Ricky Broussard's Black Cat Moan
Two Hoots frontman went nowhere fast, then learned to slow down and live
His eyes were darting, terrified, like an animal not yet used to a new cage. Ricky Broussard looked spooked as he waited to take the stage at the Hole In the Wall — a territory he once utterly owned — on June 7, 2002. He stiffly nodded and smiled at well-wishers. When he stepped up, strapped on his guitar and plugged it into his amp, it was with the anticipation of a dicey medical procedure. He looked around the club and saw the guy he used to buy cocaine from, the folks he used to drink with all night, and more than a couple of fellas he’d battled in drunken bouts. Broussard took a deep breath and then got ready to play stone-cold sober for the first time in more than two decades.
“We used to fuss, we used to fight,” he sang, separating the lines with four curt guitar notes, then repeated the words as the crowd erupted. “We used to hoot and holler late into the night and let the shotgun blast/We’re plumb out of our minds/we’re going nowhere fast.”
Halfway through that first song, Broussard settled down and his band, Two Hoots and a Holler, played one of its best sets since its Black Cat Lounge heyday in the late ’80s/early ’90s. And when the crowd screamed and stomped for one more encore, Broussard and a friend from his support group back in Seguin were already in the car. The Austin music scene’s notorious symbol of unrealized potential, who never let something trifling like morning light break up a party, was heading home before last call.
“I’d played the Hole hundreds, maybe even thousands of times,” Broussard recalled of that gig, “but that was the first time I ever really felt the love from the people. It was like, everybody in the place was in my corner.”
It was really always like that, but Broussard had previously been too messed up, too insecure, too defensive to notice. The local music community fell in love with the ragin’ Cajun since he started coming here from Seguin as guitarist in the Surfin’ Cajuns in the early ’80s. Fronting his next band, Two Hoots and a Holler, Broussard dripped with star power. Such catchy rock songs as “Blues in the Night,” “Step Fast,” “We Play Guitars,” “Good Used Heart,” “She Makes the Angels Cry,” and “Middle of the Night” transformed the Black Cat Lounge from a biker bar into a live music venue in ‘88, soon after owner Paul Sessums moved the club three doors west to a bigger 309 E. Sixth. Monday’s “Two Hoots and a Hot Dog” residency was the nightlife equivalent of out-of-your-league sex, with free food! When Sessums was told he needed a permit to sell hot dogs in his club, he gave them away, for years, until the health department shut the free weiners down.
Musicians were awed by Broussard’s instinctive grace on the guitar; his single-string runs were songs within the songs. “When you looked into the crowd at those early Two Hoots shows, you’d see a couple dozen guitar players,” said musician Jesse Dayton. “A bunch of us would follow them from gig to gig because Ricky was doing something different than all the other roots or rockabilly bands in town. He wasn’t mimicking his idols; he had his own hybrid that was like Joe Strummer and Bobby Fuller rolled into one guy that you absolutely couldn’t take your eyes off.”
Managers, label owners, club bookers, other musicians were always there to slip a business card or scribbled phone number into Ricky’s hands. But for every person out to help Ricky’s career, there were 50 who just wanted to hang out with him after a gig. Fans passed packets of cocaine and methamphetamine to him through their handshakes, young women yanked him into spare bedrooms, bartenders looked the other way as Broussard loaded a case of beer into the van after a show.
THIS MUSICAL SLIDESHOW TAKES US BACK TO THE CAT
“I got swept up in it, big time,” Broussard told me in 2004. “The first time I saw people in the audience mouthing the lyrics to songs I wrote, that just blew me away. I was connecting, man, for the first time. It felt so good that I didn’t want the party to stop.”
He was the chosen one, blessed with so much talent, so much intensity. Everyone wanted a piece of Ricky Broussard. He was the most coddled Austin musician since Roky Erickson.
The singer/guitarist, meanwhile, was paralyzed with self-doubt and self-medicated with heroin, whiskey, crack cocaine, really anything he could get his hands on.
“I had 100 forms of fear running through my mind,” Broussard said. “I started questioning the motives of everyone who was close to me. When (bandmates) Vic and Chris would come to me and say, ‘We’re worried about you,’ I’d think, ‘Yeah, they’re worried about their gravy train going dry.’ I pushed everybody away.”
During the second SXSW in March 1988, Two Hoots attracted the attention of Oakland-based Hightone Records, which had money to put into new bands after releasing a million-seller by Robert Cray. “The label owner, Larry Sloven, came up to us after the set and said he really wanted to take us to lunch the next day,” Two Hoots bassist Vic Gerard recalled. “I picked a spot that was a couple blocks from one of Rick’s haunts, but he never showed up. Me and Sloven sat there for two hours and then he got up and said, ‘Well, if he can’t even meet me for lunch . . .’ ”
Even his favorite club owners struggled with the singer’s erratic behavior. In late 1991, Broussard quit, or was fired from, the Black Cat, a gig that was paying the group as much as $2,000 every Monday, after owner Paul Sessums made a crack about the singer’s masculinity when Broussard bowed out early one set after hurting his leg on one of his trademark, ripped-knee leaps. Punches were thrown and they had to be separated.
Broussard’s association with the Continental Club ended in 1993 when he got in a drunken, physical fight with Toni Price, whom he’d been seeing. “I just snapped,” Broussard recalled. The next afternoon, Broussard woke up with the worst kind of hangover, the kind when you piece together the events of the night before and go, “Oh, my God. Did I really do that?” Gerard called the singer at home on, appropriately, Jinx Street, with a solemn tone. Broussard was banned from the Continental, disowned by a family of club employees that he’d been very close to.
“I couldn’t face what I had done,” said Broussard, who went straight to the liquor store and stayed drunk every waking moment for months. His wife, who’d put up with so much in three years of marriage and about seven years of being together before that, finally left him. Then, Gerard joined the Derailers, and drummer Chris Staples got a job with Whole Foods. Two Hoots and a Holler, once Austin’s most promising band had hung it up after just one album, 1991’s No Man’s Land on France’s New Rose label.
Addicted to heroin, going through withdrawals when he was sent to jail twice for DWI arrests, Broussard hit rock bottom. In 1996, the SIMS Foundation musicians assistance program stepped in and offered to send Broussard through rehab. He took them up on it but was back on the hard stuff a few weeks after his discharge. A second rehab stint a couple years later also failed to take hold, though Broussard says he was starting to learn the tools of recovery, of coping with his guilt.
The ninth of 10 children of a civil service worker at a San Antonio Air Force base, Broussard grew up idolizing his older brothers, two of whom were the only white members of soul band C.L. and the Teardrops. When drummer brother David, a Vietnam vet, died of a heroin overdose in 1979, it hit Ricky hard.
A year earlier he had a musical epiphany when he saw the Sex Pistols at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio. “There was a real division between the metalheads and the punks and the local rock stations had been badmouthing the Pistols,” Broussard said. “That’s when I said ‘I’m there.’ ” Galvanized by the Pistols’ swagger in the face of their musical primitiveness, Broussard dropped out of school in the ninth grade and put together the trailer park anarchist punk band 60 Inch Bazookas. But his guitar playing, heavily influenced by Duane Eddy instrumentals, was taking him in a different direction.
“I saw Gene Vincent and Sid Vicious as connected,” Broussard says. “The rage of rockabilly and punk came from the same place.” Vincent and Vicious were also linked through heavy use of drugs and alcohol. Broussard could identify with the demons and struggled with the idea that the only way to get sober was to hang up the Fender.
In early 2002, facing a third DWI conviction, Broussard entered rehab in Fredericksburg and this time the treatment took. He got back with Two Hoots, releasing a CD of covers called Songs Our Vinyl Taught Us on Freedom Records, then an album of originals produced by Dayton.
“Ricky’s really the same guy, with the same intensity,” said Dayton, adding that Broussard was the last person he thought would get sober. “When he plays, there’s still a lot of anger there, but he’s figured out how to bottle it in more productive ways.”
It was a spectacular Two Hoots set at SXSW 2003, in a tent in back of Opal Divine’s, that convinced Broussard to quit his construction job in Seguin and concentrate on making a living playing music again. “Man, we were firing on all cylinders that night,” he said. “It was just like the old days, only I wasn’t sticking a needle in my arm afterward.”
The SXSW set, just a few days after the death of his idol Joe Strummer, concluded with Two Hoots covering the Clash’s “Career Opportunities,” a song of bleak prospects. At the end of the number, Broussard swung his guitar over his head and pounded the stage with it until it smashed into bits. Many in the crowd, longtime Broussard watchers, no doubt thought the violent burst signaled a return to past ways. Dayton, who stood near the side of the stage, laughs when asked if the destruction was part of the show.
“That was just some Telecaster copy piece of crap guitar, Ricky’s way of saying goodbye to Joe Strummer,” Dayton said. “Now, there was a time when, if Ricky smashed a guitar, you could be sure it was his most precious, cherished, one.”
Nice Story with a happy ending. Dude's lucky to still be here. Keep up the good work Ricky.