Willie (14 page)

I fell in with Johnny Bush at some nightclub. He wanted to be a singer but was learning to play drums because it's easier for a drummer to find steady employment. Johnny and I sat in with Adolph Hoffner's swing band called the Pearl Wranglers (Pearl beer was brewed in San Antonio). Johnny had a big voice. He could have been an opera singer if he'd had the training. I remember hearing Johnny sing “Stardust” one night and marveling at how good he was.

Johnny and I became real fast friends. We were sort of like Zeke and me—semi-insane, drinking a lot, and doing a lot of dumb things. Like traveling around the country without a quarter in our pockets. But we always found a place to play. We'd pick up enough gas money to go on to the next gig.

This was when Johnny organized the Mission City Playboys with me on guitar and him on drums and lead vocals.

Johnny advised me to quit trying to sing. He said I'd never make it as a singer. He liked my guitar playing better than he liked my voice. Plus Johnny was a singer and didn't need two singers in one band.

Always in need of money, I heard about a disc jockey job at KBOP in Pleasanton, thirty miles south of San Antonio. My only radio experience had been performing live music at KHBR in Hillsboro in high school, but I drove down to Pleasanton and met the man who owned KBOP, Dr. Ben Parker.

Dr. Parker asked if I could run a control board, and I told him I was an expert. He showed me the board. It had RCA Victor printed on it.

“That's an RCA board, ain't it?” I said. Dr. Parker agreed that it was. I said, “I've only worked on Gates boards.”

I remembered the board at KHBR was a Gates board. Dr. Parker said, “I'll show you how to work the RCA board.” He showed me, and then he had me do a live fifteen-minute newscast as a tryout. Right in the middle was a commercial that I will never forget. I had to say, “The Pleasanton Pharmacy's pharmaceutical department accurately and precisely fills your doctor's prescriptions.”

Try saying that sometime with a hangover.

But Dr. Parker hired me anyhow. Dr. Parker became a major influence on my life. Just from watching and listening I learned how Dr. Parker thought about things and the best way to handle them.
He paid me $40 a week, but the education was priceless. I would sign on in the morning, do the news, sell advertising time, collect the bills, write copy, do everything there was to do at a radio station.

I kept playing music at clubs in San Antonio. Nights I was lucky enough to get a gig, I wouldn't sleep a wink before it was time to drive to Pleasanton and sign KBOP on the air at 5:30
A.M
.

Johnny Bush went to work at KBOP, too. One dawn I ran out of gas on the way to Pleasanton and started hitchhiking. Johnny came along and picked me up. While he was still laughing at me,
his
car ran out of gas, and we both hitched a ride to work.

This kind of schedule couldn't last forever. Martha was pregnant by now and didn't want to have her first baby in a strange town. So we left San Antonio and went back to Abbott long enough for our daughter, De Lana, to be born at the hospital in Hillsboro on November 11, 1953.

Martha said De Lana was a biblical name. I don't know of a De Lana in the Bible. She was Lana to me—a brand-new little old person who had come into our young lives.

Now that we had a baby to look after, I figured I should become more responsible. Martha and Lana and I moved to Fort Worth to be close to my dad Ira and his wife Lorraine and my sister Bobbie. I located a job as a disc jockey in Denton. But Denton was sixty miles north of our house, and it wasn't long until I had the same trouble getting there as I'd had driving to Pleasanton, only sixty miles a day more so. In the fifties the speed limit was 70, but you could drive as fast as you wanted to. It was like a French Grand Prix road race on the Texas highways.

I thought we'd found the answer to my 100-mile-an-hour driving to Denton at dawn when they hired me as a disc jockey on KCNC in Fort Worth, replacing Charlie Williams on a program called the
Western Express
. Charlie had suddenly moved to California.

At KCNC I worked from 6 until 7:45 in the morning, was off for three hours, and then worked until 3
P.M
. I had a terrific sign-on that I'd stolen from various disc jockeys, primarily Eddie Hill.

I would sign on with, “This is your ol' cotton pickin', snuff dippin', tobacco chewin', stump jumpin', coffee pot dodgin', dumplin' eatin', frog giggin', hillbilly from Hill County.”

Then I was off and running. And running was a good talent to have in Fort Worth, because the town was lighting up with a real Wild West gun-shooting, bomb-throwing gang war.

Fred Lockwood.

Thirty-four years ago I promised Fred if I ever wrote a book I would put his name in it. Fred was the first person who ever gave me a joint, back in Fort Worth in 1954.

Fred said, “Willie, let's blow some tea.”

I knew what he meant, of course, but I had never tried it. Marijuana was known as tea or reefer or weed or boo, and you bought it by the lid—a one-ounce Prince Albert tobacco can full—or by the penny matchbox from other musicians. I told Fred I couldn't blow any tea at the moment, but I'd like to take some with me and blow it when I got time.

The truth is I was kind of anxious about what might happen. The U.S. government and movies like
Reefer Madness
said I would go crazy and stick up a bank and rape little girls and murder innocent people if I blew tea. I knew enough musicians who used it to know this was most probably a lie. But there was only one way to be sure.

Fred and I had been sitting in some saloon watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on black-and-white TV and listening to Doris Day singing “Hey There” on the jukebox when he suggested we blow tea. After I turned him down, he gave me a skinny little joint with both ends twisted and told me to get high and be somebody.

On the way home, I pulled my car over to the side of the road and lit up. I smoked the whole joint and waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. I had puffed the joint and blown out the smoke, not taking the smoke all the way down and holding it like you're supposed to. I didn't get even a little bit high. I thought: What's the big deal? If I want to get high and be somebody, I'll drink a quart of bourbon. For six months I bummed joints now and then from Fred and puffed them and still didn't get high.

Finally one night I did it right. Since then, I have made up for those wasted six months.

Fred Lockwood and his brother Ace played in clubs on Exchange Avenue, the Jacksboro Highway, the Mansfield Highway, Hemphill Street, White Settlement Road. Fred was a funny son of a bitch. He would say, “That little gal there is the prettiest thing that ever stepped out of the back of a patrol wagon.” He would say, “I ain't ate in three days—yesterday, today and tomorrow,” a line I borrowed for a song.

I have borrowed another of Fred's great lines for a song—“I've gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it.”

Fort Worth in those days had a population of 300,000, and the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
had a daily circulation of 250,000. It wasn't because everybody in town read the
Star-Telegram
—though it seemed like damn near everybody did—but because it was the regular morning newspaper for all of West Texas. Most of the news had to do with shootings, stabbings, and exploding automobiles.

A kid named Elston Brooks, who was about my age, had the best-known byline on the
Star-Telegram
because he covered both the nightclub beat and the police beat at the same time. You'd see his name and photo above his column on the amusements page, and then you'd turn to the front page and see his byline on a story that said
TWO MORE SHOT TO DEATH ON NORTH SIDE
.

This double duty of Elston's worked against country musicians getting publicity in the
Star-Telegram
. He would show up in the press room at the cop shop at 5:30 in the morning and check the desk sergeant's report, homicide and the hospitals first thing. Every morning there was a long list of wounded from the honky-tonks.

So when it came time to write his amusements column, Elston wouldn't even think about going back to the honky-tonks to hear a country band, no matter how good it might be. Instead he would interview a touring movie star or go to a play or catch a pop act in one of Fort Worth's “legitimate” nightclubs. (“Legitimate” frequently meant the joint had strippers instead of country singers.)

Big bands like Gene Krupa or Tommy Dorsey would come to Fort
Worth and play the beautiful old Lake Worth Casino. The Skyliner, the Rocket Club, and the Air Castle offered dance music, jazz music, and strippers. Local pop performers like Charlie Applewhite, Norm Alden, and James Petty worked the clubs on West Seventh and Camp Bowie Boulevard where the level of violence was fairly low.

These were the places and people Elston Brooks wrote about in his amusements column. This meant a country artist could sing his ass off in the Jacksboro Highway dives, but his big West Texas audience would never read about it in the
Star-Telegram
unless he made the police news by shooting the promoter.

Elston didn't get around to writing about me until 1961. I was back in Fort Worth again doing a brief stint as a DJ at KCUL—luck spelled backwards—when Elston called the station and asked me to meet him for coffee at Anders Cafe.

I wore a gray, narrow-lapel business suit, a thin tie that was the style then, and my hair was cut short. Elston wore a fedora hat and had his tie yanked down and a cigarette stuck to his lip, like the newspaper guys did then. He interviewed me about the new song I had written that had just been released and was fast becoming a hit.

The next morning I picked up the
Star-Telegram
and saw my picture and read Elston's column about my new hit song—“Four Walls.”

He meant “Hello Walls,” of course. “Four Walls” was a hit at the same time and had been written by George Campbell, who had a band in Fort Worth.

But Elston spelled my name right at least (I have a profound dislike for seeing my name spelled “Willy”)—and the next day he apologized and printed a correction about “Hello Walls,” so I got two
Star-Telegram
columns from Elston for the price of one.

The gang wars in Fort Worth were mainly about gamblers fighting over territory. If a Dallas gambler tried to move into Fort Worth, our local gamblers would get together long enough to shoot him. Then they'd go back to fighting among themselves.

Organized crime didn't move into Fort Worth because the local boys were too tough. Ever since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hung out in Fort Worth's Hell's Half-Acre, and famous gunfighters like Luke Short roamed Exchange Avenue by the stockyards, it has been a town with a Wild West code.

The gamblers would shoot dice and bet football at W. C. Kirkwood's 2222 Club on the Jacksboro Highway or at Boston Smith's place farther out and then would drop in to where I was playing to listen to country music. It was not unusual for country musicians,
struggling to make a living, to fall in with people at the bar and take to pulling burglaries or stickups or running a few whores to supplement their income.

Fort Worth cops had a humiliating routine they would use on you if you got thrown in jail. It was common knowledge on the street. If you had given the arresting officers any trouble, they would first wrestle you into a room behind a steel door next to the booking desk and would beat the shit out of you with belts, sticks, and fists. Then once every eight hours—with each change of shifts—they would roust you out of your cell for a “showup.”

Every prisoner had to walk in a circle in front of each new shift of cops while the sergeant read their rap sheets out loud. He'd say, “Look at this sorry son of a bitch, men. Don't you want to puke knowing this ugly shitass is in our town?” If you happened to be a police “character”—a known street tough with an arrest record—the sergeant would say, “This worthless asshole is a pimp, a burglar, and a hijacker. He'd be a killer if he had the guts. Every time you see him on the street, whip his ass and throw him in jail. You don't need a charge, we'll find one.” The cops would whack the characters in the ribs or on the butt with their nightsticks while they shuffled in a circle. The sergeant would say, “You lowlife hoods better learn you ain't safe on the streets of Fort Worth. If you want to try to scare people, go to Dallas.”

North of the Tarrant County courthouse and south of 10th Street, most of the hotels were whorehouses in which $3 bought a straight date and $5 would take you around the world. I played at the Mountaineer Tavern on 10th Street, where the stage was behind the bar. I played on Magnolia Street and at the 811 Club on Hemphill on the South Side. They all had pinball machines that paid off in cash.

I worked with quite a few black musicians and Mexicans. I played Gray's Bar on Exchange Avenue—where they rigged up chicken wire in front of the stage to protect us from flying beer bottles—with a Mexican rhythm guitar player named Momolita and his Mexican bass player, Moose. They were great musicians. I played lead guitar and sang and fronted the band. We played jazz, we played “Little Rock Getaway,” “Sweet Georgia Brown.” When the joints closed I'd get with the Mexicans and blacks and jam until the sun came up.

Busy as I was playing music at night and spinning records and playing live music on the radio by daylight, I still wasn't making enough money to support Martha and Lana and me, and I felt my career as an entertainer was at a dead end if I didn't get out of Fort Worth.

Like Charlie Applewhite, Charlie Williams, Norm Alden, and dozens of other young guys in Fort Worth at the time, I decided my next stop into the future lay on either the Left Coast or the Right Coast. I chose the Left Coast.

We hit the road again.