THE VOICE
B. W. STEVENSON lived in Dallas, but he was an Austin musician. Or at least Austin claimed him. Until he recorded his first album he was just a shy outsider who couldn’t buy a gig down there. He was another North Texas State student, but he got to Denton about the time the old folk clubbers were leaving, and he probably would have been suspect in that crowd because he was an academic music student. At eighteen Stevenson had been a west Dallas face in the crowd; his rock band was called Us. But he had this voice. It had a Texas twang that would have to be ironed out, but it surged from deep in his chest and could rattle the lights if he would let it. He had a favorite range, high in his tenor, that was both winsome and sad, but then he would reach back and gulp more air and the voice would barrel out in an overwhelming baritone. He could take a song to a thundering finish. If he had a little more bass and training, the music school recruiters must have thought, he could probably sing opera.
Unfortunately, he didn’t take his voice scholarship seriously. He was kicked out of school after a year, for reasons that he preferred not to disclose. Still living in Denton, in a tiny bedroom with a communal refrigerator and a drunk old man in the building who stole his beer, Stevenson drove thirty-five miles north for a semester at Cooke County Junior College (now North Central Texas College), which in the days of the Vietnam draft was the only institution of higher learning in the state that would accept a student who had just flunked out somewhere else. Consequently, Gainesville became one of the wildest towns in Texas during those years. Stevenson finally gave up the fight and joined the Air Force, but he got out early—again for reasons that he preferred not to disclose.
He was odd-jobbing in Dallas and playing the clubs there when he went looking for work in Austin in 1970 and found nobody was interested. During those struggling days something very important happened to both his outlook and his music. His girlfriend broke off their engagement, and he couldn’t understand why. In his writing at least, he became almost obsessed with the subject. Either he was doing the jilting or he was getting jilted. Somebody was always on the raw end of things. He was one of the most authentic writers of unhappy love songs since Bob Dylan, but while Dylan’s love songs tended to be bitter, Stevenson’s songs were just sad.
If you find your true love once again
please don’t do the same damn thing to him
Even when I was with you
I felt so all alone
So I’d as soon do without you
and be on my own
I want to be on my own
it’s a long way home
I feel like a baby boy just being born
(“On My Own”)
Those were the songs that made women cry. They attracted the starry-eyed attention of a regional scout for RCA, and they set the tone for his self-named second album, B. W. Stevenson, which was released in 1971. The other imprint on the album belonged to Michael Murphey. RCA didn’t think any of Stevenson’s songs had hit-single potential, so they pushed as his single a Murphey song that was actually a poor choice. Stevenson did the best he could with “Say What I Feel,” but it was a song about songwriting and was self-conscious and trite. Much better was his take on one of Murphey’s best early songs, a weary stopover in a predawn truck stop called “Texas Morning.”
That was enough local flavor for the Austin audiences. B. W. came out of the RCA promo offices dubbed Buckwheat; Austin radio stations pushed and played his single and talked it up. He performed at the Armadillo with Kenneth Threadgill, and the older Austin musicians welcomed him like a little brother. He was identified with Austin music, but RCA didn’t see it that way. They wanted a star, and few stars were identified with Austin music. B. W.’s producer lined up some of the best sidemen in Los Angeles for the next album, a good deal less of Stevenson’s material, and he spread the regional appeal around. The songs were variously set in Pennsylvania, Mexico, Memphis, and Jackson, Mississippi. Whoever packaged the product titled the album Lead Free, and the cover offered gibberish:
Some people call me crazy, others think I’m a genius . . . when in truth I’m just a simple man.
And on the seventh day the idea sat back and said, “Lo, I have created the rhythm, the melody, the words, the copyright, the contracts, the studio and the symphony, the wax, the cover and the cellophane. Now, I will take the seventh day and see if the ears can get it.” Welcome to the seventh day and a simple idea from a man named B. W. Stevenson. He that doth have ears to hear . . . let him hear.
—BOB HAMILTON
B. W. STEVENSON
The Natural. B. W. Stevenson is photographed here in an Austin moment that seems to convey the sweetness of his voice. In Austin only Willie Nelson matched his inborn gifts as a singer. The shot was taken not long before he died. 1972.
RCA was insulting the intelligence of its own recording artist, and this album didn’t sell much better than B. W. Stevenson had. Lead Free was slick Hollywood schmaltz, but Stevenson’s producer made a significant discovery. If he lined up a chorus, tambourine, downbeat piano, and country-rock lead guitar, and if B. W. sang just a little louder, the man could really wail. A young staff writer for ABC-Dunhill named Danny Moore had written a pop song called “Shambala” that was buried in that factory’s vault of rejects. The lyrics vaguely described an appealing never-never land, but the arrangement gave Stevenson a chance to loosen the reins on his voice.
The single, included on 1973’s Pass This Way, took off quickly and climbed to number sixty-three on the Billboard pop chart. ABC-Dunhill quickly rediscovered the song, and they just happened to have a band on contract called Three Dog Night. Their producer had an uncanny knack for recognizing hit-single lyrics, all the releases sounded the same, and Three Dog Night turned out a hit every time. They were the only rock band in the country that could get away with releasing a Christmas-season tune backed up by a chorus of dogs barking “Jingle Bells.” ABC-Dunhill and Three Dog Night “covered” Stevenson, as the saying went in the music business, their version of “Shambala” charted their customary top-ten parabola, and B. W. was stuck with number sixty-three and sliding.
With a couple of friends, I drove up to Dallas one weekend in 1973 to watch and interview him. One of B. W.’s original weepers was in the front seat of the Volkswagen. Lucy was a veteran of Woodstock, had more recently had been going through a divorce. She enjoyed meeting the performers, and her favorite was B. W., for his songs were the most emotional of the lot.
Lucy had lived in Florida, Virginia, New York, Guadalajara, and Austin, but she had never been to Dallas. As we passed Waxahachie and moved into the mobile-home suburbs she asked what it was like. My friend Don said, “You’re the Texan. You tell her.”
“Uh,” I said. “Hm.”
East Texas extended as close to Dallas as the cotton-farming blackland fifty miles to the east, and nearby Fort Worth was Cowtown, a west Texas city, but Dallas was hard to pin down. I’d lived there for a couple of years. Its image was besmirched by far-right politics and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but that was just part of the problem for me. I begged the question until we whipped off the interstate. We were waiting for a light to change beside the studios of KLIF, a pioneering pop station in Texas. Our neighbor in the next lane was a handsome young black man with stylish clothes, a pretty girlfriend, and a new Chevrolet. Suddenly there was a crash, and the Chevrolet jumped out into the intersection, bumped along several times by a smoking ’59 Buick that just couldn’t seem to stop. The young blacks’ heads popped with each succeeding collision. Finally the cars came to a halt; an anguished Chicano man got out of the Buick apologizing in poor English, and the driver gripped his steering wheel and stared straight ahead. “God damn,” he yelled, and got out of the car with a look of imminent mayhem. His nostrils flared and his eyes flashed as he listened to the unhappy Chicano, then he sighed and said, “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
“Lucy,” I said. “Welcome to Dallas.” It felt like an overheated pressure cooker when I was living there, but somehow it never blew up.
We arrived at Moody Coliseum on the campus of Southern Methodist University, and a woman with a tall arrangement of curls told us B. W. would go on two hours later than we expected. She got anxious when I told her I was a journalist. “You’re going to write about this benefit?”
“Well, more about B. W. Stevenson.”
She led us through the door, and we followed her go-go boots down a corridor. Looking back over her shoulder, she said, “Before you go in there, I think I’d better tell you this wasn’t promoted worth a shit.”
At the entrance to the backstage area, we encountered a campus policeman who stared grimly at a group of longhaired Ivy-Leaguers singing about their religious experience. The policeman held up a hand and asked us what business we had in the backstage area. What difference did it make? Moody Coliseum had five thousand seats, but sitting and sprawled on the carpet in front of the stage were about thirty people. It was a concert for the American Indian Movement.
We retreated to a shade tree outside the coliseum while the band sang about Jesus. We went back inside after a while, and finally Stevenson’s entourage began to drift in. One of them peeked through the door at the stage, stared at the emptiness, and apparently decided to let B. W. see for himself. Stevenson came in wearing a stovepipe hat, his hair, beard, and girth expansive. He set his guitar case on the floor and stood talking to one of the most attractive girls I’d seen in a while. She was red-haired and had the kind of smile that embraced everyone. Stevenson walked inside the stage entrance, and emerged quickly with a drawn look on his face.
Word got around to the band onstage that the name act had arrived, and a rock band came off angry—they needed the exposure. One said a few bitter words to one of B. W.’s associates, who asked his leader, “Who were those guys?”
“I don’t know,” B. W. said. “They’ve got a lot of balls.”
Stevenson decided that all the accompaniment he would need for that crowd was a bass. He started tuning his guitar, and I approached him and introduced myself. He grunted and looked away, rather surly. It was hard to blame him for being upset with giving up a Sunday for that crowd, and he surprised me when he went onstage. He had a shy but humorous manner between songs, and his voice fairly echoed through the gymnasium. His voice was bigger than the crowd, and I wondered what the people from RCA would have thought about it. “You’re a good crowd,” B. W. told them at the end. “I just wish there were more of you.”
After his brief performance, I approached Stevenson again, asking if he had time to join us for a beer. An impish grin creased his face; with the pressure off, he was a different man. Stevenson led the way down Mockingbird Lane in a new Ford van with the red-head, his girlfriend, in the front seat, then detoured through one of Dallas’s stuffier wealthy neighborhoods. As I watched the back of B. W.’s stovepipe hat, the incongruity of a country-rock musician living in Dallas came down heavily. Positive funk was hard to find in the city of Dallas.
After a stop at a store for several six-packs of beer, we pulled into an entrance of a mid-priced apartment complex. As we walked upstairs and followed the railing, a young man in an adjoining yard yelled, “Hey, is that B. W. Stevenson, the rock star?” Stevenson smiled and opened the door for his girlfriend. We settled into the coolness; the musicians took off their hats, and I looked around. B. W. sank into an easy chair, crossed his ankles, clasped his hands on his belly, and passed on the cigar-sized joints that his drummer manufactured. At times as we talked he seemed on the verge of sleep. He was easily the most relaxed musician I had run across.
He talked about his constant stage fright and the pressure on him to make a hit record. “I don’t really care if we have one. I’d rather grow in my songwriting ability and make it in my own time, when I’m ready to be put up at that level, when I’m sure I can stand right next to people who are considered the best in the business. I’m not right now. Those people out in L.A. are after money. I’m not particularly. I’d rather have some stability of person.”
MERLE HAGGARD
Genuine Article. Aside from his friendship with Willie Nelson, Haggard stood apart from the Austin scene, but its audiences loved the rough edges of his style. 1980.
I asked him about the “Shambala” incident.
“That kinda ticked me off. I wouldn’t have minded except ABC said they had a freeze on the song. Three Dog Night didn’t need that hit. But as far as all the uproar afterward, they made a lot of fuss for nothing. I didn’t particularly give a shit. It pissed me off that they thought I would.”
“Do you like the way you’re being produced?”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
He was not an electrifying man to interview, and my own senses had been dulled by the drummer’s reefers. Everybody always seemed to heave a sigh of relief when the tape recorder was put away. B. W.’s sidemen went back to Austin, and after a while he got out his guitar and began to sing understated, gut-wrenching, backwoods blues. By the time he finished a couple of those songs I was almost a weeper myself, but I doubted I’d ever hear that B. W. Stevenson on record. I leaned back in his chair, drank his Coors, enjoyed his music, watched his girlfriend, and generally envied his station in life. In many ways B. W. seemed on the outskirts of Austin music. He was shy and ungainly, and he lived in Dallas, he said, because he couldn’t afford to move. Yet a major label was betting that he might make it big. It didn’t matter if B. W. was the best or worst songwriter in the country; he had the voice.
RCA had an investment in B. W. Stevenson, and it was time for that investment to yield some returns. He was preparing to go to Los Angeles for a recording session when we talked to him—RCA wanted to follow up on his misadventure with Three Dog Night before the press forgot who he was. He didn’t have any songs that RCA considered hit potential, so they called in the hit doctor again. Moore said he hadn’t finished any new songs worthy of Billboard attention, but he had an interesting guitar piece he’d been working on. Stevenson and RCA liked what they heard, and B. W. sat down to write the lyrics. That way he would get more money, and part of the credit. What, he must have been wondering all along, was the magic formula for a hit song? If he could record just one, and make RCA some money, then he would regain a measure of control over his music.
First of all, a hit tune needs to be short of length and line, the rhyme scheme should be uncomplicated, and it should carry an oft-repeated chorus that is very infectious and easy to remember. It should tell just enough of a story to capture one’s attention. B. W. possibly had all that in mind when he sat down to write “My Maria,” but then again, it might have been just luck. He wrote the song for his voice, and while the story line was almost nonexistent, a chorus trilled its love for the heroine of the song in the background, while Stevenson’s voice ranged high, wide, and handsome: “Mariiiiiiiiiah, Mariii . . .” and so on. But it worked. Behind him were a tocking percussion instrument and fine, fluid guitars, very tastefully arranged. And B. W. gave the lyrics a staccato rhythm, countering the instrumental flow. It was catchy, and “My Maria” caught on, climbing the Billboard pop chart as high as number nine and topping the easy-listening list. With the song’s success, RCA repackaged Pass This Way as My Maria, which sold much better than the original. “My Maria” wasn’t a Texas song. It was Southern California, a drive up Highway 101 toward Disneyland with Jay and the Americans on the radio, but Stevenson had done it. He had made a hit record.
RCA invested heavily in his next record, Calabasas. The record sounded more like West Coast country rock than the albums released by other Austin musicians, but at least the country instruments had returned. One cut employed horns to dramatize lyrics that sounded like a marital disagreement in a Houston trailer park. The song that most evoked the feel of Austin music was also the best cut on the album, another Danny Moore song called “Look for the Light.” A lonesome train whistle blowing early in the song gave it a country setting, but in mood it was sheer gospel, revolving around a Christian sentiment that equated light with refuge and hope with light. The song was also a fine springboard for Stevenson’s vocal talent, for it allowed him to start off easy and build to a crescendo.
RCA couldn’t be sure they had pulled it off, but there were indications they had. B. W. showed up on the Billboard review page in the company of Paul Simon, Elvis Presley, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Jack Jones, Boz Scaggs, and Charlie Rich, but the reviewer spotlighted Calabasas as the best release of all: “It is a standout production. This LP is the most significant Stevenson has released in his short career as a nationally known artist. With the proper exploitation, this LP could be a massive seller; it’s that good. All the infectious ingredients in pop and rock are perfectly blended here.”
RCA burst with pride; one of their promo reps called B. W. “a monster in Missouri.” RCA had Stevenson on the road almost constantly—not in Texas too much, for he was already known in Texas, that was the last place they wanted him—but all over the United States and Canada. But B. W. wasn’t happy. He didn’t have time to write; he was having an extremely difficult time reproducing the record’s sound in concert; and, worst of all, the red-haired girl was no longer a part of his life. Just when things seemed to get right, they went wrong again. He was making a name for himself, but friends feared he was also drinking too much.
Melinda, the photographer I was working with at the time, had never seen B. W. perform. We learned he was going to play a concert in the gym at Southwest Texas State in San Marcos, just thirty-five miles south of Austin. Lyndon Johnson went to Southwest Texas (now Texas State University) once upon a time, and like many graduates he was a school teacher before he ran for congress and Franklin D. Roosevelt became his mentor. The college perched on a wooded hillside, and a spring-fed river ran through the campus. It was a pretty place. We found a parking space near the gym easily enough, but nothing else was easy. The young man at the door hesitated when I announced our intentions, glanced at a grim, white-haired lady sitting in a chair-desk near the door, worried a minute longer, then adroitly asked to see my press credentials. The white-haired lady came over and said in a voice closed to argument: “No, I’m sorry, you’ll have to pay.”
“That’s fine,” I said. I was buying tickets when a coed popped into the picture with a scrap of paper and said, “I have B. W.’s list. What are your names?”
She read down the list then folded the paper up with an air of finality. “No. They’re not on here.”
To get good photographs, Melinda needed to be able to move around. There was a brief argument, which brought the white-haired lady walking over intently. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ll just have to take your seats with everybody else.”
There was clearly no point in arguing with her. She had been right on that campus for twenty-five years. I started into the gym but the coed jumped in front of us. “I’m sorry,” the supervisor said. “Your seats are in the balcony. You can’t sit down on the floor.”
For heaven’s sake. It wasn’t that large a crowd, and B. W. Stevenson was not that big a star. Arrangements had been made with his manager, I said; the photographer had a deadline. “Well,” the woman responded. “Mr. Stevenson is working for us tonight, and it seems to me that you’ll just have to wait until he’s finished his work and pose him for your pictures then.”
Reeling and answerless, I looked around for assistance. The supervisor reproved the coed, “You’ve just got to learn how to deal with these people without coming to me.”
Down the hall I saw a bearded young man in boots and straw cowboy hat, and I played my last card. “Hey, are you with B. W. Stevenson’s band?”
The woman was glaring when we left. Backstage we found B.W. and Steve Fromholz. B. W. had a pint of whiskey in one hand and a bleary look in his eyes. The preliminary band lurched through the door, and one of them said, “Damn, B. W., this is fine. People really come out to see you down here.”
A student burst upon us and said, “B. W., would you mind if I took your picture?”
“How far you gonna take it?”
“What?”
“Never mind,” B. W. said. “Sure, go ahead.”
An instamatic materialized and a flashbulb popped two feet away from B. W.’s eyes. Pupils wildly dilated, B. W. muttered, “Thanks a lot,” and took another gulp of whiskey.
“Did you see my new guitar case?” he asked Fromholz, pointing at a red velvet-lined box on the floor.
“Yeah, I saw that.” Fromholz looked at the student who was standing watch over the equipment and said, “B. W.’s left it in his will that he wants to be buried in his case.”
A couple of coeds walked past, then scampered away giggling. B. W. staggered a step. “You’ve been taking too much acid, B. W.” Fromholz said.
“No, I been drinking too much. I wish you’d do something with this,” Stevenson said, offering the bottle to his friend.
B. W. rounded up his band and went onstage, where they played uninspired rock music in rather dim light. B. W. sang a couple of songs without addressing the crowd then said, “It sure is nice to be back in Texas. Hoot. Give a hoot for Texas.”
The students hooted as directed, and Stevenson introduced one of his slow songs. “We released this as a single once but nobody listened to it. You’re not supposed to listen to a top-forty record. You’re supposed to tap your foot and drive down the highway.”
Stevenson sang a couple of his slow tunes and the new single, “Look for the Light,” then abandoned the downbeat material in favor of more rock and roll, whooping and hollering with the crowd and exhorting them to clap to the rhythm. He was an odd figure, cavorting about the stage, clapping his hands over his head. But that was what they wanted. A young man in the balcony began to play games with the spotlights. My friend Lucy leaned over and said, “What happened to that sweet guy we heard in Dallas? That’s not him.”
Fromholz had come out of the dressing room and listened briefly, then returned backstage, pursued shortly afterward by a uniformed policeman. Maybe he was going to get arrested, I thought. It would probably do him good, and he might write a good song about it. I walked back in the dressing room and found a smaller crowd around Fromholz. While his friend was going through the motions out there, he was playing a borrowed banjo. The campus cop hitched up a trousers leg, propped one foot on the dressing bench, and tapped the other on the floor. “Play ‘Rose of San Antone,’” he requested.