The Extraordinary Bobby Doyle
Soulful piano man's greatest accomplishment may have been making Ego's cool
In nearly four decades of seeing live music in Austin there have been only a handful of times when I walked into a club with no idea who was playing, and been completely blown away. Once was a Thursday night in a windowless piano lounge tucked away in a parking garage under an office building. Congress Square, at 510 S. Congress near Riverside, also had apartments and I was visiting a friend in 1992 who’d just moved in.
“Let’s go to the Regal Beagle,” she said, a Three’s Company reference. Approaching the dark faux British pub, I was thinking “quick beer then on to Seis Salsa.” But the doors opened to a world I didn’t know existed in Austin. Bobby Doyle made Ego’s feel like the coolest jazz basement in Greenwich Village.
Before the “What happens in Vegas…” marketing campaign, Ego’s touted its discretion with the slogan, “Even God can’t see inside here.”
What He would’ve witnessed on my first night there was a blind man in a jacket too nice for the room, thumping the piano and singing “I Feel the Earth Move” like Ray Charles covering Carole King, followed by a perfectly-crooned “Fly Me to the Moon,” then “When the Saints Go Marching In,” with a long jazz piano break a la Mose Allison. I was flattened by the sheer talent of this soulful jazz/pop piano man, who created a glorious venue in his mind, and we were all welcome to join him.
Watch this incredible performance from the Playboy After Dark TV show: “River Deep Mountain High” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
It didn’t matter that there were only 12 people in Ego’s that night. As Bobby started playing “As Time Goes By,” he could hear them get out of their chairs to dance in the corners. One patron called out a request and Doyle said, “I don’t know that one, but this song has a lot of the same words.”
He gave Kenny Rogers a gig as bassist in the Bobby Doyle Three from ‘60-’65, and he briefly replaced David Clayton-Thomas in Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1972, but Doyle made perhaps his most impact locally by validating Ego's as a live music venue in the early '90s. He christened the room- whose early ‘70s incarnation as Mrs. Robinson’s had illicit MILF implications- in blues, country, rock n’ roll, jazz and gospel. “He had his own style by combining all those things," said Riley Osbourn, one of several keyboardists who’d sit behind Doyle to watch his hands.
It took a couple years for the hipsters to discover Bobby and Ego’s on the same night, but once that happened the club started booking bands- Bellfuries, Derailers, 3 Balls of Fire, Dale Watson- and created a cool new scene. Suggesting a bar in Looking for Mr. Goodfellas, Ego’s was where you took friends from out of town to really impress them. It had a lawless feel- the authorities could never find this place- and a lotta folks did bumps and bobs in the parking lot. If your friends wanted more sketchiness you took them 15 blocks south to Trophy’s (now C-Boy’s), the other divey anchor of wide-open South Congress in the ‘90s.
“Our place is all the rage for people who say they are tired of Sixth Street and want a bar that's more relaxed and laid-back,” Ego’s manager Kim Montee told the Statesman in 1996. “Most of all they want a place where they can hear themselves talk to each other all night long.'' Bobby started that, but as so often is the case, those who inspire transformation get left out when grit turns to gravy. Doyle’s twice-weekly gigs became bi-weekly, then monthly, so his income source moved on to Eddie V’s and the Driskill. Those venues better showcased his elegant musicianship, but lacked that basement jazz vibe, with the crowd packed around Bobby’s piano and urging him on.
Doyle also played regularly at Austin’s top jazz club, the Elephant Room, finally receiving hometown recognition for his brilliant musicianship. Those instrumental-heavy sets conjured the King Cole Trio, whose guitarist Oscar Moore grew up in Austin.
Doyle kept playing until he got the diagnosis that his lung cancer was terminal, and he became too weak to put on his usual show. He passed away on July 30, 2006 at age 66. “He was ready to go after Mary died a couple years earlier,” said Eddie Wilson, his former McCallum High classmate. Mary Cockrill Doyle, his second wife, who he wed in 1988, was much more than her husband’s eyes, providing vocal support near his side at every show. Their interplay made every gig fun.
Ego’s is still open, but it’s a full-time karaoke bar, so the name fits.
By the time Doyle formed his jazz/pop vocal trio with Rogers in 1960, he’d already gone a few rounds with rock n’ roll. As a senior at McCallum, Doyle played a 15-minute rockin’ piano set on KVET-AM every Saturday morning. He was enlisted to join the Spades, a white doo-wop group of fellow McCallum classmates that soon changed their name to the Slades after it was pointed out that “spade” was a racial slur. Doyle played bass on the Domino single “You Cheated,” a regional sensation that reached #42 on the Billboard charts. The song, written by singer Don Burch, would’ve done much better if a hastily-assembled black group called the Shields (with Johnny “Guitar” Watson) didn’t rush into an L.A. studio and record a version that beat the original to record shops and radio stations.
“Here Now,” Doyle’s lone single on Domino, Austin’s first label of note, went nowhere and he followed his family back to Houston. There he came to the attention of notorious Duke/ Peacock label owner Don Robey, who had started the Back Beat label to cash in on the rock n’ roll craze. Robey’s off-shoot would hit paydirt in 1965 with “Treat Her Right” by Roy Head and the Traits peaking at #2 on Billboard (see “Beatles, the”), but Doyle was dropped after just two singles on the label: “Pauline” b/w “Someone Else, Not Me” (1959) and “Hot Seat” b/w “Unloved” (‘60).
Doyle used to compare his diverse musical interests to living in a house with many rooms, so you could say he spent the early ‘60s walking the hall between rock/ doo-wop and vocal jazz. Doyle found Rogers, a struggling singer in Houston and turned him into a bassist (he’d never played before) in the Bobby Doyle Three. Drummer Don Russell sang as well on 1962’s In a Most Unusual Way (Columbia) which sounds almost psychedelic today for its over-the-top vocal arrangements.
It was a style which didn’t catch on with the mainstream, though the trio became popular on the cocktail jazz circuit across the country. When they played the Melody Room on Sunset Strip, better known today as the Viper Room, a young actor and piano fanatic named Clint Eastwood was in the audience every night. Before he was known as Dr. John, L.A. session player Mac Rebennack was another Doyle fan. The public had no idea who Bobby Doyle was, but the musicians knew.
“How could you be a player and watch Bobby and not be impressed?” said Nick Connolly. “He could play every kind of music imaginable for four hours and it was all in his head.”
After Rogers and Russell left to play in the more popular Kirby Stone Four, still riding that 1958 hit “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” Doyle reconfigured the trio with Joyce Webb sharing leads. The new Bobby Doyle Three got a regular gig at a private club in L.A. called the Factory- the Rat Pack’s West Coast haunt- and one night an impressed Sammy Davis Jr. offered an opening gig in Las Vegas.
Connolly says he was watching a documentary about Las Vegas in the 1960s recently when something in a tiny corner of the screen caught him. “They had a 1959 Cadillac convertible with a tripod in the back panning the marquees,” he says. “I rewinded a few seconds and paused it. Yep, right there, in a row, were the names ‘Frank Sinatra,’ ‘Buddy Hackett’ and ‘The Bobby Doyle Three.’”
After landing “The Girl Done Got It Together” on the soundtrack of Vanishing Point in 1971, Doyle spent much of the next two decades bouncing between the lounges of Nevada, and such Austin clubs as Caesar’s, Blue Parrot, North Forty, O’ Henry’s Saloon, Cloak Room and the Ramada Inn on E. 11th. A journeyman with 88 keys in his toolbox, Doyle moved back to Austin for good in 1990.
“If Bobby was wearing his tuxedo and playing music for four hours, all was right in his world,” said Austin pianist Nick Connolly, who also played the piano lounge circuit in the ‘80s. Doyle played soft enough for it to be background music, understanding that everyone in the joint was trying to get laid, but his romps of soul no doubt made the sex better. “They want (the music) played for them,” Doyle told an interviewer in 2005. “Not on them or around them. For them.”
One night in ‘96, Doyle was on break at Emo’s when his former bassist Rogers was on Late Night. Host David Letterman asked “The Gambler” who was the greatest musician he’d ever worked with. Without hesitation, “Bobby Doyle.”
While the rest of the country was going “Bobby who?” Doyle sat back down at the piano for another set to prove K. R. was Ko-Rect!
Who would take fame over talent? Not Bobby Doyle.
He was born blind in Houston on Aug. 14, 1939 to Edward and Ella Doyle, a carpenter and a housewife, the youngest of six children. When Bobby reached school age, the Doyles moved to Austin so he could attend the School for the Blind and Visually Impaired on W. 45th St.
Bobby wanted to be like the other kids, so he opted to attend high school at McCallum High, graduating in 1958. The next year, a school organization that had raised $1,700 for a bus trip to Mexico instead donated the money to Doyle for a surgery to possibly restore his eyesight.
It didn’t and Doyle had to be content with having what Austin musician Jon Blondell said was “the ears of a bat.” Eddie Wilson recalls Doyle with a transistor radio in his pocket in class, bopping to Clyde McPhatter or listening to his beloved Astros at a volume level the teacher couldn’t hear. Doyle was such a fan of Houston’s baseball team that he’d sometimes listen to games on a tiny earphone as he played, letting out an “all right!” if the Astros won, and never missing a note.
Doyle lettered in wrestling at McCallum, and also tried out for the team at University of Texas, which he attended from 1958-60 before dropping out to play music full-time. “He told me once, ‘never let a blind man get his hands on you, because he’ll never let you go,’” recalled his old pal Fleetwood Richards. “He was a wiry Irishman, not to be messed with.”
Kenny Rogers remembered, in his recent Luck Or Something Like It autobiography, that Doyle struggled with alcohol and once was so soused at a gig in Houston that he snubbed the great Tony Bennett, who had asked if he could sing a couple with the band. “In a minute, Tony,” Doyle said, going in to his next number while Rogers and drummer Russell shook their heads in apology. “But even at his worst,” Rogers wrote of a lit-up Doyle, “he was better than anyone else I’d ever heard.”
Sadly, Doyle’s records are all out of print, including 1970’s Nine Songs on Bell Records, with Steve Cropper on guitar. Recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis, Doyle called Nine Songs a favorite of his records, but the Bobby Doyle Three was “the best band I’ve ever played in.”
Here’s Nine Songs in its entirety on Youtube.
Hopefully, some one will put together a proper Bobby Doyle reissue. A career retrospective for a guy who never had a hit and played out-of-fashion music for lonely people in dark rooms. But the musicians knew. Bobby Doyle was always a star among players. When Kenny Rogers flew Bobby to Los Angeles for a 50th birthday show in 1988, producer Quincy Jones was the first to his feet after Doyle’s segment, leading a rousing standing ovation.
To the mainstream he’ll remain a footnote- the man who showed Kenny Rogers the way to a musical career. But to those of us lucky enough to sit so close to that musical force, Bobby Doyle left a lasting impression as a solo artist as intense as any five-piece band. He understood how to communicate a song. The rest is noise.
I appreciate your writing about little known -- to others, at least -- Austin musicians who were local favorites. I think of so many, like Bill Moss, Carol Hedin, and Allen Damron whose wonderful talents were on display at Austin's coffee house, the id, back in the early 60s. If only some of those shows had been recorded.
All of this work you’re doing is just marvelous, but this one was especially moving for me. And the link to Nine Songs was a bonus treat. Didn’t even know it was out there.