Originally he had been a Young Republican but had switched allegiances when he became infatuated with music. He was also a good student in his early years at U.T., a quite literate young fellow with English language skills. He could not play a musical instrument so he took up the jug. He could not play the jug very well either, at least not in the traditional sense.

Unknown, unheralded and largely unheard at the folk sings was a skiffle group called "The Lingsmen". Skiffle was a bastard stepchild of folk and acoustic blues which had a brief fling on the hit parade with an English group led by one Lonny Donegan. Leader of The Lingsmen was Tommy Hall. If you had heard The Lingsmen then and been told they would be the band that would put Austin, Texas on the map as a center of pop music, you could have been forgiven if you had laughed.

In the summer of 1965 when Dylan shocked his followers by going electric, Hall got the message. The Lingsmen played that summer in Corpus Christi. They were no longer a skiffle group. They were covering the rock and roll songs of English bands and surfer music in a decidedly electric format. The group consisted of two boys from Kerrville, Stacey Sutherland and John Ike Walton on guitar and drums, respectively, and Austinite Benny Thurman on bass. None of them was much of a singer. None of them was much of a rock musician either, although Sutherland had some experience. Hall acted as manager of the group but did not play.

Another rising star on the scene in Austin was one Roger Erickson, Jr., the son of an architect/engineer father and frustrated opera singer mother. Rocky, as he was called, had an abiding love for the blues and a good collection of blues records which he learned to imitate quite well. He also had inherited his mother's voice, a powerful, intense instrument. He had received early musical training and was a competent guitar player. While still a student at Austin High he made a reputation by being expelled for refusing to cut his long, black, wavy hair. Rocky was a good-looking, very likeable fellow. He had plenty of charisma. He was a budding star. His debut on the Austin scene (while still in his teens) came when he put together a band he called "Rocky and The Spades".

They appeared at The Jade Room and were by most accounts a decent band, and a very loud one. They did not last for long and did not develop a large following. However, in Rocky, Tommy Hall saw the vocalist that he had been searching for to front The Lingsmen. Throw into this mix a lot of spooky mysticism, a little LSD, plenty of pot, other chemicals, sex, an amplifier for Hall's jug, the literary talents of Clementine Hall, Tommy's wife at the time and the author of most of the band's better lyrics, alienation, angst, and a "can do" attitude and you have the recipe that created the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Hall had become an erstwhile "Acid Guru", an individual who guided others through LSD trips. In San Francisco, in Boston, and in Austin these individuals were forming groups of followers who believed that their guides (Gurus, masters, etc.) were disciples of God (or The Man himself) sent to lead them into a greater glory. Charles Manson fit this mold. It is said that Tommy Hall had this kind of power over Rocky Erickson and others. For better of worse, it was under this veil of mysticism that Austin's first successful rock band emerged.

© Gerry Storm 2000

Afterthought.

The real story of the Austin scene was beneath the surface in the pot biz. Well into the '80's it was the dealers who financed the shows and various other businesses, bailed out buddies, financed bands, etc. You gotta have some capital to create a scene! The first upscale hippy businesses that morphed into the 6th Street scene were financed by the pot trade. Whole Foods? Dell? There was no grand conspiracy or cartel, just some guys and gals who figured out a way to cross and deliver it to a waiting buyer, and resist bragging about it. Lots of them figured it out and made it work for a time. I'd guess that they are still at it, although growing on this side of the border seems to be more common these days.

Gerry / June 21, 2008

Source. / Texas Ghetto

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Gerry Storm on Obama and McCain's Sun Signs; Alaskan Rednecks; and the Finer Points of Slaughtering a Moose

Getting your moose cooked in Alaska...
'It is hard to maintain a red neck in Alaska
since there is no sun in winter'
By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / September 12, 2008

Obama is a Leo, thus during the time when the Sun is passing through Leo (most of August) his attraction was strong, and so were his ratings in the polls. Leo expired for this year in late August and the Sun went into Virgo. John McCain is a Virgo.

We are in the Virgo season at present and so John McCain is looking good, all the same kind of attraction that Obama had last month. So all the current skirmishes will mean that when the dust settles in October no advantage will have been won by either. And, as always, in reference to elections, the switch goes down in late October/early November. That's when the Sun goes into Scorpio. This transit can aid or ruin all the work done previously by the campaigns. The Obama summer and the McCain early autumn will be old memories by then. A perfunctory study shows no significant advantage for either by this transit.

I feel like the McCain operatives have so poisoned the landscape (and will continue to do so) that it will leave an unprecedented odor to the election process, yes, even worse than the present. On the other hand they are exposing themselves and McCain to a lot ridicule, turning a lot of people off. Could be that by the end they will have disgraced themselves to the point that lots of fence hangers will go the other way. I don't think the polls include a lot of people who will vote for Obama. I do think that he has a majority and will keep it. He is cool enough to hold his base.

A word about rednecks and Alaskans, I have known quite a few of both tribal groups. They are not the same. This phenomena works on the minds of Alaskans and transforms them into very strange human beings. It is a huge space and not many of our species live there. The laws that are observed by the rural people are not the same laws recognized by those in the towns, but they all one thing in common, they are strict and conservative. Conversely, the loners of the backwoods tend to be very kind and generous with one another on the few occasions when they gather or happen upon another soul on the trail. Their gut feeling is to oppose any restrictions which might inhibit their ongoing rape of nature (all Alaskans live off harvesting nature on one level or another) or threaten the flow of oil (even more sacred than nature). Beyond these concerns they have little use for government. There is a lot of fear in Alaskans, they are in the food chain of a number of beasts and live in a cold zone where the weather catch one off-guard, whole forests can die of insect infestation, the permafrost is melting, etc. You can see it in their eyes. Lots of superstition too, seeking to explain phenomena such as the colors in the Alaskan sky.

Most Alaskans went there to make money and most do pretty well in this department. My neighbor, Sam (RIP), told me he could make $100K a year fishing there, back when that was a lot of money. His brother still lives there and is a fishing/hunting guide, has his own plane, etc. Oil company wages are very high, there is still a gold mining industry, a healthy marijuana industry, lots of ways to score if you can handle the hardships. Not many women there so they can find many opportunities and a wide of choice of places to spend the winter.

When a moose is killed there is a party similar to a hog killin', people get together to help out. Slaughtering a moose is a ton of work, bloody hand work. I personally doubt if Sarah ever slaughtered one although she may well have participated at the party. I believe she said that she went moose hunting with her father when she was a little girl, hardly the same as slaughtering one of those giant critters. Her husband, Todd, on the other hand, is the real deal. Winning the big snowmobile race makes him a hero amongst his brethren. He has won it 4 times. Must be quite a strong fellow. My neighbor Joe Runyan won the Iditarod race a couple of times. He is a dog man. Raising dogs is another way to make lots of money in Alaska, especially if your dogs win the Iditarod.

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Skateboarders, Bloggers and Cops : One Little Victory for the People

No Skateboards / calaggie.

Gerry Storm, aka Dr. Mesmo, is a former Austin musician, activist and union leader who now lives in rural New Mexico. His interests combine the political with the spiritual.

He recounts here a triumphant parable of skateboarders and cops, and the role local bloggers play in one little victory for the people.

Gerry’s dispatch grew out of an exchange on the Rag Blog Group, a listserv that brings together contributors to and followers of The Rag Blog in a spirited discussion of our little mag, its role and potential in the besieged world of today’s journalism.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2009

'All the cops are fat, some are really fat, in tight shiny black outfits with bright buttons which reveal their waistlines and fat asses, with not quite shaved heads, and utility belts that include a pistol, handcuffs, etc.'

By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2009

I live in (or rather, outside) a small community (10,000) in New Mexico that has a regular blog with activists using it, sometimes quite effectively. Lots of posts announcing local events, political rants, newcomers getting acquainted, the High Desert Gardening Club, various Messiahs, and healers, etc. Desert people’s activism often involves long rides but events are often well attended. Recently a city council meeting drew an over capacity crowd (over 200) on an issue that was talked up on the blog. There was open discussion of the council members and their reputations, times and places to be, names to remember, agendas, etc. Much of the fervor that was whipped up can be credited to the blog.

Last year the state came up with some money and built a skateboard park in Silver City. It is an attractive design, naturally landscaped, big curves with concrete surfaces, very nice shadows. The kids love it, first time they have seen government work for them personally; it built them a place to play. It cost over $700,000, a big deal in this little town. The old park had been a disgrace, rickety wooden ramps, the ramshackle wooden and concrete fence and all other paintable surfaces covered with less than artistic graffiti.

This is a town with almost equally sized Mexican American and Anglo communities. It has a sizeable retiree population. The white kids are about equally divided between straight and hippie origins. Home schooling is quite common, especially among families that live a good distance from town. The Mexican kids are generally from families that work at the copper mine which has been supporting the community for well over 100 years. There is little tension between the communities and much inbreeding over the years. The county has voted Democratic forever and the mine has had a powerful union presence for generations.

Meanwhile, back at the new skateboard park, the local constabulary moves in. As is the custom in places that are dominated by Mexican American traditions, the law operates under wide suspicion. Some of the cops have old family issues and allegiance to traditions that they remain more loyal to than their badges, not to mention their image. The park is too popular and they have to claim it. It is too free.

Couple of cop cars pull up and announce that they are enforcing the "helmet law,” everyone must wear a helmet. Of course helmets are a symbol of sissyhood among the boys. Morning after the announcement, a Saturday, a cop car shows up and busts a kid for not wearing a helmet. He attempts to handcuff the prisoner who resists. The cop tackles the kid (about 13) and attempts to straddle him. Kid's big brother is watching. He blindsides the cop. Brothers run away. Within minutes there are a dozen cop cars on the scene, lights flashing. One of the brothers is located and arrested for whipping a cop’s ass. The park is closed. Next day kids are arrested for trespassing when they attempt to skate. Kids are very disappointed, can't use their park. What government giveth, government taketh away. But wait...

Among the skateboarders are sharp kids who attend hippie schools. They do their research and discover that the “law” being enforced is the Child Helmet Safety Act of 2007. This act is designed to persuade and educate bicycle riders and other riders of recreational vehicles to wear helmets. Yes, even though it was designed for bicycle safety, it applies to skateboards as well. What is the sentence for violators under this law? A $10 fine.

Turns out that someone at city hall feared for the potential of a law suit by a party injured at the skateboard park and instructed to police to enforce the helmet law. The police, ignorant of the intent of the law and seeing an opening to establish a presence at the park, simply overreacted. They made up their own law.

There is an annual downtown puppet parade shortly after the attempted arrest. The boys from the skateboard park show up carrying signs -- "Save Our Park,” "Police Brutality,” etc. This appearance not only stirs up the cops who raid the parade, cornering and bluffing the protestors, forbidding them the right to march, but inflames much of the crowd which includes activists, it stirs up old resentments against the cops in general.

Who is the old papa-san witnessing much of this through the window of the cafe, a sidewalk away from the action? My goodness, it's Dr. Mesmo in a rare visit to town on a Saturday and even rarer visit to the restaurant which revived all the reasons why these visits are rare. But history was being made and there I was with a ring side seat. All the cops are fat, some are really fat, in tight shiny black outfits with bright buttons which reveal their waistlines and fat asses, with not quite shaved heads, and utility belts that include a pistol, handcuffs, etc. Ninety percent are Hispanic. At first I thought they were a comedy act, a part of the parade. Then I realized that they were real, disgustingly real.

They were trying to run but could only shuffle forward, what a strange dance, quite entertaining. The most shocking thing about the spectacle to me was how small the boys are, none of them over 18 and many only 13 or 14. I have been proclaiming for some time now that the kids born in the early ‘90's will change it all when they come of age. The most amazing generation since the kids born in the early 1940’s, they have a Neptune/Uranus conjunction, a very rare and powerful aspect that has not been seen on Earth for hundreds of years. Sure enough, here they are, in Silver City no less, demonstrating for a cause, in the face of the local police. Their face is the skateboarder cult. How appropriate! And they are as non-violent as Martin Luther King in Selma.

The local blog comes alive with indignation over the affair. All the details are revealed, freedom of speech, etc. For all I know the kids have their own blog. Anyway, on the adult blog it looks like MoveOn.com. People are really inflamed. By the time the city council meets the next week the cops are on the spot. Overflow crowd, dozens turned away. Citizens testify and ask hard questions, some of the boys testify (eloquently). The consensus is that cops are a general pain in the ass, bullies with bad attitudes who need to be taken down a few notches, given a crash course in the constitution, and that the park should be opened immediately and the cops should forget the helmet law. It also turns out that the city already has insurance that will cover any lawsuit over injuries at the park. In general the council and chief of police apologize and free the park.

Charges against the brothers and trespassers are dropped. Couple of local attorneys put up $10,000 to pay for educating the kids on helmet safety and provide them with free helmets. The park is livelier than ever, now, no doubt, the place to find kids who are simpatico. Democracy in action. It is on my weekly route so I have watched it develop, albeit at a distance. Now I am proud of it too.

Without the community blog, it is doubtful that the rescue would have happened. It took years for the blog to develop but one man in particular, a devotee of community awareness, stuck with it and made it into a rather impressive forum. No big deal, but well done.

To tell the truth I find the blog to be quite boring most of the time. There are more than a few crazies among the membership, people who live in isolation in the desert and develop some extreme ideas about society and community, some very spiritual with a broad understanding of the natural and others who are seemingly always looking for a fight…not always the brightest lights in the block and easy to inflame.

So I skim it very rapidly as a rule. But I do value it and can see its potential as an organizing forum of progressive thinkers and activists. Communication, Communication, Communication. And I pray that these kids, raised on cell phones and international connections, myspace and ipods, completely at home with computers and skateboards, inheriting a society which is coming apart in an economic crisis, will have the awareness and the courage that will enable them to create a new way, an alternative and constitutional society.

The Rag Blog

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Food Production and Delivery : We May Have to Rethink the Model

'We all know eating locally grown foods is best and during the normal harvest season we buy locally when we have the choice.'
By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / October 1, 2008

Most models of present and future food distribution assume that the supermarket will be with us until the end of time. It will be this institution that will dictate what we eat and how much it will cost. There are different supermarkets for each neighborhood but they all have much in common, especially shelves filled with junk food which is loaded with preservatives, etc. Companies like General Mills and Kraft and Tyson are represented in most all of these markets.

Most of the fruits and vegetables in these stores are grown in California and shipped all across the USA. In some cases this is good since the fruits are often organically grown and shipped with consummate care in refrigerated trucks. But it is unlikely that you will buy fresh foods at your store unless you live in California. Also, these shipped foods have a shorter shelf life and in spite of being sprayed and treated to make them appear to be fresh, they will spoil quickly after you bring them home. And, of course, the cost in diesel fuel involved in the delivery system is huge, not to mention the smoke it adds to the environment.

We all know eating locally grown foods is best and during the normal harvest season we buy locally when we have the choice. For the rest of the year we buy at the supermarket. While this represents an improvement over the traditional past, it is only a partial answer to the problem. Growing food is not so difficult. Processing it is more difficult. Storing it is the most difficult problem.

While we regularly can foods, dry them, grind them into flours, etc. to have them available in the months between harvests, most all these methods destroy much of the nutrition in the foods. Canning involves lots of heat (fuel intensive) as well as the cost of cans, preservatives and other additives, and labor. It works and we have been relying upon it for some time but those with an eye for the fresh and untampered have learned to look upon it as a last choice. That stuff in the can is not the top of the food chain.

Grinding grains into flour and baking them is also a popular way to consume food. Just one little problem with the idea, by the time the flour is ground and cooked most of the nutrition is destroyed. The processing is also quite fuel intensive from the beginning (grinding mills) to the end (baked in ovens which use gas or electricity). Not all cultures are flour users, some use whole grains that are processed at meal time. It is easier to store whole grains than flour and they will retain their nutritive content longer. But the real potential in economical, simple and effective processing and storing is drying foods, dehydration.

When dried and reconstituted all we have to do is add water and the foods come back to life. Yes, there is some loss in the process but it is really negligible. The conflict here is with our habits, our addiction to the easy life provided by the supermarkets. The Native Americans did not have this luxury and they were quite accustomed to living from harvest to harvest off what they hunted and caught and from what they stored. Dried foods were the norm.

I don't know that we will be easily converted to this lifestyle but I highly recommend that each of us starts thinking in terms of a food stash consisting of bulk grains and nuts and dried fruits and veggies. Yeah, you can dry meat too if that is on your menu. You don't have to grind and bake the grains, simply soak them overnight and they will not only be ready to eat but also retain virtually all their nutrition. No heat equals live enzymes.

Another important consideration is the support of small local corporate farms, those owned by stockholders who get their food nearby and thus fresher. You pay the farmer in advance and he does the growing for you. This method insures that the farmer will have the capital to plant without borrowing and also be able to have a bad year due to the natural causes without having to abandon the farm. Small farms are better for a variety of reasons; for one, a big storm is not likely to destroy them all the way it can a large farm (look at the Midwestern floods of 2008); for another, they can specialize more easily and make the delivery process much less costly.

In the future we will have to protect crops more than we do today. This will require extensive use of greenhouses and crop covers. Smaller farms can be more versatile with this. For instance, in years when the grasshopper population is great, the farmer has to cover the crops or lose them, much easier to do on 20 acres than on 2,000. A home garden with a greenhouse nearby, power from small solar and wind generators for every household, battery driven appliances and transportation are the directions our society needs to be moving.

We need to spend quality time rethinking our food production and delivery systems. We need to break the habit of blindly supporting supermarkets and eating whatever they offer. And we need to start eating more dried foods in winter. If you think the stock market crash is terrible for our financial future, think about what happens if the big trucks stop running, even for a few weeks, or global warming takes out one of the big valleys in California. Better to make adjustments now than at the last minute.

The Rag Blog

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High, High Hopes : Turning Houston Blue

Larry Joe Doherty, Congressional candidate from Houston, maps out a strategy. Photos by Dave Mann.
Can the Democrats sweep Houston? (Maybe. But don’t hold your breath...)
By Dave Mann

This article appears in the Oct. 17, 2008, issue of The Texas Observer.

You normally don’t think of Houston as a bastion of Democratic Party politics. For years the city has been dominated by the oil industry and the GOP—they’ve often seemed one and the same. Houston gave us George H.W. Bush, Tom DeLay and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, and some of the nation’s most prolific Republican campaign donors call the city home.

Democrats are hoping to overcome that profile. They’re pouring tons of money into a campaign to transform the Houston area into a Democratic stronghold they hope will help swing future state and national elections. Their goals aren’t small. Many within the party believe Houston is the key not only to recapturing Texas for Democrats but also to putting the state back in play in presidential elections. All of which makes Houston one of the most important battlegrounds in the country this year.

That may sound grandiose, but to understand the Democrats’ strategy, you have to consider that Houston is essentially its own swing state within Texas. Harris County, which encompasses the city and its suburbs, is home to 3.9 million people, outnumbering the populations of 23 states, and is roughly the same population as Oregon. Now consider that Harris County—in theory, at least—is already Democratic. Surveys and polls repeatedly show that more of its eligible voters identify with Democrats. It’s just that many of those people don’t vote. Moreover, the area is growing. Subdivisions are sprouting at the city’s edge like weeds. The people moving in are mostly Democrats. Harris County is undergoing a demographic shift that will soon put Anglos in the minority.

Practically speaking, a Democrat can’t win a statewide race in Texas without carrying Harris County. If the party can increase its turnout just enough in this presidential year to turn Harris County blue, Democrats will control five of the state’s largest counties and could become competitive again in races for governor, lieutenant governor, and U.S. Senate. Democrats are feeling the urgency to capture a statewide race and at least one chamber of the Texas Legislature by 2010 to gain a say in the next round of legislative and congressional redistricting.

But Houston’s size and shifting demographics have local Democrats dreaming well beyond the Governor’s Mansion. They talk of a day when Houston could be for Texas what Philadelphia has been for Pennsylvania—a metro area that votes so overwhelmingly Democratic it provides a large enough advantage to deliver the state almost by itself. (In the 2004 election, Philadelphia handed Democrats a 400,000-vote edge in the state’s largest population center—a margin Republican areas of Pennsylvania couldn’t surmount.)

Big Hopes in Big H: Gerry Birnberg is chairman of the Harris County Democratic Party.
Harris County Democratic Party Chair Gerry Birnberg points out that if big margins in Houston could help a Democratic presidential candidate capture Texas, the Electoral College map would shift decisively. He says New York and California likely will vote Democratic for a generation. “If you can start a presidential cycle with California, New York and Texas already in your column, there is not an electoral map you can draw that a Republican candidate can win,” Birnberg says. “Harris County is ground zero. We don’t get there without Harris County.”

Democrats have never lacked for grandiose plans. Execution is usually the problem. In the here and now, Harris County Republicans still hold every county office and every district judge position. The GOP has carried Harris County in every presidential election since 1964.

For the past two years, though, local Democrats have worked toward flipping Harris County in 2008. They’ve recruited more candidates than ever before, raised money specifically for the effort, and designed a comprehensive campaign that coordinates the state and county party apparatuses with candidates on advertising, voter registration, and get-out-the-vote operations.

At the same time, circumstances seem to have conspired to favor Democratic gains. Corruption scandals engulfed a county commissioner, the county judge, the sheriff, and the district attorney (who eventually had to resign)—Republicans all.

And in March, the Democratic presidential primary ignited unprecedented voter interest and turnout, which seem likely to carry over into the general election.

It all seemed like the proverbial perfect storm to sink Houston Republicans in 2008—that is, until a very real storm arrived September 12. Hurricane Ike devastated the area, knocking out electricity for nearly three weeks in some neighborhoods. The storm and its aftermath precluded weeks of campaigning and voter registration, a period when no one, including campaign staff, was thinking about politics—the sort of interruption that typically benefits an incumbent.

If Democrats don’t sweep Harris County this year, it might take a while. In 2010, statewide campaigns for governor, lieutenant governor and perhaps U.S. Senate may suck up much of the Democratic campaign money in the state, and Barack Obama won’t be at the top of the ballot to bolster turnout. Ike or no Ike, Harris County’s Democrats think this is their year.

For inspiration, Houston Democrats need only look north to Dallas County, where Republicans also dominated local politics, at least until 2006, when Democrats swept every administrative and judicial office in the county. Although the area had been trending Democratic, the GOP was somehow caught off-guard, and the rout stunned Republican strategists statewide. Strategists in both parties realized immediately where the next battleground would be.

The GOP retained control in Harris County two years ago, but the margin was already shrinking. Democrats won 48.5 percent of the countywide vote in 2006, an increase from previous years. “They were competitive, but they all lost,” says Richard Murray, political scientist at the University of Houston.

For Gerry Birnberg, the improved 2006 showing was an important first step. A lawyer by trade, he’s been involved in county politics since the early 1970s. Back then, Houston was so thoroughly Democratic that some political operatives didn’t even want to admit to working for Republicans. The first case Birnberg argued before the U.S. Supreme Court involved printers who feared that if they put their names on Republican political mailers—as state disclosure laws required—their careers would be finished.

Read all of it here.

Source / The Texas Observer

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Long Strange Trip : Austin's 13th Floor Elevators and Still Trippin' Tommy Hall

Tommy Hall in his Tenderloin apartment in San Francisco. Photo by Jamie Soja.

The story of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators – Austin’s favorite psychedelic sons – is rich, rowdy and textured. They sparked a counterculture, birthed a sound and inspired a generation of musicians. In fact, their work and their legend continue to serve as inspiration to new artists and to a legion of cult followers.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2009

See 'A Long, Strange Trip: An originator of acid rock in the '60s, Tommy Hall used LSD to expand his consciousness. He’s still psychedelic,' by Jennifer Maerz, Below.

The story of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators – Austin’s favorite psychedelic sons – is rich, rowdy and textured. They sparked a counterculture, birthed a sound and inspired a generation of musicians. In fact, their work and their legend continue to serve as inspiration to new artists and to a legion of cult followers.

The Elevators joined a gang of Austin carpetbaggers – including promoter Chet Helms, musicians Janis Joplin and Powell St. John and the rowdies from Rip Off Press – who played a formative role in the Sixties San Francisco music and counterculture scene. The Elevators headlined the Avalon and Fillmore Ballrooms, the palaces of Sixties rock.

I first saw the Thirteenth Floor Elevators at Jubilee Hall in Houston in the mid Sixties. It was an extraordinary and totally consuming experience. Their live performances are truly a thing of legend.

The Rag Blog reported last year on the death of original Elevators bass player Benny Thurman. And of course the tall but so very true tale of Elevators front man Roky Erickson -- his vision, his unforgettable voice and the well-documented battles with his demons -- has been told far and wide. (The other prime mover, guitar player Stacy Sutherland, contributed -- in the words of S F Weekly’s Jennifer Maerz -- the band’s “acid-drenched garage-blues style.”)

Less known is the story of stoned poet Tommy Hall from Houston who introduced acid to the band and the electric jug to the world. The Rag Blog’s Gerry Storm wrote of Tommy Hall: “He was called 'Turn On Tommy.' He was a fast talker, a hustler, a jive artist, a rapper, a believer, a fanatic, a salesman, and sometimes a bore.”

The following is a fascinating feature on Tommy Hall, from the Feb. 17, 2009. S F Weekly. Hall now lives in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district where he is still stoned and still creating.

Tommy Hall in the early days. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.
A Long, Strange Trip
An originator of acid rock in the '60s, Tommy Hall used LSD to expand his consciousness. He’s still psychedelic.

By Jennifer Maerz / February 18, 2009

Tommy Hall is nursing a Coke at a corner table at the Hemlock Tavern, a Polk Street music dive. The guru of '60s psychedelic rock doesn't drink alcohol. Booze brings you down, and Hall believes you should always be working on a high.

The jukebox is playing "You're Gonna Miss Me," the biggest hit by Hall's band, the 13th Floor Elevators. The 1966 single made it onto the soundtrack of the film High Fidelity and the prized garage-rock box set Nuggets, helping the group gain massive cred with young garage-rock fiends.

The Elevators' jug player, philosopher, and lifetime LSD devotee either pretends not to notice his song or genuinely can't hear it over the din of early arrivers for the club's headliners, Mammatus. The metal band is one of many local artists whose stoned sound has ancestral ties to Hall's sonic ideology.

For many of his 66 years, Hall has been pursuing intellectual enlightenment through acid. He began that quest in the mid-'60s with the 13th Floor Elevators. Music scholars now note that the Elevators pushed an aggressive psychedelia that stood out against the feel-good artists of the time, pre-dating both punk and new wave. The band combined lingering, futuristic garage-rock jams with propulsive rock 'n' roll rhythms, grooving well with the counterculture's burgeoning drug experimentation.

Three elements made the Elevators truly transcendent: singer Roky Erickson's manic, mercurial vocals; Hall's invention of the electric jug — which made inexplicably cool sound effects based on the reverberations of his voice; and Hall's beautiful, image-rich lyricism promoting the spirituality of getting high. Of the last, he says now that he was combating the teenybopper attitude prevalent during the British Invasion. "We were trying to get into the results of acid," he says, "to get into the results of the universe."

Four decades after the Elevators collapsed, experimental garage rock and metal have enjoyed a huge resurgence in the Bay Area, and many of the leading acts have been influenced by Hall's band: droning rockers Wooden Shjips, garage punks Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall, and pop songwriter Kelley Stoltz, to name a few. The Elevators' cult following is far from regional: Danger Mouse, the producer behind Gnarls Barkley and Beck, told The New York Times that he greatly admired the Elevators' mix of common melodies and left-field sonic adventures.

When he was playing with the Elevators, Hall made it a rule to drop acid every time someone picked up an instrument. From all reports, he didn't stop dosing regularly until very recently, when he lost his LSD connection and had to stick with pot. Hall says he's holding a bag of mushrooms at his apartment, a one-room efficiency in a sketchy Tenderloin residential hotel. He's saving that stash for the final breakthrough on his current project, a book revealing divine patterns in the solar system he's been working out in his head for years.

Hall still has very clear ideas about what makes a band psychedelic. That's why he's at the Hemlock to see Mammatus, an underground band he first heard at Amoeba Music, and one he believes is carrying on the tradition of trip music. These musicians "flash" to a higher consciousness, he says, darting a chalky hand across his scraggly Merlin beard. "It's real music," he adds. "The rest is just a bunch of noise."

Hall's offbeat observations about music make him an engrossing conversationalist. He intellectualizes songwriting to levels far beyond the average musician, and gives almost holy meaning to his favorite artists. But he also unleashes a torrent of information independent of whoever is on the listening end, the result of years of sustained drug use. Talking with him is like flipping on multiple public affairs programs midway through the discussion. It's challenging to comprehend everything he's saying. Pay attention, though, and you can sort salient points and philosophical nuggets from the sometimes intolerant — and occasionally racist — ramblings.

With a ravenous appetite for higher learning, Hall could have been a flawed yet significant cultural signpost, a rock 'n' roll Timothy Leary. Instead his lifestyle teeters closer to another visionary rock 'n' roll drug casualty, Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett.

Despite his struggles, however, Hall is still a fascinating figure in musical history. It's not often that you encounter someone who so fiercely believes rock 'n' roll is a voyage to the beyond. But it's been a difficult journey, one that isn't without its casualties.

"Most bands are just in it for entertainment," music industry vet and Elevators fan Bill Bentley says, "but the Elevators gambled on it with their lives and they got squashed.

If the Great American Music Hall has the equivalent of a VIP section, Tommy Hall is perched in it, a plaid flannel shirt hanging on his hunched frame. It's the day after Halloween, and Roky Erickson is the headliner.

Erickson's career as a solo artist was given new life with the 2005 documentary You're Gonna Miss Me, which propelled the Elevators back into public discourse while showing the damage caused by methodical drug use. Erickson was the group's most serious victim, and his communication skills are delicate these days. Nonetheless, he's a cause célèbre in certain rock circles and has sold out the Great American tonight — in part because this performance promises to be a historic one. Erickson's set list will include 13th Floor Elevators songs, which he hasn't played live since the late '60s, when he started forgetting his lyrics onstage and wearing a Band-Aid over the "third eye" on his forehead.

Upstairs, Hall sits incognito near the soundman, flanked by his closest friends, husband and wife George Ripley and Priscilla Lee, who are wearing their 13th Floor Elevators shirts for the occasion.

Ripley warned earlier that Hall had refused to perform tonight. The Elevators' wordsmith, who invented the electric jug's spectra effects, is strangely dismissive these days about his role in the group. Hall says it was his limited abilities on a musical instrument that forced him to put everything into the Elevators' lyrics and ideology. "I was mainly trying to advance a philosophy so I could take over the whole acid thing," he says. "The jug occupied a position."

A young Austin band called the Black Angels opens the show with Velvet Underground–aping rock. This same group will double as Erickson's backing band; singer Alex Maas has learned the electric jug in preparation. After hearing them perform, Hall believes the Black Angels aren't playing with enough "higher structures." He'll later tell the group that there are other psych bands ahead of them, recommending Mammatus, "so they'll learn."

When the Texans come onstage for the second time, Erickson is at the mike. The portly singer opens with his ghoul oeuvre — goofy songs about vampires and zombies — before turning toward the Elevators with "You're Gonna Miss Me." When he howls, "How could you say you missed my lovin', when you never needed it?" he sounds equally maniacal and naked. His voice remains a powerful weapon.

Erickson had already written "You're Gonna Miss Me" when Hall discovered him in 1965, sparking the idea for the first — and only — band Hall put together. The pair quickly formed a bond and traveled into deep hallucinatory space, setting Hall up as a psychotropic prophet on a vision quest from which he has never returned.

Thirteenth Floor Elevaters poster: at Fillmore in SF for a show with Grace Slick’s band, the Great Society.
The need to understand humans was coded into Tommy Hall's DNA. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to a nurse named Margaret "Perky" Perkins and a doctor named Thomas James Hall. But music was also in his blood. He spent his formative years in jug-band country with an ear to the progressive jazz station and a record-collecting habit.

In 1961, Hall enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied philosophy and psychology, fascinated with how the mind works. At night, he continued his musical education, hitting blues bars with songwriter — and future Elevators contributor — Powell St. John.

Austin introduced Hall to two future loves: an English major named Clementine Tausch and the drug lysergic acid diethylamide. For years they were a tightly knit trio, but it wasn't love at first sight. Hall's slicked-back hair and long beard were a turnoff for Tausch, added to what she calls terrific arrogance: "He was pretentious and always making pronunciamentos," she says. A shave, a new suit, and Hall's genuine affection helped change her mind; they married in 1964.

It's impossible to pinpoint Hall's first LSD trip; he estimated to Elevators biographer Paul Drummond that he'd dosed 317 times between 1966 and 1970. One of Hall's initial experiences was profoundly negative. He was given the drug as part of a study at the UT lab, where he freaked out about all the scientists testing his paranoia levels. Hall realized then that chemicals have a valuable effect on the brain, but he was determined to explore LSD in more welcoming environments. This involved turning on the people closest to him, including his mother. (Perky was apparently ecstatic on acid, playing a Mozart record and repeating that she'd never realized the music had "all those things going on in it.")

Hall was into deep thinkers, including G.I. Gurdjieff, whose philosophical writings had also influenced Bob Dylan. Gurdjieff believed there were four pathways to enlightenment, one of which was interpreted to be paved with drugs. Hall carried the 19th-century writer's books everywhere, eager to spread Gurdjieff's gospel. But by the mid-'60s, rock 'n' roll was doing the heavy proselytizing to the kids — Hall wanted this access to the masses.

Hall found the vessel for his lysergic prophecies when a friend invited him to a concert by the Spades, featuring 18-year-old frontman Roky Erickson. He heard the future in Erickson's ravaged, bluesy screams — his singular voice is said to have influenced Texas pal Janis Joplin — and Erickson easily fell under Hall's mentorship. Hall poached him from the Spades, matching him with a local group he liked called the Lingsmen.

Their first jam session took place in November 1965 at the Hall residence. Tommy doled out the LSD and grabbed a clay whiskey jug, eager to be part of the action. He ushered the instrument into the electric age, holding a mike in one hand and making noises into the jug's interior, the echoes of his voice producing the Elevators' ghostly je ne sais quoi. Hall's primitive sound effects alternately came off like pigeons mating ("Earthquake"), emergency sirens ("Fire Engine"), and carnival rides ("Roller Coaster").

"The first thing you notice, before anything really, is Tommy Hall's electric jug sound," notes Elevators fan Jim Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain. "Never could quite work out how that sound was made."

Second to Erickson's soul-wrecked wail, that jug stamped the Elevators' signature on the burgeoning psych scene of the mid-'60s. The group's third charm was guitarist Stacy Sutherland, whose use of heavy reverb gave the group its acid-drenched garage-blues style.

Tausch claims she named the band, joining an "elevating" word with her lucky number 13. But the Elevators were nonetheless a remarkably unlucky act during their brief three-year run. Every time they'd catch a break (1967: lip-synching on Dick Clark's American Bandstand!), something negative would counter the streak (Dick Clark steals their manager!)

Their biggest problems, however, came from their record label and the law. The Elevators signed to International Artists, a company many say kept the group in the poorhouse. Soon after the band formed, International Artists picked up its first single, "You're Gonna Miss Me." In 1966, the song had risen to #55 on the Billboard charts. That same year, the Elevators put their mark on a movement by titling their first official LP The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. It became one of a string of records for which the band saw minuscule royalties.

Psychedelic Sounds' artwork was unusual for the time, featuring swirls of color with a pyramid and an eye in the middle, a takeoff of the image on the back of the dollar bill. But most importantly for Hall, the record sleeve gave him space to deliver specific, if unsigned, messages about the philosophical quest for "pure sanity" that informed the album. Song titles came with his explanations, such as the revelation on "Reverberation" that you can reorganize your mind against self-doubt. "Tried to Hide" was a dismissal of superficial trippers. And "Splash 1" — a song written by Erickson and Tausch, who played den mother to the band — described the connection felt between two honest seekers.

In his lyrics, Hall penned elegant lines about trust: "Don't fall down as you lift her/Don't fall down/She believes in you," and spiritual bonds: "She's been always in your ear/Her voice sounds a tone within you/Listen to the words you hear." There were also, of course, plenty of encouragements to take a magic blotter ride: "You finally find your helpless mind is trapped inside your skin/You want to leave, but you believe you won't get back again."

This new musical mysticism attracted a following in Texas. Elevators bassist Ronnie Leatherman remembers Hall hosting weeknight sessions in Houston where he'd play records and deliver his divine philosophies to gathered flocks.

As the band started touring Texas, though, young idealists weren't the only ones listening. The Elevators lived in a conservative hotbed when, as drummer John Ike Walton tells it, rednecks were really red. The Elevators were seen as threatening to the very moral fabric of the state; their arrests were broadcast on television. Walton says the cops wanted to beat them up, cut off their hair, and throw them in jail. Band members spent time behind bars or were threatened with hard labor on the cotton farm for such minor violations as possession of a joint.

The Elevators decamped to the more supportive environs of San Francisco in 1966. With connections to Joplin and other Lone Star State buddies gone West, the group was quickly playing venues like the legendary Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom, its audiences growing exponentially. The Elevators shared stages with the popular acts of the time: Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape. They were embraced by the locals, despite having much shorter hair — a consequence of going through so many drug trials — and Hall occasionally getting smacked around for taking Richard Nixon's side in political debates.

They were barely scraping by, though, getting paid $100 each for Avalon gigs, and by the beginning of 1967 they moved back to Texas. Deeper fractures also plagued the group. Hall's insistence that the band "play the acid" every time they picked up an instrument was at odds with the members who didn't enjoy the drug, and it was taking its toll on the ones who did.

The Elevators' last hurrah came in the form of 1967's Easter Everywhere. The landmark album was littered with allusions to Hall's Eastern religious studies. The songs were ethereal love ballads lifted by exquisite harmonies ("She Lives (in a Time of Her Own)"); and parables with heavy visual imagery ("If your limbs begin dissolving/In the water that you tread/All surroundings are evolving/In the stream that clears your head"). The record's lo-fi production value added to its eerie aesthetic, as did Hall's photo on the back cover. He's holding a finger to his lips in a warning to handle the mysteries of the universe cautiously.

From that minor peak the band fell mightily, starting in 1968. Erickson's story became perhaps the most tragic. After becoming increasingly irrational on- and offstage, he cycled through mental institutions and in 1969 was locked up in Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Texas on drug charges, the final patch of dirt on the Elevators' grave. Sutherland also entered dark times: He battled for years with hard drug addiction before being shot to death by his wife, Bunni, in 1978.

Hall's path became more difficult to trace.

[....]

Read all of this article here / S F Weekly

Also see Austin Musician Benny Thurman Dead at 65 by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog/ June 24, 2008

And Mesmo's Reflections on the Sixties by Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008

Thanks to Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog

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ENVIRONMENT : The Island in the Wind

Once people on Samsø started thinking about energy, a local farmer explains, “it became a kind of sport.” Photo by Joachim Ladefoged.
A Danish community’s victory over carbon emissions
by Elizabeth Kolbert

Jørgen Tranberg is a farmer who lives on the Danish island of Samsø. He is a beefy man with a mop of brown hair and an unpredictable sense of humor. When I arrived at his house, one gray morning this spring, he was sitting in his kitchen, smoking a cigarette and watching grainy images on a black-and-white TV. The images turned out to be closed-circuit shots from his barn. One of his cows, he told me, was about to give birth, and he was keeping an eye on her. We talked for a few minutes, and then, laughing, he asked me if I wanted to climb his wind turbine. I was pretty sure I didn’t, but I said yes anyway.

We got into Tranberg’s car and bounced along a rutted dirt road. The turbine loomed up in front of us. When we reached it, Tranberg stubbed out his cigarette and opened a small door in the base of the tower. Inside were eight ladders, each about twenty feet tall, attached one above the other. We started up, and were soon huffing. Above the last ladder, there was a trapdoor, which led to a sort of engine room. We scrambled into it, at which point we were standing on top of the generator. Tranberg pressed a button, and the roof slid open to reveal the gray sky and a patchwork of green and brown fields stretching toward the sea. He pressed another button. The rotors, which he had switched off during our climb, started to turn, at first sluggishly and then much more rapidly. It felt as if we were about to take off. I’d like to say the feeling was exhilarating; in fact, I found it sickening. Tranberg looked at me and started to laugh.

Samsø, which is roughly the size of Nantucket, sits in what’s known as the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea. The island is bulgy in the south and narrows to a bladelike point in the north, so that on a map it looks a bit like a woman’s torso and a bit like a meat cleaver. It has twenty-two villages that hug the narrow streets; out back are fields where farmers grow potatoes and wheat and strawberries. Thanks to Denmark’s peculiar geography, Samsø is smack in the center of the country and, at the same time, in the middle of nowhere.

For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

The residents of Samsø that I spoke to were clearly proud of their accomplishment. All the same, they insisted on their ordinariness. They were, they noted, not wealthy, nor were they especially well educated or idealistic. They weren’t even terribly adventuresome. “We are a conservative farming community” is how one Samsinger put it. “We are only normal people,” Tranberg told me. “We are not some special people.”

This year, the world is expected to burn through some thirty-one billion barrels of oil, six billion tons of coal, and a hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The combustion of these fossil fuels will produce, in aggregate, some four hundred quadrillion B.T.U.s of energy. It will also yield around thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide. Next year, global consumption of fossil fuels is expected to grow by about two per cent, meaning that emissions will rise by more than half a billion tons, and the following year consumption is expected to grow by yet another two per cent.

When carbon dioxide is released into the air, about a third ends up, in relatively short order, in the oceans. (CO2 dissolves in water to form a weak acid; this is the cause of the phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.”) A quarter is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems—no one is quite sure exactly how or where—and the rest remains in the atmosphere. If current trends in emissions continue, then sometime within the next four or five decades the chemistry of the oceans will have been altered to such a degree that many marine organisms—including reef-building corals—will be pushed toward extinction. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 levels are projected to reach five hundred and fifty parts per million—twice pre-industrial levels—virtually guaranteeing an eventual global temperature increase of three or more degrees. The consequences of this warming are difficult to predict in detail, but even broad, conservative estimates are terrifying: at least fifteen and possibly as many as thirty per cent of the planet’s plant and animal species will be threatened; sea levels will rise by several feet; yields of crops like wheat and corn will decline significantly in a number of areas where they are now grown as staples; regions that depend on glacial runoff or seasonal snowmelt—currently home to more than a billion people—will face severe water shortages; and what now counts as a hundred-year drought will occur in some parts of the world as frequently as once a decade.

Today, with CO2 levels at three hundred and eighty-five parts per million, the disruptive impacts of climate change are already apparent. The Arctic ice cap, which has shrunk by half since the nineteen-fifties, is melting at an annual rate of twenty-four thousand square miles, meaning that an expanse of ice the size of West Virginia is disappearing each year. Over the past ten years, forests covering a hundred and fifty million acres in the United States and Canada have died from warming-related beetle infestations. It is believed that rising temperatures are contributing to the growing number of international refugees—“Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement,” the United Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said recently—and to armed conflict: some experts see a link between the fighting in Darfur, which has claimed as many as three hundred thousand lives, and changes in rainfall patterns in equatorial Africa.

“If we keep going down this path, the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others,” President Nicolas Sarkozy, of France, told a meeting of world leaders in April. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has called climate change “the defining challenge of our age.”

In the context of this challenge, Samsø’s accomplishments could be seen as trivial. Certainly, in numerical terms they don’t amount to much: all the island’s avoided emissions of the past ten years are overwhelmed by the CO2 that a single coal-fired power plant will emit in the next three weeks, and China is building new coal-fired plants at the rate of roughly four a month. But it is also in this context that the island’s efforts are most significant. Samsø transformed its energy systems in a single decade. Its experience suggests how the carbon problem, as huge as it is, could be dealt with, if we were willing to try.

Read all of this article here. / New Yorker / Posted July 7, 2008

Thanks to Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog

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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.
The Rag Blog

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