What a Disc!
The best Texas music-ever-on CD.
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A West Texas contemporary of Holly’s, Wink’s Roy Orbison, was in on the bottom floor of the rock and roll movement by virtue of his earliest recordings at the Sun Studios in Memphis, where he ran with Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. That experience paid off once Orbison developed his voice—his operatic range could stop a train or jump start a romance. Roy Orbison For the Lonely: 18 Greatest Hits (Rhino) and the more thorough four-CD set, The Legends: Roy Orbison (CBS Special Products), capture the full drama of Orbison’s impassioned singing, surrounded by bombastic production values that rivaled Phil Spector. “Crying,” “It’s Over,” and “Pretty Woman” transcend the rock idiom and survive as timeless music.
By the mid-sixties, rock and roll took on a life of its own, an entrenched paragon of youth and rebellion that even adults began to accept as mainstream. Then along came psychedelia—rock music fueled by mind-altering drugs. While this movement didn’t come into prominence until the late sixties in San Francisco, Texas’ 13th Floor Elevators laid the groundwork in 1965 on their self-titled debut for Houston’s International Artists label. Unfortunately, legal claims have stymied efforts to reissue that record, so post-Elevator recordings by vocalist Roky Erickson must suffice. Erickson’s You’re Gonna Miss Me (Restless) reprises the Elevators’ big hit of the same name with a credible live version, as well as studio renderings of the rest of Erickson’s bizarre, demon-infested repertoire, backed by a band that traded out the Elevators’ electric jug for an electric autoharp.
The British Invasion inspired an entire generation of imitators who tried to look and talk like Englishmen as well as sound like them. The first but not the only Texas group to do so successfully was the Sir Douglas Quintet, whose signature back beat on their hit “She’s About a Mover” actually borrowed more from the Tex-Mex sounds of their native San Antonio than from the Brits. The Best of Doug Sahm & The Sir Douglas Quintet 1968—1975 (Mercury) features recordings largely made during the group’s northern California exile, including their third hit “Mendocino,” T-Bone’s “Papa Ain’t Salty,” the chip-kicker hoedown “Be Real,” and “At the Crossroads,” the best song ever written about Texas from a distance.
Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills (Columbia), featuring Janis Joplin, symbolized the San Francisco sound that put the progressive in rock. The band, history has borne out, was incidental: The show was Janis, who blossomed into full flower as the quintessential blues mama on this recording. Just listen to “Ball and Chain.”
The boogie beat that Big Brother locked on to was both streamlined and stripped down by the time members of a three-piece band called ZZ Top tackled it in the early seventies. Tres Hombres (Warner Brothers), their breakthrough album, freezes them in transition from a blues-rock club band to an arena act that eventually became a parody of itself. The appeal here is regionally specific lyrics set to boogie riffs borrowed from blues legends like Slim Harpo and John Lee Hooker, ultimately yielding songs like “La Grange,” a macho saga about the notorious brothel. A more thorough assessment of ZZ Top, easily the most popular Texas band of all time, as well as one of the biggest groups in the world (if record sales and concert tickets are the barometer), can be gleaned from The ZZ Top Six Pack (Warner Bros.), consisting of the group’s classic recordings up through El Loco, which presaged its transition to MTV mainstay.
The country-fried tour de force of Texas boogie (country division) is Joe Ely’s Musta Notta Gotta Lotta (MCA), the 1981 release by the champ of the roadhouse tradition. It blends accordion, pedal steel, Hammond B-3, and electric guitar into a driven dance sound that has lost none of its excitement in the past decade, while positing beautiful wordplay like “Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night?”
The importance of blues within the realm of rock was never more obvious than on Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble’s Couldn’t Stand the Weather (Epic), the second album by the prodigious guitarist. He was already on his way to mega-rock status, but Vaughan’s heart and fingers were still in the joints, manifested by his ominous reading of “Tin Pan Alley,” on which you can almost hear the guitar cutting flesh like a knife; a frenzied jump original, “Scuttle Buttin’”; and the only interpretation of a Jimi Hendrix song that literally twangs.
Also recommended: The Best of the Bobby Fuller Four (Rhino), which picks up where Holly left off with “I Fought the Law” (Fuller’s one big hit) and seventeen other three-chord tales of cars and girls; Pharoahization! The Best of Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs (Rhino), a slice of organ-driven party rock with wonderfully stupid lyrics, including “Wooly Bully” and “Ring Dang Doo”; Progressive Blues Experiment (One Way), the live-at-the-Vulcan-Gas-Company recording of Johnny Winter that started the white blues-rock guitar movement; the Vaughan Brothers’ Family Style (Epic), a humorous, pluralistic overview of rock, jazz, blues, and guitar sounds from the fifties through the eighties by the best modern guitar players in the state; the Butthole Surfers’ Locust Abortion (Touch and Go), a shining example of rugged individualism taken to the extreme, borrowing unequally from the 13th Floor Elevators, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Dada, and Marcel Duchamp—as irritating and as confrontational as electronically generated noise can get; and the equally disturbing We Can’t Be Stopped (Rap A Lot), from the Geto Boys, Houston’s (and Texas’) most notorious rappers.
Up From the Border
BEGINNING IN THE MID-THIRTIES, promoters and entrepreneurs recognized a sizable audience in South Texas for Spanish language music. Most of this was Mexican in origin, but as Hispanics fanned throughout the state, they soaked up the sounds of Czechs, Bohemians, Anglos, and blacks around them. Out of this mishmash came the last great American folk music, variously known as norteño, conjunto, tejano, and Tex-Mex. Tejano Roots/Raices Tejanas: The Roots of Tejano and Conjunto Music (Arhoolie) and Tejano Roots: The Women (Arhoolie) trace its development from the early accordion combos of Narcisco Martinez, Tony De La Rosa, and Conjunto Bernal to the orchestras of Beto Villa and Isidro Lopez, the birdlike trills of Lydia Mendoza, and the rock and blues incantations of a young Freddy Fender. The women’s album, with its emphasis on amazing duetists who are little known outside of South Texas, is particularly enlightening. 20 Tex-Mex Corridos Famosos (Hacienda) focuses on Tex-Mex’s true-tales tradition, with artists like Valerio Longoria, Flaco Jimenez, Texas Revolution, and Los Terribles del Norte commenting on illegal immigration, tequila, dope, all sorts of smuggling, earthquakes, and jailbreaks. The best example of how far-out the Brown Sound can get is Steve Jordan 20 Golden Hits (Hacienda), an eighties-vintage look at the Hendrix of the accordion, who manages to sneak an inordinate amount of jazz phrasing into dance hall fare.
By the seventies, tejano continued to display a duality defined by the orquesta sound of Little Joe y La Familia and the simpler, stripped-down accordion sound typified by the Jimenez family of San Antonio. Little Joe y La Familia: Live for Schlitz (Freddie), from 1979, shows why Temple’s Little Joe remains the maestro of tejano, mixing country influences into an urbane big band sound steeped in rhythm and blues with a bouncing polka beat as its underpinning.
Los Texas Tornados (Reprise) is the all-Spanish version of the debut album by the Tex-Mex supergroup that includes Freddy Fender, Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers, and Flaco Jimenez, who collectively have done more to popularize the sound around the world than anyone else. The bonuses here are Fender’s rendition of Butch Hancock’s “She Never Spoke Spanish to Me” and the Meyers standout “(Hey Baby) Que Paso.” Also recommended: La Mafia’s Estas Tocando Fuego 20 (Discos Sony), the latest from the hottest of the tejano big bands; Selena y Los Dinos: 16 Super Exitos Originales (Capitol/EMI Latin), by the heiress to the Lydia Mendoza legacy; Unsung Highways (Capitol/EMI Latin), this year’s hit album by Emilio Navaira, the George Strait of tejano; and 16 Exitos Originales (Discos Gil), which includes “Juana la Cubana,” a huge international hit for Houston’s Fito Olivares. Its mesmerizing tropical beat underscores the popularity of the cumbia, not the polka, on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border.
Wish List
JAMES CLAY AND DAVID “fat-head” Newman’s The Sound of the Wide Open Spaces (Fantasy/OJC); The Nightcaps’ Wine, Wine, Wine (Vandan); Best of King Curtis (Atlantic, available only on Ace import); Don Walser’s Pure Texas (Bear Family import only); 13th Floor Elevators (International Artists); something by Pee Wee Crayton; Kenny and the Kasuals’ Live at the Studio Club (Mark); something by Buster Smith; a Texas rockabilly compilation including Gene Summers, Johnny Carroll, Mac Davis, Ronnie Dawson, Groovy Joe Poovey, Sid King and His Five Strings, Ray Campi, Link Davis, Rudy “Tutti” Grazell, and Alvis Wayne; a various-artists Texas garage bands compilation including the Five Americans, the Sparkles, Mouse and the Traps, the Undertakers, Countdown 5, Zachary Thaks, Roy Head, Bad Seeds, Kit and the Outlaws, the Jades, the Briks, and the Chessmen; something by Johnny Moore & the Three Blazers (with Oscar Moore); the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s Rock-It to Stardom (Amazing); Michael Murphey’s Geronimo’s Cadillac (A&M); The Boogie Kings Live at the Bamboo Hut (Montel Michelle); Willie Nelson’s Yesterday’s Wine (RCA); Terry Allen’s Lubbock (on everything) (Special Delivery/Topic import); the Traits’ One More Time (TNT); Bubble Puppy’s Gathering of Promises (International Artists); the Moving Sidewalks’ Flash (Tantera); and Magpie Records’ piano compilations, a sixteen-volume series of American piano music, half of the volumes featuring such notable Texans as Alex Moore, Bobby Cadillac, Peck Kelly, and Mercy Dee Walton.
My Library
