Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley

Chapter 46: Texas Troubadour

46 Texas Troubadour D ecades later, I’m tormented by what I don’t know. I want to unravel the rest of his story, to see if and how our paths entwined beyond our last good-bye. Fleshing out his life, I take the torn shreds of fact I find and tack them onto our tattered history. Like Blaze, the truth is hard to pin down, and my efforts are confounded by his myth, of which he was the chief contributor. For instance, he liked to say he was born in Marfa—partly for the way it sounded, mostly because it made a better story for the hillbilly kid from Malvern, Arkansas, longing to be a Texas troubadour. Mike Fuller’s fully fledged flight as Blaze Foley would occur in Houston in the late ’70s, in tandem with Gurf Morlix. The two musicians had introduced themselves by other names at The Hole in the Wall in the summer of ’76. Dep had been intrigued by the name of the young guitarist’s band, The Goats of Arabia, as advertised on the dive’s marquee. Two years later, they would migrate together to Houston in a musical partnership that lasted three more. Since then, Gurf has gone on to produce albums for Lucinda Williams, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Mary Gauthier, not to mention his own, and his wideranging virtuosity is also the stuff of legends. These days Austin offers a Sunday phenomenon called gospel brunch, where musicians sing hallelujah before a restaurant’s breakfast crowd. This morning a gospel brunch is taking place on the patio of Maria’s Taco X-press on Lamar Boulevard, and Gurf Morlix will be playing there. I don’t guess we’ve seen each other in at least twenty-five years. We meet again on the sidewalk outside the café. Still boyish despite the gray hair falling to his shoulders, Gurf peers at me as if reorganizing his memories to fit the person before him. Reflected in his face is the possibility that he doesn’t remember me at all, but that matters less than the fact that we both knew and loved Dep, as he still calls him. 177 178 | Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley Gurf can recall Dep’s first gig in Austin. It was in the summer of ’77, just after Depty Dawg came back from Chicago for the last time, at happy hour in a disco behind The Hole in the Wall. As the intro to “I Won’t Be Your Fat Boy Any More,” Depty passed around a portrait from his Tex days at Sears. Gurf was impressed; Dep’s Blaze Foley was funny and touching, and his songs were good. “So when I went to Houston the following summer,” Gurf reminisces on the patio before the gospel brunch begins. “Dep just came along.” Gurf is the only person I’ve ever met about whom you can use “grin” and “terse” in the same sentence. “He attached himself to me.” Gurf grins tersely. “I don’t know why.” I think I do. Gurf would provide ballast for Blaze’s mercurial emergence, and Blaze, in turn, offered his new partner an expanding bag of original tunes. Houston was an enticement too. Spurred by Willie Nelson’s Texas-music revolution , the oil boomtown had become a haven for other gifted performers, like Lucinda Williams and the late Townes Van Zandt. Riding that creative wave, Blaze Foley’s prize band—The Beaver Valley Boys—became a reality at last. It wasn’t an all-girl band as Dep had envisioned in the tree house; nor did the players remain the same gig-to-gig. When he and Gurf played alone, Blaze would introduce his partner as The Beaver Valley Boy. Performance art was the heartbeat of the legend he was hell-bent on creating . He and Gurf invaded junk stores for outrageous wigs and costumes. During a show, Blaze might read the instructions off a tampon box, or expound from medical encyclopedias on hallucinogenic drugs. His sense of style was evolving too. Shedding the cowboy hat for a bowler, he wore buttondown shirts, colorful ties, and suspenders. His intricate finger-picking grew stronger, more skilled, and he was composing from morning till night. The new improved Blaze Foley caught the eye of some Texas oilmen with money to burn. Bankrolling a musician seemed like a groovy idea, so they formed Zephyr Records with Blaze Foley as their major...