Crime
Outlaw Country
Rick Sikes was a rising star of Texas music—until he and one of his bandmates went to prison for bank robbery.
(Page 2 of 2)
Sikes went ballistic. "Hey, you son of a bitch, you wanna f— with somebody, why don't you f— with me?" he yelled. "I'll f— with you all right, boy," said the man. "You want me to come in there?" He reached into his vest pocket, according to Sikes, and patted a derringer. "Come in here," Sikes told him, "and I'll stick that derringer up yo' ass sideways."
Sikes was nailed with 50 years from the State of Texas. The Eastland County district attorney persuaded a jury that Sikes, wearing a disguise, had pulled a gun while robbing the First State Bank of Rising Star. In a separate trial for another bank robbery, the Feds sentenced him to 25 years.
Off federal parole, Sikes remains on state parole until the sentence is up, in 2021. "I doubt I'm gonna make it," he says. He got out of prison early, in 1985, and since then he has become a model for prisoner rehabilitation. Leavenworth is considered the second-toughest maximum-security prison in America. It's for career criminals and killers—not first-timers or country musicians. In his book The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, Pete Earley quotes former Leavenworth prison warden Jerry O'Brien as saying, "The only real thing that rehabilitates a convict in Leavenworth is old age. When they get so old they can't run out of a bank, they retire." Nevertheless, in Sikes's case, "I got it all out of my system," he says. "People don't know what bottoming out is until you really don't have nothin', not even the freedom of what you eat, what you wear. There's no way that I would do anything to go back in there."
While in prison Sikes got his GED, studied graphic arts, and wrote hundreds of songs, which are now stored away in unopened boxes. (In one 1980 clipping on Sikes's music wall, Boxcar Willie credits a song he was planning to record, called "The Hobo King," as having been written by inmate No. 87047-132—that's Sikes—at Leavenworth.) He invented devices like the prototype "bead-o-matic," which simplifies Native American beading. He remodeled guitars; he strums a brilliant chord on one of them, a resonator Dobro-like instrument. The resonators were made out of little aluminum tins that once held pecan pies from Leavenworth's commissary. He named another instrument, a silver battle-ax with a Fender neck and a banjo body, the gitjo. "You had to have permits to keep each one in the cell," he says. Other convicts kept their distance from Sikes, and no one dared mess with his guitars.
Sikes was so industrious in his solo endeavors that he was taken to the prison psychiatrist for being "anti-social." The shrink, who had a Viennese accent and has become one of Sikes' stock character routines, wore his wristwatch on his ankle, fearing a convict would steal it from his wrist. "He'd be walking down the hallway," Sikes says, "some guard would ask the time, and he'd stop to pull up his pants leg. 'Mr. Sikes,' he said, 'I unnerstandt you don't associate wit anyone; you haf no friends.' I said, 'Do you realize that over 90 percent of the people in here are felons? Killers, thugs, drug pushers? What kinda people you want me to hang out with, man? We're not allowed to patronize the officers.' He told me to go."
B. B. King often played Kansas City, which is thirty miles from Leavenworth, and he performed at the prison free. But the guards would shake down B. B.'s band, Sikes says, tearing up the amps looking for contraband drugs: "B. B.'s band was black, so I assume the guards figured they were smuggling dope in. Last time B. B. came, I carried his guitar in, and he said, 'Boys, we like to play for y'all, but it's just gotten to be too much of a hassle.'"
The warden was mightily impressed with a song Sikes wrote called "From the Bottle to the Needle." Sikes didn't sing his way out of prison, like Leadbelly, but he did persuade the warden to let him build a recording studio at Leavenworth. It was the first one ever in a federal pen, he says, and it was a Nashville pipeline that enabled prison songwriters to submit demos. Before the studio, convict musicians had to send in their demos on sheet music. An incarcerated trumpet player, who was paid off in cigarettes from the commissary, had been transcribing everybody's music charts.
Sikes painted music notes across the recording studio's walls to make it appear less institutional. Given an old, broken two-track recorder for starters, he built a homemade console using old radio parts. He glued egg crates on the walls for sound baffling. Then Steam Train Maury, the real "King of the Hobos," befriended Sikes during a Leavenworth visit. Tight with the Peavey company in Mississippi, Maury arranged for it to donate some amps, a P. A., mikes, and a Peavey soundboard.
"Rick's greatest talent is taking pieces of nothing and making something out of them," says Jan Sikes, leading a tour of the main house. All the cabinets, furniture, and Native American-style crafts were built by her husband. He constructed a bunkhouse for their kids, now refitted with a hot tub. A 130-year-old trunk from Jan's grandmother has been refurbished to look like a museum piece. "He still repairs most things with nail clippers and a razor blade—the only things that were allowed in his cell," she adds. The master bedroom's king-size bed is decked out in red satin sheets. The landscaped grounds, which stretch out to the Davis Feed Mill, nearby, could easily be mistaken for some sort of West Texas resort. A rebuilt nineteenth-century woodstove outside can smoke eight briskets at a time.
Five years ago a cardiologist gave Sikes a death sentence. The doctor told him that if he ate nothing but rice, beans, and pasta, he might last six months. "But I'll die when I get goddamned good and ready," he says, digging into a steak delivered from his next-door neighbor's restaurant, Caroline's Coldwater Cattle Company. Jan spent "thousands of hours" learning about low-fat diets to reverse heart disease, he says. "She straightened me out more than anybody in the world. She's to blame for keeping me alive, man."
Other members of Sikes's former band haven't fared as well. Rick's brother, Bobby, who played keyboards, died of kidney failure a few years back. Tommy "Red Hoss" Jenkins, the tall, skinny bass player, was Sikes's cell partner at Leavenworth. "One morning guards came in and took him," Sikes recalls. "He had a bad eye, and they said they were taking him over to Kansas City to take the bad eye out and put in a glass one. I never seen him since." Gary Marquis, the lead guitarist, died of a heart attack in the late eighties. Though Sikes had once helped out Preecher Williams, the drummer, when he went AWOL from the Army—"I had some friends in Nashville," Sikes says; "I sent him down there to hide the poor little bastard out"—Williams repaid the favor by turning state's evidence, saying that Sikes had forced him to steal and rob banks. Sikes doesn't know his whereabouts either, and "he never done a day in jail."
Sikes, who is of Native American ancestry, developed a close friendship with the late Native American poet Roxy Gordon when Gordon returned home from Dallas to the Coleman area in his dying days. Gordon had been encouraging him to get back onstage. So for the first time in thirty years, Rick Sikes performed, at Gordon's memorial last May at the Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas. He liked it, the audience liked him, and he aims to do some more.
Finally, one wonders whether Sikes keeps a bank account these days. "My best supporter since I've been home has been the First Coleman National Bank," he says. "They loaned me money for the antique shop, the sign works shop. They back me all the way."
Dallas-based blues guitarist Josh Alan Friedman is the editor of the upcoming Terry Southern anthology, Now Dig This (Atlantic/Grove).
Pages: 1 2
My Library
