One Man's Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell

III. Sweat Like a Boxer

10 III SweatLikeaBoxer The Old Quarter was a rundown, twostorystucco -over-brickblockhouseofabuildingwithironbarsacross broken, cloudy windows. If you played in Houston, this was the gig everyone wanted. The entrance was ten-foot-high barn doors that could not be locked without a chain and a stout two-by-four. They hung below a rusting, wrought-iron signboard swinging in the sticky humidity from the Gulf of Mexico. The joint on the forgotten corner of Austin and Congress streets lookedlikeanabandonedbuilding.Itwaswithinearshotofthenightly howling that issued from behind the bars of the Harris County Jail for Women. Across a block of broken cement making a patchwork wasteland of parking lots was what you would certainly call several floors of America’s most pissed-off gentlewomen. Dale Sofar, one of the owners of the Old Quarter, drove a Jeep to the club every night with a pooch named Pup next to him and a keg of beer in the back. With a water bowl behind the bar, the little dog confidently roamed the block around the club like a policeman taking names. Inside, the dog would promenade on top of the bar before falling asleep in the middle of our sets. Ownership of this four-footed Sweat Like a Boxer � 11 lady-killer seemed a touch murky between Dale and the other owner, Wrecks Bell. Wrecks lived upstairs in a room with nothing but a mattress on the floor, a bass guitar without a case in the corner, Lightnin’ Hopkins records everywhere, and a water bowl for Pup. Like the dog, I was there every evening, gig or no, hauling spent kegs or stacking boxes of empty beer bottles for Joy Llewellan and Jan Holly, the young ladies who bartended. When they didn’t have busywork I’d still be there, playing pool for money on a quarter table. More often than not, I made more money shaking down the permapressed tourists who unwisely challenged me to a game of nine-ball than I did downstairs playing for the cover charge. But play I would. Most any night of the week. The problem back then was that not many wanted to hazard into the old part of town to watch a kid learn how perform his own songs, regardless of how hip and cool it was. One night I teed it up for a skeleton crew of an audience, maybe eight people. In the front row there were a couple of collegiate-looking types. A blonde girl, but not too blonde, and a tall guy, but not too tall, sat there squeaky clean. They were so suburban they glowed. In front of them on a pedal-sewing-machine frame converted into a bar table sat a large birthday cake with lots of green icing. As I completed the first low-key, downtown, 45-minute set of the night, the couple giggled and complimented me on the wonderful music. The disarming young girl said, “It’s Buster’s birthday. You’ve made it so nice with your music, we want you to have a piece of his birthday cake.” So I said, “Sure. And thanks.” She replied, “Have a lot of the green icing. I made it myself.” Ten minutes later I heard a buzzing in my ear. After a short while, I realized it wasn’t going away anytime soon. I looked around the bar, and our youthful couple had made the rounds of the place, giving 12 � One Man’s Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell large pieces of that cake to everyone who was interested, including one of the owners. When I belatedly began the next set, I felt like I was in an elevator going up. I looked down in front and the young couple, back in place with a large empty cake pan, could have been posing for a horror movie. I looked at them as squarely as I could under the circumstances and said, “You didn’t, did you?” They nodded up and down slowly, as if in a trance. They were demoniacally smiling but their faces weren’t moving. They had put LSD in the green icing. After the shock wore off that the entire bar had been stoned by a couple of kids from West Houston, the rest of that night the jukebox played the tunes and the beer was free from a bartender seemingly without a care in the world. I...