1978, backstage in Austin, that’s my lovely wife, Lois Richwine, and the blonde with the Skunks T-shirt draped on her shoulders is Debbie Harry. I met Debbie and Chris Stein outside the rock club Mother Earth, while handing out flyers for the Skunks’ gig at Raul’s, and I happened to be carrying a pet skunk at the time. They were intrigued, quite friendly, and they came to the gig. Clem Burke, Frank Infante and the keyboard player (his name is slipping my mind, but a very fun guy) jammed with us. That same year, other celebrity jammers included Elvis Costello, Pete Thomas, Eric Johnson, Van Wilkes, and I forget who else. The Clash was the following year.
Posts tagged the skunks
my heart is burnin’ like a witch at the stake/ your body moves like a poisonous snake / jump around like an ape at the zoo / look out when I get my hooks in you / do the earthquake / do the earthquake shake / do the earthquake / do the earthquake shake…
The Skunks, my band, in 2008, the year we were indicted by the Austin Music Hall of Fame. Left to right, Jon Dee Graham, Jesse Sublett, Billy Blackmon. Photo by Todd Wolfson.
Yes, I am smiling because I dig playing bass. Especially my Fender bass. No, I don’t really think about any other kind of electric bass. For me, if you say, “electric bass,” I think “Fender Precision.” Call me crazy, I don’t care.
B. B. King, relaxing before a performance at the late, lamented Club Foot in Austin, Texas, having chosen a seat according to his preference in Austin legendary rock bands, the Skunks, apparently agreeing with the sentiment that “The Skunks helped put Austin on the rock n’ roll map.” Or maybe that’s just where he felt like sitting.
RIP Joe Gracey, deejay, producer, songwriter, musician. This is a photo layout from the Daily Texan coverage of a benefit for Joe at the Armadillo World Headquarters in 1978. Joe started recording my band, The Skunks, when the band had been together a mere four months. But we were hot shit. Also shown, Asleep at the Wheel and Alvin Crow.
Never the Same Again: A Rock N Roll Gothic, was published in 2004. I decided to write this book as a way of surviving throat cancer, because the odds were pretty bad, about four percent, that I would in fact survive. I figured I finally had enough hardcore plots of my own to write about, because besides this crazy fight I had just begun, with 13 1/2 hours of surgery, followed by many months of chemo and radiation and recovery, I had a few other stories to tell. I knew that the story of the Austin punk scene had not been written about in a full length book, and I was there at Ground zero in 1977, with Kathy Valentine, Carla Olson and Marilyn Dean, in a band called The Violators, plus, simultaneously, I started a band with Eddie Munoz and Billy Blackmon called the Skunks, and we pretty much launched the punk / new wave scene at Raul’s here in Austin. And then, a couple of years before that, when I was out of town playing in a different band with Eddie, my girlfriend was murdered by a serial killer here in Austin. So… I decided it was time to go back and investigate a few things. If not for my wife, Lois Richwine, my son, Dashiell, my doctor, Melba Lewis… and many other great friends, I wouldn’t have been able to write the book… in fact, I’d be dead now. Talk about some dark blues, man, oh man…. Anyway, it’s a pretty good book. The music parts are pretty funny.
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A bluesy, jazzy conjuring of Bryan Ferry, maybe, or a letter to a wicked lover, who is bound to come to no good, because he or she is no damn good, minor key groove, with me playing and singing all the parts, recorded here in my tiny project studio in the East Travis Heights neighborhood of Austin, Texas.
