Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll
Before he got busted, my friend Huey Meaux was the top record producer in Texas. Nobody knew about his sordid secret life—not even me.
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“He had cataloged the photos with dates and everything,” Wright said. “We went through photos and found girls who we later learned were twelve to sixteen years old, and others seventeen to twenty-one. We found thirteen rolls of undeveloped film in a bag. There were kids eight, nine, ten years old.”
Wright went out to the police car and informed Meaux that he was under arrest. “I told him some of the girls were under seventeen years of age.”
“Some might be, some may not,” Meaux said.
Meaux was charged with possession of child pornography and possession of a controlled substance (fifteen grams of cocaine). Thanks to Huey’s filing system, Shannon was able to identify one young girl who was willing to testify that Meaux had sexually assaulted her. After several other victims were contacted in the days following his arrest, he was charged with two counts of sexual assault of a minor. In the two years the forty-year-old Wright had been working juvenile sex crimes at the Houston Police Department—averaging 325 juvenile sex-crime cases a year—this was the biggest he had seen. “It’s the old ‘drugs, sex, and rock and roll.’ That’s what you’ve got here,” Wright told me. “But there’s another thing that motivates me: the girl who came forward. I saw her in a video and thought she was lost. Huey didn’t want to listen to her. He just wanted her to take her clothes off. Then I met her. She’s got her life together. To see that someone can come away from him motivates me, because wherever he goes, he’s going to do that again.”
A few days after the additional charges were made, a team of attorneys including high-profile criminal defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin and plaintiff’s attorney Percy “Wayne” Isgitt filed a $10 million civil suit against Meaux on behalf of Brasher, accusing him of sexually abusing her as a child. Brasher may yet be added to the criminal case because some of the alleged assaults against her occurred when she was sixteen—still within the statute of limitations for the sexual assault of a minor. Then a divorce suit was filed by Hilda Meaux, Huey’s wife of 42 years, a woman I had never heard of. On top of all that was a guardianship battle for Ben Meaux.
Facing the possibility of a long prison sentence and losing all his money, Meaux failed to show up the week after his arrest to be fitted for an electronic monitor. He had skipped town in the company of a shadowy associate named Jim Davis, forfeiting $130,000 in bail bonds. Davis and Huey had met in federal prison years ago. “Jim was the butcher in ‘college,’” Huey had told others, “he always got me the best cuts of meat.” Davis had shown up last fall. By the time of Meaux’s arrest, he was living with him and representing himself as Meaux’s business adviser.
Bounty hunters knew that wherever Davis was, Huey was likely to be close by. They trailed Davis from Las Vegas to Dallas and then to El Paso and Juárez, Mexico. By then, they had picked up Meaux’s scent in Juárez, and by tracing Meaux’s credit card billings, they were monitoring his and Davis’ movements to different hotels around the city. When Davis came across the border into El Paso, FBI agents involved in the search confronted him with the prospect of doing time for aiding and abetting a fugitive. Davis told them Meaux was camped out in a suite at the Juárez Holiday Inn. Twenty-nine days after he’d fled, Meaux was apprehended without incident. One of the bounty hunters told me that Huey’s bags were packed as if he had been preparing to move again.
The one revealing statement Meaux offered me when I spoke with him in jail came when I asked him if I should talk to Jim Davis.
“If you can find him, bruddah,” he said. “They tell me he was the one who gave me up, but I don’t believe he snitched on me.” In this instance, though, the Crazy Cajun was mistaken.
Cutting Hits
I MET HUEY IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES after I had moved back home to write about Texas music. Naturally Huey became an invaluable resource. We spent a lot of time together over the years, and I wrote several articles about him, glorifying his seat-of-the-pants hustling, his wit, and his astute observations on the music business. He was one of the last links to the time when records were sold out of the trunks of cars and music was popular because it sounded good, not because it fit a marketing niche. But after his arrest, it became clear to me that there was much about the man I didn’t know. I felt like I should have known who Jim Davis was, that a Hilda Meaux really did exist. I was surprised to hear Huey described as a cocaine addict. And, of course, I was stunned by the revelations of his perversion. He once showed me a hard-core porno tape. And he never hid the fact that in the late sixties he spent three years in prison for conspiracy to violate the Mann Act (also known as the white slave traffic act)—specifically, for transporting an underage female across state lines to a disc jockey convention in Nashville. He had always maintained that he didn’t know the girl was a minor but admitted she was taken along to entertain the deejays with sexual favors—“a favor for a favor” was his business credo. Meaux said that the whole episode was a setup and that he took the fall because he wouldn’t incriminate others in the record “bidness,” as he called it. Meaux always spoke with pride about his pardon by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, though in retrospect it probably only encouraged him to resume the behavior that led to his arrest.
Huey Meaux grew up outside of Kaplan, Louisiana, a small community surrounded by rice fields near Lafayette. His parents and siblings were poor sharecroppers who spoke mainly Cajun French, worked hard in the fields all week, and played harder on Saturday night, when Creoles and Cajuns would push back the furniture in a house, get roaring drunk, and dance to a band all night long.
“Back in them days, my dad worked for the man—picked cotton, hoed, grew rice, shucked it, and harvested it,” he told me one time. “We had four shotgun houses, two black families, two white families. Music was a release. If somebody didn’t get cut up and beat the shit out of someone, the dance was considered bad. I was raised that way.”
He moved with his family to Winnie at the age of twelve, part of the Cajun migration west across the Sabine River to greener rice fields and better jobs. His father, Stanislaus Meaux (known to all as Pappy Te-Tan), played accordion and fronted a group with teenaged Huey as the drummer. “I wasn’t worth a damn,” Huey told me once, but the excitement of being in a band stayed with him. In his twenties, he cut hair at the barber shop by day. “A barber is like a bartender, he knows who is screwing whose wife, when, and what time. I dug all that because I was part o something,” he said. After hours, he was a disc jockey, hosting teen hops in Beaumont and promoting dances all over the Golden Triangle.
His colleagues on the local music scene included singer George Jones, pianist Moon Mullican, and disc jockey J. P. Richardson, a.k.a. the Big Bopper. (“I was riding with him in the back seat of a car from Port Arthur to the studio in Houston when he wrote the lyrics for the B side of a novelty song he was cutting called ‘Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor.’ He called the B side ‘Chantilly Lace,’” Huey told me back in the seventies.) A local promoter and record producer named Bill Hall taught Meaux the nuances of the business of music, mainly by never paying Meaux what he was owed. “That was my college education in the bidness. I didn’t think people were supposed to get paid for having fun. So Hall would take my records, put his name on them, and take them to the record companies. When we’d go to Nashville, he’d tell me to keep my mouth shut. He said they’d laugh at my accent up there. And I believed him,” Huey said.
In 1959 Meaux produced the first hit with his name on it, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” a maudlin lament by Jivin’ Gene, as Meaux had rechristened Gene Bourgeois. The song’s hook, he liked to tell people, was the vocal’s echo effect, which was accomplished by “sticking Gene back in the shitter, surrounded by all that porcelain.” Subsequent hits such as Barbara Lynn’s soul stirrer “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” Joe Barry’s swinging “I’m a Fool to Care,” Rod Bernard’s “This Should Go on Forever,” T. K. Hulin’s “As You Pass Me By Graduation Night,” and Big Sambo and the Housewreckers’ histrionic “The Rains Came” were all expressions of teen sincerity tailor-made for belly rubbing on the dance floor. The sound was dubbed swamp pop in honor of the region the artists came from.
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