| The Savvy Stories by Steve Jones (continued) |
|
| Chapter 38 - Wacky In
Waco I never could figure out what had been bothering Ricky, but he soon seemed to be in a much better mood and there had been no more talk about him quitting. Laurie had confided in me and asked that I not mention anything to Ricky about it, so I didn't. Things in Longview (if indeed that had been the real problem) must have settled down and I was relieved. Someone told me that the great house on Castillo where Lilly and I had parted ways was the scene of a fire. The rumor I heard was that she'd leased the place out to KEGL radio DJ, Steve Nichols. Nobody was hurt and the fire was supposedly isolated to the living room area. The giant hanging bar clock that I'd built when I lived there was allegedly destroyed. To be honest, it was a monstrosity, so I didn't think it would be missed. [I would hear in 2007 that all of this was not true. There was no fire. Steve Nichols never lived in that house. Go figure.] Rod Steward impersonator, Rob Hanna, was all the rage when he played Savvy's for the first time in late October of '82. The girls went crazy over that guy as if it were Rod Stewart himself. I have to admit he did a great job. A McDonald's finally opened up on the North Side. According to mom, it was a really big deal to finally get one in that area. There were a lot of festivities and several of my family members went to the grand opening. It was over by Billy Bob's, which had become famous as one of the world's largest honky tonk clubs. I remembered the place when it had been a Clark's Discount Shopping Center. Later it was a Gibson's. RJ's mom, aunt, sister, nephew, and niece went to the McDonald's event too. The band had been skipping a lot of rehearsals lately. We got pretty good at coming up with excuses not to practice when we needed to. We were just worn out from the constant grind that hadn't let up in a while. I met a really nice girl named Linda. We went to Six Flags, where we were secretly tailed for half an hour by the security staff before they all gathered and jumped out to surprise us at once. They were big fans of Savvy and were regulars at the club. The main guy from the group was Phezecus. They always made going to Six Flags extra special during those Savvy days.
Because they were working security, they would always provide me with a wad of big bills to spend in the restaurants and gift shops. The bills were marked and at the end of the day they could see if they showed up in the register! Sneaky, but we got to keep the stuff we bought. While there that day I saw Shannon McMahan, an old Savvy friend, singing in the show at the Southern Palace. They did big show numbers with the Vegas type costumes and headpieces. For the big finale, she was dressed as the Statue of Liberty. She did a great job. Marcus and I went to Bill Martin's Seafood Restaurant next door to Savvy's. We had a feast of steak and lobster, and Marcus picked up the check. Great guy, that Marcus. Hud was a different story. Ricky's friend Kevin had loaned the band some money to help pay for the mastering of our album. I wasn't in on the actual deal so I don't know how much the loan was for. I just know that suddenly he wanted his money back and went to Hud for it. Hud wrote a check that bounced.
The country was in a serious recession. The national deficit was $180 billion. (Not bad when you compare to today's TRILLIONS.) Unemployment rate in April was 9.4 percent, the highest rate since the Great Depression. Ten Million Americans were out of work, but I was oblivious to it all. The early 80's was a time when everyone was partying, perhaps to escape from the gloomy everyday conditions of society at the time. Savvy's Nightclub was the perfect place to go where you could leave your troubles at the door. But some people still managed to find trouble, no matter how hard they ran from it. Hudson was fast becoming one of them, but it wasn't really evident to us yet. During the week of Halloween, I visited my good friends at Harris Costume Shop. On the 27th through the 31st, we played at the Inner Visions Club in Waco again for the first time since April. The owners, Steve and Bill, were good guys to us. They seemed like big Savvy fans and they treated us well. The door man at the club was a behemoth of a guy who everyone called "Tank." His real name, we would later discover, was Chuck Bush. Tank looked incredibly intimidating even when he wasn't wearing the dog collars with big steel spikes around his neck. But as we'd soon come to find out, Tank was just for show. Underneath the exterior was a pussycat and we became good friends. Tank loved for Ricky to climb up on his shoulders so he could carry him around on the dancefloor while Ricky played guitar. Tank was our "Big Mike" of Waco. Everyone loved him and while he might have just been a big, oversized man-boy crying out for a little attention, his 15 minutes of fame would come soon enough, and in a BIG way!
One night, Tank popped into a Seven Eleven for a diet Pepsi when by freak circumstance, he was discovered by the director of an upcoming Kevin Costner movie called Fandango. They'd been looking for a large, hulk of a young man to play one of the lead characters in the movie, and Tank filled the bill. The next thing we knew, Tank was no more, and our friend Chuck Bush was on his way to being a bona fide actor in a major motion picture! Essentially, Chuck co-starred with Kevin Costner before Costner became famous. (It's a cool movie. Ask for it at Blockbuster.) Jeff Moody and Mike Quest were a couple of Baylor frat guys who became good friends of ours in Waco. Jeff was taking communications at Baylor and was on the Baylor radio station, KWBU. He did an interview with us in the dressing room of Inner Visioins, which was interlaced with all the songs from our album. It was a very cool interview, which got us a lot of much needed exposure in Waco. Jeff and Mike also worked part time driving Limousines for a rich old lady in Waco. Now and then, they would come to Ft. Worth with the limos and drive us to gigs, parties, award shows, and sometimes they'd just park them out back for us to hang out in during breaks at Savvy's. Loved those guys! They lived in a big frat house that looked like it was right out of the movie Animal House. On one of those nights in Waco, Kenny Stocks got a couple of rooms at a hotel on the Brazos River and invited everyone at the club to come over and party after the gig. It was a party alright, but it seemed that only couples showed up. I had a new camera with me and took some black and white photos. Thank goodness the hotel had HBO! That night I saw something very strange swimming up the river. It looked like a "big foot" type creature. I'll never forget it. Nobody else saw it. No, I wasn't on drugs. [Since then, I've seen similar creatures in a local lake and came to the conclusion that it was either a very large Nutria that I saw in the Brazos that night -- or a small swimming Werewolf.] The crowds were great in Waco and we broke the attendance records at the club. Back at home, a guy came into Savvy's talking about wanting us to star in a movie. He said if we'd come to L.A. he would put us on top! On top of what? A refrigerator? A hill? We learned not to get too excited about rhetoric. On Halloween night of 1982 we played at the Agora in Dallas. It was a big costume party and I took two costumes. Before the show, while Lee Malone played, I was dressed as Uncle Ernie. That was fun because anyone who wasn't a regular at Savvy's didn't know who I was. I stayed in character the whole time, acting like a hip and horny old man who liked to hang with young people and party. [I would learn that it is a lot easier to convincingly portray an old man when you are young than to portray a young man when you are old.]
During the gig, I dressed up in a clown outfit. It was sort of a punk Bozo thing. I took more pictures and dad offered to develop them for me in his home darkroom. I agreed. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten about some of the photos I'd taken at the after-gig party in Waco! Nothing too bad, but I really was sweating if for a few days once I remembered they were on that roll of film. Mostly drinking, smoking, and making out. Luckily, I was behind the camera. Dad was cool about it and never mentioned anything. "Nice composition" was about all he really ever said about it. We couldn't put rehearsal off any longer. In three days we worked up "Everybody Wants You" (a hot new Billy Squire song), "I See the Look In Your Eyes" (a song that was too high for even Ricky's vocal) by Hughes Thrall, "You Don't Want Me Anymore " by Steel Breeze, and what would end up being one of the best cover songs Savvy ever did, "It's Over" by Loverboy. That song was practically tailor-made for Ricky, and the harmonies were fun to do and sounded great. Texas had a new governor. Mark White succeeded Bill Clements. I tried to see how many Texas governors I could remember; White, Clements, John Hill, Dolph Briscoe, and Preston Smith. Not bad for a rock and roller! We'd been scheduled to open for the Motels in Temple but the show got cancelled. Brezhnev denounced U.S. imperialism. (He would die within a month. Hmmmm...) I always consider myself patriotic, but I was feeling more patriotic than usual. Brezhnev's remarks ticked me off. (I swear I had nothing to do with his death!) November 1st, 1982 was a Monday -- or in Savvy terms, a day of rest. The week of the 2nd we played at Savvy's, before gearing up for another road stint. On the night of the 7th, our last night at Savvy's before the road trip, RJ pulled a gag on me that would go down as a classic! Sunday night was usually Tequila night at Savvy's Nightclub; it made sense because we had Mondays to get over it. There were usually fans at the club who would keep the rounds of shots, beers, and drinks coming for us. Some nights we'd have the bartenders substitute Coke or Sprite instead of Whiskey or Tequila, but not THAT night. We had a packed house and everyone was having a great time. Just before we went back up for the last set of the night, RJ and I were hanging out in the dressing room. He'd just told me a joke and was laughing his head off. I don't recall the joke, but it had something to do with a wheel chair and a vegetable. He was pushing and goading me to tell that joke when we got back out on stage. We were feeling no pain and I was not thinking about political correctness or making good judgment calls. So as soon as the break was over and I was back on stage with a live microphone at my disposal, without even giving it a second thought -- I told the joke. It was essentially more of a one-liner than it was a joke, but that didn't matter because nobody laughed except for RJ when I told it. I wondered if the microphone was on, and probably even jiggled the cord to check for a short. I looked at the other guys on stage and they were staring back at me in disbelief. All except for RJ, who was laughing that insane, nervous, hacking, choppy, Beevus and Butthead laugh while he poked me in the back with his finger. He was trying to get my attention. When I looked in his direction, he signaled for me to look over to my left, and there, right in front of the speakers by the keyboards, was a man in a wheelchair! The man in that wheelchair was looking up at me in utter shock. I looked back at the other guys on stage in horror! I wanted to die. The only sound continued to be RJ's manic laugh. But then, the guy in the wheelchair broke into a big grin and said, "Got your ass!" It had been a set up to embarrass me, and it worked. I'd been punked. From then on I made a point to be much more suspect when considering the use of RJ's material on stage.
On November 8th, it was back on the road for another one-niter at the Graham Central Station in Bryan. That time we decided to stick to the MAIN roads. Then on the 9th we played back in Dallas at the Agora with Billy Thorpe, who had his big "Children of the Sun" hit out at the time. In music, there are the good guys -- and then there are jerks. Billy Thorpe's manager was an absolute asshole to us. He wouldn't let us use any of the Agora stage lighting or other equipment for our opening set. Every light had been set for their use without leaving as much as a night light for us. We'd worked with much bigger acts than Billy "freakin' Thorpe" (Heart, Allman Brothers) who were exceptionally generous and considerate to their opening acts. Even if Billy Thorpe had nothing to do with the way his crew treated others, his name was on the product. He was the "brand" and therefore we held him responsible. We ended up with the saddest light show in the history of the Agora that night. (Funny, but I don't think Billy Thorpe ever did anything else worthy of mention again after that... and even if we had anything to do with his career going in the toilet, I wouldn't be at liberty to talk about it here...) From there it was on to San Antonio for three nights at the Rock Saloon. I was happy to see Sherry H. from Houston there. She drove in to spend the three days with me! It was a surprise, so I had to figure out accommodations. We hung out at the club for a while, and by the time we got back to the hotel, a party was in full swing - IN MY ROOM! All the other guys had sent all the people who showed up from the Rock Saloon to MY ROOM! I was rooming with Rich, who couldn't turn anyone away, and had let things get out of hand. And to make matters worse, when I turned back the covers on my bed to see what the "lumpy thing" was, I found a girl passed out, and she'd thrown up all over the sheets and pillow. That was about all I could take. I dished out the extra bucks to get my own room for the rest of the stay. With Sherry there, it was the only option. The following night, we all went to Mi Tierra's after the gig. Mi Tierra's was a world famous Mexican restaurant, and it was awesome! The next day we went to the Alamo. The whole time we were in San Antonio, Hud was showing signs of a serious drinking problem developing. Until then, his dry wit and sarcasm had been subtle, and always funny. But in San Antonio he became loud, unruly, disruptive, and it got scary a few times. On the few occasions that any of us paid attention to the business of the band, things didn't seem to add up. Because we were allowed to run wild like spoiled children, we didn't want to deal with business. That's what we were paying Hud to do. If only we had, we might have realized that Hud was teetering at the brink of going over the edge. We had no idea how deep in over his head he was. I'm not sure if he realized it either. But as long as Ricky and Hud were tight, there wasn't much point in worrying about it.
|
|
|
|
