BILLY BLACKMON REMEMBERS .......

Where to start...

"I was thinking of other bands from the Rauls//Continental Club era, primarily the Explosives, who are/were Rocky Eriksons back up band. They were a great band and great friends. A couple of them left Jerry Jeff Walker to form the band. Jerry Jeff thought they were crazy. I met him a few times and HE was nuts - he and Doug Sahm together in the drug room at the original Soap Creek Saloon.........Doug  never shut up and you could never understand Jerry Jeff. A lesson on the dangers of tequila and cocaine. It took me a while to learn it, though.

Willie Nelson ..

I met Willie Nelson early on and played pool with him at an underground club in Victoria in 1973 before he became huge. He was really nice; we bought each other beers. I got so drunk I lost my car keys so we had to take a cab and couldn't find the house we were supposed to stay in and
almost got shot for knocking on the wrong door (s). Finally found the house. The keys were in the car on the floorboard. And that happened a lot.

Interesting story: a member of Willie Nelsons band or wife or something committed suicide in a room at their house on the lake. They moved out and Too Smooth moved in. The place had a sound-proof room that everyone swore was haunted though I never saw anything.

One time we were driving back from New York City and our Winnebago died outside of Waco. We limped into a truck stop in Abbott, Tx. - where Willie Nelson is from. Our roadie got out to see if anything could be done. He came back with a 6 pack and said not much could be done but these guys had  a lot of beer and asked us to come and have a few. It was 3:30 in the morning and guys hanging around looked pretty rough but we went in anyway and told them we were a band so they suggested we bring our instruments in since we were going to be here awhile and would we like some speed so we'd feel better. So we said, yes yes and yes and 2 hours later were playing in a gas station, wired and drunk. And then we called our girlfriends to come and pick us up. And of course that's when the party was over.........I didn't sleep for 2 days. We stopped there on every trip after that. Last I heard the place was still there.

New Orleans to New York and CBGB's ..

Sometimes we'd play in New Orleans and then drive to New York City, sometimes not. When we didn't we had to drive through Arkansas. The only good thing about Arkansas is that they sell fireworks year-round. So we stocked up on nigger-chasers and cigarette loads. The chasers were great for the guy on the toilet with the light off. The cigarette loads  were always directed at our long-suffering roadie Richard (who really enjoyed the attention). Richard was a profession punk - white stripe in his hair, Elton John glasses, dozens of pins with every big punk band etc. He was also extremely star-struck. One night were playing at CBGBs and some of the members of Blondie showed up. Richard managed to get a seat at a table with Debbie Harry, the sexiest girl in all of new wave. So one of us managed to get his cigarette pack and load a bunch of his cigarettes. We all waited for one to go off, and sure enough, one did. We all fell over laughing, Debbie look kinda appalled but didn't leave. Richard, still cool, immediately went for another cigarette. Same thing. He was drawing a lot of attention. After the third one, he left the table and chased us into the street. I'll never forget it. Someone else took his seat......Also, super-glue is great on volume knobs of the guy manages to get his own room in the motel. Richard would get in the shower, we'd break into his room, glue the volume all the way up, turn off the light in the bathroom, light a nigger-chaser and run. Always lock your door and put a bed in front of it. And fire extinguishers are great fun unless you get chased out of the room naked with the extinguisher in your hand. That happened to me at the Peachtree Hotel in Atlanta. They let me back in before anything worse happened.

And it went on and on. There were a lot of fights - one guy maced our guitarist for no reason, came back and threw fire crackers at him, was chased down and brutally beaten and chased to his car. He pulled a spear gun out of his trunk and came back but we scared him off through sheer numbers. That was in Dallas.

We played at 2 frat parties in Austin that were marred by riots and fights. The police wanted to arrest us rather than screw around with the frat rats. We stopped playing those places regardless of the money. Animals....of course Charlie Hatchett booked those gigs.

Metal band KROKUS. ....

One of the weirdest gigs we played was with a Swiss metal band named Krokus in some club on a loop that being build around San Antonio, can' t remember the name of the place. We played there a lot and had a following. Anyway, the promoter was a friend of ours and he asked us to open so as a favor so we did though all of us knew it was probably a very bad idea.

We went down there and unloaed our equipment. Krokus only spoke a horrible Swiss-German dialect that I've heard since in Switzerland but was totally dumbfounded by at the time. They wouldn't let us do a sound check and they insisted that I play their drummers drums to conserve space on the stage. Of course their drummer had a 20 piece set of drums on a riser that went in circles and all of this other crap and I said no, I won't do it. I hate playing other peoples drums, especially drums belonging to arrogant heavy-metal foreigners. This argument on and on and I finally packed my drums up and was driving away, much to everyones chagrin. I saw the promoter come running after me and stopped. He'd straightened it all out - we got a
sound check, they gave us space on the stage and their lazy fucking roadies had to move the drums around.

We were so pissed by the whole deal we made a point of playing as hard and as fast and as loud as we could, which was considerable. Jon Dee pulled out everything he knew as 21 year old guitarist and we got 2 encores and would've had a third but Krokus made sure we got off stage in time. After us, they seemed like a group of clowns. Bombast and 3 lead guitarists and requisite hysterical, operatic lead singer. It was funny - smoke machines, bombs going off. Just fucking stupid. We all got drunk as hell and laughed all through the show. You can usually learn from people from people you open for but we learned what not to do from these clowns. I never saw a heavy metal band after that.."

- Billy Blackmon june., 2008