I started playing professionally when I was about 13 years old. By the time I was 16 I had my own band and playing all over north Texas. At 18 I was touring with a few local bands six to eight weeks at a time. Most of my adult life was spent travelling all over the US with some well known bands, some 'wanna be' bands and some bands that never progressed beyond a three or four week stint.

People often joke about the scene in “The Blues Brothers” when the blues band ended up playing in a honky tonk called “Bob’s Country Bunker” after posing as “The Good Old Boys” who were running late traveling to the gig in their Winnebago. The scene showed the stage as being behind chicken wire. Presumably to keep glass bottles from knocking the musicians out while performing. In a couple of scenes you’d see a bottle break on the chicken wire and shower the musicians with broken glass. As funny as the scenes were, they were not realistic. The bottles and glasses being thrown really happened in real life, but they used chicken wire to expressly prevent the bottles from breaking as chicken wire is flexible enough to just bounce the bottle back. I have, indeed, played several places with chicken wire around the stage.

In my very early days of playing, I got a sub job playing guitar with Bob Geesling, the owner of B&N Music in Denison, Texas. He had a hard core country band called “The Country Travelers”. If I remember correctly, I was about 16 years old. Bob had booked a job in Midland, Texas, which was a typical West Texas oil town. In the early 70s, Midland was a booming and growing town with a lot of roughnecks. They’d get their paychecks and hit the honky tonks to drink, dance and fight…not necessarily in that order. A lot of small places were popping up all over town. Many of them would end up completely trashed by the end of Saturday night due to all out free-for-all fights. The builders would use the cheapest materials to put these places up since so much destruction happened, it wouldn’t cost too much to rebuild walls the roughnecks knocked each other through. I wasn’t aware of this fact prior to committing to playing the gig. I learned all this on the way to Midland. Needless to say, I was concerned.

We got to the gig and set up on a 20x20 chicken wire stage that was recessed into the wall. The men’s bathroom was on the right side and the women’s on the left. The walls were made out of what looked like ¼ inch sheetrock framed with 2x2 studs. During the third set, we saw a few light-weight fights break out on the dance floor, but the bouncers were big, fast and took no shit from the patrons, so those skirmishes were usually quelled pretty quick and the offending parties removed from the premises. We were almost finished with the third set and we heard the loud cacophony of an active fight directly through the bathroom wall next to where we were performing. Suddenly, we heard this huge crash and a cloud of sheetrock dust coming from a hole right even with the stage. This guy’s head was completely through the wall. It appeared that someone had slid him across the tile floor in the bathroom with enough force to penetrate the wall. The guy kind of shook the sheetrock off of his face and said “Hey! Do y’all know San Antonio Rose”. Unable to form any words while in shock of seeing this, I just nodded up and down. The guys said “Great!! Play it for me!!”, pulled his head back through the wall and continued the fight. We later played the song for him and he danced by with sheetrock still on his shirt and in his hair. So, that first foray into honky tonks left an indelible mark on me. It was a benchmark, of sorts, to compare future honky tonks…very few reached that standard of ‘excellence’, but many came close.

country music