Janis Joplin Jammin’ With Gilbert Shelton. That’s Brother Steve On The Fridge.
Thanksgiving
Last year, we gave thanks for The Big Apple and The Silver Screen. This year, we show appreciation for adolescence and where we spent it. Oh, I realize adolescence is an expansive thing which can’t be narrowed down to a mere six months….except that sometimes, as in my case, it can.
It’s funny how Fate lays low the best laid plans of mice and men. In 1962, when I was 21, a planned journey to Albuquerque was interrupted by Fate (and an inadequate vehicle) and diverted to Austin, Texas. I was headed from Massachusetts to the University of New Mexico to meet a friend named Jacques Guerin and to embark upon the publication there of an off-campus humor magazine, not unlike but hopefully better than my first effort, the Charlatan, at Oklahoma State. The transport in question was The Iron Maiden, my 1950 Cadillac Superior Model Hearse, hard on gas, tougher on tires but great for sleeping accommodations.
I rolled across the top of the country, an area rife with quality highways, stopping only in University Heights, Ohio, outside Cleveland for a brief tryst with an old girlfriend named Karen Meckler, whose parents had earlier clapped me into the county jail at Champaign-Urbana for the dastardly crime of not being Jewish. When I left Karen’s fond embrace and went outside, I discovered the Iron Maiden with a flat tire—not a horrible experience but one made scarier by the fact of her mother’s simultaneously pulling up at the house. Visions of prison guards danced in my head. I mean, in University Heights, the cops wear yarmulkes as standard headwear. I inflated the tire about half way with one of those magical little aerosol cans and hastily went on my way to the nearest gas emporium. In those days, they could actually fix things at such establishments. Imagine.
By the time I had descended into Oklahoma, it was apparent my radiator was in the throes of self-immolation. Luckily for me, I had an old OSU consort named Rita Peyton living in Oklahoma City. She took me in while hearse repairs were being made….at least those few repairs available for my budget limit of forty-nine cents. The fixit-man told me he’d plugged the dike as well as possible but Albuquerque, 1000 or so miles in the distance, was no longer a consideration. “How about Austin?” I asked him, remembering UT humor mag editor Gilbert Shelton’s offer of a free spot on his hair couch in exchange for help putting out his new charge, the Texas Ranger. “That’s about, oh….400 miles,” the repairman judged, weighing the possibilities. “Mebbe. If you fill up the radiator every 50 miles.”
And I did. Religiously. And thus was rewarded much later by the sight of Austin on the horizon. The Iron Maiden rumbled up to Shelton’s apartment smoking and coughing, prompting the neighbors to dive for cover. “You really know how to make an entrance, Killeen,” said Shelton. I followed him inside his modest but roomy digs, recently enhanced by a magnificent wall-painting party. The Greenbriar Boys were singing “Life Is Like A Mountain Railroad,” on the stereo. “Amen to that!” I muttered to no one in particular and headed for my hair couch.
Austin
There are many places on this Earth which provide an abundance of reasons for taking up residence. Manhattan offers Perpetual Juice, a natural speed high. San Francisco is nonjudgmental and the beauty of the Bay is ubiquitous. Key West is a painted tropical paradise, untroubled by Winter. Probably not many people think of Austin, Texas in these terms and even less did in 1962. But I’m here to tell you different.
Austin, the capital of Texas, the county seat of Travis County and the home of the mammoth University of Texas is at the eastern edge of the well-named Texas Hill Country. Contrary to the stereotype of Texas towns, Austin is green and hilly, dotted with lush parks and lakes of considerable girth. Not to be outdone by the Grand Canyon, it has its very own Colorado River, a wide expense south of the Capitol. The city was established by the three-year-old Republic of Texas in 1839 to serve as its permanent capital and named after Stephen F. Austin, the founder of Anglo-American Texas. In 1962, the population of Austin was 201,762 happy souls.
To better appreciate Austin, you must begin by considering its challenges. First and foremost, it is surrounded by a state population which ranges from nebulous to psychopathic. The majority of Texans are best described as “Anti.” Anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-what-have-you-got. It would be easier for a warthog to pass through the eye of a needle than for a Democrat to be elected to public office in Texas. Yet, here is Austin, sitting in the midst of it all, packed with not only an appreciable number of well-intentioned Moderates but also a slew of Liberals and even an aging (but loud) crew of unreconstructed Socialists. It is not unusual to see, on any given night, a vibrant collection of all of the above verbally duking it out at Scholz (Beer) Garten, right next door to the Capitol dome, more or less providing dinner theater for the edification and enlightenment of itinerant college students, statehouse politicians and Church League softball players while they pester their fried chicken and raise a few Lone Stars. Scholz’ is considered such an institution that when the city razed the entire area adjacent to the Capitol Building, the beer garden was the only edifice spared. Such places expose odd lots of people to alternative possibilities seldom considered.
Austin is an island of sanity in a raging sea of negativism and discontent. It is, of course, not unusual for a large university to disproportionately influence its immediate surroundings, as we also see in Republican Florida. The wealthy University of Texas, however, has the financial capacity to perennially raid even the campuses of Ivy League colleges in search of quality faculty, a group not known to suffer fools gladly. UT draws all kinds of scholars, but it has a greater appeal than its sister schools to the classical student, the Liberal Arts major, the high school valedictorian, and enough of these people can redirect the conversation. On graduation, many stay, comfortable with their surroundings, often willing to take a lesser job than they might find elsewhere in order to remain a part of the Austin scene. And so it grows. Just to make it interesting, of course, they still have a lot of Texan in them.
In 1962, Austin was not famous for its vast live music venues, as it is today. But music has always been important there. When a young Janis Joplin came to town that year, she was already familiar with icons like Odetta and Bessie Smith and Maybelle Carter and could trot out a dozen or more old Protestant church songs. At the Wednesday night “folksings” at the UT Student Union, many participants offered ancient folk songs passed on from generations past. That year, a couple of progressive local clubs developed weekend jam sessions, surprisingly well-attended for jazz joints in the middle of supposedly unenlightened Texas. At Threadgill’s Bar, just outside town, owner Ken Threadgill kept a jukebox exclusively housing old Jimmie Rodgers songs and his saloon was a gathering place for local music-makers, which even included several guitar-twanging UT faculty members. The clientele featured disparate types, people who might not meet in any other circumstances, but who were united by one tie. In such extraordinary cases, demons are often humanized, ideas challenged, compromises considered, differences planed down. Austin was a huge melting pot of people and music and contrasting notions….notions sometimes taken under advisement. “Hey, that nitwit over there can play one hell of a banjo!” So how awful, then, can he really be?
Barton Springs, Austin
The Cast Of Characters
There are quirky people everywhere, of course, artists, writers, dancers, musicians, people who just don’t fit in with the mumbling masses, many of them doomed to spend compromised lives in Keokuk, Iowa or Two Egg, Florida or Newbiggin By The Sea. People of this ilk, however, are more adventuresome than most and will take great measures to find a place with like-minded colleagues, a spot where talents are appreciated rather than held suspect, a small universe where they can actually thrive. People like this are drawn to Soho, to Taos, to Seattle and San Francisco, and also, yep, to Austin, Texas.
Gilbert Shelton, hailing from Bryan, Texas, where his father ran a Firestone store, was our fearless leader. Shelton woke up one day to find himself in school at a strange place in Virginia called Washington & Lee and he wondered why. Quickly coming to his senses, he repaired to Austin, which suited him better. Shelton was a cartoonist extraordinaire and sometimes-writer and soon found himself a cozy home with the University of Texas humor magazine, the Ranger. You will look long and hard to find such a publication these days but back then these tiny magazines, prevalent on many campuses in one form or another, were the first tug on the collar of Authority. College newspapers had a tendency to be administered by what Janis Joplin would call “the straight people,” editors who had dutifully risen through the ranks by dint of hard work, responsibility and loyalty to the university. They wouldn’t be calling out any deans. Truth be told, few people were likely to do so in those times, authority being greatly revered and seldom challenged. The outsiders who gravitated to college humor magazines, however, were quickest to see the Emperor wore no clothes and they weren’t afraid to raise the subject, their reward often being suspension or expulsion from the university or, in more than a few cases, the discontinuance of the magazine itself. Put that in your typewriter and smoke it, punk!
Shelton had the impeccable timing to join the Ranger staff when a fellow named Bill Helmer had taken the reins. Helmer was the greatest college humor magazine editor ever and he was blessed with a clever and imaginative band of pirates which included art director Tony Bell, Shelton, a strange visitor from another planet named Joe E. Brown and promising rookies, Hugh Lowe, Dave Crossley, Lieuen Adkins plus other miscreants too numerous to mention. Helmer had the finesse to walk a perilous tightrope, pleasing the students with his iconoclastic views while keeping administration outrage just this side of censure. UT employed a Director of Publications named Loyd Edmonds, a serious fellow whose job it was to keep the Ranger free of scurrilous content and “ol’ Loyd” became Helmer’s foil in a neverending battle for truth, justice and the American Way. The Ranger staff considered it their Sacred Duty to somehow, someway, sneak into each issue some form of forbidden fruit, often discovered only days after publication, and bringing wry smiles to the faces of its readers and big frowns to Loyd Edmonds and his friends.
Gilbert inherited the editor’s job in 1962. Tony Bell was still around, as was Joe E. Brown, Hugh Lowe and Lieuen Adkins. Being responsible artists and journalists, it was only natural that many of this crew considered it important to expand their mental horizons by whatever means necessary, in one case the consumption of the newly-popular peyote. Now, peyote has its merits, without doubt, providing exceptional multicolored visions and cosmic insight, however fleeting. It is also difficult to keep down once consumed, requiring the assistance of peanut butter and other accomplices. While there is little doubt the peyote will eventually resurface in a manner quite violent, containing it for a modicum of time can offer great rewards. Joe E. Brown, for instance, saw and heard magnificent rock-‘n’-roll bands parading down the street outside and was insistent he be allowed to go and greet them. Shelton, the conscientious scientist of this crowd, was more interested in preserving what knowledge he had gleaned from the experiment and to that end commandeered a large pad of yellow ruled paper on which to capture his cosmic insights before they quickly escaped. This went well for a while. After about ninety minutes, however, I noticed the entire face of one page contained only the giant letter “N.” I took the pad and thanked him for his contribution to science.
Joe E. Brown, dissatisfied with the whole affair, went back to alcohol, which occasionally made him paranoid. One night, in the throes of a bender and suspecting he was being spied upon, Joe secured a can of yellow spray-paint and staggered to the roof of Austin’s tallest building, painting FUCK YOU, SKY KING! where Sky would be certain to see it the next time he flew over. Joe’s foremost ambition in life was to someday have enough money to construct along some busy highway a gigantic billboard which simply said, MAYBE NOT. So you see what we’re dealing with here.
Lieuen Adkins, on the other hand, was a benign little fellow, a writer and punster of some merit, a superior poet and one of the few people on God’s Green Earth who knew every single word of the Broadway song “Gee, Officer Krupke” from “West Side Story” and, even more impressively, “I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General” from “The Pirates Of Penzance.” If provoked, he would sing them for you. Lieuen, much to the derision of Shelton, continued to live at home while well into his university career, a fact which failed to inhibit his inclinations toward drinking and carousing late into the night. His fretful parents, seeking to stem the tide, initiated a midnight curfew, which found Lieuen sleeping on a wide variety of front porches during his college career. Seeking to improve his image as an academician, Adkins (aka, The Sparrow, via Shelton), decided one day that he would run for Student Senate. Killeen even wrote him a fine campaign song, all to no avail. On election night, as the votes came in, Lieuen was nowhere to be found. Fearing a humiliating loss, he was off at a friendly tavern, warding off disappointment. He finally arrived late in the evening at the building where the votes were being counted, charged up the stairs and, when confronted with the numbing results which found him placing fifth of six candidates, attacked the evil blackboard portraying the final score, attempting to destroy it. As Gilbert wrote in a subsequent issue of the Ranger: “He failed, of course.”
This interesting collection of talent and many others came and went from Shelton’s homey apartment on East Ninth Street, hard by the Interregional Expressway, soon to be demolished in favor of a spanking new post office. Janice and a throaty young lady named Nan O’Byrne (with whom all the gentlemen were smitten) sang there often, accompanied by Gilbert on the guitar or banjo (he was also passable on piano) and anyone else available. Tony Bell, unwilling to be left out of the music scene, constructed or somehow inherited an enormous instrument he called a guitarron, the likes of which I had never seen before and seldom since. The beast was so large it sat on the floor while Tony happily plunked, perhaps not vital to the musical conversation but nonetheless included.
What kind of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times. All things are as they were then. And (thanks to The Flying Pie), YOU were there!
Zilker Park, Home Of The Great Waterballoon War
Next Week
The Great Waterballoon Wars, Janis arrives and The Ghetto appears. A true-to-life account of adventure in the Old West continues unabated. Long Live 1962! There’ll never be another.
That’s not nearly all, folks….
