Getting to Austin on an all-time low
The best time to get lucky is in your darkest hour
Note: With Austin Music Is a Scene now with the designer, I move my attention to the sequel. First posted most of this about a year and a half ago, but I’m reworking it as the opening chapter of Overserved: A Personal History of the Austin Music Scene, which picks up in the ‘80s where AMIAS left off. What brought me to Austin? I thought I’d never ask.
I arrived in the state of Texas in the spring of ‘84 in a state of crippling depression. I lost the nest egg, like the Julie Hagerty character of Lost In America, a disgrace I’ve never been able to talk or write about until now. Driving to Austin in a U-Haul truck, after a year of planning, my goal was to find a shack just big enough for a cot and a cooler, and to spend my days collecting aluminum cans for food and beer. I didn’t want to let anyone down ever again.
I’ll get into that later, but first an example of how the negative things in your life become positive over time.
My mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1973, my senior year of high school, and she passed away near the end of my freshman year of college. My grades resembled the downward chord progression of “House of the Rising Sun,” and after dropping out I started living the lyrics of a poor boy, ruined.
But if all that didn't happen, I wouldn’t have been raised by Kate Hellenbrand and Michael “Rollo” Malone, a couple from New York City who bought Sailor Jerry’s tattoo shop from his widow in Honolulu in 1973.
While my mother was alive I was still a virgin, of course, and had never done drugs, not even alcohol. That would soon change like the weather during typhoon season.
The period of debauchery, now entering it’s fifth decade, started when I sent a short humor piece about getting an ear pierced to Sunbums magazine, Oahu’s bi-weekly counterculture rag, in Dec. 1974. The editor called me and said to come down to the office to talk about being a contributor: a top three phone call all time. I went down to the address on Cummins Street, and there across the desk was this 31-year-old streetwise hippie with a faux-fro and an electric smile. Me and Kate Hellebrand were pretty much inseparable the next year or so, as her live-in boyfriend Malone worked ‘til midnight in Chinatown, and Kate needed a running buddy.
Hellenbrand had taken over Sunbums from the popular married couple who had founded it, and there was a lot of grumbling when she made changes, like bringing in a University of Hawaii professor to write highly-analytical film reviews. This had been a surfer lifestyle rag! But Kate’s titanic personality eventually got everyone on board. She didn’t butcher your articles, or really even line-edit, once returning a 2,500-word draft of my first cover story, with “Write this better!” at the top of the first page. Which pissed me off until I re-read it.
I did a couple record reviews, but I told Kate I didn’t feel qualified. I’ve never played a note of music, and my tastes were mainstream, not hip. Then she gave me liberating advice I still carry: “If you can’t be good, then be bad.” I stopped trying to be Lester Bangs and instead emulated the attitude of professional wrestler Ripper Collins, whose matches always sold out after he goaded the proud Hawaiians by butchering their pronunciations. He was hilariously obnoxious on those televised Saturday afternoon locker room interviews. The other voices in my head when I wrote were Paul Lynde and Rex Reed.
Rollo tattooed a big back piece on a guy who worked at the airport stocking first class cabins with food and beverages, so their refrigerator on Liliha Street was always full of Michelob, filet mignon and lobster. They’d host visiting tattoo artists from all over the world, and there were big dinner parties where I was the only un-inked guest. One night Thom DaVita from the Lower East Side announced that he wished he was gay. Well, that squashed the small talk! “In my neighborhood they just busted 200 guys having sex at 5 a.m. in an old warehouse,” he said. “Can you imagine how great it would be if that’s what you were into?” Rollo added, “yeah, we’re stuck with women, whose idea of kinky is screwing with the lights on.”
What a glorious world I stepped into! Sunbums was a pot, beer and coke party for 13 days, then a brutal all-nighter when we put the paper to bed. I’d drive, frantically over the mountains to the printer in Kaneohe, as Kate would proof the pages, then run in with her big hippie breasts to apologize for being two hours late. Every single issue was delivered this way.
Kathy, as I knew her, was the most fascinating person I’d met in my 19 years, by Secretariatian lengths. She told the best stories while we drank saki at Japanese hot pot joints, and since I was broke and she had Rollo’s cash, Kate paid for everything and never made me feel guilty. I went from having no friends to having the best one ever.
The first time I got stoned was driving over the Pali Highway with K and Sunbums associate editor Leilani, going to see Blazing Saddles. Leilani’s other job was street prostitute, with a black pimp, so she lost her shit on all the movie’s racial stuff. The three of us were howling uncontrollably to the point that the usher came to ask us to please keep it down. At Blazing Saddles!
After Hellenbrand and Malone had a bad breakup in ’76 and she moved away, I felt like the child of divorced parents who was closer to the other one. But Malone and I eventually got tight putting out the scandalous Honolulu Babylon zine. We took pseudonyms- Yikes! Crawford and Rollo Banks- so we wouldn’t get sued. Or beat up.
I had a girlfriend who volunteered for Women Against Rape (WAR), and they had counseled several victims of a famous Waikiki performer, whose name was not used in a newspaper report about the charges. The Babylon showed no such journalistic caution (“Is Don Ho a Rapist?”- issue #2), but then folks cautioned us that Mr. Tiny Bubbles had big mob muscle, so I never went by to pick up the money from our distribution points, which were mostly convenience stores near Chinatown. Nobody knew who these Yikes! and Rollo guys were except the seven or eight punk rockers on Oahu at the time. Rollo wrote lyrics for the Squids, Hawaii’s first punk band, whose drummer Frank Orrall would later lead Poi Dog Pondering. Here’s 1981 single “Tourist Riot.”
Over our seven years as friends and roommates, Rollo became my greatest teacher- a man of letters who couldn’t write. He called me his typist, but I was smart enough to put up with the insults because I was learning to become more interesting.
Rollo taught me to never use cliches, like “when pigs fly” or “not my cup of tea.” He'd go into a big windup about how something would happen only "when the little bacon butts are stacked up over LaGuardia." When I wrote that a band’s music was “not my mug of Sleepytime,” that was straight Rollo.
I remember one day at the grocery store we were in tears laughing so hard as we perused the cheese section for "who cut the cheese?" variations. Who parted the provolone? Who gouged the gouda? Who broke the brie? Who choked the cheddar? Who carved the camembert? Who mangled the mozzarella? Grown men giggling like lunatics. Yeah, we were stoned.
Rollo had a t-shirt business on the side- Mr. Lucky’s- which is what brought us to Austin in ’84. I was the lone employee, handling everything besides the designs, which Rollo based on tattoo motifs like the Grim Reaper and wizards and unicorns. Harley Davidson had discontinued its skull designs on t-shirts in favor of a more family-oriented image, but bikers still wanted the badass stuff, and that’s what Mr. Lucky had.
The business took off in Honolulu after we ran ads in Easyriders and Outlaw Biker magazines, and started receiving 10-20 orders a day. One thing we didn’t fully calculate was how much time and money it would take to mail the shirts. We were charging $10 each and they were $3 to ship, because everything from Hawaii had to go first class. There was never not a long line at the Chinatown post office, where immigrants would send money orders and packages home.
We started talking about moving the company, and Rollo's tattoo business, to the Mainland. But where?
Austin was on my getaway-dar after I got a postcard from my friend Andrella, who was on tour with the Cramps (her boyfriend was guitarist Bryan Gregory), and she said the band had just played a great show at a club called Raul's in Austin. “You wouldn’t believe this was Texas,” she wrote. I knew Lester Bangs lived in Austin for awhile, so I figured stuff must be happening.
Same day, or maybe the next, Rollo received a newsletter from his old friend Travis Holland’s Dallas County Jug Band (with Steve Fromholz), which was based in Austin. Originally a photographer, Rollo had known Holland since his Jerry Jeff Walker days in NYC. Rollo’s photo of Kate, in a slip and cowboy boots, ended up on the back cover of an LP by Circus Maximus, the ‘60s band Jerry Jeff formed with former Austin jazz bassist Bob Bruno.
“How about Austin?”
Middle of the country. College town. Music town. And a river runs through it. Austin just felt right, so, after an exploratory week in ‘83, we moved operations the next year. The second location of Recycled Records was moving out of an old white house at 2712 Guadalupe that had a shoe repair shop in the front, so we took it for China Sea Tattoo and Mr. Lucky T-shirts. It was a shit location with three parking spaces, shared with the cobbler, but, as luck would have it, the Austin Chronicle soon moved to 28th and Rio Grande, two blocks away via the back alley. There was a steady stream of visitors from the Chron, as Rollo was always up for holding court, especially since there was no tattoo business in Austin to speak of, back in the ‘80s.
Just like with Honolulu, Rollo loved Austin and despised Austin, which he called “the little town with the big head.” He mocked the worship of musicians here and made me write down some of his Rolloisms, like "life is what we do because we can't play the guitar," and "once you put on the clown suit, you can't take it off." The latter was aimed at Dino Lee, the theatrical rocker who tried to play it straight one night at Steamboat and got cracked in the head with a shot glass. Rollo met Margaret Moser when she was one of Dino’s Jam & Jelly Girl backup singers. They married a few months later, in Dec. ’84, and I filled in on her popular “In One Ear” column while they were in Hawaii for a working honeymoon. Rollo needed a couple months of military paydays to get his cash flowing
The $6,000 alligator bag
I should mention here that enroute to Austin, just a couple hours after we picked up Rollo’s ’58 Chevy and the U-Haul truck that would carry all the tattoo supplies and t-shirt screens, I lost $6,000 in cash. I carried it in an alligator doctor’s bag, which I put down outside a Denny’s in Hawthorne, Cal. to get a copy of the L.A. Daily News. Then I walked away, thumbing through the paper to see if it still carried Charles Bukowski’s “Notes From a Dirty Old Man” column. Please don’t tell me how much money $6,000 in 1984 is worth today.
Rollo was less concerned about the money than the ownership and registration papers for his beloved Chevy, which were also in the bag. The hostess at Denny’s said a man had started returning the bag, but then looked inside and hightailed it outta there. I called the local newspaper and said what had happened and it was on the front page the next day: “Dumbass Loses Cash T-shirt Business Had Spent Two Years Accumulating,” was the headline, best to my recollection. The report included which motel we were staying at, and that morning the guy called us. He was sorry, “I just panicked,” he said, taking our information and vowing to send the money. He also told us where he left the bag, outside a supermarket about 20 miles away. “We’ll never see that money,” Rollo correctly predicted, but we were off to get his Chevy’s ownership and registration papers.
We got back the bag! I guess Rollo was impressed at the lengths I went through because he never mentioned the 6K again. I worked hard selling t-shirts at swap meets and biker rallies, as well as Rollo’s designs, Mr. Flash, to other tattoo artists. I paid myself $120 a week, working six days.
Besides writing for the Chron, I did a lot of freelance for New Times in Phoenix, and one morning I was about 30 minutes late to work after going downtown to overnight an article. Boy, did Rollo let me have it! I quit a couple weeks later. In ‘86, Rollo sold his screenprints and mailing list to another tattoo artist for $6,000. He coulda maybe got more or settled for less, but that number held significance. After I lost the money, Rollo told me I could never tell anyone. He didn’t want his enemies in the tattoo world to laugh at him.
Before we moved to Austin I never drank at home. Oh, I’d get shitfaced at some rock club down in Waikiki and drive home in those pre-MADD glory years of the .15 legal limit, but I never had beer in the fridge until 1984. Then I had a lot, usually the cheapest brand.
Was I becoming an alcoholic? I had never blacked out and given my number to someone who sold Herbalife, but I was guilty of the other 10 signs from an Ann Landers column. 1. I drank every day. 2. Before noon somedays. 3. I drank alone. 4. I drank until drunk. 5. I couldn’t stop unless I was broke. 6. I’d drink wine coolers if that’s all there was. 7. I read only books by alcoholic writers. 8. If I gave a wino a quarter I’d ask for a swig. 9. If I saw folks loading a keg into their car I’d follow them home.
I especially loved keg parties. All that free beer, and you didn’t know the brand because it didn’t matter. “Everybody has one thing they can’t be trusted with,” Rollo said one night after he watched me fill my cup and then get right back in line. “For me it’s pussy. For you it’s the beer hose.” Free beer was the most wonderful pairing of words in the English language.
I was drinking to forget, but also because I liked the way it made me feel. I knew it wasn’t good for me, however, so I’d quit for a couple days, a couple weeks here and there. I’d quit so often that I wasn’t “on the wagon,” I was on the skateboard. Once, I told Rollo I had a new rule about drinking. I would only imbibe when it was part of an experience- a great concert, a victory celebration, a mind-blowing art exhibit. The next evening he came home to me sitting behind a pyramid of Milwaukee’s Best cans on the kitchen table. “Oh, wow,” he said in mock amazement, flicking the light switch.
He was not the kind of guy that ever went for sentiment. There was a biker who did our screen-printing, a surly know-it-all. One day he was really down, said he’d just broke up with his ol’ lady. “She wasn’t honest with her feelings,” he said. When we were leaving the shop, Rollo starting singing a song to the melody of “Feelings,” the sappy hit. “Chopper,” he sang, in the voice of Morris Albert. “She rode upon my chopper.”
When his close friend, T-Birds bassist Keith Ferguson, died from drug-related causes in 1997 at age 50, Rollo remarked that one thing he always admired about Keith was that he accepted his addiction and never whined about needing to stop. He was a man about it. Ownership of your actions, good or bad: that was big with Malone, who would pick up his own heroin addiction in the late ‘80s. He put Margaret through a lot, but I had no idea he was strung out.
When Margaret told me that Rollo had shot himself in Chicago in April 2007, days before his 65th birthday, I started thinking about what might’ve been going through his mind at the time. It never dawned on me that he was depressed. He’d had mounting health problems and it was just "time to check out," as he scribbled in his suicide note. We all have to die sometime, and Rollo was not going to let anything else decide his date. He was a man about it.
Hellenbrand became Shanghai Kate, “the Godmother of American Tattooing,” and moved to Austin in 2008. Her lust for adventure has always inspired me, but two nasty bouts with Covid left her bed-bound for much of 2022. Then she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in November and went fast. I visited Kate in the hospital and she was having a terrible time. “I’m ready for this to be over,” she said, and I knew I’d never again see the best friend ‘d ever had, at a time I needed one most.
I was in Hawaii when I heard Kate had passed away at 79, and found that the Sunbums building, at 525 Cummins Street in the hideous side of the Kaka’ako neighborhood was still standing. I felt like an orphan at age 67.
I had a beer in a nearby Korean dry hustle joint, beating away the professional crotch palmers so I could just sit there and remember my friend. The jukebox played “Sukiyaki” followed by “Already Gone” by the Eagles. Why does the music always know?
It’s the answer to the God Riddle: all-knowing and all powerful, inside all of us. Always was and always will be, and if you don’t think music can last an eternity, you’ve never been to a Kenny Chesney concert.
Whatever I was going through, there’d be a song on the radio that would tell me what to do. “Slip Sliding Away” by Paul Simon convinced me to quit a good job that made me miserable. “When a Man Loves a Woman” urged me to give a souring relationship one more try. Good songs sometimes lead to bad decisions- as in those two cases. But at least you don’t feel all alone.
Where would I be without Kate Hellenbrand or Michael Malone? Maybe I still would’ve found Austin, but I wouldn’t have been the person who asked, “Who lanced the limburger?” after somebody farted.
My mentors were also my dementors, praise the lord.
I was really touched - and very amused - by this. Thank you.
This is great! Never thought I’d be getting life lessons from a Corky article, but here we are. Divining secret messages from music is a thing I thought only I would do. So glad to hear I’m not alone.