The Great Tequila Boogie
THROUGH THE COLD months, the stock market continues its slide. Financial analysts say the U.S. is in a mild depression. Our hopes for The Fool of Paris fluctuate with the Dow Jones average. The uncertainty sends risk capital into oil stocks, and Bobby and I are no longer lunching on Wall Street.
In April, the Italian film director Marco Ferreri, little known in America, is in New York. Somehow Bobby makes contact and gets us a meeting. In conversation, Ferreri is like an Italian Albert Grossman—enigmatic, saying little. He has an assistant who translates for him, but it becomes apparent that Ferreri understands English well enough and uses the running translation to give himself more time to think. He offers us $20,000 to finance the film. We’ve calculated a budget of $100,000 just to get the actors and crew to Paris, shoot the film, develop it, and make a work print. Bobby and I go over the budget line by line and trim it down to $70,000. We present it to Ferreri, but he won’t or can’t up his offer.
The first warm days of spring bring rumors from California. Janis has moved into her house in Larkspur. We hear she is putting together a new band. We hear she has kicked heroin. We hear she has banished her junkie friends from her house.
Albert calls. He confirms that the rumors are true, and his enthusiasm is palpable. I have never heard him so unrestrained, so optimistic. As he tells me about the new band and Janis’s delight in being clean, he reveals the depth of his emotional investment in her well-being.
He asks me to go back on the road with Janis at the end of May, but it is my turn to be cautious. I have known too many reformed junkies to backslide. So long as there’s a chance that Bob and I can get our movie airborne, that’s what I want to do. I tell Albert, “Probably not.” Janis calls to make her own appeal, and I tell her the same thing, but her confidence is so real, her excitement so infectious, I dare to hope she’s serious about staying straight.
One evening in mid-May, when I’m too weary from the late-night hanging out to accompany him, Bobby goes to the Village to hear Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at the Gaslight. He walks in and finds no one onstage. Jack’s on a break. Where’s Jack, he asks. Oh, Jack and Kris Kristofferson went around the corner to hear Odetta, the manager tells him.
Kristofferson’s is a name that has bubbled through the music underground since last year, when Roger Miller recorded Kris’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” Ray Price has a hit with another Kristofferson tune, “For the Good Times.” But nobody we know has set eyes on Kris until now. Once again, Neuwirth’s where-it’s-happening radar is zeroed in on the right place at the right time. He finds Ramblin’ Jack and Kris at Odetta’s gig, and they become a late-night hang-out team, often joined by Michael J. Pollard, that lasts until Jack and Odetta’s Village bookings come to an end.
Inspiration strikes Neuwirth one evening midweek. He calls Pennebaker to borrow a camera. Penny’s intrigued, so he comes along as cameraman. After the clubs close, Neuwirth takes the crew to the penthouse apartment of a friend of Pollard’s where they film The Woody Guthrie Story under Neuwirth’s direction. Neuwirth and Pennebaker shoot the life story of the Depression-era songwriter and troubadour, co-founder, with Pete Seeger, of the folk music revival, at night in a penthouse apartment in New York City. How does Bobby come up with these ideas? Sheer audacity, and a creative spark that flares most brightly at unlikely times. Ramblin’ Jack plays Woody Guthrie, at whose feet he learned his own troubadour licks. Michael Pollard plays Bob Dylan, who was an acolyte of both Woody’s and Ramblin’ Jack’s in his early days. Kris plays Woody’s pal Cisco Houston and Odetta plays Leadbelly. Now that’s casting.
When the impromptu movie crew emerges onto the streets in the morning, they find newspaper headlines announcing the Kent State massacre. The day before, at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen killed four students and wounded nine others who were demonstrating against President Nixon for expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia.
What am I doing while this is going on? Too tired to come downtown at night? Can’t keep up the pace? I have no credible excuse for missing the gathering of talent and energy that launched upon an unsuspecting nation a transcontinental party-hop, bar tour, and roving hootenanny that will become famous enough in its own short life span to be given a name. It is christened the Great Tequila Boogie—by Neuwirth, it should go without saying—and we are not apt to see its like again.
With Bobby in charge there is only one acceptable course: No one will be allowed to abandon ship—the team will continue to the next party, come hell or high water. What matter that the party is a continent away in Janis’s house in Larkspur? On very little notice, Ramblin’ Jack drives the celebrants to JFK, whence they fly to San Francisco. Bobby’s idea is that in addition to hanging out with Janis, they should visit Joan Baez and her sister Mimi. Both would be delighted to see these musical voyagers, but they would be among the least likely to join in imbibing the libation that propels the journey.
Whether Bob, Kris, Michael, and Odetta actually connect with the ladies Bob calls “the Baez brothers” is unclear, but they do visit Janis and so are on hand for a party that will become part of Janis’s folklore. For some time a young man named Lyle Tuttle, his own body extensively decorated with indelible artwork he has mostly applied himself, has been introducing some of the leading personalities of West Coast rock and roll to the art of tattoo. Janis has one already, a bracelet on her left wrist, and gets another at the party, a miniature heart located above her real one. It is becoming fashionable, especially among the women, to have small tattoos placed on areas not normally revealed to the casual observer, all the better to delight the favored few. Accounts of how many willing subjects Tuttle actually tattooed at the party differ, but his artistry and the renown of the party contribute to the rising popularity of tattoos among the young that dates from this time.
The party is co-hosted by Lyndall Erb, who has taken Linda Gravenites’s place as Janis’s roommate. Like Linda, Lyndall designs and makes clothes for the psychedelic era. At the Monterey Pop Festival she sold colorful shirts, one of which I bought and wore during the Charles River Valley Boys’ California tour. Lyndall has made clothes for Country Joe and the Fish and for MC5. Life magazine has dubbed her “the seamstress to hippiedom.” In recent years, Lyndall and Janis have become friends. When Linda left, Janis asked Lyndall to move in.
The Great Tequila Boogie flight crew mingles with a host of Janis’s local friends and acquaintances. Ramblin’ Jack has made it, after driving across the country in record time. Nick Gravenites is there, and Mike Bloomfield, and Big Brother and their first equipment man, Dave Richards, along with Kozmic Blues equipment men Mark Braunstein and George Ostrow. Also present are the members of Janis’s new band, as yet unnamed, with one wife and a girlfriend or two. San Francisco erotic filmmaker Alex de Renzy records the goings-on but the results are hardly arousing. Not enough light, or too much smoke.
There are drawbacks to being descended from a family imbued with the Puritan ethic. I am as desperate as the next guy to get out of New York, but we have set out to produce a movie and if the top man wants to take off on frivolous adventures in the middle of the night, I will prove my mettle by staying on the job and holding down the fort and keeping the home fires burning. The Tequila Boogie is rocking in California and I am marooned in the Big Apple.
Within days of Neuwirth decamping to California, I’m on my way to Washington, D.C., with Larry Poons, a painter friend of Bob’s in whose studio we have passed many an hour during the winter, drinking and playing guitars. When we weren’t with Michael Pollard and Annie, Larry’s place was the other locus of our late-night hanging out.
Larry and I have the same reaction to the shootings at Kent State: Okay, that’s it. They’re gunning down American students on an American college campus. Fuck ’em. We’re going to Washington. Across the country, hundreds of colleges and universities are shut down by a national student strike. Organizers have called for a mass demonstration in Washington on the weekend after the killings.
We drive down in traffic that’s a lot heavier southbound toward D.C. than the northbound flow, and we feel that we’re part of something big. We stay with Bob Siggins, my fellow Charles River Valley Boy, who has moved to D.C. to practice the art of neuropharmacology for the National Institute of Mental Health. We walk to the Mall on a perfect spring day that has brought out a mostly cheerful crowd of demonstrators. Somewhere in the center of the densest mass there is a stage and a sound system. We hear Judy Collins sing “If I Had a Golden Thread,” and a voice that may be David Dellinger exhorting us: “How can you love the Cambodians, whom you have not seen, if you cannot love the black people in the jails and the ghettos of the United States, whom you have seen?”
Closer at hand, the most popular chant is “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” Dozens of demonstrators are frolicking in a knee-deep pool that surrounds a fountain. A couple of girls perched on the shoulders of their boyfriends have gotten topless.
What Larry and I witness is more like a May Day festival than an antiwar demonstration, but the next day, the Sunday papers carry stories of clashes with police and National Guard troops, and of demonstrators smashing windows and overturning cars. Spokesmen for the Nixon administration focus on the violence, and the press doesn’t give equal time to the exuberant, peaceful crowd on the Mall.
New York is dull after the energizing weekend. On my own, there’s little I can do to further the fortunes of The Fool of Paris. I keep up regular appearances at Max’s, but when Janis and Bobby call me from the tattoo party and I hear the hullabaloo on the other end of the phone, I regret my overzealous devotion to duty. Bobby tells me to hail a taxi and go directly to JFK. “We’ll keep the party going until you get here,” he promises. Janis offers to buy me a plane ticket just to come out and meet the band and think about going on the road, but even this isn’t enough to get me going.
It takes one more phone call. In the aftermath of the tattoo party, Bobby and Kris and Janis are sitting in Janis’s kitchen nursing hangovers. “Boy, I wish we could get John Cooke to go on the road again,” Janis says. “You want John Cooke?” Bobby picks up the phone. “I’ll get you John Cooke.” Janis is better than ever, he tells me, and you’ve got to hear this band.
I fly into SFO on May 23. The tour will begin six days later, in Gainesville, Florida. I dump my bags in my North Beach apartment, recover my trusty Volvo from Peter Berg’s garage in Berkeley, and traverse the graceful span of the San Rafael Bridge at a high rate of speed, determined to make up in the intervening days for the fun I’ve missed.
When I arrive in Larkspur, I learn that the band has acquired a name. On a recent day when Janis and the boys were winding up rehearsal, Neuwirth and Kristofferson sailed in, already three sheets to the wind, recruiting deck hands for the evening voyage. “Is everybody ready for a full tilt boogie?” Bobby demanded.
Janis lit up like a neon sign. “Full Tilt Boogie!” she cried, and the christening was celebrated with holy water from the agave plant.
By the time I get there, the Boogie has been curtailed, and it’s Janis who is cracking the whip. She has banished Bobby and Kris during working hours. When they first arrived in California, they were spreading the good-times gospel of the Great Tequila Boogie around the Bay each day and falling down on Janis’s floor each night. Kris’s sleeping accommodations soon evolved upward to the comfort of Janis’s satin sheets. She persuaded him to remove, at least temporarily, the split-cowhide shirt and pants he has been wearing nonstop since he left New York. He hesitated, briefly, fearing that if he took off his latter-day mountain man’s garb, he would fall to the ground while the outfit remained standing, a concern that proved to have some basis in fact.
Each afternoon, after band rehearsal, Bob and Kris would corral Janis and the boys for the evening’s rambles. But the drinking, and its effects, were cutting into rehearsal time, and Janis laid down the law: We’ve got songs to learn, a tour coming up, and I need these guys to stay sober.
Janis’s new house is a palatial version of her recent apartments, furnished in a combination of Beatnik Modern and Grand Funk. It is set among old-growth redwoods, where it catches maybe half an hour of sunlight a day in midsummer and exists for the rest of the time in softly filtered light that is gentle on the eyes. I prefer open skies and long vistas, but this nest in the forest primeval perfectly suits Janis’s preference to be sheltered from the full glare of day.
The house is full of dogs. Janis’s beloved George was let out of her Porsche last year while she was rehearsing with Kozmic Blues in San Francisco, and he vanished. The loss hit Janis hard. To fill the gap, Albert has given her, as a house present, a good-natured malamute mix whose mother was Albert’s malamute bitch, and whose father, the story goes, was Bob Dylan’s poodle. His name is Butch. Dave Richards has given Janis another puppy, Lyndall has a young dog, and Janis recently acquired a Great Pyrenees and named him Thurber. When a new arrival comes in the door, the canine troop careens through the house for a welcoming inspection. It’s a noisy but cheerful domestic ritual.
The garage has been converted into a rehearsal studio that features an antique pool table with a slate top and leather pockets. Janis’s two-piece cue, and the set of ivory balls, were a Christmas gift from our New York limo driver, John Fisher. The stick, he told her, once belonged to pool legend Willie Mosconi.
The lamp that hangs over the table has a (genuine) Tiffany shade. A new tape recorder and a rack of tapes stand on a bookshelf in the corner, the source of old and new material to be learned by the Full Tilt kids. On breaks, they can shoot a rack or two.
Janis looks trim and fit, and she is in high spirits as she presents me to the band. Brad Campbell and John Till, the two holdovers from the Kozmic Blues Band, greet me like a long-lost brother. Meeting the three new members, and learning how they all came together, gives me more reasons to believe that Janis’s rampant optimism is justified.
In the final days of the Kozmic Blues Band, on a flight to Nashville for the last gig before Madison Square Garden, John Till was feeling low. He had been with the band only five months and it was folding out from under him. He looked up and saw Brad Campbell bouncing down the aisle toward him, all grins, and he wondered what Brad had to be so happy about. Brad sat down next to John. “She wants you and me to come out to California,” he said.
Brad and John have spent the winter in San Francisco, living on a retainer, waiting for Janis to put together her next band. The retainer was less than they would have made on the road but more than they would have gotten from unemployment. They did a little freelancing—play a gig here, play a gig there—but nothing regular. One day in the spring, John Till was wandering around North Beach when he ran into Snooky Flowers and a guy he didn’t know. “You wanna play guitar tonight?” the guy said.
“Sure,” John said.
“Can you get a bass player?”
“How about Brad, man?” Snooky said. “Can you get Brad to play?”
John went off to phone Brad. They spent the afternoon rehearsing in a second-floor loft with Snooky, the other guy, and a drummer named Clark Pierson.
Clark is from Albert Lea, Minnesota. He’s an American version of Ringo Starr: It takes a lot to wipe the grin off his face, and he has the same happy-go-lucky basic rhythm. Clark came to California from Chicago with a band that had a recording contract. The record didn’t go anywhere, and in the spring of 1970 Clark was living in San Francisco playing music anywhere he could get a job, Polish dances included. He had a small-time agent trying to find him work. One day the agent called up and said, “These people need a drummer for a week. Do you want the job?”
“How much is the pay?”
“Thirty a night.”
“Sure.”
Clark showed up at the second-floor loft for rehearsal, where he met Brad and John and Snooky’s friend. The gig was playing five sets a night in the Galaxy, a topless joint on Broadway. Rumor later has it that Clark was discovered in a strip joint, but he scotches that story: “There’s a difference between the strip joints and the topless: Topless is already topless.”
One night, along about the middle of the evening, Clark heard a jingle-jangle sound and he saw a long-haired chick come into the club, dressed up in satin and spangles, with small bells tinkling from a sash tied around her waist. She was arm in arm with an older man in a Brooks Brothers shirt and a crewneck sweater and a pair of Levi’s turned up at the cuff over a pair of Buster Brown shoes that may never have been polished. His gray hair was tied back in a ponytail and he looked like the man on the Quaker Oats box. “Man,” Clark thought to himself, “what a weird couple.”
When the song ended, Snooky grabbed the mike. “Ladies and gentlemen, in this club tonight we have one of the finest singers”—racka-racka-racka, giving Janis a glowing introduction. Snooky harbored no grudges about the demise of the Kozmic Blues Band. Albert sat in the spotlight’s glare and smiled his best smile. When the set was over, Brad and John went over to talk to Janis and Albert, and after a little while Brad came back to ask Clark if he’d like to audition to play in Janis’s new band.
“Well, I ain’t got nothing else to do,” Clark said. A few days later he went to the house in Larkspur. “We played a couple of tunes and then Janis asked me if I wanted to join the group. Albert is standing there. I can’t get used to him. She was real happy when I said, ‘Yeah.’”
Besides Brad and John and Clark, there is Richard Bell on electric piano and Ken Pearson on organ. Like Brad and John, they are Canadians. Kenny has played with Jesse Winchester, an American songwriter who removed himself to Canada a couple of years ago, beyond the reach of draft, and made his reputation there. Richard is yet another graduate of Ronnie Hawkins’s bands, from which Albert earlier plucked Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson to play behind Bob Dylan when Dylan electrified his act.
“Hey, you guys, here’s a song I like,” Janis will say. She’ll play the boys a tape and they’ll run through the song to see if it begins to rock. To Big Brother classics like “Ball and Chain” and “Summertime” and “Piece of My Heart,” and a few songs from Kozmic Blues, like “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder),” they have added punchy new tunes that will soon become familiar to audiences across the country—“Move Over” and “Half Moon” and “Cry, Baby” and “Get It While You Can.”
The band is tight. There is none of the every-man-for-himself wariness that marked the early days of Kozmic Blues. These guys are already a band. They are on Janis’s trip and she basks in their selfless support.
In her garage-studio-poolroom, I see something new in Janis. She is running the rehearsals as if she’s done it all her life. There is no slack time. Oh, they laugh, and there are jokes, but when Janis counts off a song and kicks a leg to start the beat, the band is right there. She is in charge, with none of the strained authority that marked her occasional attempts to exert leadership with Kozmic Blues. It’s clear that the boys already feel they are working with her, not just for her. Unlike the macho-sensitive men in Kozmic Blues, they don’t object when Janis calls them “my boys”—they love it. From the stories I hear, Richard and Kenny were sometimes overwhelmed by the level of hanging out that kicked in when the Great Tequila Boogie hit town, but Janis helped them over the rough spots. Now that she has forbidden Bobby and Kris from tempting the band with invitations to play hooky, not even the promise of a full night of rocking can distract Janis from the task at hand: She is getting her act in shape. Put on your dancing shoes, boys, we’re going on the road.
The band has already had its local debut. They played a gig at Pepperland, a dance hall in San Rafael, for the Hells Angels, where Janis’s act was billed as “Main Squeeze and Janis.” Bennett Glotzer, who has been Albert’s partner since Albert’s relationship with Bert Block ended last year, became close to Janis in the fall, during my hiatus from the road. Bennett was managing Blood, Sweat and Tears when Janis and Big Brother played with them at the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston and again at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico. Janis has been aware of Bennett since then, and since he joined Albert, he has become someone Janis confides in. Like Albert, Bennett has spent time in California this spring, supporting Janis in preparing for her return to touring. He has been largely responsible for booking the upcoming tour.
Bennett didn’t want Janis to do the Pepperland gig. Hells Angels? What are you, crazy? Remember Altamont? Bennett thinks the Angels are sociopaths and thugs. But Janis insisted, and the stories are wild: An Angel (not really an Angel, Peter Albin says—a member of a rival club, maybe a Gypsy Joker; everybody else says he was an Angel) and his motorcycle mama fought Janis for her bottle as she was about to go onstage. Bennett stepped in and got pinned under the melee, which ended when Sweet William, a member of the Angels’ San Francisco chapter, stomped the guy on the head and escorted Janis to the stage. During her set, a naked couple tried to make it onstage, in the midst of the music, and an Angel, a real one this time for sure, tossed the naked guy out and let the naked girl stay. Big Brother and the Holding Company, reconstituted since Sam left Kozmic Blues, opened the show, with Nick the Greek Gravenites at the mike, in a friendly battle of the bands. By all reports it was intense like no other gig in memory.
Afterward, when Janis was leaving the hall with Glotzer, she said to him, “Well, Bennett, you were right.”
Be that as it may, the Pepperland gig has redounded to Janis’s benefit. The reviews, and the word of mouth around the Bay, are favorable. Old prejudices that did so much to alienate Janis from her hometown the year before have evaporated with demise of the Kozmic Blues Band. In the Larkspur house or sashaying into the Trident—the preferred watering hole of the famous and funky in Marin, a hippie rock-and-roll hangout with organic food and tall drinks, stunning waitresses and a view of Sausalito Bay—or whipping across the Golden Gate Bridge in her psychedelic Porsche, Janis is firmly in her element and enjoying every minute.
Even before I absorb the full extent of Janis’s rebirth, I want my old job back. But I have delayed accepting the offer long enough that Janis and Albert have taken on a provisional road manager. Stan Rublowsky has some credentials from another wing of the music business—he has toured with the renowned jazz pianist Stan Kenton—but he seems a trifle out of place in Janis’s Marin madhouse. A new age has surely dawned if a guy who has road-managed jazz musicians looks too straight to rock-and-rollers.
Janis feels an obligation to Rublowsky, but she is happy to see me again and tells me so. Finding her so bright-eyed and cocksure, so uncontainably happy, I realize I’ll be seriously bummed if I don’t get to wrangle this bunch on the road. It’s no time to be coy, and I let my enthusiasm show. Janis resolves the dilemma by deciding to take both candidates out for the first couple of weeks. She will decide later which of us to keep. Stan and I agree to do the job together, which should make it easy on both of us. He has already confirmed most of the arrangements for the first weeks of the tour. I look them over and find them in order, which leaves me with little to do by way of work until we are off and sailing. I am out of New York at last, after a long winter of discontent, and glad to be back in California. I’m ready to celebrate. The Great Tequila Boogie, in its final days, provides the vehicle.
Neuwirth and Kristofferson are the sole survivors. Odetta and Michael J. are long gone. Ramblin’ Jack has rambled on. Kris and Bobby decamp to my San Francisco apartment when I arrive. They sleep in my living room for the next few days and we put plenty of miles on their rent-a-car and my Volvo, around the Bay, visiting friends, playing music, chasing women, and stopping at assorted bars to refuel.
Kris is a former Rhodes scholar, a former army captain and former chopper pilot in Vietnam, which adds a dimension to his persona as a leather-clad, long-haired songwriter, not a Nashville type at all, but one who has surely got Nashville’s attention.
Kris’s Bay Area rambles with Neuwirth have already earned him his first booking in L.A., thanks to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Jack had a gig at the Keystone, a Berkeley music club, where Bobby and Kris joined him on the very evening when Janis and Full Tilt Boogie were debuting at Pepperland. (Like Bennett Glotzer, Neuwirth too was leery of the Angels and what might ensue at a full-on rock-and-roll goonbash fired up by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis’s new band.)
As Jack tells the story, he invited Bobby to sing a song or two and Neuwirth in turn persuaded Kris to sing. In the club that night was Doug Weston, owner of the Troubadour, in L.A. After hearing Kris, Weston booked him at the Troubadour.
According to Ramblin’ Jack, Janis was so pissed at Kris and Bobby for missing the Pepperland gig, she called the Keystone and left a message that was handed to the miscreants as a written note that said, “Thanks a lot. Now I’ll know who my friends are.”
For the record, tequila is not just another drink. Some component of the agave plant contributes, along with the alcohol, to the elevating result. For many, the effect is psychedelic. Where tequila puts me is out there, especially drinking it day and night with two lunatics who don’t know any better. Now and then I suspect that I know better, but I try to keep up anyway. It isn’t bad, really, once I get used to ordering Bloody Marys for breakfast to calm the tequila willies before I tackle the huevos rancheros. And the truth is, I will remember these days fondly, even though the few scenes I can recall in any detail play like clips from a demented underground movie—
EXT. MILL VALLEY HOME—SWIMMING POOL—DUSK
The house belongs to Big Daddy Tom Donahue, a pioneer of underground FM radio. Tom is not home. The young men and women in the pool are naked. Donahue’s teenage son is not sure he should allow these people on the premises, but he can’t imagine how to evict them, and besides, the naked girls are very attractive.
CUT TO
INT. PEGGY CASERTA’S HOUSE—STINSON BEACH—NIGHT
The party turns weird when Peggy decides to shoot herself up. Neuwirth, Kristofferson, and Cooke abandon ship.
CUT TO
INT. CARL DUKATZ’S HOUSE—BERKELEY—MORNING
Kris is singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” It is morning, but not Sunday. We are coming down but trying to get back up. Carl learns the lead guitar part as it goes along and Neuwirth finally gets the harmony right after weeks of patient instruction from Kris.
FADE OUT
Through it all we avoid serious trouble and get little sleep. On Thursday, May 28, Stan Rublowsky and I pick up Janis and the band and we fly off to Florida. Kris comes with us as far as Atlanta, where he changes planes for Nashville. He has run out of money and I lend him fifty bucks. When he strolls off down the concourse, giving us a parting look at his Western-hero walk, we feel we are losing a member of the family.
It may be the last time Kris has to borrow pocket money. Roger Miller’s and Ray Price’s recordings of his songs are beginning to pay off. Later in the summer, Kris gets a quarterly royalty payment in five figures that’s a boost toward the fame and fortune that will follow. He repays my loan with a check I wish I had framed. For Kris, like Janis, the spring of 1970 marks a turning point toward the good times.
The Great Tequila Boogie is history. Full Tilt Boogie is on the road.