Court Lewis, one of our Piemen, has a weekly talk show on American Variety
Radio out of Johnson City, Tennessee. The program is carried on several
stations in the Southeast—including one in Orlando—and generates about 25,000
listeners weekly. Every so often, when he has a spot available between the
flying trapeze artists and the dancing bears, Court calls us in from the
bullpen, this week to discuss the sixties counterculture and what became of it.
We think Court secretly likes to reminisce about these things because he once
lived in Gainesville, himself, during which time he was a horrendous womanizer
and notorious pursuer of dubious other enticements better left unnamed, he
being on the radio and all. But, then again, who wasn’t?
Well, now we’ve probably got Court in trouble with his beautiful wife, Margaret, who makes all the bread for the family. It’s not easy these days to find a nice girl who is also the breadwinner. What? Oh, I see. Margaret, says Court, is the bread maker of the family. Well, that’s good, too. And it smells so much better than the other stuff.
Given time to reflect, the answers below are not the same ones given on the show but they are similar. Some of the descriptions of the Good Old Days have been written of in earlier installments of The Flying Pie, which happens now and then around here, but they are relevant in a new context. Besides which, a LOT of people read this column now who didn’t catch the earlier ones—even though they certainly COULD if they just scrolled back to the beginning. We figure you could finish the whole thing up in just under thirty years.
Question 1. Bill, you were at the University of Texas in Austin back in the early sixties. What was it like in those days?
Gee, I feel like Grampa talking to the chilluns about the Great War. But I was in Austin for most of the Summer and all of the Fall of 1962. What it was like was exciting. Obviously, everyone’s adolescent and post-adolescent years are memorable because we’re making earthshaking discoveries every day, forming rafts of new relationships with all manner and make of people and basically, negotiating through unlimited corridors of life without a hell of a lot of responsibility. I had been away from home before, having been to college in Oklahoma and working briefly at a magazine job in Champaign-Urbana, but Austin was nothing like these places. Austin, for me, was the good Disneyland.
I ended up in Austin by accident. I was driving my 1950 Cadillac Superior Model hearse across the country from Massachusetts (where I had been unjustly deprived of my driver’s license by a vengeful police chief who, unfortunately, lived directly across the street) to New Mexico, where I was to meet my friend, Jacques Guerin, and restart publication of my humor magazine, Charlatan, at UNM in Albuquerque. I made it all the way to Oklahoma City, where my hearse began to expire of coronary radiator disease. An old girlfriend, Rita Payton, took me in while the mechanics ministered to the poor vehicle. Since I was poor as a churchmouse, the ministrations were fairly meager. “No way you can make it to New Mexico—that’s a thousand miles,” said the nonrepairman. How about Austin, a mere four hundred? “If you’re lucky,” quoth he.
I had a friend in Austin. Gilbert Shelton, cartoonist extraordinaire, was to become editor the UT humor magazine, The Ranger, in 1962 and he had previously invited me to come and help him with it. I could sleep on his “hair couch,” he said. Without recounting a long, ponderous and often funny journey, I eventually made it to Austin. The hearse was on its last legs by then, huffing, puffing and emitting great clouds of steam as I pulled up in Gilbert’s back yard. “You certainly know how to make a great entrance,” he said, surveying the downtrodden vehicle. I gathered up my meager belongings and walked into the apartment, which, I believe, was on East 9th street, hard by the Interregional Expressway. The place was decorated in Early Shelton, having been enhanced earlier by a drunken wall-painting party, the art director of which was the redoubtable Tony Bell, also of Ranger fame. The music playing was “We Need A Whole Lot More Of Jesus And A Lot Less Rock And Roll,” by the Greenbriar Boys, who made a lifetime fan of yours truly.
The next day, my first in Austin, Shelton took me to a friend’s house on Lake Travis. The friend had a boat. The purpose of this boat was to allow us to splash around Lake Travis, firing pistols at floating cans and anything else brazen enough to raise its ugly head. Shelton handed me a gun. “Here, take a few shots,” he said to me, a novice, who had only seen guns on television. They didn’t let people in Massachusetts have guns. We have the Red Sox, after all, and there could be great carnage. I fired off a few wildly errant rounds and Shelton quickly retrieved his revolver. A good time was had by all.
That night, there was a party somewhere. There were few nights when there was not a party in Austin. Parties usually consisted of showing up at some brave person’s house and drinking beer. There would be anywhere from a dozen to a hundred people. Sometimes, the beer would be provided, more often if would be provided by yourself. Occasionally, there were eats. And very often, there was music. The music came from a variety of sources, one of them being a tall, buzztopped character named John Clay, whose consistent wardrobe included jeans and a t-shirt stamped “Property of Stamford High.” John carried a dobro guitar everywhere he went and he went a lot of places. John, merry man of mirth that he was, wrote a lot of songs about disasters he had read about in the newspapers. His two favorites were Road To Mingus and Anson Runaway, which he would be glad to demonstrate for you if prodded. “Prodded” consisted of you saying something like, “John, would you….” Don’t mind if I do, replied JC, breaking into song, delivered in a deliberate monotone and so often, at so many places, that everyone in the audience knew all the words. Say what you will about John, his songs were brilliant. Road To Mingus (a small Texas town) told of a crew of hard-drinking youngsters who unsuccessfully attempted to beat a train to a railroad crossing. Not being content to merely recite the police version of the tale, John thought he would liven it up by adding an additional character. To wit:
They were takin’ the curves about ninety,
And they didn’t always stay on their side,
Then they met a little old lady
Just goin’ out for a ride.
The little old lady said “Let us drag
If you’re on your way to Strong;
I ain’t had nobody to race me
And it’s just a few hours before dawn.”
They gave her a half-mile head start
Because she was a lady;
She reached the railroad track up ahead,
They got there and so did the Katy (the train).
The car tore apart like a shot-up tin can,
It landed upside down.
The car kept part of their bodies….
The rest landed up on the ground.
In Anson Runaway, John concocted one of the greatest lines EVER:
As they got bigger, they took bigger things,
Becoming a juvenile criminal ring.
Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
If John Clay was a constant presence, the Waller Creek Boys were almost as prevalent. This trio consisted of guitarist Lannie Wiggins, banjoist/harmonica player, etc., Powell St. John, both of whom also sang, and UT freshman art major, Janis Joplin on the autoharp. Janis could also be persuaded to sing if you twisted her arm. These people played and sang anything and everything from obscure folk stuff to blues to funky Protestant church songs. They would sing Railroad Bill. They would sing The St. James Infirmary Blues. They would sing something they just made up on their way to the party. They were inordinately good.
Daily life in Austin consisted of waking up at a nominal hour, the previous night probably having been spent drinking at a party or rummaging around the Mexican section of town, often enjoying an 88-cent midnight meal at the lively Market CafĂ© where we competed to see who could find the most misspelled words on the giant wall menu. Eventually, we gravitated to the Ranger office in the Student Publications Building to work on the magazine. UT Student Publications was presided over by a suspicious gentleman named Loyd Edmonds, who was constantly on the lookout for dubious—often profane—material hidden in the margins of the magazine or in the copyright notice or some other obscure locale by the merry staff who saw all this as a great game they were playing with old Loyd, whom they called in print “the censors.” Occasionally, Loyd was forced to actually fire some perp who had heretofore successfully eluded notice of a cleverly placed but nonetheless heinous noun or verb.
Lunch and part of the afternoons were celebrated hanging out in the student union’s eatery/gathering spot, The Chuckwagon, provider of the greatest chili dogs in the history of man. One day, I was sitting by myself, chili dog in hand, editing a story I had written for the magazine, when the strains of a spectacular melody came rushing into the place from the nearby piano room. I got up, walked over and stood there in bliss as a beautiful young woman pounded out Silver Threads And Golden Needles, the first time I had ever heard it. I don’t know about you, but this was MY idea of total rapture.
Many evenings were spent a short distance from campus in a small neighborhood its residents called The Ghetto. “Neighborhood” might be an ambitious description, the whole area consisting of a few ramshackle buildings smelling of catpiss with a generous amount of open space for small gatherings, of which there were many. Smudge pots were often lit and placed strategically. John Clay lived in The Ghetto and the Waller Creek Boys were frequent visitors. Eventually, I moved there myself, sleeping on a dirty mattress on the floor of Wally Stopher’s apartment—me and 17 other people.
One night, as the music was playing and the smudge pots were smoking, I surveyed the crowd, dressed liberally in ragamuffinry, and suddenly recalled a photo I had seen in Time Magazine. It was a picture the magazine had taken in San Francisco and the caption read something like “Beatniks Ply Their Trade.” My friends and I looked just like the people in the picture. Beatniks? Us? The label never even occurred to me. I wasn’t a beatnik, whatever the hell a beatnik was! Or WAS I?
That’s all, folks. Continued, of course, next week.
Well, now we’ve probably got Court in trouble with his beautiful wife, Margaret, who makes all the bread for the family. It’s not easy these days to find a nice girl who is also the breadwinner. What? Oh, I see. Margaret, says Court, is the bread maker of the family. Well, that’s good, too. And it smells so much better than the other stuff.
Given time to reflect, the answers below are not the same ones given on the show but they are similar. Some of the descriptions of the Good Old Days have been written of in earlier installments of The Flying Pie, which happens now and then around here, but they are relevant in a new context. Besides which, a LOT of people read this column now who didn’t catch the earlier ones—even though they certainly COULD if they just scrolled back to the beginning. We figure you could finish the whole thing up in just under thirty years.
Question 1. Bill, you were at the University of Texas in Austin back in the early sixties. What was it like in those days?
Gee, I feel like Grampa talking to the chilluns about the Great War. But I was in Austin for most of the Summer and all of the Fall of 1962. What it was like was exciting. Obviously, everyone’s adolescent and post-adolescent years are memorable because we’re making earthshaking discoveries every day, forming rafts of new relationships with all manner and make of people and basically, negotiating through unlimited corridors of life without a hell of a lot of responsibility. I had been away from home before, having been to college in Oklahoma and working briefly at a magazine job in Champaign-Urbana, but Austin was nothing like these places. Austin, for me, was the good Disneyland.
I ended up in Austin by accident. I was driving my 1950 Cadillac Superior Model hearse across the country from Massachusetts (where I had been unjustly deprived of my driver’s license by a vengeful police chief who, unfortunately, lived directly across the street) to New Mexico, where I was to meet my friend, Jacques Guerin, and restart publication of my humor magazine, Charlatan, at UNM in Albuquerque. I made it all the way to Oklahoma City, where my hearse began to expire of coronary radiator disease. An old girlfriend, Rita Payton, took me in while the mechanics ministered to the poor vehicle. Since I was poor as a churchmouse, the ministrations were fairly meager. “No way you can make it to New Mexico—that’s a thousand miles,” said the nonrepairman. How about Austin, a mere four hundred? “If you’re lucky,” quoth he.
I had a friend in Austin. Gilbert Shelton, cartoonist extraordinaire, was to become editor the UT humor magazine, The Ranger, in 1962 and he had previously invited me to come and help him with it. I could sleep on his “hair couch,” he said. Without recounting a long, ponderous and often funny journey, I eventually made it to Austin. The hearse was on its last legs by then, huffing, puffing and emitting great clouds of steam as I pulled up in Gilbert’s back yard. “You certainly know how to make a great entrance,” he said, surveying the downtrodden vehicle. I gathered up my meager belongings and walked into the apartment, which, I believe, was on East 9th street, hard by the Interregional Expressway. The place was decorated in Early Shelton, having been enhanced earlier by a drunken wall-painting party, the art director of which was the redoubtable Tony Bell, also of Ranger fame. The music playing was “We Need A Whole Lot More Of Jesus And A Lot Less Rock And Roll,” by the Greenbriar Boys, who made a lifetime fan of yours truly.
The next day, my first in Austin, Shelton took me to a friend’s house on Lake Travis. The friend had a boat. The purpose of this boat was to allow us to splash around Lake Travis, firing pistols at floating cans and anything else brazen enough to raise its ugly head. Shelton handed me a gun. “Here, take a few shots,” he said to me, a novice, who had only seen guns on television. They didn’t let people in Massachusetts have guns. We have the Red Sox, after all, and there could be great carnage. I fired off a few wildly errant rounds and Shelton quickly retrieved his revolver. A good time was had by all.
That night, there was a party somewhere. There were few nights when there was not a party in Austin. Parties usually consisted of showing up at some brave person’s house and drinking beer. There would be anywhere from a dozen to a hundred people. Sometimes, the beer would be provided, more often if would be provided by yourself. Occasionally, there were eats. And very often, there was music. The music came from a variety of sources, one of them being a tall, buzztopped character named John Clay, whose consistent wardrobe included jeans and a t-shirt stamped “Property of Stamford High.” John carried a dobro guitar everywhere he went and he went a lot of places. John, merry man of mirth that he was, wrote a lot of songs about disasters he had read about in the newspapers. His two favorites were Road To Mingus and Anson Runaway, which he would be glad to demonstrate for you if prodded. “Prodded” consisted of you saying something like, “John, would you….” Don’t mind if I do, replied JC, breaking into song, delivered in a deliberate monotone and so often, at so many places, that everyone in the audience knew all the words. Say what you will about John, his songs were brilliant. Road To Mingus (a small Texas town) told of a crew of hard-drinking youngsters who unsuccessfully attempted to beat a train to a railroad crossing. Not being content to merely recite the police version of the tale, John thought he would liven it up by adding an additional character. To wit:
They were takin’ the curves about ninety,
And they didn’t always stay on their side,
Then they met a little old lady
Just goin’ out for a ride.
The little old lady said “Let us drag
If you’re on your way to Strong;
I ain’t had nobody to race me
And it’s just a few hours before dawn.”
They gave her a half-mile head start
Because she was a lady;
She reached the railroad track up ahead,
They got there and so did the Katy (the train).
The car tore apart like a shot-up tin can,
It landed upside down.
The car kept part of their bodies….
The rest landed up on the ground.
In Anson Runaway, John concocted one of the greatest lines EVER:
As they got bigger, they took bigger things,
Becoming a juvenile criminal ring.
Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
If John Clay was a constant presence, the Waller Creek Boys were almost as prevalent. This trio consisted of guitarist Lannie Wiggins, banjoist/harmonica player, etc., Powell St. John, both of whom also sang, and UT freshman art major, Janis Joplin on the autoharp. Janis could also be persuaded to sing if you twisted her arm. These people played and sang anything and everything from obscure folk stuff to blues to funky Protestant church songs. They would sing Railroad Bill. They would sing The St. James Infirmary Blues. They would sing something they just made up on their way to the party. They were inordinately good.
Daily life in Austin consisted of waking up at a nominal hour, the previous night probably having been spent drinking at a party or rummaging around the Mexican section of town, often enjoying an 88-cent midnight meal at the lively Market CafĂ© where we competed to see who could find the most misspelled words on the giant wall menu. Eventually, we gravitated to the Ranger office in the Student Publications Building to work on the magazine. UT Student Publications was presided over by a suspicious gentleman named Loyd Edmonds, who was constantly on the lookout for dubious—often profane—material hidden in the margins of the magazine or in the copyright notice or some other obscure locale by the merry staff who saw all this as a great game they were playing with old Loyd, whom they called in print “the censors.” Occasionally, Loyd was forced to actually fire some perp who had heretofore successfully eluded notice of a cleverly placed but nonetheless heinous noun or verb.
Lunch and part of the afternoons were celebrated hanging out in the student union’s eatery/gathering spot, The Chuckwagon, provider of the greatest chili dogs in the history of man. One day, I was sitting by myself, chili dog in hand, editing a story I had written for the magazine, when the strains of a spectacular melody came rushing into the place from the nearby piano room. I got up, walked over and stood there in bliss as a beautiful young woman pounded out Silver Threads And Golden Needles, the first time I had ever heard it. I don’t know about you, but this was MY idea of total rapture.
Many evenings were spent a short distance from campus in a small neighborhood its residents called The Ghetto. “Neighborhood” might be an ambitious description, the whole area consisting of a few ramshackle buildings smelling of catpiss with a generous amount of open space for small gatherings, of which there were many. Smudge pots were often lit and placed strategically. John Clay lived in The Ghetto and the Waller Creek Boys were frequent visitors. Eventually, I moved there myself, sleeping on a dirty mattress on the floor of Wally Stopher’s apartment—me and 17 other people.
One night, as the music was playing and the smudge pots were smoking, I surveyed the crowd, dressed liberally in ragamuffinry, and suddenly recalled a photo I had seen in Time Magazine. It was a picture the magazine had taken in San Francisco and the caption read something like “Beatniks Ply Their Trade.” My friends and I looked just like the people in the picture. Beatniks? Us? The label never even occurred to me. I wasn’t a beatnik, whatever the hell a beatnik was! Or WAS I?
That’s all, folks. Continued, of course, next week.
