Gotta Lubbock
Long Before Austin Was The Live Music Capital Of The World, A Cotton-Pickin' High Plains City Put Texas On The Map. From Buddy Holly To Jimmie Dale Gilmore, An Oral History Of The State's Most Storied Scene.
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Terry Allen They had record burnings at the fair grounds. People would say that if you keep listening to this rock and roll music, you’re going to turn into a homosexual, you’re going to turn into a criminal, you’re going to turn into a “nigger.” You’re going to be literally transformed into one of these hideous things. Then you had at the same time the same people in lots of cases telling all of these outrageous, wonderful stories about the Depression, about the war, about whatever. You’d go over to someone’s house for supper, and someone’s mom or dad would tell you some story. So there was that openness — an atmosphere that opened you up to your imagination. And then at the same time, all of these forces were trying to shut it down.
That Little Studio
Carolyn Hester Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis was probably the best studio within hundreds of miles. I made my first album there when I was twenty. The studio itself was built on Norman’s dad’s gas station. His dad repaired cars and sold gas in the daytime. At night it would close, and we would start to tape at six or seven. Of course, you would chow down big-time before, and then you’d start recording. At six in the morning they brought out the little cots, and everybody went to sleep.
Jennings I was down there not too long ago. I can’t believe it was that little. That little studio.
Hester My album came out in 1958, and I was one of the few people on the New York City folk scene with a major label recording. Between all that, I met Buddy and the Crickets, and Buddy would call me sometimes when he came to the city. Years later, it turned out, when I met a certain harmonica player named Bob Dylan, he wanted to get to know me because I had known Buddy Holly. By that time Buddy was dead. Bob opened for me at a club in Boston, and I told him, “Well, the next thing I’m going to do is make a record for Columbia. You know John Hammond is signing folk artists. Do you want to come play harmonica?” He said, “Yeah, here’s my phone number.” Then I said to [Hammond], “I’ve got a new friend playing harmonica. That’s Bob Dylan.” And so he says, “Could I hear the band? Could you, say, do a rehearsal I could come to?” And so he came down to the Village for our rehearsal. At that time I was married to [singer-songwriter] Richard Farina, so he was at that rehearsal also. We all sat around a dining table except for Bill Lee [director Spike Lee’s father], who stood up because he had an upright bass. Dylan and John Hammond sat next to each other, and Bob just had his harmonica — there wasn’t much elbow room there. John’s eyes lit up. He loved my band. So that’s how all that happened. More than I realized, everything in my life related to Clovis.
Everybody Played a Stratocaster
Bobby Keys After Elvis came on the scene, all of a sudden guys that I was playing Little League baseball with the year before had guitars the next summer. Man, there was a lot of activity going on in garages, a lot of three-chord activity.
Ely When I first got to Lubbock from Amarillo, everybody I ran into was a musician. It seemed like after Buddy Holly died, bands just spread like crazy. Everybody played a Stratocaster. And everybody had a band. So I got in with all the bands around there and put one together myself when I was in the eighth grade or something.
Terry Allen Rock and roll hit Lubbock like a bomb. The whole beatnik thing. Lubbock had its squirrely coffee shops, and there was always some girl in a leotard saying poems to some guy playing his bongos. And everybody started wearing their sunglasses at night.
Ely I guess the fact that there’s a big university there brought in a diverse culture. There was a kind of Lubbock Underground, and the musicians knew each other and all lived in a different world than the cotton farmers and the people who had to make a living off the land. There was a real sense of community.
Johnny Hughes We were outsiders. We were hippies before there were hippies.
Fiel Well, I’d say back in sixty-five and sixty-six, you could count on one hand the number of guys with long hair in Lubbock. The ones I knew were Joe Ely, Lewis Cowdrey, Lance Copeland, and my brother, and me, wanting to be like them.
David Halley When I was growing up, I never thought of country music as possessing the qualities of an art form. And when I first saw the Flatlanders [Gilmore, Ely, and Butch Hancock’s mythic sixties band], it was conceptual art. It was like, “Oh, you mean smart country music, spiritual country music? Country music that has all these kind of hippie issues — everything from the beat generation to Bob Dylan — but put it in a traditional country framework?” To me, that combination of elements was a real folk-art masterstroke.
A Melting Pot
Fiel You’ve got so many influences that converge out here from different cultures, and different people hearing all kinds of different things. I don’t know if there’s another place in the United States where it’s quite this mixed: blues, jazz, Mexican music, all those folk traditions, old Celtic folk tunes, all those traditions coming together in one spot.
Terry Allen You couldn’t call it urban in any sense, but it was the largest town in about three hundred or four hundred miles in any direction. So it was a center, and I think that it did have access to things that a place like Wichita Falls didn’t.
Lloyd Maines Lubbock was sort of a stopover point for a lot of touring bands. They would go to Amarillo or Lubbock or both when they were traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast.
Terry Allen Black music was a huge influence on Lubbock music. The Cotton Club had a lot of touring black bands in the mid-fifties, when rock and roll came together. We used to go there when I was eleven or twelve, and they would let us in the back because we wanted to hear someone like Jimmy Reed or Bo Diddley. And they always let us in.
Hughes All these Mexican migrant workers would come in to pick the cotton, and they just filled downtown on Sundays. They’d all come in from miles around. You had the accordions and conjunto, and all the different things they brought with them.
Curtis There was a Mexican cafe across the street from us in Meadow [25 miles southwest of Lubbock] when I was a real small child, and I used to love to go sit on the front porch in the evenings. They’d have a jukebox or a radio or something playing a Mexican radio station, and you’d hear these terrific Mexican songs floating through the air. It really was a melting pot.
Conni Hancock Whenever we meet someone like Flaco Jimenez and he finds out we’re from Lubbock, he says he remembers it affectionately. That always surprises me, because we grew up with a lot of racism there. I’m surprised that people like him would like it. But apparently they just stayed in their culture and had a good time.
Tommy X Hancock The races were really split up there until recently. In fact, the Cotton Club was the only place they ever mixed at all.
As Rough and Rowdy a Scene as Ever Was
Terry Allen My dad, Sled Allen, got a little defunct gospel church in Lubbock. He rented out the space and started throwing dances and, eventually, wrestling matches and boxing matches. Then it moved to bigger spaces. He became a local promoter of entertainment in Lubbock. He brought in some of the very first rock and roll and country shows. He had a place called the Jamboree Hall — this was in the late forties, early fifties. Friday nights they would have all-black dances, and great blues bands would play. Saturday nights would be all-country.
Tommy X Hancock The original Cotton Club went back to the forties. It used to bring in all the big bands, like Benny Goodman and Harry James. The main reason it got so many big-name bands was that it was the only place between Dallas and L.A. that could seat 1,600 people.
Charlene Hancock When we opened our place, it was 1965. Then it burned down about a year or two later. We rebuilt. Both incarnations were out on the edge of town, in the country. Tommy’s folks took care of running the place. Tommy did the booking, his dad ran the front, and his mom ran the concession, which was soft drinks. We had Hank Thompson and Bob Wills, Ray Price and Willie Nelson.
Tommy X Hancock Of course, the greatest shows were Little Richard, right after he married his drummer. All of the greatest bands in the country were there over a twenty-five- or thirty-year period.
Hughes The mid-fifties, the dawn of rock and roll — that’s when the Cotton Club was such a place. Little Richard and all those guys — black guys and white guys. Crowds would mix. Then, later, the hippies and bikers and the Unitarians and the college students could coexist and there was no fighting. We had no bouncers. It was all because of Tommy Hancock. He was doing the thing Willie got known for in Austin — peaceful coexistence. You didn’t have to beat up the hippies.
Conni Hancock There was this little viewing area upstairs, and they would let me go up there sometimes. I would sit and watch. It was all cowboys. And it was interesting that the cowboys from the different little towns had their own little styles. They would wear their crease in their hat a certain way. Some of them would tuck one side of their pants in the boot. Depending on how they dressed, you could tell whether they were from Post or Ralls or somewhere else.
Hughes Out here they don’t clap for you when you play music. If they like you, they get up and dance. And the little ones dance, and the old ones dance. We can just dance. We could dance when we were twelve real well.
Conni Hancock One thing I loved about the music scene in Lubbock when I was growing up is that people danced to every single song.
Tommy X Hancock I remember playing at dances and barn dances where you would play until one or two in the morning, and then someone would give you money to play another hour, and then another hour, and you might be there until five or six. People virtually danced all night. They worked hard and they played hard.
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