Three Chords and A Station Wagon

The Novas of Dallas. The Livin’ End of Abilene. The Zakary Thaks of Corpus Christi. In 1964 the Beatles inspired a generation of middle-class teens to buy guitars, grow their hair out, and hit the road. The secret history of Texas garage rock.

by Michael Hall

March 2010

(Page 4 of 4)

As the songs got longer, they got more serious and complicated, losing the snap and humor of the halcyon days of the previous summer. Waco’s Gaylan Ladd recorded “Repulsive Situation,” which included these lyrics: “Trying to find a repulsive situation. All you got to do is look across this nation.” The Nomads, from Houston, had a song called “Mainstream,” which sounded like a hippie caricature: “The new generation is based on love and imagination . . . Let the new generation show you that the lovin’ thing freely is the only way.”

Unfortunately, the teens had grown up.

Get back to where you once belonged

By the Summer of Love, most of the world had moved on to “Light My Fire” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Plenty of bands, though, especially those playing in the hinterlands, didn’t get the memo about the end of garage rock. In Odessa, the high school sophomores of Knights Bridge recorded “Make Me Some Love,” a simple four-chord garage song with organ and furious feedbacking guitars about, well, “the way you hold me, the way you touch me.”

And in Bridgeport (population approximately 3,500), fifty miles north of Fort Worth, the Green Fuz created “The Green Fuz,” one of the greatest garage songs of all, a song so poorly played and horribly recorded it’s a wonder the band ever released it. The Green Fuz had formed in 1967 and was named for fifteen-year-old guitarist Les Dale’s green fuzz box. They played at parties, teen clubs, skating rinks, and county fairs and at some point in 1968 decided to make a record. They had two original songs, one of which, “The Green Fuz,” Dale had written in 45 minutes. There were no studios nearby, so they recorded in an empty cafe owned by Dale’s mother at the intersection of two farm-to-market roads. The band’s producer, Shorty Hendrix, set up a tape recorder and laid a couple microphones on a table nearby. The cafe was made out of stone, so the acoustics were horrible; the boys had to keep turning the PA system down, and they had to muffle the bass drum by stuffing it with pillows. Because of the heat and humidity they also had a hard time keeping the guitars in tune. But still they pushed on, recording “The Green Fuz,” one minute and 59 seconds of primitive, mind-blowing noise. The drums rumble as if they’re being played next door, the bass is barely audible, and Randy Alvey’s vocal is high and scratchy: “Here we come, we’re coming fast. / All the others are in the past. / Jump to your feet, let us catch your eye / We’re the Green Fuz.”

Maybe it’s the simple singsongy melody, maybe it’s those needy words of teen bravado, maybe it’s the limitations those boys were pushing against, but “The Green Fuz” is a work of art in the same way “Louie Louie” is a work of art. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sounds like God. Ravel’s Boléro sounds like sex. “The Green Fuz” sounds like youth—out of tune, out of time.

The band pressed five hundred copies of the 45 and released it in 1968. “We were so sure we were going to be rock stars,” Dale told me. “We were less than happy with the way it sounded, but on the other hand, we had a record. No one else in town did. The people at the Dairy Mart, where everyone hung out, put it on the jukebox. For a while we were the rock stars of Bridgeport. But nobody outside of Wise County ever heard it.” The group broke up a year later, and four of the five members eventually went into the Navy, including Dale, who later married, had three sons, and rarely thought about “The Green Fuz.” In 2006 he returned to Bridgeport for the first time in thirty years and located the band’s old rhythm guitarist, Jimmy Mercer. “He told me, ‘I need to show you something,’” Dale recalls. Mercer pulled out a copy of an album called Psychedelic Jungle, by the Cramps. Dale had never heard of the Cramps, who were famous as the trashiest, kitschiest punk band of the seventies and eighties. This 1981 LP was their best, full of covers of eccentric old American garage rock and rockabilly. And the very first song: a magnificent version of “The Green Fuz.” The song had become an underground hit, known and loved by punk rock weirdos everywhere.

“It’s hard to wrap your head around something like that,” Dale says. “A song you wrote at fifteen has a worldwide cult following.” After the other three members signed on (all of Dale’s bandmates thought he had been killed in Vietnam), the band reunited at the oldies revival show the Ponderosa Stomp, in New Orleans, in 2008. They performed some of their covers and played “The Green Fuz”—twice—to a fanatical crowd. “It was like we were sixteen again,” Dale told me.

The Green Fuz aren’t the only sixtysomethings enjoying a fillip of sixties-rock fame. Vintage garage rock has become extremely hip over the past decade, with collectors (many from Europe) scouring garage sales for rare 45’s. In January of last year David Lott got a Facebook message from David Smith, whom he hadn’t heard from in forty years, telling him that a copy of the Souls’ “Diamonds, Rats, and Gum” had sold on eBay for $1,225.

Many of the Texas bands have reunited. The Thaks did a handful of shows in 2005 and 2006—without drummer Stan Moore, who died in 2000—and then stopped. “You can’t replicate the magic,” says Gerniottis. “There was an obvious gap in the sound without Stan there. He was the heart and soul of the group.” Kenny and the Kasuals have turned nostalgia into big business, playing some twenty shows a year, mostly private parties and corporate events (Jerry Jones is a client). The Novas play occasionally, though Dennard says, “We do it for the fun, not money or fame and certainly not for the sex anymore.”

Dennard is almost sixty but finds that playing with his old friends in the Novas takes him back to being sixteen, when the simple things were the only ones that mattered. “It’s so fun to make that sound,” he says. “It’s so much fun to be in a garage when those instruments clash together till you get something new. If you get a beat going and you all find a key and someone has something to say and if you have a guitar player and he’s mad at his parents or society or his school and he’s taking it out on his instrument—you get a great garage moment. The teen angst is coming through. It’s kind of spiritual. It makes you fly. You’re in your moment, mapping a way ahead of yourself.”

10 Famous Musicians

Who got their start in Texas garage bands.

Doyle Bramhall solo artist, songwriter (The Chessmen, Dallas)

T Bone Burnett producer, songwriter, solo artist (The Loose Ends, Fort Worth)

Roky Erickson solo artist, songwriter (The 13th Floor Elevators, Austin)

Billy Gibbons ZZ Top (The Moving Sidewalks, Houston)

Don Henley the Eagles, solo artist (The Four Speeds, Linden)

Gary P. Nunn Lost Gonzo Band, solo artist (The Sparkles, Levelland)

Dan Seals England Dan and John Ford Coley, solo artist (Theze Few, Dallas)

J. D. Souther solo artist, songwriter (The Cinders, Amarillo)

Jimmie Vaughan Fabulous Thunderbirds, solo artist (The Chessmen, Dallas)

Mitch Watkins Lyle Lovett and His Large Band, solo artist (The Marauders, McAllen)

Texas Nuggets

20 garage rock songs you must hear before you die.

“Look in Your Mirror” The Merlynn Tree, Austin

“My Time” The Golden Dawn, Austin

“You’re Gonna Miss Me” The 13th Floor Elevators, Austin

“The Green Fuz” Randy Alvey and the Green Fuz, Bridgeport

“Face to Face” The Zakary Thaks, Corpus Christi

“A Taste of the Same” The Bad Seeds, Corpus Christi

“It’s a Cry’n Shame” The Gentlemen, Dallas

“Journey to Tyme” Kenny and the Kasuals, Dallas

“Love for a Price” Kempy and the Guardians, Dallas

“William Junior” The Novas, Dallas

“You’re Gonna Be Lonely” The Chessmen, Dallas

“I’m Blue” The Rising Sons, Fort Worth

“Little Girl” The Jades, Fort Worth

“Live and Die” The Barons, Fort Worth

“Air conditioned man” Thursday’s Children, Houston

“I Can’t Believe” Neal Ford and the Fanatics, Houston

“No One Wants Me” The Actioneers, Houston

“No Friend of Mine” The Sparkles, Levelland

“Diamonds, Rats, and Gum” Christopher and the Souls, McAllen

“A Public Execution” Mouse, Tyler

Watch a documentary about garage rock in Texas and one of the genre’s best bands, the Souls.

Pages: 1 2 3 4