Ricky Lynn Gregg had passed a death sentence on the greatest thing that had ever happened to five other guys (up until that point in our lives) and four of them wouldn't even know it for some time to come. People were coming out of the woodwork filling Ricky's head with blueprints and master plans for what he should do with his career if he wanted to succeed.  If OUR egos were stroked, HIS was full-body massaged! He was a young man with talent and ambition who'd mastered the part of a "team player", but underneath the sheep's clothing, he knew he was meant to be a lone wolf. 

The "Lone Wolf" version of Ricky Lynn Gregg that I
was seeing in my nightmares. 

For a time during the initial difficult period after telling me his feelings, Ricky tried his best to respectfully avoid me - knowing I was having a hard time as bearer of his secret. As long as we lived together in that house, there was no way he could've continued to carry out his plans of breaking out on his own without me knowing. He had to tell me. At the time, I convinced myself that he'd clued me in because we were so close, but that had been pure folly and wishful thinking on my part. He hadn't mentioned taking me along with him on his new venture, and that may have hurt the most. At times I felt like I was betraying the other members of Savvy by not telling them, but if I had, it would only have created a lot of unnecessary drama. Ricky had assured me that when the time came, he would give the band ample notice. I had to take him at his word on that one, and he had to trust me not to expose his plans to leave until he was ready.

I began paying close attention to my spending and started socking away as much money as I could for the possible rainy day - no - make that "inevitable rainy season" that was coming. After a few weeks of wallowing in self-pity, I'd had enough and decided not to think about it anymore. I wanted to savor whatever time we had left together as a band without the anguish and despair of worrying about what Ricky was going to do, or when he would do it. It became difficult to look at him without realizing he had his hand on the master switch that was about to shut down our amusement park lives. There was no way around it. I swallowed my pride and sallied forth like a good rock-and-roll soldier.

Meanwhile, the carousel of life kept turning, and it was turning fast!  Dad's 62nd birthday was on the 14th of January, 1983.  Rhonda and I went over to my parent's house and had a small get- together. Fred "Papa" Calhoun dropped by and we had a jam session! Chris video taped it. Fred was credited with being the first person to ever incorporate a piano into a string country band, with Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies. That was back in the days of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. [Fred would eventually be posthumously inducted into the Western Swing Hall of Fame in the late 90's.] 

The legendary Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies.  Fred "Papa"Calhoun is 
second from left. Milton Brown is standing at far right. Many music historians claim 
that these guys would have given Bob Wills a real run for his money had Milton 
Brown not died in an automobile accident, just as the band was gaining major 
popularity. As a young kid, I knew Fred as the man who ran the neighborhood 
grocery store next door. He was almost like a second dad.

Rehearsals went on as usual. Ricky brought in a new original called "I Don't Want to Be Losing", which had great symbolic meaning to him. The other guys in the band thought he was singing about a relationship with a GIRL. We also worked up another original that day called "Some Day."

  ["Losing" was a lame song, and we only played it two or three times before dumping it. Fortunately, "Losing" was captured on video. The other song, "Some Day", was an enigma - nobody seemed to have any recollection of it until the hook popped into Rick Miller's head after I asked him if he remembered it. The consensus was that Rich Mauch had written it, but it never took off. Because all we could recall was a vague part of the chorus, and there was no recorded version of it anywhere, we decided to re-write the song from scratch for our new group, The Jones-Miller Band. We've also worked up versions of "Losing" along with 21 other Savvy originals. ]

Marcella was coming to the club regularly again and I couldn't help noticing her because she was such a very beautiful girl. But she'd been in an off-and-on relationship with a guy in another band since I'd first met her, and as a result, she'd lost that innocent vibe that initially drew me to her. Frankly, I think I was a bit fearful that Marcella was more than I could handle. She'd become a force to be reckoned with - a sort of "maneater" who I suspected would chew me up and spit me out in a heartbeat. Had my confidence not been at a low ebb because of the Ricky situation, perhaps I would've had more of the spirit to pursue her. I'd never felt that I had to "pursue" her before. We had a mutual interest. But the timing was always wrong and it just didn't seem to be in the cards. As fate would have it, there wouldn't have been much use in worrying about it anyway because before long, Marcella would completely vanished from Savvy's -- never to return.

Savvy's Nightclub bouncer, James, cracked a guy's head open with a flashlight. Larry Patton was on vacation so Rick Miller was standing in as manager and had to handle the ordeal. The Dallas Cowboys had a big game coming up with the Redskins for the Conference Championship. They had lost eight games during the season because of the player's strike, so it was great to have real football back, and to be on the path for a possible Super Bowl win.

We were coming to the halfway point of our twenty-straight day tour. So far we'd been played Graham Central Station in Byran (the trip when Ricky told me he was leaving), then we were back home at Savvy's for a week, followed by the dreadful Head East show at the Dallas Agora, and then back at Savvy's for another week. On January 19th, Sally (a waitress from the Agora) and another girlfriend of hers came over. We watched old movies on TV until the sun came up. One of the movies was "Bottom of the Bottle" with Joseph Cotton and Van Johnson. Don Reeder and his girlfriend Bev came to Savvy's. He was playing with Tru Blu, a Charlie Hatchett-managed band in South Texas. He told us that he'd lost almost all of his equipment in a tragic fire that had killed his sax player. 

Business was really slow at the club, and for the first time I could recall, I was having a hard a time getting into the mood to play. Rhonda was supposed to show up one night, but didn't. I called her from the club and she sounded very disinterested in talking to me. It was too bad because I was really starting to develop strong feelings for her. I felt that perhaps she just didn't want to deal with dating a guy in a band, but that didn't really make much sense when I considered that she'd dated a radio jock, and had also been involved with a guy in another local band. Something seemed to be up, but I had to get back to work.

[While we rarely used booking agents, we had done a show or two for Charlie Hatchett. Bands had great nicknames for agents, and Charlie Hatchett had one of the best of them all; Dartboard Charlie! The name came from the urban legend that said Charlie Hatchett booked bands by throwing a dart at a map to decide what cities they would play without any other rhyme or reason to his booking. Steve Carter from Damien claimed, "He'd put you in Arizona one week and Louisiana the next and back to Arizona the following week."] 

I paid another visit to Dr. Hawa, who set me up with a sleeping pill prescription. I hoped that would help with my grogginess, still not understanding that it was simply depression I was feeling. When I spoke to Rhonda the following day, she claimed that the reason she sounded "disinterested" might have been because I'd woke her up!  She was sweet about it and convinced me there was not a problem. She'd just been tired and decided to go to bed instead of coming to the club. It was easy for me to forget that other people had normal lives and real jobs and kept regular hours. She invited me to come over after the club closed and when I got there, I saw that Pandora's sound man was visiting her roommate, Cheri. An old Walter Brennan movie was on and we snuggled for a while, then I headed for home.

The Volare' died three times on my way home from Rhonda's! I made a vow to do whatever it took to get it fixed for good. There was some problem with the carburetor, and I'm sure it didn't help that I'd tried to do an overhaul on it myself. My four track reel to reel deck was also acting up. The 4th channel was cutting in and out. I hoped it only needed a head alignment. I was the king of screwing up head alignments on tape decks for some reason. I needed to find someone who knew what they were doing to take a look at it.  I was scheduled to go have allergy tests done, but decided that getting the car in shape was more important. The allergy tests were going to be expensive, and I needed the car more than I needed more expensive prescriptions to buy. At least that was my convoluted logic at the time. 

Chris Caldwell, Lilly's old friend, came to the club and told me that Lilly got married. MY LILLY? No. She hadn't been my Lilly in a very long time. In fact, it dawned on me that I hadn't seen her in months. She hadn't followed me home or cornered me in the club or anything since I could remember. She'd just sort of vanished. Now I knew why. She'd finally found someone to take her mind off of me. I hoped it would be a good thing, but I was sad at the same time. It was like hearing there is no Santa. The end of an era. Not another FAKE end, as we'd had so many of. This was the real deal. Lilly got married. Chris said that Danny was into some heavy stuff and that now Lilly had followed suit. Chris didn't care at all for Danny and said he was giving it a month before it would fall apart. He also said she looked pregnant. Was our girl in over her head? What happened? I had no right to ask out loud. So I kept my concerns to myself. 

Monday the 24th of January, 1983 would have typically been our night off after a six night stint at Savvy's, but we were just at the halfway point of our twenty day gig-athon. Instead, that Monday was spent driving back to Bryan for another one-niter at Grahams. Sherry showed up, along with two of her girlfriends from Houston - Donna and Pat. It was Pat's birthday so they were celebrating heavily. After the show they drove back to Houston and we headed to Austin to play two nights at Cardi's with a band called Mirrors.  I took a Restoril sleeping pill and crashed hard for the entire drive from Bryan to Austin. By the time I woke up the next day, everyone else had gone to eat, leaving me stranded at the Ramada Inn. Being stuck without transportation, I decided to walk over to the Highland Mall to get some lunch, exercise, and to do some shopping. I picked up some gig clothes at a shop called High Voltage, and invited the girls who worked there to come to the gig. After getting some lunch at a mall food joint, I took a taxi back to the Ramada Inn and got ready for work. 

Austin was known for being a laid back town, and Cardi's was no exception. We did gain a lot of new fans who hadn't heard us before, but it still wasn't the powerhouse response we'd been accustomed to on the Agora circuit, and back home at Savvy's. The music being played by the DJ's during our breaks seemed to be some sort of new style that was much more suitable for a discotheque than for a rock and roll club. We worked up as much of the new cover stuff as we could, but it never really blended well with our basic original rock and roll style. Something was a little uncomfortable, but we couldn't put our finger on it, so we kept doing what we knew how to do.

Austin was notable for a couple of other reasons as well. Dan got into a ruckus of some sort or other and almost got arrested. (I'll have to look into the details on that one...) Ricky and I intervened and took Dan with us on a late night drive through downtown Austin so he could cool down. When we arrived back at the Ramada, we found that Rich, RJ, Hud, and Rick had already headed out for Beaumont without telling us. Marty and Dave rode together in the van with the equipment, and the rest of them had piled into Rick's BMW. We later learned that the topic of conversation during their drive to Beaumont was RJ ranting about Marty's foot odor! Sorry I missed that one. 

Ricky wanted to drive to Beaumont in the morning, so Dan went back to his room and Ricky and I were hoping to get some sleep. A knock at the hotel room door put that plan on hold. It was two girls from the club who had stopped by to "party."  Each club usually has a particular hotel, motel, or condo where bands stay while in town. It wasn't a secret where we were, and it was likely that the two girls had been invited by someone with the band, only whoever had invited them was already on their way to Beaumont, listening to RJ hold kangaroo court regarding Marty's feet. We invited them in, but neither of us was interested in either of them. One had a fever blister that looked like a fried green tomato stuck to her face. They were wound up and very chatty, so we let them talk while Ricky and I blindly gazed at the TV, watching a bad movie called SKYWARD for the third time that week.  

The following morning we headed to Houston for two nights at Cardi's with a band called Savage Grace. The name "Savage" was starting to turn up in a lot of rock and roll band names. Sherry and Donna came out on the first night and I ended up staying at Donna's trailer house in Cypress with them. The next morning, Sherry had to go to work leaving me there alone with Donna all day. Donna passed the time by telling me far more about Sherry's personal life than I wanted to know. If she was telling the truth, Sherry was NOT the girl I had thought she was. There were a lot of girls out there who dated a different guy in every band that came through town, but I didn't want to believe that Sherry was doing that with me. But according to her own friend, Donna, that was the case. Donna knew that Sherry and I had talked about getting serious on one or two occasions and didn't want to see me get hurt. That was nice, but I was very disheartened by her report. 

Donna and I had lunch together at the Black Eyed Pea and then she dropped me off at the Marriott so I could get ready for the gig. That night at Cardi's, Rich screwed up the guitar intro to "It's Over" and RJ came down hard on him during the break. Later, after I stumbled over my words during an awkward introduction for our song "Run and Hide" - RJ stepped up to his mic and said, "Anybody got a hook?" It was a rude and cutting (and hell yeah, funny) reference to the old vaudeville days when the MC would have a long pole with a big curved hook on the end. When a performer bombed, the MC would use the hook to whisk the act off stage. That was RJ. We all knew it and we all had to live with it.

Those 20 nights without a break was really starting to take its toll on all of us. Tempers and emotions were already running high. But with the added stress of RJ's pension for pushing buttons and stirring up trouble, Ricky's desire to quit on the spot, and my low level depression from carrying Ricky's secret around, we had a potentially volatile situation on our hands. Luckily for me, Sherry was coming out again, so I was able to avoid the madness at the Marriott on that last night in Houston. The following day -- January 30th, 1983 --  RJ, Rich, and I decided we'd had all we could stand for this trip, and took a flight home.

I wondered if all the negative energy that was going on during that road trip was coming from Ricky. Could he be so powerful and influential that his personal displeasure would cause everyone to go nutty, much like the effect some believe a full moon can have?  It was a passing thought which I was far too exhausted to entertain. My last thoughts, as I nodded out on the plane, were mixed between positive and negative; On the positive side, I knew that despite all the glitches and frustrations that had occurred, the Cardi's tour had been productive for us in broadening our fan base. But on the down side, I knew it was a moot point. I knew that no matter what we did to promote Savvy from here on out, it didn't really matter much if Ricky did indeed leave, as he'd told me he was going to do. So far I'd managed to keep his secret. How could the other's not have felt it in the air? Without a crystal ball I had no way of knowing we'd played our last night in Houston with Ricky in the lineup - or that it would be 14 months before I would see the vast Houston skyline again. It wouldn't take a crystal ball to know it was doubtful that I would ever see Sherry again. 

CHAPTER 43:   KEEPING IT REAL!

SAVVY STORY INDEX

BACK TO JONESLAND

SEND EMAIL