NOTES FROM A DOUG SAHM JOURNAL

Doug Sahm, 31-year-old musical soldier of fortune, sank back into a patch of crimson clover in a sun-dappled field in the secluded hills outside Austin, cradled a four-inch Texas Tamale in one hand and exhaled at length. “Brother, this it,” he half-choked on the smoke and waved a spidery arm at the woods around him. “I’ve come home. I mean, Texas, you have to fight for this shit, the hills and the freedom but it’s worth it. I’m here and I’m stayin’.”

Halfway down the hillside was his current home base, a rambling barn-like affair of a club called the Soap Creek Saloon, an [extremely informal joint where he was”$erving as the house band and playing three nights a week.

Just across the rise of the next weed-choked hill was a house he was in the process of buying, a refuge hidden away. After his latest, adventure that week — a mindless bust and roughing up by police in San Antonio — he wanted seclusion for a while and he wanted to call the shots.

“I just want,” he motioned with the tamale, “to groove with my kids and my band and do what we want, man. My house in Monterey, man, it’s beautiful, but this is what’s real now. And we can still pick our gigs. Houston and Dallas, there’s five grand a shot waitin’ there when we want to go, and Jerry Garcia called today and wants us at JFK stadium with him. And July Fourth we’ll do Drippin’ Springs with Willie and Waylon and Kris and Leon.

“This scares ‘em all, man, us sittin’ down here in a little club, it’s like a group just startin’ out, like the Sir Douglas trip all over again but we can still sell out a gig anywhere and this scares ‘em, it ain’t spozed to .be like this, us down here on a farm after doin’ the Philharmonic, but this is our trip.” He .passed the tamale to drummer George Rains, who set down hSs Pearl Beer and nodded assent.

The mercurial Doug Sahm, who had just whizzed through the Eastern seaboard with his latest band, a versatile honkey-blues-swing-Quintet outfit, was back, as he said, in his patented Texas Groove — a nebulous mental frame bounded by Oat Willie’s Hernandez’ Cafe, and the Soap Creek.

He had just completed another album, a quick follow-up to the Doug Sahm*and Band venture, and a single, “Nitty Gritty,” and decided he and the band needed a breather. “It’s heavy,” he wound up his monologue and we traipsed back down the hill to Soap Creek for more beer and a few games of pool.

Sahm wrapped his gangly frame around a barstool, mopped his brow with one sleeve of his red Cisco Pike shirt and brushed his straw hair out of his bony, angular face: “Yeah, brother, this is it for me, home”

Well, I had heard that before, several times in point of fact, but there was no denying his sincerity. Doug has zipped in and out of Texas so many times that you can blindfold him, put him behind a wheel, and, depending on the “vibrations” he’s getting, he’ll be in New York or California in 24 hours. The last time he blitzed town, I came home to find a message to call him at Oat Willie’s Department Store, which serves as his Austin office. I called and was told that he had just stepped out. He called the next morning, from San Francisco: “It’s a far-out thang, man, I can’t ‘splain it, I just needed to get back in my California groove for awhile.”

Boz Scaggs, at Celebration of Life Festival, 1971, Louisiana: “I love him, but everybody knows about Doug, he’s just a little cat running around the fringes.” Scaggs’ drummer George Rains was standing beside him.

Doug Sahm, Austin, 1972: “Yeah, Boz ain’t goin’ nowhere and George knows it. I love the cat but George knows my music is where it’s at now.” Rains rejoins Sahm.

In his musical ups and dpwns during the past two decades, Sahm has had a certain amount of trouble keeping a band together. Many reasons, but mostly his volatile nature arid his reluctance to tour. Now, however, he’s got his bedrock back: Rains drumming, Jack Barber, the San Antonio barber and bassist; Augie Meyer on keyboards and honk organ; and the great Chicano tenorman, Rocky Morales; plus guest shots by 57-year-old fiddler and crooner J. R. Chatwell and harmony singing by Atwood Allen.

Their first appearance at Soap Creek was the social event of the season. Morales hocked his spare tire to get gasoline for the drive from San Antonio. Cave-dwelling hippies who hadn’t seen the light of day since 1967 came to dance and discover that they really like beer after all. Willie Nelson was lured out of his refuge in the hills to play rock ‘n’ roll with Doug. I stood outside during an exploding version of “She’s About A Mover” and watched the building shake. Doug’s raw voice carried to the highway, half a mile away. The show was sold out in advance and more than one young girl was overheard offering to ball the doorman if only he would let her in.

Doug, long-distance, late 1972: “I’ve been gettin’ outside myself to see myself. I’ve been doin’ like early Dylan, only country, but country like it was before it was hip to like country, know what I mean?”

The usual temptation with Sahm is to let him write your story for you. Writers are lazy, after all, and he’s only too glad to discourse for hours, tangentially touching on everything from baseball to Watergate. That’s why stories on him usually amount to a writer tiirning on his tape recorder and giving Doug a cue sign. Then his incredible, convoluted jetstream of talk is transcribed, an introduction is tacked on along with a little description and some kind of profound ending and, presto, there’s your story. You can mfiil it in and go get stoned. What it comes down to is the old hack sportswriter ploy: you take the play-by-play furnished you in a football press box, add a lead to it (“The immovable force of Downy Tech finally went down to vainglorious defeat at the hands of Worcester Middle A & P today, 73-0 before 25,022 rain-soaked fans in soggy Whimp v Memorial Stadium.), call it in and go get drunk.

That’s a pretty simplistic approach to anything, and it obviously doesn’t begin to explain anything, not football or Sahm.

To start with, he’s the product of the sort of odd musical upbringing that just doesn’t happen anymore. San Antonio, in the 1940s and 1950s, more so than now, was a tri-cultural city, although still backward and infused with a lingering frontier rawness.

His family was part of the white minority, although they lived at times in the largely Chicano West Side and the black East Side. Each was virtually a separate city with strong, independent musical traditions. Doug learned to move so freely in all three areas that the boundaries for him became nonexistent. In his family’s milieu, he was a child prodigy in drafty shitkicker honky-tonks, learning steel guitar, fiddle and guitar before he Was ten years old. Later he went into the blues clubs, which were just as tough as all the cliches you’ve heard about them: beer and wine often merging with blood on the wooden floors, razor fights out back and T-Bone Walker letting little Doug Sahm sit in on stage.

Doug at the bar at Soap Creek: “Dig it, man, even Garcia now has a colintry band. Where do you think he got it, this country thang? That’s raht brother. And John Fogerty? And even Leon, callin’ hisself Hank Wilson now? Thank about it, brother.”

Besides the C & W joints and the country amateur radio shows and the black clubs, Sahm discovered the West Side’s churning, insistent Chicano music and he became Doug Saldana, picking up the teeming rhythms of his brown brothers. Freddie Fender’s view of the barrio as desolation row: “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights”; Flaco Jiminez’ accordion rolling out endless Mexican polkas; Rocky Morales and his compadres inventing Mexican bop; and the bajo sexto music from the border; all of it pouring out of sad, faded tile beer joints the size of your living room. These clubs are intense. The drinking is serious, the music is serious, and so is the fighting. The black clubs had the cuttings; in the brown joints, the air was rent with bullets and the bandstand was often the most dangerous place to be when bullets started flying and bottles of Jax starting carooming off heads. The fights then were mostly over women: tod^y, the West Side is all but inaccessible to outsiders because of junk killings, random murders in the petty heroin wars. Doug doesn’t go back to San Antone much anymore; the cops in Balcones Heights are after him; the younger Chicanos who never heard “Mover” don’t know who he is; and the brown and black clubs don’t favor white faces. He’s still recognized on the street in the deep West Side where the Chicanos im their late 20s and early 30s remember him; but this new generation, my, my.

In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, though, he ruled in San Antone, supplanting the city’s first generation of rock ‘n’ rollers — Johnny Owen and Ricky Aguiree — on the bandstands of the Tiffany Lounge and the Blue Note. It was high school music in its Finest punkoid form: the triplet-dominated, slow, whiney, parking and making-out songs and blues-based shuffles and screamers. All the while, he was busy assimilating the C & W and blues and Chicano music he played into a new form and it burst on the scene in ‘64 and ‘65 as the Sir Douglas Quintet, the first (along with the Beau Brummels) of the long-haired American groups.

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The police had their eye on them, though, and the bust occurred at the Corpus Christi airport. The rest is hysteria. Doug and part of the band flee to California and become San Francisco hippies. Doug’s musical schizophrenia becomes evident in a series of bands and albums: the Honkey Blues big band, Chicano rock with Augie Meyer, and country music. In 1971, Doug returns to Texas and cuts his best album, The Return of Doug Saldana: separates from wife, freaks out, disappears, later emerges with juicy Atlantic contract, and records with Dylan, Dr. John, Fathead Newman, etc. His three audiences — the rockers, blues-heads, and cowpie fans — can’t agree on the quality of the album.

Jump back to a chill Texas morning. I am awakened by banging on the door. It is Doug, in new cowboy duds. He carries a stack of records in a George Harrison box. As I fumble with preparing coffee, he bounces around the room and talks: just got back from New York,, the album is far out and he has the unmixed lacquers with him. I burn two fingers as he slips on a disc: “Far out, man, you’re the first person outside New York City to hear this. Dig, here’s some songs that won’t be on the album and here’s Bob.” He plays snatches of a dozen songs while pacing the room and talking at 78. Got to run, he says, and grabs up the records and trots out. Wait, I bleat piteously, let me get my tape recorder. Too late.

Another morning in 1972: it is 2 in the ayem and I am finishing up another shitty short story and' getting ready to burn it and ship the ashes to Philip Roth when I hear a faint tapping at the door. Doug it is and I have never seen him so low. He is walking, rather than running, and he slumps into a chair, pulls desultorily at a beer. He is down; Doug Sahm has finally run out of gas: “I just don’t know, man.” We, talk a while, embarrassing stuff about Music and Life, and then wander outside, under the 180 panoply of crystalline stars and velvet sky. He gestures vaguely in the direction of the Big Dipper. “Texas, man,” he says and trails off. “I wanta get a place here and take care of my family.”

Doug, cruising with Jerry Wexler in a Lincoln en route to San Antonio: “It’s far out, man. I cain’t ‘splain it.” Wexler sagely nods.

Now we’re in New York several months later for his opening at Max’s Kansas City. Dopg loves New York, likes eating at the Brasserie, and just plain enjoys “bein’ back in the'Apple.” He starts every morning with a jog in Central Park, across the street from our hotel. Every afternoon, we bundle up and take the subway to Baggie’s for practice. The first afternoon, he carries a small suitcase, about the size of a typewriter case. I wonder about it but it slips my attention until we get to Baggies and he opens it to disclose: a gallon jar of fine Mexican tamale fixings. Two pounds. After the first five days in New York, there is only a pound left.

Doug gets worried: time to wire Texas for another shipment.

Two days later, Doug and band open at Max’s and the Sir Doug freaks outnumber the Dylattantes who were counting on Bob making an appearance. As usual, there are three main segments to the crowd: SDQ fanatics, country cats, and Honkey Blues nuts, and all of them request and get their favorites. It reminds Doug of the time, at the Fillmore West, when he had three different bands on stage.

Rocky Morales and Charlie McBurney, the San Antonio horns, go downstairs to order burgers. They have never heard about Max’s downstairs (never having been out of Texas before) and start getting skittish as the feathered, sequined inhabitants begin eyeing them. They grab up their burgers and beers and escape to the safety of the hotel.

Doug hangs around after his set to have a beer and we are talking upstairs when a stunning New York Fox closes in on him. Her eyes are flashing and her mink is pushed back off those creamy shoulders and her little rosebud tongue is fairly darting in and out. “That was beautiful, Doug” she breathes huskily and her hand starts wandering and there’s a hotel room number shining in each sultry eye. Doug turns away, “Yeah, far-out thanks.” The Fox makes a small moue of discontent with those luscious lips but sticks around, just in case.

An hour later, I meet her on my way out of Max’s. She stops me on the sidewalk. “Wheah,” she asks throatily, “Wheah’s the pahty? Theah is going to be a pahty, isn’t theah?”

Naw, I say, Doug’s calling his kids and then he’s gonna grab a sandwich and get some sleep.

From her expression, I can’t decide whether she’s going to cry or claw my eyes out. She stands there pondering and pulls the mink closely around her and I go back to the hotel to see if Rocky saved any beer.