MUSIC
I started playing guitar at age 13, but didn’t get very far until I took up the bass three years later. I learned most of my licks from the bass solos on Cream’s Wheels of Fire and the extended boogie songs on Canned Heat LP’s. I was in garage bands, all of them terrible, through high school, and during my 2 1/2 years of college at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. I was briefly in a band called Nasty Habit, but it wasn’t until I met a kindred soul named Eddie Munoz that things really started to click.
Eddie introduced me to a singer named Danny Coulson, who was forming a blues/hard rock band. We recruited a drummer and lead player and named the band Jellyroll. The band was styled after some of the glam rock/hard rock blues outfits that were popular in Austin and Dallas in the early to mid Seventies. The best of these bands was called Crackerjack. Stevie Ray Vaughan came from that scene. After Jellyroll broke up in 1978, Eddie and I recruited a drummer named Billy Blackmon and started a band called the Skunks.
At the same time, I was playing bass in a band called the Violators. The Violators also featured Carla Olson (Later of the Textones) on guitar, Kathy Valentine (later of the Go-Go’s and Delphines) on guitar, and Marilyn Olson on drums. The two bands played a double bill Austin debut on February 12, 1978, at a University area club called Raul’s.
The rest of this story is fairly accurately presented in an account in the Austin Chronicle, Young, Loud and Cheap . Also, the hilarious/tragic story of the Skunks first trip to NYC to play the punk/new wave Mecca, CBGB’S club, is chronicled in my story “Bottle Rockets.” It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry, it’ll make you try to sing along with “Sister Ray.”
As fun as being a Skunk was, eventually, I wanted something else. So in 1983, a few months after the release of our new album on Republic Records, I disbanded the Skunks and started a new band called the Secret Six (after the 1930’s film noir). We had some local success, but nothing compared to the Skunks. We recorded some songs for Elektra in 1984, including one that appeared on compilation called Ten From Texas: Herd It Through the Grapevine. Ironically, the LP art has a photo of a guy playing saxophone on a bar who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bill Clinton. After the Elektra option expired, I formed an R&B cover band, Hang ‘Em High, and also released an EP with another trio called Flex. Then in 1987 Lois and I moved to LA.
I played in a band with Kathy Valentine called World’s Cutest Killers. Kathy played guitar and sang. The band also included Kelly Johnson, ex-guitarist/singer for a Brit heavy metal band called Girlschool, Jebin Bruni, ex keyboardist for John Lydon’s Public Image, and Craig Aaronson, formerly the drummer for Broken Homes. We briefly had a publishing deal with Mike Chapman, the producer of Blondie’s big hits and the DiVinyls. It was exciting for me, because I was writing more songs than ever. One summer I wrote more than two dozen songs.
Kathy and I parted company in 1989, and then I joined Carla Olson’s band, formerly the Textones, now simply called the Carla Olson Band. Like me, Carla had always been a huge Rolling Stones fan, but her tenure in LA, plus the music biz associations of her husband, Saul Davis, had led to friendships with people in the Stones’ orbit, including ex Stones guitarist Mick Taylor. In 1990, Mick joined the band and we recorded a live CD, Too Hot for Snakes, at the Roxy. Besides Mick, the regular band was augmented by keyboardist Ian McLagen (formerly with Rod Stewart and the Faces, besides playing on tour with the Stones), pianist Barry Goldberg (Electric Flag, Dylan), and Juke Logan, of the Rhythm Pigs on harmonica. We also had two saxophonists. In addition to our regular songs (which included two of my own compositions, “World of Pain” and “Who Put the Sting on the Honey Bee”), we played at least a half dozen Stones covers, including “Silver Train,” “Sway,” and “You Got to Move.” It was like heaven. Ever since I’d first seen the Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan show, I’d fantasized about being in the Rolling Stones, about sounding kinda like the Stones, about getting my hair cut like Keith Richards. Here we were, on stage, louder than God, and it felt an awful lot like all those things, except better than I’d ever dreamed it would. Mick Taylor is one of the most talented rock musicians who ever lived.
Eventually, writing kept taking up more and more of my time until finally had not time to play in bands regularly. I’ll never stop playing bass. I’ll never stop writing songs. I’ll somehow find time to play live once in a while. Kathy Valentine plays some of my songs with her current band, the Delphines and she’s recorded several, including “Gone Underground” and “Pissin’ in the Wind.” A San Antonio punk band, Sons of Hercules, does an Iggy Pop take on my song “Gimme Some,” which appears on their CD Hits for the Misses. A French band recorded “Earthquake Shake,” but I’ve lost track of the name of the band.
A Skunks CD titled Earthquake Shake: Live, was released in December 2000. The CD collects two live shows recorded in 1980, one at historic Max’s Kansas City in NYC, the other at Austin’s Back Room. The CD project originated when an old friend loaned me a cassette recording of one of the shows, claiming that it was still one of his favorite recordings. I thought it sounded pretty good, too – probably better than any of the studio recordings we’d made. I dug through my closet and found the cassette from Max’s Kansas City, and talked it over with the band members. Jon Dee and Billy both thought it would be a good idea to get the music out there for our fans, so we did. Rave Up Records, an Italian record label with a taste for Texas punk rock, also wanted to do an LP, so I selected some outtakes from the CD, and also some of the better studio material. The result is another recording called Earthquake Shake (not my idea). I think it sounds pretty good.
"On a cold and otherwise unremarkable Austin night in February 1978, something happened in a campus-area club called Raul's. The first punk show was scheduled, featuring the debut of a band called The Skunks. Bassist and lead singer Jesse Sublett was handsome and erudite, brimming with piss and vinegar. His vision of the band as an apolitical garage-rock trio manifested during the punk explosion. Its attitude and energy fueled his desire to make rock & roll that mattered, a dream that came true at Raul's: The Skunks, quite literally, helped put the cosmic cowboy kingdom of Austin on the rock & roll map." - Margaret Moser, Austin Chronicle.
You can’t release a CD without having a party, so Jon Dee and Billy and I played a reunion show on April 2nd, 2001 to a full house at the Continental Club, still Austin’s coolest nightclub after about half a century of existence, and about 20 years after the Skunks first played there and called it home base. Jon Dee and I also played a benefit Skunks show there a month earlier, with John “Mambo” Treanor sitting in for Billy. Did we rock the joint? Yeah.