A night at Poodie's 2005, and "the hole that'll never be filled"
The old Austin of Spellman's, Alliance Wagon Yard and the Split Rail lives on in Spicewood
Twenty-two miles west of Austin is where Willie Nelson's stage manager Randall "Poodie" Locke opened the coolest country music beer joint in Texas. It debuted in 1998 as a place where he and his crew could hang out when they're not on tour. But it quickly became a live music venue, with a stage for up-and-comers like Meagan Tubb, as well as legends like Merle Haggard, who just wanted to cut loose one night.
Poodie's Hilltop Bar & Grill could be the place that inspired the dirty joke about the rewards of mistaken identity that ends, “I’m not Willie Nelson.” The bar is filled with life-hardened hombres with braided ponytails. Willie himself has played Poodie's a dozen times, once billed as "Phood" after hanging out with members of Phish.
"When we're out with Willie, we can't wait to get back to the Hilltop," Locke says, as he sits at a laptop, e-mailing equipment specifications to Australian Customs in preparation for an upcoming tour Down Under. "I'm dreaming about these cheeseburgers on the drive back. But then when we're home a couple weeks, we can't wait to get back out on the road."
Maybe there's a song in there somewhere.
Norman Draper, a retired school teacher and part-time lifeguard from Atlantic City, loads up his van once a year and builds his vacation around visits to Poodie's. "This is a special place," says Draper, a self-professed music freak, who names of Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver and Leon Russell as some of the acts he’s seen at the 133-capacity club. “It’s not just the music,” Draper said of the Hilltop’s appeal. “It’s the friendliness, the warmth. There’s no place like this in New Jersey.” Or 48 other states.
The original Poodie’s on Red River, where Emo’s would move into in ‘93, didn’t last long as a downtown honky tonk, but the Hilltop Bar & Grill is now in it’s 24th year.
When you're the only live music club for miles around, you become a scene unto yourself. Your customers become the cast and, in the case of Poodie's, the wait staff becomes the stars. The day bartender is Jimmy Lee Jones, whom Poodie met more than 20 years ago in San Diego, when Jones was a Marine drill sergeant who used to get up and sing fast songs ("Auctioneer's Song," "I've Been Everywhere") with local country bands.
The sign may say Poodie's, but Jones, who hosts the Wednesday night open mike, is the one who holds court nightly. On a recent Tuesday, where the resident Troubadillos play everything from "Friend Of the Devil" to Lefty Frizzell to the Beatles, Jones is showing a group of regulars the stitches on his finger from an earlier adventure slicing limes. "I told the doctor I had a gig tomorrow; 'Will I be able to play the piano?' " Jones says, as a few stragglers drift closer to catch the punch line. "And he said 'No problem.' I thought, well, that's cool. I never could play the piano before."
You never know who's going to show up at Poodie's. Garth Hudson of The Band flew in from Paris to play SXSW in 2004 and felt that he'd just been getting warmed up when the 40-minute showcase was over. He ended up at Poodie's the next night and played for three hours with a pickup band.
Poodie says his joint's "anything goes" atmosphere -- on this night there's an impromptu nine-ball pool tournament -- reminds him of the old Soap Creek, off Bee Cave Road. "You'd have to drive way out in the country, at least back then there wudn't nothing else out there, and go up this winding dirt road, and you felt like you were invisible from the authorities," he says. "When we get people driving all the way out here from Austin, I have to laugh. I can't tell you how many times, back in the old days, when someone would say, 'Let's go to Soap Creek' and I'd go, 'Nah, it's too far.' Compared to this place, Soap Creek was downtown."
One of my most rewarding assignments was in 2008 when the Statesman sent me up to Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie to write about Willie’s support band. The big man took care of me. “This is the top writer in Austin, the new Townsend Miller,” Poodie introduced me, and set me up in the front booth, where drummer Paul English, bassist Bee Spears and guitarist Jody Payne, came up, one after the other, to entertain me with stories of their combined century in The Family.
They’re all gone now- and Poodie led the way, as he always did.
"There are no bad days" was Poodie’s motto, but an exception was May 6, 2009 when this giant of kindness and personality was taken away by a heart attack.
As news spread, Poodie’s quickly filled up with mourners. The thought that he’d never walk through those doors again was more than most could handle. A family member had died.
In Willie's band of gypsies, Poodie was the ringleader who had a hug for everyone no matter how much was going on. Everybody wanted time with him, and he gave as much as he could, but there was work to be done. Both of the Nelson crew buses had signs that said "Poodie's on the other bus."
As stage manager, Poodie handled most of the advance work and was in charge of setting up the instruments. He guarded Willie’s favorite guitar like a secret service agent, willing to take a bullet for Trigger. But at the same time, Locke, who dressed in drag and chased Owen Wilson in the video for “You Don’t Think I’m Funny Anymore,” knew how to have crazy fun.
"He was the heart and soul of the road crew," said Joe Nick Patoski, author of the Nelson biography An Epic Life. No other roadie had his own logo, a silhouette featuring his prominent beer belly, on t-shirts and ballcaps.
As his mother, Gloria "Momma" Locke loved to tell people, Poodie Locke won the Most Beautiful Baby contest in Waco when he was only a few months old. The nickname "Poodie" is derived from "purty."
Poodie was only 12 when he met Willie, a regional star from nearby Abbott, who was playing bass with Ray Price at the time. After a college try at North Texas State, Poodie got his first job in music as a 20-year-old roadie for B.W. Stevenson. After 1973’s “My Marie” craze waned, Poodie and Buckwheat’s harmonica player Mickey Raphael, joined the Willie circus. This was right before ‘75’s Red Headed Stranger made him a superstar. That was a good year for Austin music club graduates, as Freddy Fender went from Soap Creek Saloon to the top of the charts with “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.”
Poodie was promoted to stage manager after a year. “I’ve got the best job in the world,” he told me in 2008. “I never want to let Willie down.” The work is hard, but worth it when you’re part of a team ruled by love, not stress. The crew of hippies and bikers and rednecks are on one hell of a ride, and they don't forget that for a second.
Having Mr. Nelson as a boss is like living a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan. You'd have to be crazy to move out/move on, and so the average time of employment on the "Whiskey River" raft is about seven presidential terms. Willie has more ex-wives than band members who split.
On June 28, 2009, a celebration of Poodie Locke’s life was held at the Tim’s Porch stage of the Backyard at Bee Cave. Everyone was there but Willie, who promoter Tim O’Connor said didn’t want to take any attention away from his dear friend.
"This is probably one of the toughest days of Willie's life," O'Connor said.
The nine-hour concert, with a sellout crowd of 2,000, featured so many bands personally touched by “the big man on the Hilltop,” including Joe Ely, Little Joe Hernandez, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Cross Canadian Ragweed, Billy Joe Shaver, Reckless Kelly, James Hand, Folk Uke and Carolyn Wonderland.
In the crowd were Johnny Knoxville, with a t-shirt that asked “What Would Poodie Do” and Hall of Fame pitcher Goose Gossage, who called his friend of 30 years “the greatest facilitator I’ve ever known.”
The show closed with a song Billy Bob Thornton, who knew Poodie since the B.W. Stevenson days, wrote the night of May 6 and performed with the Boxmasters. “Poodie was the master of ceremonies for all of us,” said Thornton in introduction. “There’s a hole that’s not going to be filled.”
Unless we all fill it with our own compassion, and a sense of responsibility and fun that neglects neither. What would Poodie do?
Here’s Billy Bob remembering his friend with “He’s Making His Rounds.”