Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley

Chapter 47: Loma Ranch

47 Loma Ranch A s the keeper of the Blaze Foley timeline, Kevin is my guide to Blaze’s last decade in Texas, providing the roadmap to places he frequented. This morning we’re on our way to Loma Ranch, where Blaze and Gurf recorded in 1980. Apparently the ranch became a refuge for Blaze in the years that followed, a place he returned to again and again. Kevin and I drive through countryside Dep and I once traversed, where the Pedernales meanders beside winding back roads and the dark green mesquite trees hold down the dust. The bracing cold at the cemetery has lifted as quickly as it set in, leaving these hills with a warm patina of spring green over their scrabbled surface. Moving through time as well as space, Kevin and I piece together Blaze’s history after Houston. He returned to Austin in ’81. Hardly anyone called him Dep any more. He’d landed back in Austin the way he’d intended to in ’76—as Blaze Foley, with a reputation for world-class gallivanting and a battered attaché case full of beautiful songs. Memory merges with myth as I picture him in his early thirties, cleanshaven and handsome with a mournful blue gaze. By all accounts, his drinking binges had accelerated. No longer writing at a furious clip, he was intent on being a character. His pockets were full of trinkets and aluminum-foil “mood” rings to give away, and he’d made duct tape a way of life. For formal occasions, he would bring out the Duxedo, a tuxedo decorated with the shiny stuff, his ultimate antidote to rhinestone lapels. Soon after his return to Austin, Blaze fell for Mandy Mercier, an aspiring singer/songwriter and musician. They would live together on and off for two years. After their break-up, Blaze perfected his run on the couch circuit, flopping with friends for days or months, unless he was with a lover. Adamant about giving his all to his music, he maintained that a day job would blunt his 183 184 | Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley ambition, not to mention curb his gypsy feet. He’d disappear for weeks. Few in Austin knew he was going back to Georgia in the summers, to help Glyn build the multiplying sheds and decks at Waller. “Georgia was one of his best-kept secrets,” Kevin remarks. “Except in his songs.” By the early ’80s Blaze no longer played in public many of the tunes he’d begun in the tree house. The rare nights he performed in Austin, his shows were packed. His appeal stemmed from his honesty, from that deep sorrowful voice and the seamless way he fused with his music. Drunken, unpredictable behavior would cost him many gigs, but the times he got himself there, the room would be filled with songwriters, come to learn from a master. Kevin didn’t have to tell me this. Every musician I’ve met here so far has mentioned Blaze’s legendary artistry. I turn to Kevin in the car. “Listen. I need to ask you a favor. Would you please—please—stop introducing me as Blaze’s wife?” “Why?” he stammers. “I’m sorry but it’s what feels most true. Don’t people tell you that he talked about you? That you were the love of his life?” “Yeah, so?” I reply, trying to conceal the comfort, and confusion, these remarks had caused. “So,” Kevin goes on patiently. “Your lives were entwined. You were soul mates.” “That still doesn’t make me his wife.” “What about the broom-jumping?” “What about it?” I grumble. “You know too much.” Kevin lifts a hand, smiling blandly. “That’s what I’m here for.” He knows my lame protest stems from a reluctance to make any claim among these longtime devoted friends of Blaze. No doubt he’s also guessed that secretly I don’t mind it. The title places me squarely in Blaze’s life, lending me identity, even stature, among strangers. I’m still clinging to the faces others draw on me, though the fact that we jumped over a broom does seem to carry a lot of weight around here. At Loma Ranch, John comes out to greet us. Producer by profession and dreamer by nature, he has lived here with his wife, Laurie, for decades. His eyes swim huge and blue behind wire-rim glasses, and the beaming energy of...