Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

The first halcyon years of the Dillo lent themselves well to the hippie ethos. I was a “bouncer,” but my modus operandi when dealing with disruptions in the social mien generally involved isolating transgressors and appealing to their better nature (which in sleepy Austin we all seemed to have): Hey, man. We don’t do that here. Be cool. This was our extrapolation on how people should behave, something that had stood us well even within the confines of the Fillmore (until it didn’t, and the hulking outside crew came in to quell any disturbance to the hip continuum). It was a shared perception of our new reality, what we should be aspiring to—and probably why so many Canandaiguans (six all told) with their small-town notions were welcomed into the fold at the Fillmore. We were nice people.

In Austin, there even came a time in the early Seventies when the Dillo reached an uneasy peace with the town’s constabulary. As one wag suggested, cops refrained from busting into concerts for fear that some of the attendees might well be local politicos themselves or their sons or daughters—or worse, statewide officials or their progeny in this, the capital city of Texas.

Gradually then, the creation of a scene opened up a bit of a breathing space for hippies who had once been anathema to the local powers. And in so doing changed my perception, admittedly self-serving, of a perceived martyrdom: I had believed, for instance, that hippies had supplanted minorities on the bottom rung of society in Austin, hounded as we seemed to be by cops. I reasoned that blacks should welcome hippies being on the scene as it gave the establishment some other evildoers to focus attention on. To some extent, that may have been true, given my run-ins with the law. But one episode in my early years bouncing at the Dillo gave lie to that fanciful notion.

It happened one night when employees escorted an ov­erly inebriated attendee out through the entrance. He became agitated and pulled out a knife, threatening those of us who spread a wide ring around him. We didn’t move on him, knowing cops were on the way, and we didn’t want anyone getting stabbed as we tried to reason him out of his berserk. Within minutes, two cop cars skidded to a halt in a shower of dust and gravel just outside our gathering, and a burly cop strode through our circle, brandishing a stout nightstick and barking, in that command voice, “Put it down,” the steady bounce of the weighted club in his hand communicating the menace of an impending whupping. The drunk quickly dropped the knife and put his hands behind his back.

After the cops stuffed the drunk into one squad car and the area cleared, a second officer accepted my thanks and chatted a bit with me. (I always tried to maintain an affable de­meanor, retaining some appreciation of cops from my days in New York City.) Then he noted that he had to return to the “dust bowl” on the east side—the colored side of town—and took his leave. He deigned to talk to this friendly hippie, no doubt because of the unmistakable whiteness of my being. A teachable moment.

A further lesson learned came courtesy of aforementioned artist Henry, who took great pains at self-deprecation, labeling himself “the greaser” and otherwise belittling his Hispanic heritage as done to him throughout his upbringing in redneck Texas. I didn’t understand this initially, having lived in NYC surrounded by all kinds. It took some experiencing life among the rubes beyond our defensible hippie perimeter before I understood his defense mechanisms.

But these small lessons paled in comparison with what awaited at the dawn of the cosmic-cowboy age (or menace, as one wag allowed). More and bigger shows filled the Dillo with increasingly rowdy crowds, Willie Nelson leading cowboy-western acts into the mix in 1972. And as laid-back Austin gave way to a more cosmo outlook, the mood gradually began to darken. To deal with shows that often drew 1,500 revelers or more, the club took on more muscle, extending beyond the peaceable pot-smoking hippies that had once sufficed as bouncers to bigger and badder dudes. As the crew expanded, I found amongst our number those I wouldn’t feel comfortable backing up because of their belligerent approach to “peacekeeping.”

Other changes closer to home signaled further disruption in my world. The legal appeals to Bro’s case ran their course in 1973, and he was carted off to Huntsville to serve what would prove to be eleven months (a sentence shortened thanks to political connections the Greezy Wheels had made playing at various fundraisers and the like). The band soldiered on, joined at various times by additional musicians such as Madman on percussion, Riley Osbourne on piano, and Jimmy Day on pedal steel. Sis, honored as an all-state vo­cal­ist in high school, had been added to the lineup earlier, chip­ping in on man­dolin.

By the time political ties sprung Bro in 1974, the band ap­proached escape velocity, extending their touring beyond the state—signing with Lon­don Records and recording the first of their two albums. The APA talent agency then added the band and began booking them gigs up along the East Coast.

While all seemed rosy with the family, I grew frustrated at my own situation, beset as it seemed by a host of little in­dig­ni­ties. While life became ever more expensive in boomtown Austin, the Dillo still paid only $10 a night for a job that grew increasingly hard to deal with, in the company of co­work­ers with quite different dispositions. And truth be told, it rankled further when another crew member was anointed “head” bouncer. Bobby took pains to tell me he didn’t choose me because he didn’t expect I’d be around long. Since my own faint hopes of stardom appeared dashed, I assumed he referred to my future given the success of Bro’s band. But a young man’s ego is not so easily assuaged.

Then opportunity beckoned when in April 1974 the Texas Opry House opened less than a mile away. A large airconditioned concert hall with tables and a dance floor—serving mixed drinks, not just the beer and wine the Dillo could offer with its limited license—the club offered a more refined environment for the concertgoer. The opening, however, exhibited the growing pains of a new operation, an inauspicious debut with the Eagles, which apparently had drunk patrons dancing on the tables and nearly trashing the place, a perfect opening for this entrepreneurial hippie bouncer.

Fellow crew member Mike and I, after a quick huddle with roommate Madman, hastened over to the club and spoke to the beleaguered management, touting my experience as a hon­cho at the Fillmore and years at the Dillo. For a mere $15 a night apiece plus a small surcharge, we would provide the best of the local bouncers to maintain peace in the new venture (and ultimately wangled $20 for nights when Willie and the the gang played into the wee hours of the morning, a not uncommon occurrence). With an agreement in hand, we had our choice of those Dillo bouncers we felt had the best attitude and approach to the job, as nearly all approached us to sign on.

The new venue quickly attracted the cowboy-western bands, as Willie (reportedly a secret partner) and the Armadillo had run afoul over questions of money and the pistol-packin’ predilections of some of his followers. Back at Willie’s first Fourth of July picnic, a number of Dillo bouncers hired on as experienced help to manage security. I ended up working onstage trying to herd the gigantic throng of followers and hangers-on—onto the stage area as members of a performer’s coterie then off the stage to make way for the next entourage—all in the inexorable heat of a Texas summer, trying to maintain a studied cool to deal with the myriad personalities gravitating to the scene. A fellow bouncer served as gatekeeper to the backstage parking area, where only those with special passes could attain entry—that is, till one self-entitled cowboy in a Winnebago showed his conception of a pass, a mag­num .38 pointed at the gatekeeper’s head. Needless to say, he gained admittance.

That was part and parcel of the falling-out with Willie, aggravated by a money-losing nine-city tour around the state with Michael Murphey that the Dillo sponsored. But the upshot of that breakup gave me and our little bouncer confederation a shot at the big time with the opening of the new venue.

And with visions of commercial prospects dancing in our heads, we coined a lofty biz moni­ker, Concert Security Consultants, printed up business cards, and contrived to secure more work for the crew—expanding into a pure cowboy club, the El Paso Cattle Company, and signing on for various outdoor fests and shows at the city auditorium.

For the short time the Opry House survived in this iteration—a shade over six months—we rubbed shoulders with the cowboy glitterati, becoming nodding acquaintances with Willie and the gang, who, after all, were mostly nice people, as many performers tend to be who rely on public adulation. We maintained relations with our Dillo coworkers (a few of whom we’d periodically sneak in to shows) and even pitched in a bit on some remodeling work going on to make the implacable cavern more fan accessible. Some of our crew worked both places to make ends meet, through whom we got word of an ugly incident in the beer garden, when some Dillo bouncers exchanged blows with a biker group. One of the bikers ap­par­ently had taken a razor to a number of them, requiring hundreds of stitches to sew them up. (One of the victims told me years later that he had ultimately caught up with the offending biker and settled the score. I didn’t ask what that meant.)

For our brief stint at the Opry House, we managed to avoid this ugly offshoot of the growing cosmic-cowboy scene—the violence of real thugs or the “outlaw” poseurs. (Some of the wannabes of the music biz, personified by such hangers-on as David Allen Coe, actually encouraged this with blat­ant puffery to inflate their image as a bad dude.) Our genial crew of level-headed security dudes managed to maintain the peace even during some of the more rowdy performances. For a time, all seemed to be com­ing up roses.

That is, until word filtered down to us of money woes in­volv­ing management of the club. Apparently they had run afoul of the taxman on withholding and the landlord on unpaid rent, among others. Some signs of skullduggery had been noted by one of our number working the front door, who allowed as how one of the bosses would come by during big shows and grab a fistful of dollars for personal “consumption.” We duly reported this to a fretful moneyman, who instituted changes on access to the till—but too late. In November 1974 the the Texas Alcoholic Bev­er­age Commission pulled the club’s liquor license, citing unpaid taxes.

In retrospect, the era’s out-of-hand proclivities for partying best defined the loose money management. A good time was being had by all. And though the countrified acts definitely led to more communing between hippies and rednecks at the Dillo, Opry House, and elsewhere, an insidious element had begun to creep in: cocaine. As artist Micael Priest put it, “When the cowboys got into cocaine, things got a whole lot uglier before they got nice again.”

Cocaine lends a person an empowerment that otherwise may be lacking, a power perhaps heretofore missing in one’s life. Some fell heavily into the drug and its allure (and I was no doubt a better person because I didn’t have the wherewithal to partake on any meaningful level). Some wielded it as a way to greater riches—or as just a prelude to ready sex. One young lady in the ever-widening Dillo family joked once about how a slick dude with good cocaine and a smooth line spread the clap to a number of the girls in the group.

Coke also fed into the dark side of a shit-kicker mentality creeping in, a perversion of the outlaw-coun­try mystique grown around the music of the time. This ugly side of the scene often reared its head outside the friendly confines of the Dillo in outdoor concerts staged in and around Aus­tin, where I suffered my only physical damage working security. In those wild and woolly days, conflict maybe smoothed over in the early years of the feel-good
cosmic-cowboy surge turned ugly when the sun went down and revelers got thoroughly liquored and/or drugged up.

In one, a concert staged with Willie Nelson and friends at the Party Barn outside town, our little bouncer outfit contracted to maintain the peace. Late that night, as I cruised the area in front of the stage where Willie launched into his headline act, I came upon a longhaired dude shoving a redneck so hard that he fell down, cradling his longneck beer. I quickly stepped in to stop the altercation, embracing the recumbent gen­tleman—who, thinking me his assailant, swung his bottle and konked me on the back of the head.

“Hey, man. It’s me,” I implored, and he then saw it was me, not his attacker.

Fueled by my own dose of go dust, I hefted him upright. Turning to the assailant, I noticed that Big Charlie, our crew member who minored in competition weightlifting, had arrived on the scene. Pointing to the hippie, I told Charlie, “Get him outa here.”

The subdued attacker glumly—yet meekly, given Charlie’s bulk—left. I was surrounded by concertgoers patting me on the back, one remarking, “I like the way you handled that.”

His companion, a comely young female, noted, “You’re bleeding.”

Not too badly, though, and stopping my wound (and still buzzing), I continued through the night.

On another occasion, a number of us ventured out to see a Waylon Jennings show at the Steiner Ranch some twenty miles outside Austin. We always liked him (a gentleman I’d have chance encounters with at the Opry House), so several of us determined to talk our way in. We weren’t scheduled to work, but Buddy drove us out and I blustered our way in, saying we worked at the Armadillo and heard they might need extra hands for security. Though not everyone with us cut much of a bouncer figure, they let us in. We were, after all, Dillo veterans, and I for one presented a good-sized body in case of trouble.

As the festivities wore on and dark descended, we ventured outside the backstage confines—fueled once again by marching powder—to deal with a number of fights that had broken out. We proceeded from scuffle to scuffle, breaking assailants apart and acting the peacemakers. As I approached one fracas, pumped up with my chemically induced empowered righteousness, I hadn’t noticed that my compadres were still occupied with the previous ruckus. I seized on the assail­ant poised to deliver blows to a guy on the ground and, think­ing my accompanying peacemakers would then restrain him, pulled him away, turning to the prostrate combatant. As I bent over to assist him, the attacker, gone whacko in a hopped-up rage, seized me by the hair and yanked me off balance, dragging me to the ground. One quick kick caught me in the nose, and as he gripped my hair and rared back to deliver another, I caught his heel, tripping him up. Whereupon my fellow heroes arrived on the scene and restrained him, swearing mightily and struggling wildly. Buddy led me away, ruefully stopping a bleeding nose and regretting I hadn’t thrown a punch in return for what proved to be a deviated septum.

That resulted in a long wait lying on the operating table of the hospital, ultimately, waiting for an insurance approval the concert promoter assured would be given to cover my mishap. Dunno if they ever got word, but they finally said “Let’s do it,” knocked me out, and straightened my beak.

That served to cure me of any notions that the bouncer life was for me. Our bouncer consortium didn’t survive the shuttering of the Opry House, in part because of a subsequent home visit from an officious dude from some state bureau or other, inquiring after the licensing and bonding of Concert Security Consultants.

“Oh, no,” I averred. “That was disbanded.”

Fortunately, I had remained good friends with the Dillo family and was accepted back into the fold—however grudgingly in some cases—but this time as a bartender, safe from any mayhem breaking out in the crowd.

A final episode in my Dillo bartending stint reinforced my desire to stay out of the bouncing game. One of the dudes hired on at the Dillo (and never used by us at the Opry House) had a particularly abrasive style of crowd management. On a busy evening I buzzed around the bar in the beer garden serving up beers, he apparently tried muscling a couple of in­ter­lopers in the nearby waitress station. They apparently weren’t buying Texas tough, having themselves just graduated from the Texas penal system, and one planted his buck knife squarely into said bouncer’s mouth, knocking out his front teeth and sending him to his knees. I heard a bang but was preoccupied shuffling drinks and didn’t see what happened. Two other staffers, neither particularly big, cautiously tailed the assailants to their car, where they pulled off the rear license plate to avoid identification, avowing they weren’t going back to prison. They quickly loaded up and peeled out.

At this point, I hadn’t yet taken the bandage off my bent nose, and I seriously began questioning my life choices once again. I had settled into a long-term relationship with one of the Dillo waitresses, Che, who was finishing a degree in mi­cro­biology at UT, and started thinking about my options. Fate once again intervened, as Bro’s band had launched into serious touring and he approached me about joining on as a roadie/road manager. I don’t believe I thought twice about it—and spent the next two years traveling to gigs in everywhere from Lake Placid in Upstate New York to Miami, Florida, swinging back through Mississippi and Louisiana on our way to Austin.

In that time, I did miss massive upheaval at the Dillo, which went through bankruptcy and a massive retooling that enabled the club to ultimately survive the decade. Before the club’s last waltz, though, I left the band and began a seven-year stretch working as a mechanic at the local Volkswagen dealership—so spent some time with my belle seeing an occasional band there and the final blow-out show. But that’s a story for another time.