In April, 1991, Houston White and Sandy Lockett were interviewed at Harold McMillan's house in Austin, Texas.

BFT: You probably had a group of people that you hung out with that. Who were those people?

HW: It was more or less, by the time, it was probably the Ranger Crowd. 'Would've been called the Ranger Crowd. There was also another group of a people, the Speelunkers, and we were kind of on the fringes of those, I guess you would say.

SL: Yeah.

HW: And they were sort of considered radicals, or... The... Certainly the Ranger Crowd, to some extent.

SL: Untrustworthy types of one sort and another.

BFT: This is, this is pretty SDS, right?

SL: Well, the SDS was beginning to wind up, but I think most of the people we dealt with found that the SDS was perhaps a little bit over on the mad dog side of things.

HW: Yeah, we weren't involved in that sort of thing; and we didn't generally go out and march with them or whatever or anything of that nature. We left that to the other folks, basically.

SL: But uh, oh yeah. There are connections that go back a long way. I met Jack Kerouac of... I walked around in black turtlenecks, smoking thin cigarettes and drinking coffee. I still have my treasured first edition of Howl, not to mention my contraband edition of Lady Chatterly's Lover, and you know, did all the east coast coffee house thing at one time or another. And that, that gives you an attitude after a while.

BFT: How did you just kind of fall into running a club and being promoters?

SL: We had friends who were musicians and needed a place to play.

BFT: Do either of you play?

SL: Scarcely.

BFT: Scarcely?

HW: We actually put on our first two shows, if I'm not mistaken, over on the Eastside at the Dorie Miller Auditorium, and that was kind of our beginning, more or less.

BFT: Do you remember when that was and who those people were?

HW: I think it was '66.

SL: '66 I believe is right. And the headliners were the... In some order there were two shows and I have them a little mixed up in my mind: the 13th Floor Elevators, which I was kinda managing at the time, and the Conqueroo, and a vanished bunch called Rachel's Children, and... Was there somebody else?

HW: Ah well, I don't think so. We might have put Shiva's on one of those shows.

SL: Right, we did. We put Shiva's Headband on there.

HW: But the first show, I believe, was the Elevators headlined, and then the Conqueroo. And in the middle, we ran up Franklin and his fools that did a completely different kind of thing, where Franklin sat on the table and played tablas and someone played a 12-string, and it was actually very nice because it was sort of an acoustic break between two fairly heavy electric acts.

BFT: Franklin, Jim Franklin?

HW: Uh-huh.

SL: Yeah.

BFT: How did psychedelic acid rock play East 12th Street or Rosewood?

SL: Very well, I think.

HW: Well, it actually drew mostly all students and so on over there. There weren't any locals of that area actually probably, except the very few that might have stumbled in, wandering in wanting to know what was going on or heard the music. But basically, we were kind of amazed that we could get all these students over on the Eastside. And it was more or less a matter of economy, far as the hall. We later tried to show at the [City] Colosseum but the sound was awful then as now, and we didn't have nearly the equipment to do it right anyway -- and that we never had to do that again.

BFT: Lesson had been learned?

HW: Yes!

SL: What was that marvelous card that Ira handed out? He... Ira was, of course, promoting his club as good as he could. He was a nice man, but wasn't doing this for charity. And he had a little business card that he handed out, and it had pictures of devils on it. And it said, "Come see our crazy, beatnik band. They whips shock theater." It really did, I am not kidding you. I think I have one of those around too.

HW: Whip shock theater!

SL: Yes, indeed. The devils had whips of course, I guess that was the reason.

HW: We forgot to mention Fat Charlie being a member of the Conqueroo. He was the lead guitar player.

SL: Yes, indeed.

HW: And he drew quite a few folks in the I.L. [Club]. They were most amazed to see a chubby white fella with a bushy head of hair playing that kind of music for the most part.

BFT: Charlie Vanderer?

SL: Yeah.

HW: Yeah, oh yeah.

SL: I don't know why we left him out, I guess he's such a permanent presence in the mind.

HW: But he was... It was sort of through him that I first really met Lightning. There had been a folk club before our club called... What was the name of it? Bill Simonson's club?

SL: Oh, gosh!

HW: Well, I can't recall the name of it right now, but he... Eleventh Door was one of them...

SL: Yeah.

HW: ...Or something. He booked Lightning on a semi-regular basis. Every few months or something.

SL: Through the... With the idea in mind of the folk deal, rather than the blues deal, you know.

HW: He was a... It was a folk thing, more or less. But he brought Lightning and Billy Visor, who was a harmonica player in Houston -- played with Lightning frequently -- and Cleveland Chenier, who was a washboard player at that time anyway. And they all came and stayed at our house on San Antonio Street for most of a week or something. So, that was quite an experience.

BFT: I bet!

HW: And that was all Charlie's doing basically. He was just a pretty fresh young fella up from San Antonio and the junior college there or something.

BFT: I've seen some video documentaries on Lightning Hopkins, and he seemed like he was pretty much fun to hang out with for a couple of days.

SL: Uh, pretty dangerous! Like I say, I first came across him in Houston. We'd hire him for high school parties. And his fee was $50 and two fifths of gin; and when he drank the last of the second fifth of gin, he went home. Not until. So toward the end of the evening, it became a little serious about seeing whether we were going to get through this party alive, but you'd have to like put ropes up around him and things because he'd get funny. But, he was, he was seldom boring company, that's true.

BFT: Did you ever have any trouble in the bar? I mean, not so much in the last few years, but historically? 'Specially, the joints out in the country -- blues bars are kind of known as "cut-and-shoot" places where lots of whiskey drinking...

SL: Well, Ira saved my life one time. He and Ed Guinn caused a gentleman to not shoot me, so I guess that's trouble.

BFT: That's trouble!

SL: As to the Gas Company, we would occasionally have altercations, but we always made it our business to have somebody working the door that you didn't mess with, and so nothing got to much. I suppose we seldom... Well, I don't know, maybe two dozen people got ejected in the entire time of it's career. You know, it was all peace and love, man.

BFT: Oh yeah, that's what I was thinking: the '60s, man.

SL: So, what do you, what do you say about that? Also, we didn't serve booze there. People could bring in their own beer, but we did not have a bar. We did not have a bar for the simple reason that we knew, with the attitude on the part of the authorities that if we had a liquor license -- if we ever got one, which was possible I suppose -- the as it was then called TLCB [Texas Liquor Control Board] would be there every night and bust us every night. So we just avoided that part.

BFT: So, you had just a performance base?

SL: Yes, yes.

BFT: Serious about the music?

SL: That was sometimes difficult for some of the artists to understand, that we did not have a bar to support us; that it was essentially supported by the gate. But many of them came to like it after a while, the idea that it was possible to do it this way. Made limitations, but it worked.

BFT: I've asked this a couple of different ways so far, but I'm still trying to dig. Why blues? You know, how did you personally get into listening to and presenting blues?

HW: Well, I was... I guess before actually, before I met many of these people around The University, listened to a bit of Jimmy Reed and that sort of thing. And then maybe in the mid-sixties, '64 or so, the Butterfield Blues Band got national attention, and I think that was kind of instrumental in most of the college kids getting any interest in blues. And then from there, it was a matter of looking into where that came from, and...

SL: Where'd Paul get all this from?

HW: ...And uh, of course, at that time, I guess, Bobby Bland was just sort of starting his career. And he was from around here, but we didn't see all that much of him, really. He played the Eastside some, and went on to some national attention later on, I guess.

But, I certainly enjoyed the Butterfield Blues Band, as opposed to all the English stuff and that kind of thing. And it was really later in the career of the club that we really started getting into the more electric stuff.

We started out, like I say, with Lightning and Mance, whom we'd seen on the folk circuit. And so, we finally thought we'd try to get Muddy Waters to come down. We also got Freddie King to come down from Dallas a couple of times, and we would usually supply the band -- all of these people, except for Muddy who brought his whole crew with him. We had some young white guys we'd put with them, and they usually took pretty well to the guitar player we usually stuck with them, who was named Jim Mings; and he was just a young clean-cut college kid that could play the guitar like all those old guys.

SL: Eddie Taylor, and you know? When he played with Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Reed could hardly believe it. 'Wanted to take him home with him or something, because he could play them lick for lick, just like it was supposed to be.

BFT: Where is he now, do you know?

HW: I believe he's gotten a degree in Music and plays jazz or teaches Jazz, maybe somewhere on the east coast, in the Carolinas or so. I haven't heard from him in long time. I don't know.

BFT: In the interviewing that we've done so far with Paul and Diana, Paul and Diana Ray, he spends most of his time talking about the Dallas Bunch.

HW: Right

BFT: What about the Dallas Bunch?

HW: Well, we got a few of those folks down in the late '60s, I guess. At that time, Jimmy was working out of Dallas with a band called, known as Texas, sometimes it's referred to as Texas Storm, but we brought them down -- I think it was '69 maybe, a couple of different times -- and Paul sang with them. And then around that same time, he also was singing with Minnie Row and the 1948 Band. Those were the two main Dallas groups that we got down to play for us -- of course, with the exception of Freddie King. As far as I know, nobody else was doing anything up there.

SL: Well, it is odd really when you come to think of it that we didn't get more of those people because Billy Lee Brammer would have fed us some if he thought there was anything worth feeding us.

HW: Right!