It’s sure taken me a long time to sit down and write this story. The main reason is that a couple of months ago I was passing through Cincinnati and, on an impulse, I walked into Will’s Pawn Shop on lower Vine and casually inquired whether they might have a steel guitar for sale. Not a pedal steel, but a lap, or Hawaiian, steel guitar. Will went into the basement and hauled out a dusty case which contained the most beautiful National double-eight I’d ever seen. We dickered $ome on the price, but Will’s heart was clearly not into bargaining. After all, who, in this day and age, would be buying an outdated instrument like that?

Somebody who had gotten zonked out by Western Swing music, no doubt. And I had been. Watching Asleep At The Wheel Tuesday after Tuesday at the Longbranch had given me a kind of fever.

What a good investment that axe turned out to be! I don’t play it particularly well, but I do play it well enough to satisfy myself, and I’ve passed a lot of time these past few months working out classics like “Remington Ride,” “Hillbilly Bebop,” “Steelin’ The Blues,” and so on, playing along with records, or just plain jamming the blues. Not sitting at the typewriter..

In the Good Old Days (When Tiros* Were Bad)

I knew Ray Benson in college, but he dropped out after six months and after that he disappeared from my consciousness until one day at a Commander Cody gig Cody’s manager, Joe Kerr, came up to me raving about this band they’d gigged with that had blown them off the stage. An old college friend of mine was in it, he said, and I thought he ijiight be referring to a band I once dug Called Ed Chicken and'the French Fries, but no, he said they were a country band called Asleep At The Wheel.

“That part about us blowing them off stage is simply not true at all,” says the Wheel’s steel player, Lucky Oceans. “Yeah,” Ray adds, “they’d just never played with anybody who played country music before.” In fact, Joe was probably being charitable. Ray had been writing him letters about how good the band was, and Joe was taking a kind of I’ve-heard-this-one-before attitude, so that when he heard them at last, he was probably pleasantly surprised. •

But Ray had had the idea for the band in his head for some time, and somehow he got a rent-free 1500 acre farm near Paw Paw, West Virginia. He collected Lucky, with whom he’d played in high school, Leroy Preston, who had grown up on a farm in Vermont with his father’s collection of Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb records, a piano player named Ed Freeman (who was on vacation from Ed Chicken), and a bass player named Hal. “We didn’t have electricity,” Ray remembers, “so we got a generator. For the first three months, all we did was rehearse; we didn’t try to get gigs.” They rehearsed in a packing shed where the temperature was kept at freezing. “I was playing steel, but there wasn’t nothing you could kick when you were playing steel, so I became the drummer because it was the easiest way to keep warm,” says Lucky. Leroy, who had drummed in a high school rock band, switched to guitar.

Somewhere along the line they moved to a smaller farm and decided they were ready for the public. The Sportsmen’s Club in downtown Paw Paw (population 706) was a bar that featured rock and roll on Saturday and country music on Sunday. The oldsters came bn Sunday, and the kids came on Saturday. The rock band was terrible, but it was all there was. Ray managed to talk the club owner into letting them play a Sunday night and pass the hat, and at the end of the evening they were $50 ahead — $15 of it kicked in by the proprietor himself. The next week they got $75, and then they played both weekend, nights. They still weren’t all that good, but they were deeply appreciated by young and old in Paw Paw. “It was real funny to watch the old geezers dancing with the hippie chicks,” Ray remembers. For a while they played rock and roll. Sometimes what transpired bore very little resemblance to music, but you know how those things go.

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“Then we got a call from the Hog Farm,” says Ray, “and they wanted us to play at the Medicine Ball Caravan, and we didn’t know what the fuck, so we said sure. We’d only played the Sportsmen’s Club, and suddenly we were at this . . . this, thing, and I got dosed, and.. . it was totally ridiculous.” Gigs with Poco in Washington D.C. followed, and they picked up a small following. Then Lucky and Ray’s brother got caught breaking and entering the week after the Manson murders broke into the news, and the Justice of the Peace suggested they move out of tiie county. The bass player and piano player left, and Ray called his friend Fitzhugh in Boston and asked him if he’d like to play with them. Fitzhugh said sure, and then two girls showed up at the farm wanting to sing backup vocals.

You better believe Ray’s glad he took them on. The two girls were named Chris and.Emily, and Fitzhugh and Emily left, but Chris O’Connell stayed on. “I’d just gotten out of high school, and I knew I had to leave Arlington (Virginia — Jim Morrison’s parents lived in back of the O’Connells) because I didn’t want to be a secretary for the rest of my life. I like to sing, and I thought there was something I could do with dt, but I needed a push in one direction or another because, I had no self-confidence at all. But I’d sung harmony to Emily’s lead singing, and I think that’s why I stayed arid she didn’t — she didn’t have the ear for harmony .” But with the bass player gone and no piano player at all, the band was still in trouble. They’d lived off the land all summer, eating vegetables and poached deer, but as winter approached, Joe’s repeated invitation to go West looked brighter. Finally, they decided to go, and on their way across the country, Ray took a chance and picked up Gene Dobkin, a bass player he’d known in college. Ray knew they’d have to be on the West Coast for at least a year, but the band was so reluctant to leave the security of West Virginia that he told them they’d only be gone six weeks or so.

“And' so,” says Ray, “we starved. We lived in Joe’s back yard, a basement. . “We had a pigeon coop for a while,” Chris adds. “Except for the fact that we were Starving, it was real neat. Somebody was always around, and there was the volleyball court... Then Gene ran into this fiddle player who came over to jam and wound up offering us a gig with Stoney Edwards. Now, there’s 1500 bands in the Bay Area, and Cody helped us out as much as they could, which was a hell of a lot, but we were still starving, and we weren’t even making a slight living. So we went with Stoney and made a worse living, except that we ate.”

Poor Polks Stick Together

Stoney Edwards is a country-singer Who sounds a hell of a lot like Merle Haggard. He is the victim of incompetent management, living, in northern California, and the fact that he’s black, but he is a warm human being and a top-notch performer. He calls his band the Poor Folks after his biggest hit, and he tours incessantly* playing the lowerechelon country gigs — military bases, cowboy clubs in the Southwest, and dingy bars with live entertainment. The band is whoever he can get to back him up, in the grand country-and-western tradition.

The Wheel backed Stoney at the 1971 Country Deejays’ Convention in Nashville (the same one at which Cody debuted),' and then went off on a thirty-day tour with him in a Winnebago camper that had such a low ceiling that 6’10” Ray couldn’t stand up in it. Part of the tour was a package deal, and the Poor Folks not only got to back up Stoney, but also artists as Freddie Hart (Chris sang harmony on “Easy Lovin’ ”),. Cbnnie Smith, Dickie Lee and LaWanda Lindsay. “We worked hard on that tour,” says Rayv “sometimes six hours a day, and we didn’t get paid a cent.” “I had to wear those damn shoes with the five-inch heels,” Chris says. “Boy did my feet hurt.” They were learning the business they wanted to be in, but they weren’t exactly.getting rich or famous, and being a bunch of hippies backing up a nigger at a country bar in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico, with not a cop for 125 miles around tends to wear down your nerves somewhat. And like Ray said, they weren’t getting paid.

So they went back to California, no poorer, but wiser.

Swinging Doors

“I remember the first night we were gonna play the Longbranch, we got here at about 9:30 and they said there wasn’t no use settin’ up till some people showed up, so we waited around until 10:30 and nobody’d showed yet, so we just packed up into, the truck and went home.” The Longbranch Saloon is truly one of Berkeley’s dingier holes, made up in mock-old-Western style, with a bar that serves wine and beer that one patron notes you don’t so much drink as lease for -a while. Across the street from a Chinese MSG parlor on the southern stretch of San Pablo Avenue, the Longbranch used to be known as Babylon, and in times gone by Country Joe and the Fish played there. Now it is mostly a hangout for bikers and wasted dregs of the Berkeley streets, with a sprinkling of college students on dates 'on weekends.

But on Tuesday nights these days the Longbranch is where Asleep At The Wheel plays. The whole thing got off to an inauspicious start, but it wasn’t long • before the word got around that there was actually a, place in Berkeley where you could get drunk and dance and have a fantastic time, all to some of the most wonderful music the East Bay had heard since Commander Cody was getting started. The word began to spread and pretty soon a hard core of 20 to 30 fans could be expected to show up every week — many mo^e, if things were right. The Wheel began getting known around town, and pretty soon, there were nights when the Longbranch was so packed that condensation poured down the walls and it was too hot to dance, even if there had been room to.

What events those nights were! Everybody from local musicians like Elvin Bishop and Mike Lipskin to suburban teenagers flarbed out on sopors to a flock of weird Mansonoid chickies between 10 and 20 years old in transparent dresses and about $10,000 worth of turquoise jewelry to equally weird bikers to an old black guy named Doc who likes to talk about Texas and how to grow popcorn to various members of the Cody entourage to a cowboy or two to local country pickers ...

Ray took care of booking and so forth, and consequently the second bands were usually pretty good, too. Up-and-coming country-rock bands like Tokapila from Sacramento, a strange folk-rock group called Oganookie, local faves like Alice Stuart & Snake and Knee Deep (formerly the Crabs), a guitarist from a local country TV show, Billy Charles and, iribetween sets, Dave the Juggler juggling balls, frisbees, and — gulp — flaming torches, or Bill White, a 60-year-old landscape gardener for the state, playing hoedown tunes on harmonica. One night the Wheel just played three long sets, and a (working!) television set was raffled off. Admission was, for the longest time, $1.50, which got you in and entitled you to a free beer.

But' the best part was that you could get out there and shake it till you break it, drink up, and come back for more.

TexasPJayboy Rag

Lest you have been harboring any wrong ideas, let me set you straight: Asleep At The Wheel bears absolutely no resemblance to Poco, nor are they particularly like Commander Cody. They are a Western Swing band.

Western Swing was a form of music that started in Texas in the 30’s, and reached its greatest popularity in California in the 40’s. It’s the “western” half of country and western, pioneered by such artists as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Moon Mullican, king of the hillbilly piano players (who taught Jerry Lee everything he knows), Tennessee Ernie Ford in his early days, and little-known artists like Hank Penny and Mel Cox. Big Western Swing bands like Spade Cooley’s and Bob Wills’ often featured clarinets, saxophones, and trumpets along with the piano, guitars (steel, rhythm, and lead, or “take-off’), accordian, vocalists, and two to four fiddles. Merle Haggard, to name but one, has been immensely influenced by it, and even cut a fantastic album called A Tribute To the Best Damn Fiddle Player In The World using ex-Texas Playboys. Bob Wills is about the last living star in the field, and he is nearly immobilized by a number of strqkes. (Hank Penny is reportedly running a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, but I wrote him a fan letter and never heard a word.)

Western Swing is much more jazzy than Nashville C&W, with an off-beat that pushes the music along in a way you’d expect more from Count Basie than Conway Twitty. There is a lot of instrumental soloing, and at its best, it’s hot, hot, hot!

The Wheel also does straight-ahead Nashville-style country music, and their' original tunes are written in both styles. “Space Buggy Boogie” is a swing tune, while “Before You Stopped Loving Me” could show up on the country charts tomorrow. Probably will, in fact. For make no mistake about it — while the band loves you long-haired creeps out there, they also love the people who think CREEM is what separates out of milk and think Jimmy Dickens plays better guitar than Jimi Hendrix.

Poor Folks Stick Together

(Reprise)

One of the best things that happened at the Longbranch was that the band finally got a piano player, in the person of Floyd Domino, who was born and raised near Berkeley, and started hitching East one day. He got as far as Stevensville, Montana, a town with four bars, two of which have pianos. He settled there and played piano' on weekends in one of them, boogie-woogie and taught piano during the week. On a visit home, he dropped in at the Longbranch, and a week later he was in the band.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 39.

Another epoch-making event occurred when Stoney Edwards agreed to appear at the Longbranch one night. The event was publicized on the local country music station, but not many of their listeners made it that night, and the crowd was just about the usual one. Stoney wasn’t all that confident when he mounted the stage, backed by his latest Poor Folks, who included Cody’s old steel player, the West Virginia Creeper. Two songs into the set, though, he had them conquered. At the end of the set, the audience just would not let him off. After about the fourth encore, Stoney had to beg them to let him go, since his voice was about gone, and finally they relented. A whole new flock of Stoney Edwards fans gathered around him, seeking autographs and shaking his hand. To put it mildly, he was overwhelmed by it all.

They Built the First Atomic Bomb in Tennessee

All summer long, the band dickered with United Artists Records, which had just re-opened their Nashville office under the direction of Kelso Herston, and finally, just before the important Deejays’ Convention in mid-October, they signed. The Convention is an important part of the commercial life of country music, with deejays coming from all around the country to be wined and dined by the record companies who put on shows in the Municipal Auditorium for the purpose of showing off old and new acts. As soon as Asleep signed, they were allotted a place on the UA show, which opened the Convention.

I got to my motel late and had just enough time to note that the guitarshaped swimming pool had been drained, but rain had filled up part of it, and a healthy mess of green stuff was growing there. Grabbing a cab, I zoomed off the Municipal where, since UA had forgotten to register me (and the band!) as a participant, I sneaked in through the garbage room. Once by the stage area, I was introduced to my first Nashville celebrity, Buddy Spicher, super-session fiddler, who, along with back-up vocalists the Nashville Edition, would be aiding the acts on the show. He had rehearsed with the Wheel, and had been so impressed that he demanded to play on their album. “He ain’t exactly hurting for sessions, either,” Ray noted.

The show got off to a slow start. Billy Bob Bowman, aka Biff Collie, UA’s Nashville Promo man, MC’d. Billy Mize exemplified what a whole lot of acts would be doing by singing the Eagles’ “Take It Easy.” Country music seems to be undergoing an identity crisis, and a lot of old and new rock hits are making the charts in slightly different versions. Then Doc and Merle Watson did some clean guitar picking and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band took the stage. Louder than any body’d ever heard in that town, they did a slick, facile, showy, and emotionally empty set, with fiddler John McEuen springing around on one foot like Doug Kershaw. Since the band at least put on a show, and because the audience was shocked, there was thunderous applause. I was worried — how could the Wheel follow them? Jack Reno took the stage and struggled through “Hitching A Ride,” and then the Wheel set up.

Ray looked more scared than I’d ever Seen him, and Chris looked like the wooden Indian maid Hank Williams’ cigar-store Indian Kaw-Liga fell in love with. “Hello,” said Ray, “we’re Asleep At The Wheel,” and they launched into the Ernest Tubb classic “Driving Nails In My Coffin.” The applause was weak. Next Leroy sang one of his own tunes, “Hillbilly Nut,” which went over a little better, no doubt because the tale of the country boy attempting to cope with the city hit home. Then Chris took the third and last song, another original about a country singer who lets fame go to his head, “Your Downhome Is Uptown.” When Chris is on, she has a voice that can go as deep and mellow as a viola’s lower range and bring it right up into a clear, powerful, bell-like soprano, but she was scared and it showed. The sound crew fucked up bad, and Floyd’s piano solo was lost, as were the backup singers. When it was over, they got off stage, and we split without hearing Del Reeves or Slim Whitman. They were expected to show up at a party at UA’s Nashville studio, the Sound Shop, on Division Street near the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Chris, Lucky, Gene, Floyd, and I piled into a cab. The mood was one of resignation — they’d done their best, under the circumstances, and they didn’t seem to have gone over too well.

I didn’t even want to try and talk to Ray, because there was a large black cloud over his head. We got to the studio, and shortly Ray arrived, walked up to the portable bar, and slugged down three huge shots of whiskey in a row. We sat around making small talk and waiting for the deejays to arrive. Pretty soon they started trickling in, and Ray was standing alone, glowering, when some guy walked up to him with an outstretched hand, saying, “Well, if it isn’t file new Ernest Tubb.” He couldn’t have picked a nicer thing to say — not only does Ray look a lot like him, but Tubb is clearly one of his big heroes. All Ray could do was stammer “You, you mean, — you liked us?” “HELL YES,” the deejay bellowed, whomping him on the back. Ray caught his breath. “Well all right!” And from there on in the convention went just swell, with the band signing hundreds of autographs, including several in Braille for a young blind girl, and deejays telling Leroy how much they liked “that song about the nut,” and asking everybody when the record would be out. It was grand.

Honky Tonkin*

Broadway is dying. As John Hartford has noted, they’re tearing down the Grand Ole Opry, and nobody eats at Iinebaugh’s anymore. The Merchant’s Hotel is closed, leaving its resident crew of winos, has-beens and would-bes to find a more copacetic climate, and across the street from Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop, a huge storefront lies vacant. Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge is more for tourists than pickers now, but there are still signs of life if you choose to look around. Little Roy Wiggins’ Music City sells fine steel guitars, and during Convention time, features some of the finest picking you’ll ever hear. Tubb’s is one of the most complete country record stores in the nation, and Buckley’s across the street offers amazing rare 78’s for a buck apiece. But' the Ryman Auditorium, long-time home of the Opry, is being torn down, and in 1974 the show will move to Opry land, a plastic amusement park outside town. This move is being sponsored by several local businessmen, including Roy Acuff, whom some consider a country legend, and others an obnoxious honky whose prime is long past. “He said he’d personally remove the first brick from the Ryman if it’d get the Opry out there any quicker,” snarls Chris in a voice that leaves no doubt as to what might happen to Acuff if they were to meet. And once the Opry’s gone from Broadway, it will turn back into the Skid Row it’s been trying to be for so long.

All week long, it’s seemed like a party alternating between Cody’s digs at the Holiday Inn (John Sinclair was along for the trip) and the record company parties and hospitality suites in the hotels. By Sunday night it’s all over, and the deejays and bands are pulling out of town. The Wheel is staying, though, to make their record under the eye of veteran swing producer Tommy Allsup, and I’m gonna go out for one last night on the town before I split.

Ray and Hank, a fat, jolly steel player from Jim Ed Brown’s band, show up at the motel loaded to the gills and suggest we head, off to a jam session at Deeman’s Den, a funky Boradway bar around the corner from the Merchant’s Hotel. We walk in and a band is playing, but half of them are sick with flu and more than glad to hand over the stage to these new pickers, so at intermission Ray, Hank, and Bobby Herold, a local guitarist, along with §ome other people, set up on stage. Two pedal steel guitars, drums, guitar, and Ray on bass. Members of the Wheel and Cody’s band show up to jeer, and in no time they’re off. “Here’s little number we recorded in ... The Merchant’s Hotel!” Laughter. “One take!” “Yeah,” says Ray, “after we finished recording it a wino came up and stole our instruments.” And into the whackiest version of “Loving Her Was Easier” that you’ll ever hear, with Ray making up the lyrics and Hank laughing so hard that he looks like a beet, he’s so red. Next victim is that bar-band classic, “Proud Mary,” a song that Merle Haggard’s band has written into their contract they will not play under any circumstances. But it’s quickly brought out of the mire as the steel players get into a duel, with breathtaking licks zooming around and grins spreading across the faces of all concerned. By the end of the set, everybody’s so weak with laughter they can hardly applaud. Somebody calls “Last call fer alky-haul” and we stumble out into deserted rain-soaked Broadway.

Epilogue:

Space buggy Boogie

Cody’s steel player, Bobby “Blue” Black, and his brother own a recording studio just south of the San Francisco airport, and it’s a Sunday morning as members of the Wheel, Bill Kirchen from Cody’s band, and some friends gather to hear the first mix of the Wheel’s album. It’s beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Three fiddlers — Buddy Spicher, Johnny Gimble (who once played with Bob Wills), and Cody’s Andy Stein — fill out the sound admirably, and every performance is sparkling fresh. The hard work in Nashville has paid off, and when the tape is over, Kirchen slaps Ray on the back. “You got yourself a hit record, boy.” Ray is relieved, as is everybody, that it sounds so good. As I’m leaving, Ray calls to me, “Hey, Ed! You still gonna write that article?” Sure. “Tell ’em we still need a fiddle player.” Okay. They still need a fiddle player. But even without one, they’re the finest country and Western Swing band in the land.

Always wear a great big smile, never do look sour

Travel round the country, playing music by the hour “Take Me Back to Tulsa,” Bob Wills