SL: It was kind of interesting. At that time, there was a very intimate connection between the San Francisco concert situation and the Austin concert situation. A lot of the people important in the San Francisco scene had come from Austin, and we'd swap back and forth. And you may or may not know that the Family Dog Productions -- the Avalon Ballroom people -- were, that was the creation of a local boy, Austin fella.

BFT: Who was that?

HW: Chad Helms.

SL: He opened up a branch in Denver which went for a while, which was managed by Billy Lee Brammer. Well, that's where we got Johnny Winter from, and all that kind of thing. And then Billy later settled down in Dallas to fool SMU [Southern Methodist University] for a while with his analysis of the American author, and kept his music connections; and we did not get too much from that end of things. I hadn't, I hadn't thought about that before. I guess, I guess it was a thin situation as far as what we could use, anyhow. The information that I've gotten from Paul is really more early-seventies.

HW: I'm sure.

BFT: Yeah.

HW: He came down just a couple... Well, like I say, with both of those bands, I believe. And that was, more or less, his introduction to Austin, I should imagine.

BFT: Yeah, I think he'd said he had come first as a college student, and that didn't work...

HW: That's true, he did come to school here.

BFT: That didn't take very long. And he went back to Dallas, and then came down here a few times with bands, and ultimately decided he wanted to come down and live here.

HW: Right.

BFT: You got any favorite stories, favorite performance stories, or nightmares -- whatever the case may be?

HW: You can tell him the one about Lightning and Petrochic, I suppose.

SL: You tell that one. I guess the thing I remember most... Well, when I think about the incredible labor that went into all that, and try to think of what made it worthwhile, I do think about a few things.

One of them is preserved in a picture by Burton Wilson, and it's a picture of Muddy Waters standing up there just wailing as hard as he can! And the light show has the "First Noel" behind him; and it was, it was indeed Christmas season! And he was playing Christmas; he was playing joy.

And the other one involves a late set with Mance Lipscomb, when everything got real quiet, and he did his very best. I think you'll probably find that most of the people who've met, met or dealt with Mance have kind of a special feeling about him. He was such a good man, and it stuck out all over him. He could... He'd get that good vibe going, and there just wasn't any possibility of doing anything but Right for while he had you. That's... Those are the ones I think about.

HW: Yeah, yeah! Mance was truly an amazing person!

BFT: How did he take to... I guess, he really didn't get that much bright lights and media attention, but there was a while when he was hitting the college coffee house scene and doing festivals and stuff. He was basically a farmer from the country, though.

SL: He took to it just the way he took to anything else. He had full confidence in himself and no need to show off or play games of any sort. He sat down and played his music; and of course, you liked it; And that was satisfactory with him, and was satisfactory with you. Very straight-forward man, remarkable man.

BFT: So during this time period, were you listening to any of the black locals? Who was hot in '65?

SL: Houston, you might know more than I do, but I can't remember anything that stuck together long enough.

HW: Not, not so very much. At one point, there were some fellows from the Air Force base mostly that had a percussion kind of a group called Afro Caravan.

SL: Right, I'd forgotten that! They were interesting.

HW: They did an entirely different kind of music than most anything else that was happening, because maybe they would have a flute or... And then, they would have several different drummers and...

BFT: Hmm, I hadn't heard anything about that. Glad you brought that up.

HW: I think, you know, one of them or another might have been a sergeant in the Air Force or something. But, they would put on sort of traditional African hats and robes or so, and come down and do an entirely unusual show, for the most part, from what we were up to. And we'd sometimes work them in between a couple of other kinds of acts or something like that. And they actually make a record for Bill Josey on his little Soma Beat label at some point, which I may somewhere have a copy of; but we did actually record them a couple of times, I think.

BFT: This late '60s?

HW: That would have been during the time we had the Gas Company, '67 to '70, somewhere in there.

SL: I think it would have been '68, Houston.

HW: 'Could have been.

SL: That's my best recollection. These days there'd be a bag for them, you know. You'd call them "World Beat" or something like that, but they were just sort of unheard of back then.

BFT: I can imagine.

SL: And they'd get things going, and people enjoyed it considerably. I don't think they ever had very much commercial success, but it was very successful at the time. I ought to try to look them up.

HW: The other band that we used a few times was more or less locals from the Eastside. It was a band called the Mustangs, and they had a four-piece horn section, I think, three or four piece. It was a fairly good band. I mean, a fairly sizable band; it was probably as many as ten pieces sometimes. And they weren't necessarily all that well-rehearsed, but they did...

SL: They did have revolving personnel and all that kind of thing.

BFT: Band that large...

HW: Right.

BFT: ...Would need to, yeah. From information I got about them, there was a little while when it looked like they were going to do okay. And they, I don't know, got two or three trips to the West Coast -- working out through, I guess, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, California and back -- a couple of times where they made a little money on the road. I'd actually ended up working with a guitar player and singer, but... Matthew Robinson, you remember Matthew?

SL: Oh yeah, I think I...

HW: Vaguely, Uh-huh.

BFT: Yeah, he's still around town. They were kinda like a top 40 R&B band more than a blues band.

HW: Right, yeah.

BFT: Soul band.

HW: Right, yes. And other than that I don't really think of any other acts. There was an old fellow that we brought up from San Antonio, who I forget how we heard about him. He was a... Well, I can't recall his name, right off-hand. The rest of the band was called the "Toronados," or whatever.

SL: That escapes me, too.

BFT: What did he play?

HW: He played guitar.

BFT: Was guitar player?

HW: Uh-huh.

BFT: Wasn't Tim was it? Tim Pickett?

HW: I'll have to think about that. I know it'll come to me someday.

BFT: It's probably one of those. I've got a list of...

HW: Maybe in the Burton's Book of the Blues, there may be a photo of him.

BFT: Okay, where... I've seen that.

HW: Right. Burton's another person you ought to interview.

BFT: Yeah! Is he, is he... He's not in Austin is he?

HW: Oh, yes.

BFT: He is in Austin?

HW: Yes.

BFT: 'Cause I was thinking he was in Dallas.

SL: And a pleasant man to talk to! He's getting old, and so it's necessary to be considerate and gentle with him. But he, he knows quite a bit. He became interested in the blues situation because it made such good pictures. Therefore, he made it his business to be known to people who played blues, and so he could take his pictures.

BFT: Has he got more than... I've seen one picture book of his.

HW: There's a second one that's mostly done at the Armadillo, I think. I believe that fellow's name might have been Blind Guitar Smitty and the Toronados.

SL: Yeah, that's right. That is it!

HW: I think that was it, and I don't recall how we got on to him, but I think he was from San Antonio.

SL: Must've been one of Charlie's deals.

HW: It could've been, and it seemed like he had a white kid who played guitar with him maybe or something, but I'm really not sure.

BFT: That'll have to be one for the list, to keep asking people if they know.

HW: Right. But now, Burton was very interested in jazz. And he was, I believe, in and out of New Orleans in the '40s, and took photos down there. But, he had an extensive 78 jazz collection that he foolishly shared with too many folks in the '60s there, and probably has very little of it left at this point.

BFT: Yeah. One of the things about jazz in Austin for that period of time that has amazed me is that in some of the digging that I've been doing back in the publications -- I've spent a good deal of time in the stacks of Downbeat -- and there's national coverage for the Longhorn Jazz Festivals that were happening here.

SL: Yeah.

BFT: With heavyweights, all of the heavyweights!

HW: What years? What years?

BFT: Mid-sixties.

SL: Yeah, I recall them. And I recall going to a few of them. I did not care for them. They were organized in such a way that it was difficult to enjoy the music, but...

BFT: I can believe that.

SL: But yeah, they... That was considered a market. That was considered a place where you could make a splash, as were some of the festivals at North Texas State in that time. But yeah, I remember seeing that cover.

BFT: Yeah, it just really surprised me because it... I think they... You know, for a range of two or three years they had had Coltrane and Monk and Miles Davis and, you know, Art Blakey! Just a whole bunch of names that I wouldn't have associated with Austin for the mid-sixties.

HW: Well, jazz was kind of a college thing, you know, during that period of time. It was something that students, some students got interested in. There was an excellent jam session that happened at the Victory Grill Sunday afternoons back in the early-sixties. I was only there a couple of times myself, but I don't know if you've talked to some folks about those.

BFT: Yeah, the Sunday afternoon jams, they've been mentioned, mentioned several times.

HW: Right. Some of those were...

BFT: Did you ever have occasion to go to either of... I think the guy's name was Doc, Doc Jones. Was that his name, Doc? [aka Dad Jones]

HW: I don't recall that name.

BFT: He was one of the guys behind Charlie's Playhouse and Ernie's Chicken Shack, I think. Did you ever go to any of those places?

SL: No, I... Well, I got to each of them about once, but I never became habituated, and certainly never learned much about the scene or the management.