John, it’s great to sit down with you, talk about your musical history & how you ended up here in St Louis.

Q: You’ve been performing around town for a few years now so people know you well as a bluesman, and most people know you have a Texas background, but you had some time in St. Louis when you were a kid, is that right?

A: Yes. My dad was from Marthasville, so we’d come up to visit his parents and we’d hang out for a couple weeks during the summer and Dad would schedule these family vacations around the Cardinals schedule. So while my sisters were were shelling peas and stuff like that, he and I would take off and go watch the Cardinals play at Busch, so that was a lot of fun!

Q: Well here we are sitting in your living room years later, and you’re living right across from the old Anheuser-Busch brewery. Glad to be back in St. Louis?

A: Yes I am! When I was a kid whenever we’d come into town you’d always drive by the brewery and when I was a little kid it always reminded me of like a medieval castle on a hill as you come around that bend and you see it for the first time! And when my wife Mary Alice and I moved up here 10 years ago and found this place…..it was just perfect because it’s basically just across the street from the Anheuser-Busch brewery. I’m living reliving a childhood memory, and of course I tell people this house is so old that President Grant used to get drunk and pass out in our front yard when he was visiting his relatives. Of course that that may or may not be a complete fabrication of my imagination, but you know that’s just the way it is!

Q: Let’s go way back before life took you to Austin TX. Where did you grow up, and where there early music influences in your household?

A: Okay first I must make a disclaimer – the gummies have kicked in! So it was a long dark stormy night, suddenly a shot rang out, and I was born somewhere in North Carolina! I don’t know where I was adopted, I don’t know where I was adopted out of, I don’t really have a birth certificate so to speak. Yeah but I was adopted in 1956 and my dad was in the Marine Corps, a fighter pilot for the Marines and he was stationed at Cherry Point and so we lived in New Bern NC which time was super small you know and when he got out of the Marines and he retired – after 23 years I think – we relocated to my mom’s hometown of Pensacola FL. I was like 7 when that happened and that’s where I went through the Great Florida Public Education system, yeah (laughs) and started playing baseball and all that. And so that’s kind of where I was raised, and that’s also where I started discovering music. My mom had me take piano lessons from time I was 7. till now I don’t know 1213! I didn’t learn it a lick. I can’t play a little piano and took her 67 years .

Q: Did that time teach you the basic chords?

A: No, nothing from the piano teacher. He used to work out in Hollywood and he was back in Pensacola taking care of his mom and so he had all this furniture throughout his house that was from movie sets. And so instead of teaching me anything on piano, he was telling me about the the furniture for movie sets all the time – for years – and those that furnishes made out of balsa wood, so these huge pieces of furniture and prop furniture that looked immovable, you can pick them right up (laughs). So that’s why I didn’t learn anything! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The piano teacher wanted to teach me you know – which is you know the proper way to learn – some theory and how to read, and all these exercises and getting into classical and stuff like that was all cool and all that, but the problem was I didn’t want to learn how to play Mozart or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, I wanted to learn how to play Great Balls Of Fire by Jerry Lee Lewis! Well they weren’t teaching that, so I got bored, lost interest, kept playing baseball.

Q: You kept playing baseball all through high school into college, didn’t you?

A: I went to Ecambia High School in a time that had a troubled history of desegregation. It was around 1970 in Pensacola, I was going to Escambia High School, and the Rebels were the school team, the Confederate flag was the school’s flag, Dixie was the school fight song! So then all of a sudden, segregation was gone and it was desegregated and they bussed a bunch of kids in from Pensacola High School, and they didn’t really appreciate all them references to the Confederacy and stuff like that. So and you know, that was at the time of my great awakening, around 1970 when all of a sudden I realized yeah, I just discovered this thing called slavery in a history book, what was that about and that’s when I realized oh man there’s a lot of f****ed stuff in this country, and you know I called that my great awakening. I quit going to church, I quit believing in Dixie and the myth of the Grand Old South and all that sort of stuff you know. I woke up, not trying to be political.

A couple years after that, it was on a Saturday morning – it was 11:00 o’clock in the morning – I was driving my mom’s old station wagon, going to the local mall and malls were brand new back in those days. So there was a record store in this mall, in a corporate record store, I don’t know what it was, but anyway I was going to get a new Rolling Stones album or something like that. Well, I was listening to the radio station WBSR, and all of a sudden they started playing this song by BB King off this new album called ‘To know you is love you’. It’s a song written by Stevie Wonder, BB was covering it, and they played the whole song and it had this great guitar break in it where he breaks it down from the full band and orchestra, it breaks all the way down to where it’s just BB and the drummer, and then finally just BB singing that string man! I pulled my mom’s car over – on the left side was the Bank of West Florida and on the right side was a pool hall – Golden Crown Recreation Center – and it was 11:00 o’clock on Saturday morning and my mind had just been blown – that was the first time I’d heard BB King. I heard the name before because I was a Beatles fan, and read an interview in Rolling Stone with John Lennon where he said he just wished he could play like BB King, and then all of a sudden I hear my first BB King ! I didn’t go get the Rolling Stones cut out, I went and got that BB King album! I still have it in the backroom, it is still one of my favorite BB King albums, that is still one of my favorite BB King guitar solos. I was playing guitar at that time, I was doing Beatles and Rolling Stone stuff and all that. Blues records in Pensacola, FL were not readily available or easy to find ,and well that record changed the way I played from playing like Rolling Stones and Beatles songs and stuff that got me into ‘ohh man I want to check this out’, and so I started going to like Zaire’s and Kmart and their cut out record bins, and I found records like an album called Hideaway with Freddie King. Hideaway, and Dance Away with Freddie King which was half instrumentals and half vocals you know like Tore Down and things like and The Stumble. And I found Albert King’s cut out record release which was the Big Blues album that Albert King had released on the Bobbin label I think, I’m not too sure. Just some great Albert King stuff on it from his first album recording and release and it was really cool, you could tell Albert played differently than BB and Freddie, and so I really got into those guys! I like that stuff and I still like the Stones and you know Beatles and Jeff Beck and all that stuff but this Blues thing, that really got my interest!

Q: Were you gigging around town in those days?

A: No I wasn’t gigging around at all, I was just some kid trying to figure things out off of records, and I was playing baseball that was the main thing you know. So I ended up getting a scholarship to University of Arkansas at Little Rock and I played there for a season and a half before I injured myself and couldn’t play ball anymore, so then I became a cook. I still stayed in Little Rock I didn’t move back to Florida because there was just no future there for me at all to do anything, and when I was about 24 I picked up a guitar again. I hadn’t played guitar since I was like in 18-19 years old, 20 maybe, and so I picked it up again at 24 when I broke up with a girlfriend, she broke up with me actually and threw a guitar at my back saying ‘here, see if you make something of yourself’. Yeah okay, and turned out I kind of had a knack for it.

Anyway, before too long after going through playing in a band that recorded some demos for RCA, a whole album’s worth of original material that’s the first band I was in in Little Rock band called **** Dog, then I played in a couple more little groups around Little Rock. Little Rock always had to potential to have an explosive music scene, but just as soon as it threatened to break out, the establishment would always shut it down, shut down the bars. So Little Rock was nowhere for me. Anyway, I’d made friends with these people at this independent record store in Little Rock – Discount Records -and one of my friends there was this guy Carol D Bland, who was a harmonica player and Carol D when he was growing up in North Little Rock as a child, he lived down the street from a Blues club that would have people like T-bone Walker, Jimmy Reed, Little Walter, you know whoever was working the circuit at the time. He would go to see, and he’d sneak around the back and stand on some old beer crates and stuff and listen through the window! So he was hip to the blue scene and stuff and he turned me on Muddy Waters and Lightning Hopkins and people like that I’d never even heard of, you know. And so we were an interesting band, we used to play originals. It wasn’t country but it wasn’t quite country rock either, we played I guess now they’d called it Americana. We’d mix our songs up in our set lists like we do a couple of Don’s originals. Don Klaus, leader of the band he was the **** dog he’s a Vietnam vet and a lot of his songs had to do with his time in Vietnam and of course with lost loves of Arkansas mountain girls. So we’d do a couple of his songs, and we’d follow it up with somebody like Lightning Hopkins or Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters, so people really didn’t know what to make of us. They just never heard of such a thing, and at that particular time and that particular location. Anyway eventually that band broke up and Carol D introduced me to Larry Davis.

Larry needed a guitar player for a couple of gigs for a weekend, so Carol D put me in touch with Larry who asked me to sing &  play a couple times when Albert King came to town,  because Albert and Larry were all childhood buddies, but I digress. I went over to Larry’s house – there’s an old shotgun style house in his him and his mother lived there and she was sick with diabetes really bad. I was waiting for Larry to come out and I was sitting on the couch with a little mouse running around underneath the bed in the bedroom right off the main thing and I was just going ‘well that’s interesting, that’s cool OK’ and then Larry came out with this guitar and sat down and showed me a chord and said ‘can you make this chord’ and I said sure! We talked a little bit and he said ‘play this rhythm’ so I played this rhythm. ;That’s OK, can you do this chord’ and I said ‘yeah I’m gonna do that chord’ and he goes ‘play this rhythm’. I play that rhythm, he says ‘OK you’ll do what’s your address’! I gave him my address, he says ‘someone be by pick you up at 10:00 o’clock tomorrow morning’. That was a Friday, and Saturday was when somebody came by, picked me up in a Bronco – the full size Bronco not the little ones – I and Coot, he was the bass plus keyboard player, he picked picked me up and then we went and picked up the rest of the band, and then we drove on to Memphis.

So here I am in my 20s, the only ofay in the vehicle, didn’t know any of these guys, they were all in their 40s and 50s, they were all a lot older than me, and we’re on the road to Memphis! I have no idea where we’re going, what we’re doing, and they start passing around the whiskey flask, get it to me and say ‘you want some?’, ‘yeah sure’ and then passed around the joint, ‘you want some?’, I say ‘sure, why not you know’, and so we’re having a grand old time! We get to Memphis , Coot pulls his Bronco into this alleyway, it’s pretty narrow and we go down it, and at the end of the alley Larry’s sitting on the trunk of his Cadillac talking to some girls! We get out, unload all our equipment. and take it through a narrower walkway to a backstage area and we set up our stuff on this stage, and then I have time to walk around a little bit. Well, on the stage next to us is John Lee Hooker and Charlie Musselwhite, after those guys Memphis Slim is playing so it turns out to be this big festival in a park right off of Bill Street somewhere. I mean I don’t know to this day! I still don’t have any idea where this festival was or anything, but we played between John Lee Hooker and Charlie Musselwhite and Memphis Slim I believe and we did a 45-60 minute set, something like that and Larry introduced everybody in the band, ‘and this young fella here on guitar, I don’t know his name yet, I just met him yesterday but ladies, he is a ladies man, you want to talk to this guy’! But you know I turned this as red as I can be! So anyway after our shows over I’ve got all these girls talking to me, and they’re all sweet and deep smiles and they’re nice you know to this redheaded kid, and I’m just quite cool and Larry goes ‘man where you going, no time for that, I’m going to head back to Little Rock, we got a show there tonight!

I said ‘what’? Larry said ‘yeah we got to go’. I waved goodbye to the girls, and got back in the truck and drove back to Little Rock and played a show for four hours to 15 people, 6 of them were in the band and 6 of them were working there. At the end of the night Larry said ‘so this is the Blues’. I go ‘yep, this is what it is’ it’s the first show, we got paid 75 bucks apiece, the second show we got paid 20 bucks apiece. Larry goes ‘do you think you can hang?’ I was hooked! I was hooked hook, line and sinker, man! That was a ‘hell yeah, I can hang’! I called up my job the next morning to quit and two months later I was homeless on and off for two years. I had a blast.

Q: So you were gigging around Little Rock for quite a while, but then you ended up in Austin. How did that happen?

A: I was back in Pensacola one day visiting my folks on a break from Larry, and he called me up and said ‘John you need to go down to this place called Night Town in Fort Walton Beach. There’s a kid from Austin TX playing there who just recorded one of my songs, and I’ve known this kid for a little while, he’s pretty good so I think you’ll like him’. So me and a buddy we go to Night Town in Fort Walton Beach, and of course the act is Stevie Ray Vaughn with the original Double Trouble! His album had not even been released yet, he had just quit the David Bowie tour and no one had ever seen him work, not there anyway and so we went there and the first song Stevie was up with Rude Mood.

1500 guitar players get up and go have a drink at the bar! Second song he did, ‘Voodoo Child’ 14, 999 guitar players try to start selling their guitars immediately and switching to the bass. I just looked up at the stage, and I said ‘well crap if Larry moves to LA, I’m moving to Austin’ because anytime they could produce a guitar player like that, it had to have something going for it, and this is before Austin exploded you know. Actually the big Texas oil and energy bust happened, and Texas was in the middle of a huge recession. So by the time I got there in ’86’, you know when you’re looking for a place to live landlords would be showing you places you know just a couple years ago I could get for $500 a month, now it’s for a parking pad you know people would put up a tent and live on it. I’ve just gone ‘well that’s just nuts’. Well anyway, the bust happened so that wasn’t going on anymore so Larry moved out, and there was there was nothing for me left in Little Rock once Larry moved to LA. When I was with Larry, that was like I said, I had a blast! I got the meet and play with Fenton Robinson, Albert Collins and Albert King and got to hang out with Albert King quite a bit, yeah just incredible stuff you know. I mean Son Seals was riding high at the time, him and Albert Collins were duking it out as to who was going to be the new king of the Blues guitar and they were both just incredible. And at the same at you had Albert King go ‘shoot **** y’all don’t stand a chance’. Freddie King was long gone by then and BB was kind of doing a a very commercialized version of BB. And rock – it was just you know, big hair and heavy metal stuff, and that’s all good you know, that’s rock and roll, and the other end was the new wave and the punk movement. And then there’s a third movement at the time, it was a blues movement, and that was for the cats that didn’t want to play hair metal, maybe just couldn’t grow the hair (laughs) didn’t want to play punk and new wave, even though we kind of sympathized with some of the ethos at the time. So we got into playing Blues and this is like in Austin mainly this scene popped up and it was just I went down there and it was just incredible! Our first night in town, my wife and I drove down 6th Street, we didn’t know what the heck was going on! It’s just crazy man, there’s bars lined up on each side of the street for I don’t know 5-6 blocks, and every bar has a live band in it and every live band has a f****n guitar player that’s just killing it!

And then you’re there, you go in one bar and you’d hear this guy playing guitar and you just go ‘Jesus’ and you’d walk out of that bar and walk into the bar next door, well this guy’s better, you go down to the next bar, well this guy’s even better! And it was like, what the heck! It was a town that, at that time, by the mid 80’s, really promoted and supported guitar players. It was a guitar town, no doubt about it, at that time it was a straight ahead guitar town. If you wanted to gig, you had to be able to play, because there were just too many great guitar players in that town, and it wasn’t all Blues. There was a lot of country, there was a lot of rockabilly, there’s a lot of rock, but everybody had great guitar players everybody could play! It was just wild, and it was such a healthy atmosphere of competition and striving to make yourself better and stuff, it was a wonderful time to be in Austin TX! I considered myself very fortunate, I was there from 1986-2006, right around that time.

Q: And you played at some legendary Austin clubs, is that right?

A: I played Antone’s, I played the Continental Club, I played the Hole in the Wall bar, played the Black Cat Lounge, played the Austin Outhouse, toured all over the the country and all over Europe in bands out of Austin, it was a great experience.

Q: Did you meet John Logan and Hudson Harkins there in Austin?

A: Yeah, I did! Hudson had a band called the Hoo Doo Cats and his guitar player was a friend of mine, Scott Reiner out of Las Vegas. Great guitar player, great singer, also worked at Ray Henning’s heart of Texas music, that’s where I’m at. And so I met Hudson because we were in different bands you know, he had his band and I was playing in different bands, a couple of them,  they were just playing the same circuit at that time. A lot of times, because when you weren’t on tour, you came back down to 6th Street and got a gig. So you know, that’s the secret to surviving as a musician, especially as a guitar player in those days, you worked as much as you could, took every opportunity.  You’d work sometimes 3 gigs a night 7 nights a week! You know you just played, you played, you played, and you toured and you come back and you hustle gigs. And then lot of bars didn’t pay very well, so you had to learn how to hustle tips and we got pretty good at being able to hustle tips out of a crowd. Of course they got their money’s worth, they got one heck of a show and excellent music!

All the musicians at that time, we all got really good at hustling the tips and we all learned when a crowd was done, how to turn the house. You know, we’d play two 2 1/2 hour sets till the crowd stopped tipping you know, and then we’d take a break and turn the house and then do it all over again! And so at several of those places, you could make a lot of money once you learned how to do that. Of course you had to be good, that’s the thing, you had to be good, you had to be able to play! And then there were the other clubs, the historic clubs, the famous ones like Antone’s and the Continental Club, you had to be really good to play in those places, and the pay is okay. You’d make more money down on 6th street, but the thing was, it was a lot of fun especially at Antone’s or Guadalupe, or Guadalupe anyway, cuz that was where all the great shows happened, well you know the Blues parties, the anniversaries, and stuff like that!

All those guys from Chicago were down there playing all the time, and it was just this magical place in time! My wife bartended there for 11 years, bartended at Continental Club for eight or nine years, it was just a wonderful place to go hang out after you finished your gig down on 6th street or some other part of town you know just down the street at the hole in the wall or something like that you haul ass up to Antone’s, try to catch the remnants of the last set and see if they were going to shut the doors and you know, play overtime! There was a lot of times there was an extra set after closing time and it was just incredible! You’d see Otis Rush on stage you know, standing 10 feet away and only you know, 30-40 people in the joint and so it was, you know, it was after 2 am, and it was just incredible! And then the Antone”s house band with Derek O’Brien and Denny Freeman playing guitars! Mel Brown was an artist in residence for a while when I was there, it was just great guitar playing everywhere and I was fortunate enough that I got to play Antone’s quite a bit and be a part-timer. I got involved in the organization a little bit and got promoted by Susan Antone and Cliff, and they made my career, you know helped me have a career!