| The Savvy Stories by Steve Jones (continued) |
|
|
Chapter Eleven – The Kostura Chronicles We may not have played the Jam, but we took great pride in knowing we won the contest – not so much for ourselves as for our fans. It meant a lot to them - and to our club business. Anyone in DFW who hadn’t heard of Savvy before June 21, 1980 couldn’t escape the media barrage following the Jam. It may have been 15 minutes of fame in the media, but the boost we got from the Jam ordeal turned Savvy’s Nightclub into a rock and roll landmark. Soon the club couldn’t physically hold the crowds any longer and expansion plans were considered. The day after the Texas Jam, Lilly started packing her things. I had figured this time would be blissful but it marked two weeks of hell. All the while, she never stopped asking me to give up the apartment and move with her. The house was wonderful. It had a huge, beautiful sunken den, four bedrooms, a two-car garage, and a perfectly manicured green lawn. The more I was in that house helping her move, the more I wrestled with my decision not to move in. I was intent on holding my ground. Once the last boxes were loaded into her garage, I kissed her goodbye and went home to the apartment without out her. That night was horrible. I was alone at the apartment, dazed and confused from the events of the previous day at the Cotton Bowl. The empty dining area was a constant reminder that she was gone. My co-dependency monster was waking up again. My self-esteem evaporated. I should have picked up the phone and called any of the numbers I had stashed away, written in matchbook covers and on old bar order receipts. Savvy’s was closed that night, but I could’ve gone to the Hungry I, Spencer's Corner, to RJ’s, or to a movie. I could’ve just gone to bed for a change. By the time the phone rang at midnight I was on the verge of going out of my mind. It was Lilly. She was crying. She wanted me to come over and talk about what we were doing and see if there was any chance we might figure out a way to salvage things. I’d never heard her talk like that before. She didn't cry. She was a ROCK! It appeared there might be hope. Something seemed different. Nothing was: I was delusional, that’s all. I never slept at Quail Hollow again. I spent the first week of my vacation moving Lilly into her new home and hanging out there like a guest that never leaves. I spent the second week of my vacation moving my things in to her house. OUR house. I had just signed another six-month lease at Quail Hollow and was too embarrassed to give notice that I was moving. So I just loaded up and moved. This was the fourth time I had set up and torn down my giant waterbed in 15 months. Every move had been a move up, but it was happening too fast and wearing me out. I wanted to settle in and not have to lift another couch for a while - yet there I was at it again. I knew something must have been wrong with me for caving, but I tuned it out and focused on the bright side. I finally had a house! A really cool house! I got into doing some remodeling projects; I built a hanging bar light, did a wall in mirror tiles, put up a ceiling fan, and used an old manual push mower to do the yard. In the evenings we had friends over. The sunken area in the middle of the den was perfect for my sectional couch, and created a conversation pit area. (I haven’t heard that term in 20 years.) The lighting and layout of that room made it feel like a small club. I bought a model kit of the U.S.S. Constitution; one of those that comes with reels and reels of thread for rigging, but really bad instructions. I used the conversation pit as my model building area by day. At night I would clear it all away to make room for our guests. That house on Costello was as comfy as a Hobbit’s Home. By the end of my vacation I began to realize that I'd fallen in love with the house -- but my relationship with Lilly hadn’t changed. After about a three-day truce we were fighting again. I knew that moving there had been a monumental mistake. I’m sure Lilly was thinking the exact same thing. We suffered through two years together mainly because neither of us knew how to let go. I was suffering tremendous remorse for moving from my apartment. After only two weeks at the house, I knew I was going to have to move again. And this time it would be without her. I couldn’t go back to Quail Hollow after leaving without notice. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure where I was going to go. I just knew it would have to be soon. Moving to the house had probably been the most monumental mistake I'd ever made. My inability to think things through and make a rational, solid, practical decision was killing me. We started back at Savvy’s on the 5th of July. Then on the 18th we played a concert at the Wintergarden with Point Blank and The Fabulous Thunderbirds. On July 26th and 27th we played the Dallas Agora with the Penguins and Pandora. It was a big show for us because everyone was still talking about how we got ripped off at the Jam. I met Ken Rundall from Q102, agent Mike Herca, David Left, Eddie Gaddis (manager of the Dallas Agora) and Gary Logan (stage manager). The Agora staff and management were incredibly nice to us and were talking about developing a strong relationship between Savvy and the Agora for the future. The buzz from the Jam got a lot of people interested in seeing what Savvy was about, and this meant big crowds for the Agora. The Penguins were old friends and a good party band. Pandora was quite interesting because, like Heart, they had two girls in the band. Both were pretty, sexy, talented, and very sweet. Gary Shaw from Q102 told us he had been in touch with Irving Azoff, trying to work out plans for us to open for the Eagles in Los Angeles. Ken Rundall had been talking with promoter Lou Messina about his part in the Jam fiasco and what Pace Concerts planned to do to make it up to Savvy. Q102 felt really badly about what happened and was pulling every string they could to right the wrong - even though it hadn’t been their fault that Eagles manager Azoff pulled the plug on us. The Q102 jocks routinely talked highly of us on the air and we became frequent guests in the studio for interviews, and just to hang around. I managed to record Tempie Lindsay discussing the aftermath of the Jam mess on the air one day. I was blown away by her kind words about how we had never "bitched or moaned" throughout the entire ordeal and in HER words, we'd proved to be a "class act." After what we'd been through, about the last thing on my mind was patting myself on the back for anything -- but Tempie's words gave me a cool new perspective about what had happened. It was true. We'd been bumped from the ROCK CONCERT OF THE DECADE after winning a rightful spot on the lineup -- but yet we never complained about it to anyone once. I'm sure Hud followed up with Q102, and with the promoters of the event, but that was strictly business. We did a lot of media interviews after the Jam and we managed to keep our heads up throughout it all. Looking back on it now, I'm pretty proud of how we all handled that ordeal. The guys in the band sensed that I was finally ready to break away from Lilly for good, and began voicing their opinions about it. My brother Chris showed me some super 8mm footage he'd shot of Rich, RJ, and Kenny Stocks during a recent trip to Galveston in which Lilly and I had been a topic of conversation. One scene showed RJ kicking back on the beach with a smoke and a beer, doing a mock interview on camera. When Chris asked RJ what it was like to be out on the beach on vacation, RJ answered that he could just imagine "Steve and Lilly fighting back at home." RJ began giving me a really rough time about my situation with Lilly.
I deserved every word and was relying on them to help motivate me enough
to do something about it. RJ's efforts at trying to help were particularly
crude, but that was his style. I took offense at first but quickly got
over it. They were right and I knew it. There were no interventions in
those days. Everyone had the right to self-destruct. I'd come close, but
had caught myself just in time. The decision to leave had been forged in
concrete; I only needed to figure out where I was going to go. But my
living arrangements were about to be overshadowed by bigger doings. It
had been almost one year to the day since Ricky had joined us, and we'd
let Larry go. When RJ got it into his head he wanted to replace someone in the band, it almost always came to pass. He would work out details in his head without anyone even knowing about it until he was ready to put everything into action. It happened that way in Desperados when he'd brought in Boogie and Wade. Not long after joining Savvy he brought Ricky in. Suddenly he had his eye on a new keyboard player. It sure didn't help matters that RJ hadn't been getting along with our keyboard player, Don Reeder. If someone didn't stop him, RJ would have changed band members as often as he changed his mind. Looking back though, I have to say he was usually making the right choices at the right times. He had a real talent for it and was a master lobbyist. For that reason, sometimes when we weren’t getting along, I felt a little nervous about my own job security. Don Reeder was an excellent musician and a good friend. He had been instrumental in coordinating the merger between Savvy and the Desperados. He was there when Savvy worked up Ricky's first originals and was there as the Savvy album was recorded at Pantego. But somehow he had become crossways with RJ, and RJ had become buddies with another keyboard player. About that time, we started hearing the name "Dan Kostura" bandied about quite a bit. Dan Kostura had been playing with legendary Dallas band Lynx when RJ
first connected with him. It came up in conversation that Dan wasn't
really happy with Lynx and might be interested in joining us. RJ started
lobbying the rest of us about Dan. It was a somber topic, since
nobody wanted to change anything that might hex the success we'd been
having. Don had been an integral part of helping to create several of
the first big Savvy originals, and was an important part of the Savvy
sound. RJ had an agenda and he only needed to convince Ricky in
order to make it happen. Ricky was the new central nervous system
of the group and would be the deciding factor. As fate would have it,
Ricky agreed that a change in keyboard players might be what we needed. So RJ and I
made a scouting trip to Dan’s house in Dallas to hear him play. After
his rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” we were sold. Don was given
three weeks notice, and Dan started doing a lot of extensive homework in
preparation of taking over on the ivories. [Don Reeder continues to
be a legendary keyboardist in North Texas. He has won many awards, and
still can be found playing with some of the top names in the area. As of
this writing he is playing in bands with Tuffy B. and Roy Robbins.] My brother Ray started helping out as a drum roadie for Rick when we played concerts. Chris was never far away from RJ’s side – day and night. Old family friend Kent Calhoun was coming out to the club fairly regularly for a while. And then we heard Lightning had come out with a T-shirt that said "Savvy Sucks – Lightning #1." We thought it was flattering if the rumors were true. But we were also concerned about rumors we heard suggesting that rival local bands believed the outcome of the Battle of the Bands had somehow been rigged. If it was, we weren’t in the loop. (Years later, Lightning's Rocky Athas would tell me that the T-shirt slogan had been cooked up by their fans, and the band had nothing to do with it.) The T-shirt sales crew from a band called Vision wanted to work for us, selling Savvy merchandise at shows. It never happened. We received a letter from Charles Rohe, director of the Texas Jam. He wanted to settle with us, whatever that meant. August 3rd 1980 was Don Reeder’s last night with Savvy at our club. Dan Kostura's first gig as a Savvy boy would be the following night at a party for Rock Bottom magazine at Sneaky Pete’s. While doing a McDonald's appearance at Six Flags
Mall, I met a wonderful girl named Chris Johnson. She worked in the mall
offices where I was to get into makeup and costume. That girl literally took my
breath away, but I could tell she was much different than a lot of the girls I
dated from the club. That is to say that this girl didn't really even GO
to clubs. It was doubtful she would consider going out with the likes of
me. But I did manage to get her phone number. Mark Karolevich quit
Lightning and came out to the club with his younger brother, Timmy. We
had some laughs about the whole Battle of the Bands ordeal. I ended up
going to his house and checking out a Flight Simulator game on his
computer. It was nothing compared to flight simulators found on home
computers today, but I was so captivated by it that I knew I was going
to have to have a flight simulator computer game of my own one-day soon. Lilly had already been up for a while and had tip-toed into the room to put away some clothes she'd been washing. I called her over to the bed and she sat down. The words came rolling out, calmly and effortlessly, as if they'd been professionally edited for a televised news broadcast. I simply told her that it seemed like a good day to move. There wasn’t a fight or an ill word spoken. We both knew it was the right thing. We were robbing each other of time we could be spending making ourselves happy. Like two actors at a wrap party for a movie, we embraced and parted friends. I don't know where that emotional strength had come from, but it was enough to propel us both out of each other's gravitational pull for good. I scoped out RJ’s big house on Green Acres and figured with a few minor adjustments I could turn their front dining / sitting room into a bedroom. Any normal family under regular circumstances would never have considered it, but this was rock and roll. RJ was all for it. He was more than happy to help in any way he could, if it meant I was going to finally be out of a serious relationship, and able to get back into the swing of things again. I'd been balled up with Lilly since the day we'd joined Savvy, and hadn't had a chance to really fully enjoy the spoils of our recent success. RJ's attitude was "the more the merrier." Besides, everyone would be paying less rent. So I was going to be moving in with RJ, Ricky, and Kenny. It would be a big change for me, since I was used to living in my own place for almost two years. Now I would be sharing a kitchen, a living area, and bathrooms with three other guys and their revolving door of overnight house guests. My good friend Rick "Hollywood" Myrick came by and helped me load up a U-haul truck. Once the waterbed was drained it only took about two hours to load everything. I shook Hollywood’s hand and thanked him for the help. Then I got into the U-Haul and drove away. In the rear view mirror I saw him getting Lilly’s phone number. Suddenly I realized why he’d been so eager to help me move. That dog had been scheming to make a move on Lilly for a long time, but waited until I was out of the picture. God bless friends like that. As I made the turn at the corner, I quietly wished them both luck – and I moved on. Late that night, after unloading all my stuff at RJ's, and returning the U-Haul truck, I became filled with sadness and thought of Lilly alone in that big house. I imagined her curled up on the bed crying over my departure. Images of her staring at the phone, hoping for it to ring and to hear me on the line asking to come back played out in my mind. The demons were doing a real bang up job on me. I dropped the keys to the U-Haul truck into the mail slot of the door at the rental place and got into my trusty Volare' and headed West on Meadowbrook Dr. past Loop 820. My heart was racing as I made a right on Hitson and drove the three blocks to Costillo. It was late and dark and I knew I had no business driving back over to that house, but couldn't resist. There was a cloud of gloom choking me from the inside out and I felt that the only way to get relief was to see Lilly and make things right again. I made a left on Castillo and counted the houses. One. Two. Three. Then I saw someone was parked in my usual spot. Then in a rush of horror, I recognized the vehicle. Our very own soundman, Marty, had already rushed in to fill the void. Surely he would only be there for a little while. Probably just consoling her. I waited. The white VW beetle would still be there when the sun came up. |
|
|
SAVVY STORY INDEX
|
|
|
|
