Ranch Report: Journey to the Past
It was a true Baby Boomer's reunion last weekend in Dallas
The poster for the Ma Blues Reunion. I made the cut!
Last weekend I was invited to MC the Mother Blues Reunion at the Kessler Theater in Dallas. For those of you who don’t know, Mother Blues was a legendary nightclub in Big D from 1970-1982. It would take up this entire post just to tell you about that club, so for a deep dive on it, read the story about Ma Blues I wrote for Buddy magazine here. (Be forewarned that it is an unvarnished memoir of one of the craziest places I’ve ever visited.)
Jeff Liles at the Kessler had set up a “reunion” of sorts for patrons and employees of Mother Blues. About a month ago he reached out to me, mainly because I’m the last man standing among the “insiders” who once partied at the place with Bill Simonson and a host of rock and rollers, groupies, drug dealers and hangers on. I got my thoughts together, and Diann and I drove in from the ranch for the weekend.
Friday morning I was a guest on KDFW’s “Good Day” program.
Co-host Brandon Todd interviewed me in this segment that aired at 7:50 am. https://www.fox4news.com/video/1657643
The other co-host is Lauren Pryzybyl, a fellow Baylor grad. She graciously allowed me a photo with her in our best “Sic ‘em, Bears” cheer.
It’s still cool to go onto a live TV set.
With so many podcasts and Tik Tok videos out there I still enjoy the energy of a live television studio where you know you have thousands of viewers watching you live, “out there”
Everyone on the set was overly kind.
After a lunch and a nap, it was on to the show.
As David Allan Coe once sang, “Well, I've seen my name few times in your phone book,
”And I've seen it on signs where I've played”
The marquee at the Kessler
The place was packed. So many people came up and talked to me that I cannot recall all of them, but one that stood out was the girl in this photo with Billy Joel taken back in 1977.
Stoney’s date, with Billy Joel, backstage at KZEW’s free Rocktober concert in Fort Worth, 1977.
I had used that pic in my film, When Dallas Rocked. She told me that she first saw it when the film came out nine years ago and had an “OMG that’s me!” moment.
For more than 45 years I had absolutely no idea who the girl in that photo was, but she walked up to me at the Kessler Theater and said that she had been wanting to contact me for a long time to let me know that’s her!
Found out her name is Lori Braunstein and she was dating Stoney when that photo was shot.
With that mystery cleared up, I took the stage around 8:00 pm to deliver a brief monologue on Mother Blues, or rather what I remember about it, and why that club will never be re-created.
The following photo pretty much demonstrates just how unique (and that’s a way over-used term) this place was.
Onstage at Mother Blues, 1975. Photo by the late, great Ron McKeown
Let’s break this photo down. (L-R) Billy Swan had a million-selling hit with “I Can Help.” That’s him on the far left. Then we have Margaret Elsdridge a record label employee, Buddy photographer Jesus Carrillo, then Stephen Bruton, who you might recall co-wrote the music with T-Bone Burnet for the Jeff Bridges movie, Crazy Heart. (That film won a best-actor Academy Award for Bridges in 2009.)
After that we have Ray Wylie Hubbard, writer of ‘Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother,” and “Mother Blues” a paen to the old club,
Check out Ray Wylie’s “Mother Blues” here:
Finally, there is Stoney Burns, the publisher of Buddy magazine and my boss for eight years. A legend in Dallas during the 60s and 70s.
To put that earlier photo all in perspective, on that stage at that moment in 1975, you have a million-selling artist, performing with an Oscar winning musician, singing with a guy who wrote two “forever” songs and the man who single-handedly reduced the penalty for marijuana possession in Texas from a felony to a misdemeanor .
I had hoped that some of the girls and groupies who used to hang at Ma Blues would be there, but alas many of them have passed on. The one I saw the most was Audrey Hamilton. She was at nearly every big show in Dallas in the 70s. Here she is backstage with Roger Fossen of Heart at the very first Texxas Jam at the Cotton Bowl.
Audrey with Steve backstage.
But she got her biggest claim to fame by hooking up with Robert Plant, who she met at Mother Blues (!!!), and then going on tour with him and Led Zeppelin on their private jet.
On the Zeppelin private plane with Robert Plant.
Robert Plant and Audrey somewhere near Dallas.
Sadly Audrey passed away about a year ago, so she wasn’t there to regale the crowd with her stories. Would have been pretty to think so. She got a mention on this blog, but they (erroneously) said that she met up with Plant at “a blues club.” It was Mother Blues. They had blues there, and it was a club, but it was not a “blues club.”
That left it up to me, so I did as best I could from the viewpoint of a guy who was “in the room” but didn’t get to go into the inner sanctum to see “what happened.” I freely admitted that Bugs Henderson, Ron McKeown and Stoney Burns should have MC’d this thing, but they are all gone!
My opening, paying tribute to Bugs, Ron and Stoney.
After about a 15-minute monologue, I turned it over to Jimmy Wallace, Rocky Athas and Jim Suhler, the guys who used to play at the old Mother Blues. I had requested that Jimmy do a song I used to hear him play with his old band Lynx, Robin Trower’s “Too Rolling Stoned (Think I Better Sit This One Out)”
They did it, and crushed it!!! (Thank you, Jimmy.)
Not to be outdone, Rocky Athas (with his son on bass) did Freddy King’s “Palace of the King”
The whole crowd was made up of people like me: aging Baby Boomers. As my daughter, Hallie, remarked, “I skewed the demographics by 30 years just by showing up.”
I really missed seeing Vicki Wade there. She was just not well enough to attend. Vicki was a waitress at Mother Blues, who posed for this ad in Buddy many years ago.
Stoney shot this iconic ad for Mother Blues that was turned into a poster.
Another waitress who couldn’t make it was Carolyne Scott Naile. She passed away from cancer a year ago. John Gasperik, a Ma Blues regular, showed up, but he didn’t feel well enough to go up onstage.
Like I said, there will never be another club like that mainly because the drinking age is now 21 (not 18 like back in the day) and things are so much more expensive now. Most of the young people (like me) back in 1977 enjoyed cheap rent, cheap gas and cheap groceries. We had enough extra dough to go out clubbing, plus drinks were also a lot cheaper!!! (The two-for-one happy hours didn’t hurt.)
After we shut down the Kessler, it was on to the Texas Theatre for a matinee screening of When Dallas Rocked. If you have never seen this rockumentary, I’ve put it up on YouTube so you can see that Dallas did indeed once serve as the center of music in the entire southwest before the scene shifted to Austin.
Yes, I met Elvis Costello when he was a young man!!!
We asked folks to wear old t-shirts, and this guy had a KZEW shirt that he said John Rody gave to him when he (the guy, not Rody) was 15 years old!!!
That logo once ruled the airwaves.
Had a good, and appreciative, crowd at the Texas. I enjoyed every minute of it. Big thanks to Barak Epstein and his crew for entertaining us.
Once it was all over we got some needed rest, then met two of our three kids for a Father’s Day breakfast on Sunday with our friends, the Blairs.
Drove back to the ranch after breakfast. Every mile was there.
I think what I miss most about “the old days” are so many of the friends I had who are now gone. It’s the curse of growing older.
Once again, I have no idea why God has let me live this long.
Let me close with yet another pitch to become a paying subscriber to this blog. It helps keep the lights on.
Adios until the next one.