When I was seventeen, I didn’t have a band; I pretty much performed either by myself or with a bass player. I often played at a coffeehouse I started called the Windjammer. It was down on McKinney Avenue in Dallas, which was a really rough neighborhood at the time. One night while I was onstage, a shotgun blast broke down the front door and peppered the entire audience and the kitchen. Fortunately, nobody got hurt seriously. Some guy was disgruntled; he was obnoxiously drunk and had requested songs that nobody knew because we were all doing our own material. He got mad and came back and shot the place up. I don’t mean to make us sound too much like towering heroes because it was pretty much by happenstance, but in those days we were literally risking our lives for our music.
