He came riding out of San Antonio with an hot-rodded electric guitar blazing, a wild son of Texas that had music filling his huge heart right up to the very brim. Doug Sahm, who left this planet 20 years ago today, was like no other musician in the world. He had so many different sounds up his sleeve, and at any given moment could pull one out and astound whoever was within earshot, whether it was Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Bobby Bland, Red Garland or anyone else. Doug just had the magic knack inside him, and would share it at the drop of a downbeat.
There was never any doubt of that, starting way back when he was in junior high school in San Antonio and started hanging around bandstands all over the city, whether it was conjunto bars on the Westside, blues joints near his house on the Eastside or country places all over town. Rock & roll was just getting started then in the 1950s, and before too long the young man would be having hit singles while he was still in high school.
Born in 1941, it was like through some other-worldly happening Doug was put down in central Texas to crack open a whole new code of music and share it with fellow travelers. The way he did it now feels like some kind of mystical miracle: dozens of different patterns converged inside the soul of a young man, which propelled him onto a path all his own. It was one that he chased until the end of his life without every looking back. I’ve never met anyone quite as musically and cosmically fearless. Somehow Doug Sahm was able to peel back the outer covering of life and see all the way inside a human being. What he found there was such a joyous surprise that all he could do was smile, utter his oft-used short summation of being alive–“far out”–and continue wading into the pudding of existence. He never took a step he didn’t believe in or play a note that wasn’t true. There should be a monument on the grounds of the Capitol in Austin for Sahm, and a declaration proclaiming him State Musician of Texas forever.
I am most assuredly biased in my beliefs, but that’s one of the very first things Sir Douglas Sahm taught when we met in 1972: If you believe in something you have to fight for it to the very end. There can be no turning back. Being from San Antonio, Doug once explained it to me as his “hometown Battle of the Alamo theory.” He took a lot of personal pride in that, always reminding me that it’s always all-in. No retreat. We first met when Sahm had returned to Texas after over five years in San Francisco. He’d been arrested for possession of marijuana in Corpus Christi in 1966, and knew he had to get out of the town. Fast. Even with Top 10 hits like “She’s About a Mover” and “The Rains Came” with his Sir Douglas Quintet, the Lone Star state had let it be known they had a reserved prison cell for Sahm in Huntsville, waiting for him to get caught again.
So off he went to “Frisco,” as only he could call it, and into the open arms of the Grateful Dead, Texas pal Janis Joplin and all the other musical escapades swirling and twirling in the Haight-Ashbury. He grabbed another hit single in 1969 with “Mendocino,” but as the 1970s began, the musician started to get homesick for the Texas sunshine and a little more laid-back groove. Once his family settled back into San Antonio, Doug quickly smelled the musical action in Austin and started making that a new home-away-from-home. He heard a calling, and when that happened the man listened.
Austin was free and easy in the early ’70s. Apartments were $50 a month, beer three quarts for a dollar, marijuana five bucks an ounce and free peyote buttons delivered regularly freshly picked from the Texas valley. There were a couple dozen clubs around town with live music, 50,000 students at the University of Texas burning for action and as long as you could stay out of the grip of local law enforcement the big blue sky was the limit. Once Doug Sahm got himself into the middle of it all, he tagged the town Groover’s Paradise. The nickname stuck.
He could be found sitting in with bands like Freda & the Firedogs and building a momentum that soon got him a record deal with Atlantic Records. Before long Doug was hanging out around town with Atlantic bigwig Jerry Wexler and New Orleans piano wizard Dr. John, or hosting a free Thanksgiving jam with the Grateful Dead at the Armadillo World Headquarters. It seemed like it took Sir Doug about ten minutes to be running the town and bringing some national attention to what was essentially a well-kept musical secret. Even Willie Nelson had asked Doug’s advice where to play after Nelson’s bust-open appearance at a George McGovern for President rally in ’72 introduced him to the swelling hippie population. “The Armadillo,” Doug quickly advised, and the soon-burgeoning outlaw country musical movement was born.
As for Doug Sahm, he kept on moving, always chasing the visions flashing in front of his eyes no matter how many times they’d mutate into sounds sometimes only he could hear. Cosmic country? No problem. Hippie blues? Look no further. Tex-Mex? Sahm helped invent it. Jazz with San Antonio’s finest horn players? Start right here. There were no walls inside Doug’s mind. A tall-boy coffee full of sugar in the morning and a burning joint here and there spread over the day and night kept the man on a mesmerizing merry-go-round of perpetual motion and boundless ideas. In his long brown Lincoln Continental he would criss-cross the city, dropping in on musician friends, hitting local record stores, heading off to San Antonio for enchiladas and then return, carrying on like he was running for some undetermined political office.
And at night there would always be a fantastical club show at Soap Creek Saloon, Rome Inn, Antone’s, Bevo’s, Broken Spoke, Armadillo World Headquarters, Hole in the Wall, somewhere. It didn’t matter, because every single night the sky would open and the sacred sounds of Texas music would reign supreme. By then, Doug had tricked the devastating drummer George “Big Beat” Rains into moving to Austin from the Bay Area, and with San Antonio homies like Sir Douglas Quintet Vox organist Augie Meyers, bassist Jack Barber, tenor sax king Rocky Morales, trumpeter Charlie McBurney, fiddler J.R. Chatwell, steel player and token Northern Harry Hess and sometimes special guest accordionist Flaco Jimenez, those shows would be like advanced studies in how to use instruments to create a churning cauldron of eternal inspiration.
Doug displayed a sonic encyclopedic knowledge of not only how music should sound but also the ways it could seemingly evolve the human species. Really. The Doug Sahm mission was to gather an audience together, invite them onto his personal rocket ship and blast off into outer space for several hours of rollicking songs and shared feelings. There was no hierarchy of inclusion: everyone was equal and all were brothers and sisters in the joyous quest for the ultimate groove. By the time the rocket ship returned to earth, the Austin landscape had taken on a shimmering glow, Doug would be soaking wet and those lucky enough to have been there would be beaming hallelujah smiles and enough memories to fill a dozen psychic scrapbooks. It was the 1970s and President Richard Nixon was on his way out, the Vietnam war was ending and it started to feel like America had a chance to redeem itself. In Austin, music was running through the streets and there were thousands and thousands of seekers looking to grab a rainbow and ride it for however long it could last.
I decided it was time to interview Doug Sahm for a small local alternative newspaper some friends had started. Off I went to Doug’s house on the hill and an hour of talk, or so we planned. We started at noon, and around four o’clock Doug decided it was time to bring former 13th Floor Elevators frontman Roky Erickson into the conversation. Off a car went to find him. Erickson wasn’t long out of the Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Rusk, Texas, thanks to a massive legal mistake where he pled insanity after being arrested for possession of marijuana. Roky was now free, but clearly the years inside had been harsh for him. Still, all three of us immediately found a shared language of rock & roll freedom and interstellar dreams, like a secret Texas brotherhood, and before the day was over I had ideas of a whole new universe of possibilities.
Roky had explained several theories of evolution I’d never heard, and Doug was cheering us on with big-throated yelps and herbal assistance. As the sun started to set west of Austin the sky spread into a fiery reddish-orange glow I haven’t seen since. Roky had the bemused grin of a green Cheshire cat. When I asked him what he saw as the future of rock & roll, the man who helped invent psychedelic music in 1965 gave me a knowing look and answered with genuine glee: “There’s no need to worry Bill,” he said sweetly. “It’s as commercial as ants and will be with us forever.” Right, Roky. How could I have been so silly to even ask? Faith is the key, and the man who helped invent the lock graciously handed it over to me that day. No other queries need ever be entertained. Doug Sahm and I soon started an uninterrupted continuum of indivisible friendship and crazed endeavors that make me giddy with gratitude. By believing in me, Doug taught me how to believe in myself. It is the treasure of a lifetime.
Now, 45 years later and after a million zig-zagging trails, endless psychic crossings and elliptical adventures both remembered and forgotten, so many of our musical brothers and sisters have traveled to the other side. They are still here, but they are also gone. It is not a trick of perception to see them and hear them, because they wander in the ozone around us and speak to our most inner ear. To stay open to all that they offer is to realize the kingdom of heaven inside us all. Foreverness is not a fool’s fortune. Rather it is the ultimate gift we give to ourselves, something that brings a stillness buried in the sanctity of life itself. There is no other secret needed. I hear Doug Sahm every day, singing his songs of freedom and offering to help me find the way to live with clear eyes and a good heart. There is no other way, Doug tells me in the silence, and as I listen the music of the spheres drifts in from a world that can’t be seen but lies just within our reach. Then, as always, the Texas tornado arrives to take me home.
Bill Bentley