As Long As You're Not Finished
Harvey "Tex Thomas" Young held church Sundays at Hut's, plus other great residencies
The song started as a poem to a brother in prison. It was first recorded in the ‘90s on an album nobody outside of Austin bought. I first heard it in Nashville in 2014, sung by Joe Pug, a rising star of new folk.
“This next one is by an Austin songwriter named Harvey Young,” Pug said at the High Watt Club, and I stood there, stunned by the incongruity of the moment. This hip “new Dylan” was covering a song by Tex Thomas (Harvey Young), whose Dangling Wranglers terrorized the Austin’s country music scene of the ‘80s. Led by Young and his musical sidekick Danny Levin, those raucous R&B cowboys played Hut’s every Sunday for a decade. It was “church” for Austin sinners and Tex was the Rawhide Messiah.
But even possessing some of the best musicians in town, the talk was always about the crazed antics of Young, who possessed the energy and the ethics of a profane preacher. Nobody could talk down or out-drink or over-entertain Tex Thomas.
The rumor was that he also wrote great songs, but I never got close enough to the hearth, hanging back with the coke whores and lip-chewers and the guys with the skunkweed pockets. More drugs than hamburgers were sold in Hut’s on Sunday nights, let me tell you.
Back at Nashville’s High Watt, where the closest to a drug deal was someone buying a beer in thanks for a Benadryl, Joe Pug stepped up to the mic and started:
From deep dark wells comes pure clean water
and the ice will melt as the day gets hotter
and the night grows old as the sun climbs into the sky
The club grew quiet except for the voice and the strum. And then came the chorus, with a melody that packed more of the meaning:
As long as you’re not finished, you can start all over again
As long as you’re not finished, you can start all over again
Harvey Young was not finished as a songwriter, even though his heyday in the Austin music scene was in the distant past. In 2015, he released More Than We Was, his first album in 20 years, to get down for posterity such deep and wondrous songs as “Vagabond Soul” and “Don’t Say No.” The theme of all his material, Young says, is that life is a gift to embrace with both hands, even when things aren’t going great.
Young possesses what could kindly be called “a songwriter’s voice,” but the songs of this musical grandfather run around in your mind when you’re asleep if you listen to them late at night.
“My parents used to take me to Hut’s to see the Dangling Wranglers when I was nine years old,” said Young’s guitarist Gabe Rhodes, whose mother Kimmie goes back with Harvey Young to Lubbock in the ‘60s. “And I didn’t realize how much that music had sunk in subconsciously until I started playing those old songs with Harvey. “I’d learn ‘Highways of Gold’ or ‘Fugitive Animal’ and I’d be thinking ‘I KNOW that song!’ They never left me.”
The spirituality of Young’s music was preserved in the ‘80s in the collection Hut’s Hymnal compiled by Casey Monahan, who headed the state government’s Texas Music Office at the time. Nearly 25 years later, Monahan was the link between Young and Pug, turning the young songwriter onto the West Texas “warrior poet” when Pug lived in Monahans’ rent house in East Austin.
Between their houses was a shed where Monahan played records by some of his favorite songwriters from Texas. “Joe was such a fan of the Flatlanders,” said Monahan, “and I wanted him to hear some of the other greats from Lubbock, so I played David Halley, Eddie Beethoven, R.C. Banks and Harvey Young.” Pug soaked it all in, but that Young material was the one that really stalked his writer’s mind.
The lyrics for “Deep Dark Wells” came from a postcard Young was going to send to his brother Norbert, in prison for bank fraud, but it was intercepted by Monahan while collecting lyrics for Hut’s Hymnal. At the urging of everyone who’d read it, Harvey put it to music.
“It’s the only song we do that I didn’t write and we play it every night,” said Pug of the Young cover that he’s grown so close to. “It’s like marrying a woman with a kid and eventually the kid becomes your son. I identify with ‘Deep Dark Wells’ so strongly that if we have a short 10-song set, that’s one that we’d play.”
Born in 1951, Young grew up on a farm near Littlefield, the hometown of Waylon Jennings. Toddler “Tommy” moved with his family to Bakersfield, where his father was an in-demand lap steel player. Harvey Sr. was always on the road, even touring with Patsy Cline, so he became almost a mythic hero to his oldest son.
The family moved back to Texas in the early ‘60s and bought a farm in Farwell, near the New Mexico border. On July 4, 1964, Young’s parents and younger siblings Norbert and Debra, were coming to pick him up from his aunt and uncle’s farm, when a 13-year-old Tommy heard a horrible crash. It was the family car, broadsided on that country road by a drunk driver. Harvey Young Sr. was dead. The rest of the family was hospitalized.
“I was not the same after that, as you could imagine,” said Young, whose mother Pauline also almost died in the crash. “I had been a good student, testing in the top 4% in the state, but my mind was just in the clouds. I had been emotionally destroyed, so I built a wall around myself so it wouldn’t happen again.”
Young found solace and release in the set of drums his father had given him just a few weeks earlier. “He said I should learn to play an instrument I didn’t have to tune,” said Young, who dropped out of high school to play drums for bands in Lubbock.
“I was scared of Tommy Young, which is what we called him back then,” said guitarist/songwriter R.C. Banks, who moved from Lubbock to Austin in the late ‘60s. “He was a tough sumbitch and he carried a chain with him,” said Banks. “Plus his Uncle Boozie was a gangster. You were wise to stay away from the Youngs.” But Banks’ band Showdown needed a drummer. And Tommy had a van, which was really the main reason Banks hired him. But in an O. Henrian twist, Young sold the van for a plane ticket to Austin.
Young was a good drummer, able to play everything from “Cisco Kid” to “Walkin’ the Floor Over You,” but he was also a songwriter on the side and came to rehearsal one day with an original composition he wanted Showdown to work up. “We fired him on the spot,” Banks laughed. “If you were a drummer, you kept your songs to yourself.”
But the material Young was writing was good, and Banks, who was dating Chris O’Connell of Asleep At the Wheel at the time, suggested that Young pitch songs to the Wheel. Harvey ended up going on tour with the Western-swing band as a roadie/gofer and that’s when he met pianist Levin, who’s still his musical spouse more than 40 years later. The pair collaborated on “Don’t Get Caught in the Rain” with singer O’Connell, hitting the country Top 40, just barely. The Wheel also recorded Young’s “Baby.” Getting those first two cuts did everything for the songwriter’s confidence.
Young was so serious about songcraft that, at age 25, he bought a 3 ½ acre spread on the San Gabriel River in Liberty Hill to use as a writer’s retreat. He’s lived there since 1976, the last 40 years with wife Patti.
He also kept an apartment in Austin- party central- during his 14 years fronting Tex Thomas and the Dangling Wranglers. He admits that the drinking and drugging got out of hand, but he made time to write. It kept him from going over the edge.
The title track of the Dangling Wranglers’ second LP Screaming In the Night came from a nightmare Young had about the car crash that took his father and his childhood.
“Danny and I always took songwriting seriously,” he said. “The Wranglers were supposed to be the vehicle to get the songs out to the people, but that vehicle just ran over everybody.”
Pug said the songwriter Harvey most closely resembles, in terms of spiritual storytelling, is Billy Joe Shaver. Like Shaver, Young grew up writing poetry in grade school. Both writers have the gift of exploring a range of emotions in simple lines.
And both are veteran fist-fighters who have never really gotten over rough upbringings. Pug came to Texas to find out what it is about his favorite songwriters, and there it was. Life is hard because it should be. Such grace does not come without debts to pay.
HERE ARE MORE OF THE GREATEST AUSTIN MUSIC RESIDENCIES EVER
SUNDAY
Freda and the Firedogs at Split Rail, Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra at La Zona Rosa, Junior Brown at the Continental Club, South Austin Jug Band at Momo’s, Rock N’ Roll Free-For-All at Hole in the Wall, Dale Watson (Chicken Shit Bingo) at Little Longhorn, Resentments at Saxon Pub, Texana Dames at Guero’s, Los Pinkys at White Horse, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble at Rome Inn, Heybale! at the Continental.
MONDAY
Don Walser at Henry’s, Austin All-Stars at Alliance Wagon Yard, Bob Schneider at Saxon Pub, Bad Livers at Saxon Pub (early ‘90s), Sarah Elizabeth Campbell at Artz Rib House, Fabulous Thunderbirds at Rome Inn, Storm at One Knite, Reckless Kelly at Lucy’s Retired Surfers Bar, Standing Waves at Raul’s, Little Elmore Reed Band at T.C.’s Lounge, Paul Oscher at Railroad Blues, Scott Biram at the Parlor.
TUESDAY
Tony Campisi at Elephant Room, Toni Price at the Continental, The Scabs at Antone’s, Erik Hokkanen at Flipnotics, Cobras at Soap Creek, 8 ½ Souvenirs at Continental, Lotions at Liberty Lunch.
WEDNESDAY
Whistler at Bonnie’s Place, Asylum Street Spankers at Austin Outhouse, Mau Mau Chaplains at Flamingo Cantina, Supper Songs at Threadgill’s, Grey Ghost at Continental, Band of Heathens at Momo’s, Jon Dee Graham at Continental, Greezy Wheels at Soap Creek, Kirk Whalum at Baxter’s, Gary Clark Jr. at Continental.
THURSDAY
Rusty Wier at Saxon Pub, Beto y Los Fairlanes at Liberty Lunch, Mother Truckers at Continental, Ian McLagan at Lucky Lounge, High Noon at Headliner’s East, Black Pumasat C-Boy’s, Cornell Hurd at Jovita’s, Conjunto Night at the Split Rail, Soulhat at the Black Cat, James Hand at the Saxon Pub, Angela Strehli at Hut’s, Chaparral at Broken Spoke.
FRIDAY
Dan & Dave at the Backroom, Hamell on Trial at Electric Lounge, Son Geezinslaw at Buddy’s Place, Erbie Bowser and T.D. Bell at Continental.
SATURDAY
Redd Volkaert at Continental, Flametruck Subs at Black Cat.
What, Toni Price Hippy hour at the Continental Club doesnt make the all time residency cut?
lived through a lot of those great venues love d a lot of them including the original Soap Creek which kinda seemed out of town way back then