Let me tell you, when we started out playing in Austin in the fall of 1967, 
besides being a weird bunch by ordinary standards, and only bunch doing original 
music on top of that, it tended to limit the venues, so to speak.  In fact 
'venue' was a word far in the future to be, like 'croissant' and 'software'. 
  Of course, our main place and musical home was the Vulcan Gas Company, at 
the corner of Congress and 4th street, considered, again at that time, to be 
well into skid row.  We played some frat parties, but they complained that 
they didn't know the lyrics to our songs, therefore could not sing them, 
sweetly or otherwise into the ears of their dates.  The Phi Psi frats were 
having a 'phi psychedelic party', no lie, and booked us to play our first 
frat show. They had epigrammatic art on the basement walls, where we set up, 
like 'LSD cures colds' and 'Tim Leary rules' and such.  So we thought, hey 
pretty cool. Then, as they say, things went south. They had a bath tub full 
of gin punch on the floor a few feet from our stuff, and an hour or so 
later, I happened to look down. The alcohol had run through the silly rag 
they hoped to plug the drain in, and the stuff was beginning to run into the 
bottoms of our speakers on the floor; also our cords were hanging in the 
stuff and we expected to be electrocuted momentarily. Nobody had told me 
about this kind of shit when I started out to be a rocker.  When Doug Sahm 
had encouraged me to get into rock music back in 1966 he must have forgotten 
to mention things like this could happen. It was to be just one of the first 
of many many learning experiences.  So we got that taken care of and got 
through and pretty much all the kids told us how they dug it etc.  But as we 
were packing our manager, Jack, spoke glumly 'well, I guess that's the last 
fraternity booking we'll ever get'.  And we said, wo, but they liked it.  
Well, what they had a problem with was with Suzy, who wasn't playing, but 
was nursing our two month old daughter, Sativa. Funny, it freaked out the 
college kids to see a baby nursed in public, but the old people who saw 
would come over and give us encouragement and let us know that this was how 
it used to be and a good thing. But look at what's on the walls, we cried.  
As it turned out we didn't play many frat gigs over the years, but still 25 
or 30 in Austin, and that many more in other places.  So to get back to the 
point of the story, it was hard to find places to play.  And was this a 
hostile environment for our 'scene' ?  The newspaper wouldn't even take ads 
from the Vulcan, not for any amount of money; and the local reviewer 
wouldn't even acknowledge our existence. For the sake of local peace let me 
emphasize that I am talking about almost four decades back, and many who 
began their relationships with enmity over the years became friends and 
mutual supporters, or as Jim Franklin has pointed out, it's where the heads 
and the necks meet.  Oh yeah, we got some press.  We were to play a lecture 
in the Architecture Dept. at UT on a Monday soon after school commenced, so 
it was mid-October.  The gig was for eight in the morning. Our guitar 
player, Bob Tom, had a Cadillac hearse, early 50's, and built like a tank; 
and so we went downtown at 7 in the morning to get our stuff from the 
Vulcan, where it was kept.  So we played our stuff as a 'lecture' and got 40 
bucks. Like, wow, ten apiece (don't laugh. you could eat pretty good for a 
week on that, again, at that time).  Next day we made the morning paper, 
front page. there was a headline about four inches maybe, to the effect that 
skid row had been lowered even more by the arrival of hippies.  The article 
railed angrily at 'sacrilegious hippies' driving sleepily in their hearse 
down Congress. What do they want from us, we were going to WORK you 
assholes.  Well, press is press and in the long run, probably helped.  Then 
we got an interesting offer.  We would play every Monday and Tuesday ay a 
club called The I.L. Club, in the heart of black east Austin.  Now, we had 
had a bad experience the first time we did an eastside gig.  A frat group 
wanted us to play at the Hideaway on east 19th, now east MLK.,  but the 
local blacks objected when they saw the fiddle, so much so that they paid us 
$100 to split.  I mean, we took the dough but it really pissed me off, and 
determined that nothing like that happen again.  So we concentrated on soul 
type material, still all original, but with a little of that Wilson Pickett 
edge.  And so we started doing these regular gigs and pretty soon had a good 
house going, with folks of all ages dancing away, and a contingent of 
classics and music profs from UT, including resident composer, Lothar 
Klien, who admitted sheepishly once to me how strange he felt to have once 
given me a B in a music appreciation course at UT, and now be utterly 
confounded trying to understand my constructions.  I think he went on to 
teach composition at Harvard.  so we played Monday and Tuesday nights, the 
Conqueroo had Wednesday, Little Ira and the Untouchables on Thursday, and 
the weekends folks like James Polk and bands featuring Johnny x Reed (again, 
no x yet) among others.  There was no shortage of theater either.  The 
drummer, Jerry, still worked at the State Hospital, and showed up still 
wearing the white uniform. Our bassist, Kenny, had had a famous incident 
involving an acid trip that ended with a nude bike ride.  Jerry was working 
on the recieving ward when the cops brought him in, so with Jerry playing in 
his work uniform was both ironic and bizarre. Bob Tom, meanwhile, had a part 
in the play, Billy Bud by Melville. His character, a sailor, gets killed in 
the first, and he would get to the club a little late and therefore still in 
costume.  Also, fans started bringing little Shiva and Buddha statues, 
photos that were psychedelic and other crazy stuff.  Instead of mike stands 
we used two old floor lamps from our house. each had three light sockets so 
we put in colored bulbs and left them kinda loose so they blinked with the 
movement of the old wooden stage.  We usually wound up making a decent wage, 
sometimes $40 a man.  Of course, back in the horse and buggy days of Austin 
rock, you didn't have three, four, or five bands in the same tiny club. But, 
on the otherhand, there were not to be public whiskey bars in Texas for 
another six or so years. Only beer and wine could be served, except at a 
private club, and it was all over at midnight or one am on Saturday.  And my 
overall strategy worked great. One night we had about 100 folks, crowded for 
that club, from young to old, and an old black man motioned for me to bend 
over to hear him while we were playing, and he said 'I just wants you to 
know, you can have any woman you wants here tonight'.  You might say, they 
were getting off. Every now and then the Conqueroo would get back to town 
after their gig at the Pussycat Club in San Antone, and would be hanging 
watching us do the work.  On one occasion we were just taking a break 
before a last set when a problem mushroomed up.  You see, Ed Guinn, who is 
Negro, was talking at a table to Sandy Lockett, who is white, but was the 
Conqueroo's  soundman and roady (another future word), and was saying how 
badly they needed another speaker cabinet made. Speaking ironically and 
facetiously, Sandy spurted out 'Why don't you get your nigger to do it?', 
meaning, of course, himself.  Now, when you use a word like that it brings a 
variety of reactions.  It was one thing in segregationist Tennessee in the 
late 40's, and quite another in a Texas prison in the mid 80's. And he never 
meant it to be overheard, this was a personal conversation between good 
friends.  But a waiter going by only heard the 'word'.  The black waiter 
grabbed Sandy, Ed grabbed the waiter, and pandemonium happened. Another 
local musician named Lafayette decided to jump in and all of a sudden Ed and 
Lafayette were into a fistfight.  I was still sitting at a table in the 
middle of the club when chairs started flying over my head.  The waiter was 
trying to hit Ed in the back with a chair.  I started knocking the chairs 
down trying to get the guy to quit, and then somebody said everybody get out 
so we did.  We were out in the parking lot, nobody wanted the cops to come, 
that would be bad news for everyone, so we were waiting to see what would 
happen when I realized that my fiddle was still open up on stage and 
anything could happen to it. I went cautiously in the backdoor, but not 
cautiously enough because I ran into a retreating Lafayette with a pistol in 
one hand and dragging a girl as a shield in the other.  I thought that was 
pretty cowardly, but he was already on probation and nobody wanted to see 
him go to prison.  So he jumped and I jumped and said hey I just need to get 
my fiddle, and luckily it was ok.   Just a simple word, loaded with 
connotation, can make tempers flare and fists fly.  I had been 'the Jew 
Communist janitor at the nigger lover student center' in Denton.   And you 
know what, I am a nigger lover, I even thought I might call a band 'The 
Niggerlovers' with a Brucian sense of irony, but I don't think most folks 
would understand.  I joined the NAACP in 1961 for one dollar, I think I 
better renew my membership.  I can't blame the black waiter for his reaction 
to hearing the word pronounced, especially by a white man an a black club, 
but at least nobody got shot or stabbed, Ed got more bruises than anyone in 
defending his friend/employee or as any rapper would say today, 'my nigger'.