Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

47. Austin 1962, Fort Davis 2011

✥ 47 ✥ Austin 1962, Fort Davis 2011 Du rin g t h e su m m er of 1962, I lived in a small garage apartment behind a big house on Nueces Street in Austin. I was ostensibly taking a crash course in German at the University of Texas so that I could pass the German translation exam then required of all PhD candidates. My next-door neighbors up the alley were a group of people my age who inhabited a much larger garage apartment, a warren of rooms and staircases that everyone called the Ghetto. Its residents that summer included Janis Joplin, Powell St. John, Lanny and Ramsey Wiggins, John Clay, Tary Owens, Wally Stopher and his brother Tommy, and Tommy’s girlfriend , Olga, and several other people who came and went. Most of them were musical. Joplin, St. John, and Lanny Wiggins had a band called the Waller Creek Boys that played at a nearby bar, Threadgill’s Filling Station; John Clay played the banjo and wrote songs about the small West Texas town he grew up in. Some of the Ghettoites later moved to San Francisco and had professional recording careers. Powell St. John formed a band called Mother Earth which cut several albums with Tracy Nelson, and he is still writing songs. Janis Joplin, of course, skyrocketed to fame after the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. But that summer no one was famous or even thought about being famous. We just thought about having a good time. Part of our good time was Friday night fish fries at the Ghetto. One of the residents was a fellow named Don Kleen, who loved to fish. On Friday mornings he would take a cane pole, hike down to ✥ 185 a spot on the Colorado River called Deep Eddy, and fish all day. In the evening, we would gather under the huge shade trees in the packed-earth yard of the Ghetto and eat what Dan caught, washed down with cold beer. The Waller Creek Boys would get out their instruments—Joplin played the autoharp at the time. John Clay would pick up his banjo, and we would all sit back under the trees and listen to the music, singing along on the choruses. Clay had two songs he would render in a high, whining voice: “On the Road to Mingus,” about a fatal drag race between Mingus and Strawn; and another one about a woman named Brenda whose husband ran around. We never tired of hearing them. One night Joplin sang Woody Guthrie’s “Roll On, Columbia” so loudly that the police came. It was an idyllic summer that changed the direction of my life. Among other things I never learned German, and I never went back to graduate school. I was reminded of that summer one evening last spring when Todd Jagger organized what he called a house party at the Cow Camp in Fort Davis. In spite of its primitive-sounding name, the Cow Camp is a large and elegant home on Court Street in Fort Davis, originally built in 1883 by rancher Samuel A. Thompson and now owned by Mark and Irene Fillman. One of the best features of the Cow Camp is a big tree-shaded backyard with a concrete slab and a small stage, and this is where the house party took place. The featured performer was Bob Livingston, founder of the Lost Gonzo Band, which backed up both Michael Martin Murphey and Jerry Jeff Walker. My wife and I and our houseguests got there to find about two dozen people sitting under the trees, sipping cold beer and listening to Livingston singing “London Homesick Blues” and “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” and a dozen other songs from the 1970s. Livingston is a consummate performer and he put his best into every song, even though the audience was small. He talked a little between songs, and at one point he told how Ray Wiley Hubbard 186 ✥ came to write “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” He said that in the early 1970s he and some other musicians were visiting Hubbard at his cabin outside of Red River, New Mexico, and they ran out of beer. Hubbard volunteered to go to a bar in town and get a case. In the bar he was confronted by a woman in her fifties who taunted him about his long hair and leather pants and called...