Frantic Doug Sahm, a musical anomaly whose credits range from the top rock hit ”She`s About A Mover” in 1965 to a Canadian Juno award for ”best roots record” in 1988 and an American ”blues record of the year” in 1989, had one of the more noteworthy of his semi-hourly brainstorms two years ago.
It concerned forming a band called the Texas Tornados.
”I analyzed the situation of getting back on the radio,” he recalls at his mile-a-minute conversational clip, ”and decided it had to be either on MTV battling Motley Crue, which I`m not even in the same ballpark with anymore, or go country and get something that could fit to get in the door.”
The Texas Tornados, whose name seems to have sprung from the title of an album Sahm made in the `70s, may not exactly ”fit,” but thanks to a contract with the Nashville office of Warner Bros. Records, it now is very much ”in the door.”
One of the unlikeliest aggregations that has had a real chance to make a name in bigtime country music, the band possesses an offbeatness that can be sensed even before hearing its just-issued first single, ”Who Were You Thinking Of,” or its debut album, to be released in late August. All that is needed is a review of the personnel:
– Probably the most familiar member to country audiences is Freddy Fender, the soulful, charismatic Tex-Mex vocalist whose ”Before The Next Teardrop Falls” was one of the biggest country hits of 1975.
– Then there`s Grammy-winning accordionist Flaco Jimenez, one of the world`s more acclaimed Latin musicians, whose name is unknown to the country mainstream but whose work isn`t: It includes prominent appearances on such recent hits as Dwight Yoakam`s country ”Streets Of Bakersfield.”
– These two Mexican-Americans join two German-Texans, one of whom is Augie Meyers, Vox organist who has had Texas hits of his own and been the backbone of many of the pop, rock, country and Mex-flavored aggregations led by Sahm.
– Finally, there is the much-traveled and unpredictable Sahm, whose name you may not recognize immediately if you are not a music aficionado or a reader of Rolling Stone, but Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger do: Sahm has toured with both, and Dylan has graced a Sahm album.
Sahm`s career is diverse to the point of the bizarre. After making his first huge hit, ”She`s About A Mover,” with a Texas-rooted fake-British group, the Sir Douglas Quintet, he went on to become a fixture of the Haight- Ashbury smokeout in San Francisco and then the cosmic-cowboy corral in Austin, Tex. He has had hits in Sweden, of all places, and has excelled at about every kind of music between techno-pop and opera.
Recently he has spent a lot of time in Vancouver, whose climate he prefers to Austin`s heat and humidity. For business reasons, however, he presently seems to be considering becoming a part-time resident of Nashville, where he will find the heat and humidity not much better than Austin`s.
Given his Southwestern-ness, it is not surprising that he is no stranger to Freddy Fender.
”I grew up on and idolized Freddy Fender,” Sahm says. ”And he was a different Freddy Fender from the one the country world has seen. His first hit in Texas was `Holy One,` which the Catholic church didn`t like because it was about a girl.
”We both had regional hits in 1959-his was `Wasted Days And Wasted Nights,` and mine was `Why Why Why`-and we played to tons of Chicanos, man. I remember we did this heavy show in San Antonio on top of this snack bar at a drive-in theater. I was 18 and Freddy was 23, a good-looking guy in boots, and chicks were screaming, trying to tear his clothes off.
”We became buddies and went out and partied. He was the king.”
The next year, however, the king was deposed by a Louisiana sentence for possessing two marijuana cigarettes; for that he had to do a three-year prison term that ash-canned his career.
The next time Sahm saw Fender was in Austin in the early `70s. Sahm had recorded ”Wasted Days” on one of his own albums and dedicated it to ”Freddy Fender, wherever you are,” and Fender, in the depths of obscurity, heard it. They got together, and Sahm and other Austin musicians arranged for him to perform on a Tex-Mex Revue at the Soap Creek Saloon in Austin. He ”just killed it,” Sahm recalls enthusiastically, and not too long afterward he recorded ”Before The Next Teardrop Falls.”
He and Fender have been able to reunite in the Tornados, Sahm adds, basically because his manager and Fender`s manager are partners and because a contract Fender had with Critique Records dissolved at the right time, just as Sahm was emerging from a pact with Antone Records.
As Sahm sums it up with typical exuberance:
”A miracle happened.”
Sahm himself is a miracle of places and times. His father was moonlighting at The Barn, a San Antonio nightclub, where the future jack-of-all-musics took up steel guitar when he was barely past toddling.
Plus the Sahm home was halfway between The Barn, where the big Nashville stars performed, and a black nightclub that presented such rhythm & blues acts as T- Bone Walker and Bobby Blue Bland. Thus were sown the seeds of his diversity.
At The Barn, a sometimes-rowdy place where one of his uncles was the bouncer, Sahm recalls sitting on the knee of Hank Willams Sr. and seeing Lefty Frizzell punch out a patron before stepping onstage to deliver soulfully ”I Love You A Thousand Ways.”
”Those old guys were hell-raisers,” Sahm says. ”I grew up on that.”
Some of the flavor of such bygone days is recaptured for the `90s by the video of ”Who Were You Thinking Of,” a steamy Texas-esque bar scene in which the singing and playing Tornados are surrounded by lecherous-looking men and beautiful women dancing something akin to the Lambada.
Country Music Television (CMTV) in Nashville already has reported receiving outraged calls contending that the mixed races of the dancers, particularly a black dancing with an Oriental, misrepresents the reality of Texas bar life; so the video is being re-edited for country music TV while the original will be retained for VH-1 and other more liberal audiences.
What else should viewers expect of a group of 50-year-olds daring to call itself the Texas Tornados? Sahm sees this grizzled quartet, most of whom are still above ground because of radically retooled lifestyling, as a link to that earlier era in which performers, beguiling a less-aggressive press, lived faster, died younger and were revered more naively when gone.
”In Texas in the `50s there were two obsessions: country music and the New York Yankees,” Sahm recalls, going on to note the similarities of these two and their dissimilarities with the present.
”Mickey Mantle has said he hit some of his most tremendous shots hung over, you know. But now it`s so specialized. Today you`d never see a Bo Jackson or a Jose Canseco putting their millions of bucks on the line to do something like that.
”Same way in music. The old guys would go out and party and drink rotgut whisky `til 3 in the morning. Now you see guys carrying briefcases. That`s the way the world has changed in sports and music. Today you got to have it together.”
Sahm adds that the Tornados have it that way. With 20,000 copies of the band`s single already shipped (”that`s unheard-of for a new act in country music today”), these inveterate performers are committed to meeting a rigorous schedule of performances that is noticeably high-profile.
There`s one with Linda Ronstadt and the Neville Brothers in Austin, for instance. There also are the Monterey, Calif., fair and an October stint with Los Lobos. Sahm indicates he expects to meet these imposing obligations the same way he did the grueling 18-hour filming of the video: ”I do a lot of herbs, ginseng and B12. I can kind of goose it up in a natural way if I have to.”
The above notwithstanding, the idea remains unshakable that these guys never will conform completely, especially the frenetic Sahm, a runaway fan of music, baseball and life. He recently drove to Chicago from Texas to see the All-Star Game and write about it for a Texas college newspaper.
He rambles excitedly on about how much he loved Chicago, where he saw blues king Albert Collins on the street, dined calorically at Pizzeria Due and hung out at Wrigley Field with the kids in the autograph line.
Sahm knows he is no kid, however, and he is not ashamed of it. In fact, he here exhibits a touch of seemingly permissible arrogance:
”Usually the pretty young kids get these kinds of record deals, but for this type of music they had to go to the oldtimers to get the talent.
”It ain`t like Warner`s is starting with a bunch of kids who never had a record, you know. The other day I was watching `Crook & Chase,` and they were asking this new group, Pirates of the Mississippi, `Are you gonna leave your day job?`
”Can you imagine asking Freddy Fender, `Are you gonna leave your day job?` Freddy left his day job in the middle 1950s.”
