In the early 70’s, Mother Blues on Lemmon Avenue was where it was at.
By Kirby F. Warnock
Photos by Ron McKeown
Click here to check out Kirby’s June Saturday afternoon showing at the Texas Theatre of “When Dallas Rocked,” Saturday, June 14, at 4 PM, featuring scenes from Mother Blues, Buddy Magazine, KZEW, and more. Get your tickets now – this one is likely going to sell out.
Also don’t miss the Mother Blues Reunion at The Kessler Theatre, on Friday, June 13th. Click here for tickets and info.
This article was originally published in a 2007 print edition of Buddy Magazine.
Public service announcement and grammar-geek trigger warning: Our hero Freddie King may be correctly and alternately spelled either “Freddie,” or “Freddy,” as he had used both spellings on different albums. While the Buddy editor is a staunch “Freddie” advocate, Warnock is partial to “Freddy.” True to our rebellious origins, we shall mildly eschew all grammatical and journalistic rules for this article, and utilize both.
When I read that the newly opened House of Blues in Dallas was offering VIP memberships for $2,200, I sat up as if I’d just hit a speed bump at 60 mph. The whole premise of this offering is that for some extra cash, the wannabes can pay for the opportunity to hang out with the “stars” and get that backstage vibe. (They even brought in Dan Aykroyd to hob nob with the VIPs when the club opened.) I must really be getting old, because I can remember a time when you couldn’t get backstage for all of the money in the world. This was back when you couldn’t buy cool. I also remember a nightclub that was a house, with the blues, but it wasn’t the House of Blues. It was a Dallas legend called Mother Blues.
From the 1970s through the early 80s, Mother Blues was the hottest club in town and most of Texas. “There were three clubs that had that certain vibe when you walked into them,” says Texas blues guitarist Bugs Henderson. “The Cellar in Fort Worth, the Armadillo in Austin and Mother Blues.” It was the hangout for every major rock and roll act that rolled through north Texas. The list of stars who headed over to Mother Blues after a concert in Dallas or Fort Worth could fill the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Boz Scaggs, Bad Company and the Texas blues master Freddy King. The upstairs room was their private enclave, but you couldn’t buy a ticket into it for any amount of money. You had to either be incredibly cool, possess the really good drugs, or be a nubile, hot, young groupie. In other words, the price of admission was sex, drugs or rock and roll. For a while it was the hippest, hottest, place to be. It was also the dirtiest and most dangerous place in town, but everyone who was anybody in the rock & roll hierarchy could be seen there.
Mother Blues was the brainchild of Bill Simonson and Larry Bradford. Bill was the owner and main catalyst, while Larry was “the responsible one” of the duo. Bill looked like a very young Tom Hanks, with a bushel of brown, curly hair, piercing blue eyes and an impish smile. He opened the club in a house on Rawlins then moved it into an old, two-story house on Lemmon Avenue. (The actual location is now occupied by a car wash and Tio’s Tortas.) The interior looked basically like the old house it was and even still had a functional fireplace. The downstairs was where the club was located, with a small stage, chairs, tables, booths, a pool table, a big bar and a patio out back. Upstairs was the private area, reserved only for those people that Bill told the bouncer to let pass.
There was live music every night, provided by the dozens of bar bands that inhabited Dallas in the early 70s. The US Kids, The Toys, The James Buck Band, Full Force, Maple, Brat, Lynx, Cottonmouth, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Smokin’ Joe Kubek. Each night they cranked out cover tunes of Kansas, Led Zeppelin or Cheap Trick to a crowd of young people.
“It was a place that was really good to musicians,” says Bugs Henderson. “Bill and Larry were more than just club owners. They cared about the music, so everybody wanted to play there.” While there were several other bars in Dallas and Forth Worth that followed this format (Sneaky Pete’s, The Losers, Savvy’s) Bill’s genius was that on weekends, he kept Mother Blues open after hours until 5:00 am. The trick was that he had to quit serving alcohol after 2:00 am, the time established by the Texas Alcohol & Beverage Commission, but he still booked bands to come onstage at midnight and play until 5:00. He still charged a cover charge, so you couldn’t get in for free, but you couldn’t drink. What this arrangement did was pack the house with young people doing drugs, not drinking.
“When all the other bars in Dallas closed at 2:00 am, everyone headed to Mother Blues,” recalls Dallas musician James Buck. “There was a whole second wave of people that came in then, and they were mostly the drug users. It got pretty wild there for a while.”
If you showed up after 2:00 am without drugs, you could ask your waitress if anything was available. She would walk around from table to table, inquiring if anything was for sale. If there was something available, she would come back, tell you the deal (“Coke, $100 a gram.”). You would hand her the money and in a while she could come back with the drugs. Let me hasten to add that this was not at the direction of Bill Simonson— it was usually a free-lance gig set up by the waitresses— but Bill didn’t do anything to discourage it.
Mother Blues was also the first Dallas club I can remember that welcomed the gay and the transgendered. There was a particular young transvestite who was a regular there. The club also attracted the slightly weird, like the guy known as Space Dancer, who would appear and dance some pretty avant-garde movements—always alone. The availability of drugs and ready sex were what attracted headline rock stars to the place. Besides the obvious coke connection, there was always a bevy of teen-aged girls looking to sleep with a rock star. Most of them were topless dancers from clubs like Youngbloods, The Fare or The Doll House, but several of them were high-school-age girls from Hurst, Bedford or Mesquite. Because the drinking age was 18 back then, it was not too hard for “mature-looking” 16-year-olds to gain entrance. And enter they did.
This reputation for easy sex and drugs reeled in Led Zeppelin whenever they were in town. Robert Plant was a regular there, as was Jimmy Page. While I cannot verify that they indulged in any of the afore-mentioned vices (because I wasn’t in the room to see it happen), Mother Blues somehow got just about every national act to drop by after their show.
There was the night that John Nitzinger, Freddy King and Willis Alan Ramsey showed up on the same evening and headed up to the private second story. Ron McKeown snapped a picture of the composer of “Muskrat Love” hanging out with the bluesy white boy, John Nitzinger and the king of the Texas blues, Freddy King.
Bill had developed an incredible network of contacts across the country. He was able to get the word out to booking agents, limo drivers and the rock stars themselves that if they came to Mother Blues, they would be taken care of. It is a testimony to Bill’s talents that he got Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band to play their very first Dallas performance at his sister club, Gertie’s. He also took a chance on Jimmie Vaughan’s new band, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, giving them their first Dallas dates, as well as booking jazz acts like Chuck Mangione, Ramsey Lewis and Mose Allison.
However, if there was one person who typified the Ma Blues atmosphere, it was Freddy King. Not only did Bill regularly book Freddy at Mother Blues and his other club, Gertie’s, he allowed Freddy to hang out upstairs as much as he wanted. It was up there that Freddy would get into poker games that didn’t end until dawn, or until Freddy had won all of his money back, whichever came first.
Those all-night card games became the stuff of legends. When Jimmy Buffet played Mother Blues (at the height of his “Margaritaville” fame) he was paid in a huge wad of cash. Shortly after counting out his door receipts and signing for them, Buffet got into a big poker game and wound up losing every penny of it, including the belt buckle he was wearing. (“It was all he had left, so he pulled it off and laid it on the table,” recalls Ron McKeown. “I won it.”).
“Freddy liked to play a game he called Loosey Deucy,” says Bugs Henderson. “It was seven-card stud, but with deuces, Jokers and sevens wild, and the low card in the hole split the pot. A regular poker hand wouldn’t win the thing. You usually needed something like five aces. “One night we had a big game going and this guy lost all of his money. He got real mad, stood up and shouted at us that he was going to his car to get his gun, then stormed out of the room. Immediately after he left, everyone except me reached into their pockets or their boot and pulled out a gun. I suddenly realized that I was the only guy at the table who wasn’t armed. Fortunately, the guy never came back.”
Freddy’s regular presence at the club fueled a steady procession of young, white guitar players who came to watch him perform, hang out with him upstairs, or seek his advice if he was in the audience during their set.
One of Freddy’s proteges was Dallas guitar legend Jimmie Vaughan, the older brother of Stevie
Ray Vaughan. “Freddy kind of took me under his wing,” recalls Jimmie. “After our sets (with Texas Storm or the Fabulous Thunderbirds) I would always go over and talk with him. He never gave me advice like, ‘You need to play it this way,’ but more about things I should add, or drop. One time I came over to him when we were through, and he said, ‘You know that little thing you did at the end of that last song? Don’t do that.’”
The influence of Freddy King on all of the guitarists in the world cannot be properly charted any more than you could measure every ripple from a stone tossed into a pond. It has led me to believe that he was possibly the most influential guitar player to ever live. Let’s just look at part of the Freddy tree: Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs were regulars at his Dallas home when they were in high school at St. Marks. John Nitzinger and Bugs Henderson were regulars at his gigs. Eric Clapton started out his career copying Freddy’s instrumental hit, “Hideaway”, even recording his own version of it while he was with John Mayall’s Blues Breakers. Eddie Van Halen grew up copying Eric Claptons’ licks. Jimmy Vaughan learned from Freddy, then taught his younger brother Stevie. Just how many guitarists started their careers by copying Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jimmie Vaughan will never be known.
“They should have a statue of Freddy King or at least a big picture of him in the House of Blues today,” says Bugs Henderson. “He was just the most influential guitar player to ever come along. I don’t think people today understand just how important he was, or how many players were in the audience whenever he got onstage. He was just coming into his own when he died.”
There were many nights when groups of bikers would show up (not today’s yuppies on Harleys, but outlaw gangs, like the Scorpions or Bandidos, on choppers). Bill usually hired a few of them to work the door as bouncers, so if you misbehaved there was a very real chance of serious bodily injury. There were also the unsavory hangers-on of the early rock trade. It was not the sanitized, cleaned-up version of rock and roll that you now see at Smirnoff Music Center, Nokia Theater or the House of Blues. It was a smoked-filled room that reeked of spilled beer and the lack of a good scrub-down, filled with runaways, street hustlers and drug dealers. It was rock and roll before the bands got publicists, handlers or press agents. There was no Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood. Rock music was still primarily underground, a holdover from the hippie days and the Summer of Love. There were no corporate- sponsored tours by Pepsi, or product endorsement deals. The mainstream press largely ignored rock and roll in the early 70s, so if anything happened at Ma Blues, it rarely made the news.
Bill was a master club owner with an eye towards the bottom line. No matter how wasted he was, he could always count the closing night’s receipts flawlessly. He was helped immensely by his manager, Larry Bradford, and his girlfriend, Nikky. (I never learned Nikky’s last name.) They propped him up when he had too much to drink, drove him home and generally made certain he didn’t fall off of the edge. This was a full-time job, because Bill led a self-destructive life fueled by drugs and liquor.
“The best thing that ever happened to Mother Blues was when they lowered the drinking age in Texas to 18,” recalls Stoney Burns. “Bill told me that six months after that happened, he was driving a new Mercedes.”
“Bill was an incredible person to be around. Just always your best friend. You never felt like he had a mean bone in his body. He was always very gracious to me,” recalls Ron McKeown, a photographer for Buddy Magazine. “When they started making a lot of money, he started doing cocaine and that’s when he really went downhill. Like a lot of people who did coke, it ate him up. If it hadn’t been for Larry Bradford (Bill’s manager), they never would have made any money.”
With the cocaine comes a crowd of people who don’t always have your welfare as their prime consideration. Things got crazier and crazier at the club, with the drug use becoming more and more brazen. As one person observed, “It was the fullfilment of Hunter S. Thompson’s motto: ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.’ “
The police couldn’t help but notice what was going on. One night they raided the place during an after-hours gig that James Buck was playing. “The cops came over the fence in the backyard, where the patio was. Everyone just started emptying their pockets onto the ground. The next day the cleaning crew told me that they must have picked up nearly $3,000 worth of drugs,” recalls James Buck.
Bill Simonson got busted. He went and did some prison time, came back out and tried to open a club in Fort Worth called Dance Land, but by now the thrill was gone. It closed down just a few months after opening. There was another attempt to re-open Mother Blues in a different location, but it closed very quickly. “Once that vibe is gone, you can’t get it back,” muses Bugs.
I got another job and lost touch with Bill, Stoney, and the other Mother Blues regulars. Then one
day I heard that Bill had died from a brain tumor. He was cremated, and his ashes scattered in Colorado.
The house that was Mother Blue’s was purchased and demolished. A car wash and a small strip center went up. There was no reminder of the wildest, craziest, hippest club in Texas, and maybe all of the U.S., except the memories of thousands of baby-boomers who inhabited the club when they were in their late teens and early twenties. The photographs are about the only thing that capture that moment in time when rock & roll and the blues were serious business, not a box seat with catered meals at the newest “venue.”
One of the traditions at Ma Blues was for every artist who played there to autograph a brick on the wall near the entrance. When the building was being torn down, a demolition worker found the brick with Bugs Henderson’s autograph on it. “He called me up and gave it to me. I’ve got it here in my house in East Texas, right now,” laughs Bugs.
It was a different time, in a place that now seems so far away. I guess you really had to be there.
Click here to check out Kirby’s June Saturday afternoon showing at the Texas Theatre of “When Dallas Rocked,” Saturday, June 14, at 4 PM, featuring scenes from Mother Blues, Buddy Magazine, KZEW, and more. Get your tickets now – this one is likely going to sell out.
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