He’s About A Mover
From pedal steel prodigy to Texas Tornado, the late Doug Sahm was a walking (and jumping and singing and fingerpicking) encyclopedia of music. This exclusive excerpt from a new biography tracks the launch of his first great band, the Sir Douglas Quintet.
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The sketchy lyrics—“Well, she was walking down the street / Looking fine as she could be”—about a cool guy checking out a brassy girl, told scarcely more story than that. Doug repeated the song’s title ten times; the second--most-repeated line—“What I say!”—was a none-too-subtle borrowing from one of Ray Charles’s biggest hits. Doug was a versatile songwriter, but he usually stayed away from lyrics with a complex narrative; he wanted people going around singing two or three lines that they’d heard on the radio and couldn’t get out of their heads. With this song he’d done it. Augie and Meaux could debate what the players did with the beat, but on the radio it was as irresistible as the sound of a small-town carnival: What it really seemed to race with and echo was the listener’s pulse.
According to Meaux, “She’s About a Mover” broke out on small stations in southwest Louisiana and on Port Arthur’s KPAC. At some point Meaux decided that the sound alone wasn’t derivative enough; he had to sell the Quintet as a genuine British band. He licensed the record abroad to England’s London label and told the musicians to keep their mouths shut until the record hit the international charts. Meaux had an overbearing sense of marketing: He wouldn’t let the band do any promotion until he was certain the time was right. “One night we had a gig in San Antonio,” Doug recalled, “and this guy came up and said, ‘What are you doing? You’ve got a song that’s number one from Houston to Miami, and you’re in this dump with two hundred people!’ ”
Soon “She’s About a Mover” was streaking up the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, peaking in the United States at number thirteen. Meaux outfitted the Quintet in black Beatles attire and footwear and got them on bills with James Brown, the Beach Boys, and Little Richard, and he told them just to sing, not to say anything. The ruse couldn’t work very long, but for a short time radio jocks and listeners thought they really were British. Doug laughed and said, “I’d say ‘pip pip’ and stuff like that when we met Peter Townshend and the Who, while trying to hush Johnny and Frank, who’d be going, ‘Hey, qué pasó? What’s happening?’ ”
According to Augie, Meaux required married band members to take off their wedding rings before a performance; the young girls who were the target audience needed to believe, or at least fantasize, that the musicians were available. The promotional climax came with appearances on American Bandstand and the prime-time music program Hullabaloo. Sponsored by brands of toothpaste, car wax, and a deodorant that provided “gentle protection without harshness,” the Hullabaloo show began with a well-scrubbed crew of dancers in V-neck sweaters, modestly short skirts, and go-go boots. There was a lot of hair-shaking and finger-snapping as an announcer introduced Chuck Berry, the Four Seasons, Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman’s Hermits, Martha and the Vandellas, and, finally, the lads from San Antonio. Holding a guitar and wearing a suit and tie, the host was Trini Lopez, a Dallas native who was best known for his version of the folk song “If I Had a Hammer.” Lopez said it was his pleasure to introduce royalty: “Ladies and gentlemen, lords and ladies, Hullabaloo proudly presents the Sir Douglas Quintet.”
For their first number, the Quintet appeared in front of a set of boards cut and painted to resemble English castles. Another prop was an armored knight riding a horse and carrying a lance. A young woman wearing an armored breastplate was assigned to move not a muscle, barely an eyelash, as the band sang about a street girl and kicked their Beatles boots in periodic tandem. Was she meant to be a princess? Joan of Arc? Whatever role she was told to play, she was no body mover.
The strange choreography didn’t matter; the song’s jumpy beat and Doug’s cocksure singing got the program racing. Doug looked as if he might have been at home on the streets of Liverpool or London. He had gotten his nose broken somewhere along the line, and as a lower-middle-class kid, he had grown up without the benefit of braces.
But the most striking thing about Doug was his hair. It wasn’t that long, but it appeared that Doug’s wife or perhaps the bass player Jack Barber, who really was a barber, had roughly whacked it with scissors. The kid who had once tried to dress up like Frankie Avalon was transformed into a tough guy—strong jaw, a face composed of craggy angles, interesting. Barber, Morin, and Perez went through the routine stone-faced, but a viewer who saw that number would never have guessed that Augie had been partly crippled by a childhood bout of polio. He was dancing behind the Vox and—pay attention, England—shaking his hair like a dust mop.
When they hit the last notes and finished their wiggles and kicks, Lopez walked out briskly. “I suppose all you people assume that the Sir Douglas Quintet is from England,” he said, grinning. “But I have a surprise for you. Believe it or not, these fellows are all from my home state of Texas. Isn’t that amazing?”
Doug stepped forward again and slyly drawled into the camera, “Y’all come back, heahh?”
The Quintet encountered unexpected difficulty in following up on their first hit. Their next release, “The Tracker,” sounded so much like “She’s About a Mover” that disc jockeys declined to play it. “Also,” Augie said, “they listened to it and thought Doug was calling himself a tractor.” It was a corny song about a lover who enlisted the CIA and a fleet of submarines to help chase down his honey; the low point was when Doug yelled, “Yeah, blow your horns,” followed by Augie taking a solo on his Vox. That was typical Doug, both in his studio ebullience and his resistance to editing.
Another release, “In Time,” found the band trying too hard to sound like the Animals. But they regained the charts that same year when Meaux steered them back to the well. In a raggedly typed letter to an interviewer many years later, Meaux claimed he wrote the Quintet’s next hit at a truck stop during a drive back home from New Orleans: “My girlfriend had left me and I was down about that. It was 3 a.m. in the morning I remember it was raining cats and dogs. I wanted to get me some black coffee so I could make it to Winnie before I fell asleep. This truck driver came in and stomped his boots and had a brown corduroy cap and slapped it against his leg and said, ‘This is the day that the rains came.’ ” And so, Meaux said, he wrote “The Rains Came” on a paper napkin.
Another story had it that Meaux had bought the rights to the song for $25 from the Gulf Coast sax player James Young, who recorded it in 1960 for Meaux under the name Big Sambo and the Housewreckers. Doug later claimed that he wrote it one stormy night in New Braunfels in tribute to a special woman friend. However “The Rains Came” was created, the Quintet’s version was a Top 40 hit, due perhaps to the delightfully off-key back-up singers, Augie’s carny-like organ, and Doug’s soulful delivery of the absurdly simple lyrics (“Rain, rain, rain, rain . . .” ). Dick Clark booked them on American Bandstand, and for the first time since Doug had performed as Little Doug, his costume featured a cowboy hat.
Around the same time, Bob Dylan was asked at a press conference if he could recommend any up-and-coming folk singers or rock groups. “I’m glad you asked that,” Dylan replied. “The Sir Douglas Quintet I think are probably the best that are going to have a chance of reaching commercial airwaves. They already have with a couple of songs.”
An unsolicited public endorsement by Bob Dylan! How did that happen? Years later, in an article for Crawdaddy magazine titled “The Psychedelic Cowboy Makes His Move,” Doug explained to the rock journalist John Swenson how he had first met Dylan in New York in 1965. As often happened to Doug, his speech was rendered in the piece as redneck dialect: “Aw, it was jes destiny y’know. The first tahm ah actually saw him was at the Kettle of Fish with Brian Jones an’ it was really a trip. That was th’ first tahm we’d come to th’ city, we were really hicks in them days, man, jes out from th’ woods. It seems lahk that everbody, y’know, man, he did such a thing to that era with that role that he played, that lil monster lil magic guy with th’ words an’ y’know that whole trip, that aura . . .”
Rock and roll writers might think Doug talked like an incoherent hayseed, but the bottom line was that in little more than a year he’d gone from opening for the Dave Clark Five in San Antonio to hanging out in New York with Dylan and Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. But Doug never forgot where his roots ran deepest. Perhaps his greatest song, “At the Crossroads,” was written when he put the teenybopper themes aside and described a brokenhearted love affair of two grown-ups. “You just can’t live in Texas,” he reflected on the song’s setting, “if you don’t have a lot of soul.”
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