Maybe she figured out that Carter’s friend was Johnny Depp. She saw Carter’s new CD on the table and perhaps needed that pause to put together, yeah, that’s right, there’s this singer-songwriter dude in town whose best friend just so happens to be the guy who cashes the checks for Captain Jack Sparrow.

Or maybe she just wondered what that ring would look like with a yellow bandanna and ruby eyes.

We order, she goes, and we get to talking about “Unknown,” a brilliantly sprawling new album that even those familiar with Carter’s resume- which includes writing “Crossfire” for Stevie Ray Vaughan and “Why Get Up” for the Fabulous Thunderbirds with wife Ruth Ellsworth- should be knocked on their asses by.

Don’t worry, we also talked about his 20-year best buddyship with the actor who’s not only the highest-paid, but among the most respected in the business. Bill and Ruth aren’t just aquaintances of Depp- they’re the godparents of his two children with French actress Vanessa Paradis. Depp owns five houses at the end of Sweetzer Avenue in Hollywood and one is for the Carters when they visit. J.D. keeps a house in the cul-de-sac for Patti Smith, too, and, of course there’s one for Keith Richards to use at his disposal.

One day Richards stopped by and had a few words with 10-year-old Jack Depp. Told the kid the secret of life was to cherish your friends, “school and everything else is bollocks,” he said. After the rock legend left, Daddy Depp came over to young Jack with a big smile on his face. “You’ll remember that for the rest of your life,” Johnny told Jack, then walked away. “What?” Jack said to Ruth. “I couldn’t understand a word (Richards) was saying.”

OK, enough “Access Hollywood” for now. A great song trumps everything else in entertainment, and “Unknown,” which got it’s name from a gravestone in a Civil War cemetery near Driftwood that which matches Carter’s career, needs two hands to carry them all.

Recorded at James Stevens’ EAR studio, built as a replica of Abbey Road, with a control room looking down, the album presents the 63-year-old Carter as a one-man Traveling Wilburys, starting with Bob Dylan and moving his way through George Harrison’s spiritual pop and the guitar crunch and deadpan observations of Tom Petty. Add the sweeping emotionalism of Bruce Springsteen and you’re ashamed of yourself for thinking that Carter was just a real nice guy with a “skill set” instead of prodigious talent. The 14 songs of “Unknown,” which will soon carry the imprint of Depp’s Infinitum Nihil label after a soft release in January, each maintain a unique character, like a book of short stories.

Though it’s in the unsexy 5^th slot, the album’s centerpiece is “Final Sacrifice,” a haunting number that Carter says was inspired by the idea of Julian Lennon turning out the lights and listening to his father’s music, the Beatles. It’s about being overcome with emotion by all the beauty and sadness that has come before, but also accepting it as part of the journey.

The pragmatic Oak Hill troubadour, who hasn’t toured in many years because it wouldn’t make financial sense, is rarin’ to hit the road with “Unknown.” His level of intrique in Austin, where wife Ellsworth is also notable as a chef and clothing designer, is about that of a Threadgill’s chicken fried steak. He’s just always been around- when he wasn’t off to London, Paris or the Bahamas with Depp. Songs like lead single “Fire In the Wire,” with the creepiest video on YouTube, are screaming to get out of town and to propel their creator from from the shadow of moviemaking royalty. J.D. does contribute slide guitar to West Memphis 3 ode  “Anything Made of Paper,” which was recorded at Depp’s studio, but everything else on “Unknown” was recorded in Austin, with the vocals, drums and acoustic guitar all laid down in one three-hour session.

Carter says he had a crazy writing spurt about two years ago, as he was visited by

a series of songs that took him places he’s always wanted to go. Songs of deep connection just pouring through him. Songs that reminded him of why he left his home in Washington state in 1976 and moved to Austin to try and make his own kind of Dylan. Sometimes the muse shows up with suitcases.

“I called up (drummer) Dony Wynn and we went into the studio one day, just the two of us, and recorded 23 songs, in one take, one after the other,” says Carter. Wynn had never heard any of the songs before. “Bill would play just a little bit, just to show me how the song went,” says Wynn, the longtime Robert Palmer

Bill Carter and Johnny Depp have three of the same tattoos. This one was drawn by 10-year-old Jack Depp.

drummer, who settled in Austin in 2006. “I thought we were making demos, which really took the pressure off. We were having fun.” Stripped to their heart and mind essence, the songs were set for later embellishments of bass, electric guitar, keyboards, percussion and a stray trombone. But the core of “Unknown” is formed by the tracks recorded when Wynn didn’t know the songs and Carter was just singing like he does at home to the dogs.

“During playback I was thinking, “’hmm, something happened here today,’” says Wynn, who knows a thing about studio magic. The Louisiana native was laying down tracks in the Bahamas on Palmer’s groundbreaking 1980 synth-pop LP “Clues,” when the band in the studio next door enlisted Wynn for a percussion army. That was Brian Eno and Talking Heads making “Remain In Light.”

From Z’Tejas to Letterman’s couch

In the past two decades, when Carter spent more time hanging around movie sets than recording studios, he’s seen the music industry change as drastically as baseball if they ran the bases backwards. With the means of production and distribution cheaper now than what a band 20 years ago may have spent on 2-inch tape alone are making recordings than ever before. And it’s all as free as you want it to be.

Bill Carter made his national television debut in February.

But Carter, a direct descendant of the first family of country music, still loves the old way of doing things. “I have such a brotherhood or a kinship with guys my age still out there playing music for no other reason except to make the best music possible,” he says over a plate of grilled salmon and green beans. Nobody’s buying records anymore? So what?

A “health nut” who once seriously considered opening a small fitness center after training with Depp on the “Pirates of the Carribean” movies, Carter drinks his coffee black because the restaurant is out of skim. The interview takes place a couple weeks after Carter made his network debut on “The Late Show With David Letterman” and he’s still giddy high from about the experience. The original idea was that Depp would sit in on guitar, but wouldn’t be advertised. “When Dave heard about it,” says Carter, “he had another idea on how it could go. He loves Johnny, so he said, ‘How about if we have Johnny as a guest and then they bring me out on the couch, which is pretty unheard of for the musical guest, and then we do go out and play one. Johnny could talk about ‘The Lone Ranger,’ and I could promote my album. We’d have the whole show.”

Letterman: What does P represent?
Depp: the letter of the alphabet.

But Depp wasn’t sure, Carter says. “He didn’t want to take attention away from my big break.” Aside from the short life of P, their band with Gibby Haynes that burned through a quarter million dollars of Capitol’s money in 1993, Depp and Carter’s public creative pursuits have been kept pretty separate. “Ruth and I have never imposed on Johnny,” Carter says. “That’s why we’re still best friends. So I told him ‘I don’t want to do anything to ruin our friendship. That’s more important than playing on a TV show.”

Apparently, that’s what Depp wanted to hear. It was on. Letterman’s idea. But since the show doesn’t pay expenses, Carter couldn’t afford to bring his Austin band, the Blame, and would have to use Paul Schaffer and company for back-up. Not so fast, Kemosabe. Depp had the plane and the L.A. guys who played on “Anything Made of Paper,” so they all flew in on Air Sparrow and Depp put ‘em up at the Waldorf Astoria.

This is not an article about how to become good friends with Johnny Depp, but I will say that the key is that he approaches you the first time. Bill Carter and the Blame were playing their Tuesday night residency to the usual small crowd in late ’92 when, after the set, blues fan Depp, in town filming “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” with Leonardo DiCaprio, came up and told Bill how much he dug it. Especially hearing those Stevie Ray songs like “Willie the Wimp” and “Crossfire” straight from the source. Rule number one: have your own thing going on.

And then you forget that your new famous friend is famous. Ellsworth Carter says the reason the couple gets on so well with Depp is that they’ve always treated him as just another guy with a different job. I know, that’s the tough part.

During the movie shoot, Depp would be Gilbert Grape, a good-looking kid taking care off an obese mother and a mentally-challenged brother while trying to live his own life in the slivers of space inbetween. Off-set, he’d hang with Bill and Ruth and talk about music and art and books. Depp would also have screeching parties at his Sixth Street penthouse with castmates Juliette Lewis and Crispin Glover, as well as new Austin friends like Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. That couldn’t happen today, because not only has “the Dirty Six” gotten crazier, but so has Depp’s career.

In 1993, when “Gilbert” was released to good reviews, yet tanked at the box office, Depp was known mainly as the rare teen idol TV actor (“21 Jump Street”) to make the creative leap to movie star with a pair of 1990 films- “Edward Scissorhands” and “Benny and Joon.” But his career was far from the hysteria that “Pirates” brought. Carter recalls the time he and Depp dropped into a Skagg’s Drugstore in town and the girl behind the counter said he looked like Johnny Depp. “Yeah, I get that a lot,” the actor said and paid for his things. That wouldn’t happen today.

“Maybe it’s because of some of the stuff with the paparazzi or whatever that I’ve seen with Johnny, but I love being unknown,” Carter says of the album’s title. “It’s freedom, man.”

Reborn on the Fourth of July

After “Gilbert Grape” wrapped, Depp needed a break from Hollywood so he moved in with the Carters in the Granada Hills subdivision of Oak Hill. “We just loved hanging out together,” says Carter. The songwriter and the actor also have Kentucky in common. Depp was born and raised there, as was Bill’s dad Cash Carter, a chief boatswain’s mate stationed in Washington state, who played bluegrass records every morning to wake up his three boys. Bill’s grandfather, William Henry Carter, whom he’s named after, was the first cousin of A.P. Carter of the Carter Family.

Bill Carter was headed for the baseball major leagues, he figured, until he heard a Bob Dylan song in the 9^th grade and dropped the mitt so he could hold a guitar. After the Beatles changed everything when they appeared on the “Ed Sullivan Show” in Feb. ’64, Carter had a teenaged band in the fertile Pacific Northwest (home of the Sonics and Paul Revere and the Raiders) called the Chimes of Freedom. But then he  got hooked on real country music, with fiddles and steel guitars. The stuff he had rejected growing up as his dad’s music, was actually deep inside him. Bill knew he had to get to Austin, the home of “progressive country,” and arrived just in time for the 1976 Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic in Gonzales.

About a month later, Carter was playing an in-store with Jubal Clark at Inner Sanctum Records when he met a University of Texas English lit major from Oklahoma who wrote lyrics. Ruth Ellsworth and Carter have been partners in writing and living ever since, through times tough and flush.

Ruth and Bill Carter met in ’76 and married in ’84.

In 1983, they were getting songs cut, but had to work at Xalapeno Charlie’s (now Polvo’s)- her waiting tables and him clearing them- to keep from starving. More than a month behind on their rent, they were threatened with eviction when the T-Birds recorded  their song “Why Get Up.” Even more financially promising, General Mills had planned to use the song in a cereal commercial. “I kept telling the landlord that we had money coming in,” Carter says. On the day a check for $25,000 arrived from General Mills to put a hold on the song, the landlord called. “I want you out of there TODAY!” he yelled, to which Bill Carter replied, “No problem, man.” The Carters rented a big house in West Austin the next day.

Like Julian Lennon in the dark, the Carters can reflect look back on times both good and bad with respectful appreciation. Bill has to laugh at the past 20 years, when he’d come home from months of private jets, yacht-lounging and five-star hotel suites to play happy hour sets at Uncle Billy’s. “Half the time, me and Ruth are living the life of working songwriters,” he says. “And half the time we’re living like billionaires.”

Unknown billionaires. What a life.

“Those dreams that lit up in the dark,” he sang on the 2011 song that gains perspective as Carter rekindles a career on hold. “Some are dead, most still live in your heart. All is right. What a life.”

Michael Jackson dead at 50. Michael Jackson dead. The words didn’t look right. When I first heard the news Thursday afternoon, my reaction surprised me. The first word in my mind: finally.

At last the boy who never wanted to grow up doesn’t have to anymore. There would be no more charges of molestation or stiffing promoters. No more babies dangling over hotel balconies. No more photos of a man who seemingly wanted to surgically transform himself into some sort of burrowing creature.

When it was announced that Jackson would perform again, selling out 50 nights in London, it reeked of a disaster. But the self-proclaimed King of Pop will never again have to live up to expectations.

In death, Michael Jackson became the way we want to remember him, and in my case it was as the most supremely gifted entertainer who has ever lived.

The first time I saw the Jackson 5 was on “The Andy Williams Show” in 1970. Michael sang “I Want You Back” and I was hooked. I played that first album over and over again and bought each subsequent recording the day it came out. “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” “I’ll Be There,” “Mama’s Pearl,” “Never Can Say Goodbye,” “Maybe Tomorrow” – it was just one instant classic after the next.

My first concert, in September 1971, when I was 15, was the J5 at the Honolulu International Center. The way the Jackson 5 were marketed was that each member had something that set them apart. Jackie was the oldest. Jermaine was the heart throb. Tito was the musician. Marlon was the dancer, and Michael was the singer.

But seeing them in concert doing the funky chicken in a row, it was easily apparent that Michael was the best dancer. He was a genius of movement, as MTV would show the world a decade later.

“Thriller” is not really a great record, aside from opening track “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” and the empty-headed funk workout “P.Y.T.,” but the videos are spectacular. The rhythm track of “Billie Jean” is a straight lift of “Broken English” by Marianne Faithfull, and “Beat It” is just plain awful, but when Michael danced to the music the songs were just the soaring ship to the stratosphere.

My fascination with Michael Jackson amused my hip friends, but I wasn’t kidding. I just couldn’t get enough of the guy in the high-water pants whose feet were gifts from on high. It should be said, without room for debate, that Michael Jackson was the greatest dancer of all time and anyone who’s thinking Astaire, Kelly or Nureyev right now should probably just head on over to the books or travel pages. A teenage Michael’s moves on “Dancing Machine” in 1974 popularized the popping and locking still seen at bus stops around the world.

And his “Motown 25″ performance in 1983 destroyed Gene Kelly’s famous “Singing In the Rain” puddle stomp.

In 1983, Jackson was a worldwide phenomenon, whose fans ranged in age from 3 to 103. Before “Thriller,” Jackson had negotiated the highest royalty rate in history, so he was also incredibly rich.

He later bought the Beatles’ publishing catalog and married Elvis Presley’s daughter, just in case there was any doubt he was the King of Pop.

But things were starting to get a little weird. Some say Michael changed after receiving second-degree burns to his scalp while filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984. But unprecedented doses of fame and adulation also could have negatively affected a young man who was trained to be the family’s cash cow at a young age.

The first real trace that something was off with this musical giant was when the Martin Scorsese-directed video for “Bad” came out in 1987 to trumpet the arrival of the “Thriller” followup. In “Bad,” the effeminate-voiced Jackson was cast as a street tough, placing himself in a laughably foreign universe. Even the song’s opening line, “Your butt is mine,” sounded like play-acting from an outdated script. But what was worse was the way Jackson kept grabbing his crotch. Obviously, there had been a meeting where it was determined that Jackson would have to sex it up, but it was a pose without transition, a choirboy playing the pimp.

Four years later came the “Black Or White” fiasco, when Jackson emerged as more white than black. The video featured the “Home Alone” kid lip-syncing a rap break. The album debuted strongly, but sales dropped off pretty quickly. “Remember the Time” and “In the Closet” were modest hits, despite lavish, star-studded videos and millions of marketing bucks.

And that’s pretty much where Michael Jackson’s career ended. Well, there and when he settled a lawsuit in 1994 charging him with child molestation. He was becoming more known for sleepovers with minors than crossover hits. In the past two decades Jackson hasn’t been much use to anybody. It was hard to listen to the old records because they just reminded you of the innocence that was lost.

But on Thursday I played Michael Jackson’s records until I woke up in my chair at 3 a.m. and went to bed.

I haven’t read anything about Jackson’s death because I don’t care what anyone else has to say about him. Michael Jackson was a special person in my life who gave me thousands of hours of pure joy and exhilaration. That’s how I remember him. The other stuff doesn’t matter.

Finally.

Club Hubba Hubba was Shit Street’s crown jewel, an old burlesque hall and dry hustle joint just around the corner from Sailor Jerry’s tattoo shop. All the old greats, like Tempest Storm and Little Egypt had been on the marquee, but in the ’70s the big draws were porn stars like Kandi Barbour and Annette Haven.

My military family moved to Hawaii from Idaho in 1971, when I was 15. Culture shock doesn’t come close. We came from six years in Mountain Home, Idaho, where one day a new kid showed up at school not wearing socks and caused disapproving murmurs and confusion. Then you’re gonna move me to a state where sometimes schoolkids didn’t wear shirts and shoes?

But the thing that really blew my mind was Hotel Street. For some reason, Honolulu city planners made Hotel Street the main thoroughfare for city buses and so everytime I rode from Hickam AFB to Ala Moana or Waikiki, I got a load of the “Boys Will Be Girls” revue placard, with real life “mahus” milling about, and all the porno movie arcades (“the quarter sweaters”) and drunken GI’s fighting with locals. Topless and bottomless joints were the Starbucks of Shit Street. I couldn’t wait to turn 18.

The most alluring neon sign was that of Club Hubba Hubba, where the full-figured featured performers would come out in layers and long gloves and make you wait three songs to see nipples. The band was a sax player and drummer, older black guys about to fall asleep onstage.There wasn’t a cover during the day, when I dropped in because I felt safer, but beers were $3 each in a tiny glass and if you didn’t keep ordering them, one of the girls would come over and tell you to get the fuck out. Or they’d

My girl Apache. I got something that will make you laugh.

try to get you to buy them a drink. It was $11. I only bought one once, for a dancer  named Apache who would come by Mr. Lucky T-Shirts around the corner, where I worked. She was actually kinda pissed off that I bought her a drink- that was for suckers- and she never came by the t-shirt shop again.

Michael Malone bought Sailor Jerry’s shop after the old man died in 1973. I met him through his girlfriend Kate Hellenbrand, who was my first editor, at Sunbums magazine. He would sometimes take visiting tattoo artists to Club Hubba Hubba, which kept grinding along in the ’80s. He and Ed Hardy and maybe Miss Roxy were in there one night, sitting behind a table of shitfaced Australian sailors on the rail. After one stripper came out in her ridiculous costume and went through a song taking off accessories, one of the Aussies stood up and started patting the runway. “We don’t care about your fancy dances and your feathers and spangles,” pat, pat, pat. “We want to see your twat,” pat, pat, pat “right here, right now.”

Hawaii’s first punk band the Squids knew the cool place to take promo photos.L-R Kit, Rudy, Beano, Frank Orrall and Kit’s wife whose name slips me.

This all reminds me of my Bernard Purdie story. Purdie is known as one of the greatest groove drummers ever, particularly for his work on Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady” and “Spanish Harlem” and Steely Dan albums like “Royal Scam” and “Aja.” But when he came through Honolulu in 1975 on Jeff Beck’s “Blow By Blow” tour, I had only known him for appearing with his band, fully clothed, in a XXX movie called “Lialeh,” which was billed as a black version of “Deep Throat.” It was a true blaxploitation film I had seen in a 37-capacity theater on Hotel Street a few weeks earlier. Well, the Beck show was amazing and afterwards me and my friends went to a 24-hour diner named Coco’s in Waikiki and sitting at a booth was Bernard Purdie with an attractive young lady. I never know what to say to celebrities, so I went up to him and said, “Excuse me, are you Bernard Purdie?” He gave a big smile and expected to hear about how great the show was, or maybe how his drumming on B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” changed my life, but instead I said, “I saw you in that movie ‘Lialeh.’ His gal said “movie?” So I said “yeah, it’s a porno movie. He was in it. They called it ‘The Black Throat.’” That was my brush with the world’s greatest living drummer Bernard Purdie.

(Originally published in May 2007. Stephen Bruton succumbed to cancer two years later.)

In his home studio in Barton Hills, Stephen Bruton has a picture on a music stand of him playing guitar with Kris Kristofferson for the first time, in 1971 at the Golden Bear in San Rafael, Calif. Bruton was 20 and Kristofferson was on a Jimmy Webb-like songwriting tear that included “For the Good Times,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Me and Bobby McGee” in quick succession. The two had met in Fort Worth a couple years earlier and when a spot opened in his band, Kristofferson asked Bruton if he was interested in playing the guitar. “Man, that’s all I’m interested in,” Bruton answered back.

Over the past 36 years, Bruton has spent 17 years in the employ of Kristofferson, who’s also one of his closest friends. So when Freescale Semiconductor Inc. wanted to re-create the fast-moving show Bruton put together for the World Congress Information Technology conference a year ago, with a few big names sprinkled in, one of the first people Bruton called was his old boss. Bonnie Raitt and Delbert McClinton – two acts Bruton backed when he wasn’t working with Kristofferson – also said “just tell us when to show up.”

And then Bruton got sick. He was diagnosed with cancer of the tonsils five months ago, and went through chemotherapy and radiation treatments from March 6 to April 17. He’s been home getting his strength back and on Monday began rehearsing with the band, which includes the great rhythm section of Brannen Temple and Yoggie Musgrove, plus B-3 great Ian McLagan on keyboards.

Bruton’s situation could’ve been worse. Bruton’s manager, Ken Kushnick, credits early detection for Bruton’s positive prognosis. Bruton’s wife, Mary, had a sore throat and she went to look at it in the mirror to see what the problem was. But first she wanted to see what a healthy throat looked like. When her husband said “ahhh,” Mary saw redness and swelling. He went to the doctor the next day.

After the diagnosis and the timetable of treatment was laid out, Bruton decided, with a month of recuperating time, he could go on with the “Road To Austin” show.

“I’ve never had an experience with anything like this,” Bruton said, looking like a gaunt version of himself from Raitt’s “Thing Called Love” video. The upcoming show has lifted his spirits, even though he said he sometimes wishes the date was later, as he’s getting stronger every day.

But he’s excited about playing guitar again with his friends.

He met Raitt in 1971, when she opened a show for Kristofferson. The two became friends and stayed in touch. Bruton toured with Raitt in the early ’90s, but then came off the road to write songs, produce (“After Awhile” by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, “Gravity” by Alejandro Escovedo) and play his own gigs. At age 40, he became a first-time frontman.

“Kris was always so encouraging about my songwriting,” said Bruton, who co-wrote the title track of Kristofferson’s 1972 album “Border Lord” and had his greatest writing thrill when Raitt and Willie Nelson sang a duet of “Getting Over You” on Willie’s great “Across the Borderline” LP.

Delbert McClinton and Bruton go back furthest of all, to the ’60s when a 16-year-old Stephen and his older brother Sumter were guitarists in the house band of a Fort Worth juke joint called the Bluebird. Their father, a drummer, owned the hippest record store in Fort Worth, and the Bruton brothers soaked up all that rhythm and blues. In McClinton, who would later teach John Lennon how to play blues harmonica, Bruton found a kindred musical spirit. As soon as Bruton came home after a Kristofferson tour, he’d join up with McClinton’s band.

“Kris always kept the band around when he was making a movie,” said Bruton, who also toured with Maria Muldaur during the “Midnight At the Oasis” mania. “He’d make his movies during the week and then we’d play concerts every weekend.”

Through his association with Kristofferson, Bruton has beefed up an acting resume, which includes that hilarious scene in “Songwriter,” when Bruton is seen shivering in his skivvies while an angry husband, played by Rip Torn, shoots a beer bottle off his head as punishment for catching Bruton’s character with his wife. Bruton’s screen work, including “Heaven’s Gate,” “The Alamo,” “Miss Congeniality” and the TV series “Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip” (he played the bandleader, naturally), has led to some ribbing from friends. When Bruton was late for Resentments mate Jon Dee Graham’s wedding a few years ago, the ceremony was held up. “Someone turn on a movie camera and Bruton will be here in two minutes,” someone said and everyone laughed. The silver fox doth love his screen time.

But not like playing music. Kristofferson never thought of himself as an actor, but as a musician first and foremost, Bruton says. Same with Stephen.

“Touring with Kris was the greatest experience,” Bruton said of the songwriting giant, who used to joke (before he married current wife Lisa in 1983) that he’d kept his band together longer than any of his marriages. “I feel like we went through life together.”

CRAZY FROM THE HEART: BRUTON’S SWAN SONG

(originally published in Jan. 2010)

It was 1960 in Fort Worth, and a couple of 12-year-old guys were in the T.H. Conn music store one Saturday afternoon – every Saturday afternoon – messing around with the various stringed instruments hanging from the walls. The shorter of the kids always went back to his favorite guitar, a beat-up Epiphone Texan acoustic, which had the sweetest tone he’d ever heard. Finally, he brought it over to owner Woods Moore, and they talked for a while, with Moore scratching his chin for a long time before agreeing to a deal.

“Stephen got that guitar for about half of what it was worth,” 10-time Grammy-winning producer T-Bone Burnett recalled of his smooth-talking friend, musician Stephen Bruton. “He took it home on the city bus in a brown paper wrapper.”

Nearly 50 years later, the lifelong friends have earned critical raves for their original film score to “Crazy Heart,” a little film with big Oscar buzz starring Jeff Bridges as a washed-up country singer with one good song – and one last chance – left in him.

“This film has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life,” said Burnett, who is one of the movie’s producers in addition to sharing music supervisor credit with Bruton. “When we won the L.A. Film Critics award, it was so sad for Stephen to not be there. This was really his film. I turned the music over to him.”

Austinite Bruton died at 60 in May at Burnett’s home in Los Angeles after a 21/2-year battle with throat cancer. Burnett and director Scott Cooper screened “Crazy Heart” for Bruton about two weeks before he died.

“We just set out to do something really good, and Stephen knew we had done that,” said Burnett, 62, who called early raves for “Crazy Heart,” which opened in Austin and 32 other cities Jan. 8, “the best of any movie I’ve ever worked on.”

Bruton’s older brother Sumter, who still runs the family’s 53-year-old record store in Fort Worth, Record Town, laughed when he recalled his brother’s tall friend from the ’60s.

“T-Bone lived in the only house with a swimming pool in the neighborhood,” Sumter Bruton said. “That’s how I met him.”

T-Bone Burnett

After leaving Cowtown for good in the early ’70s, Burnett and Stephen Bruton took separate career paths, with Bruton plying the guitarist trade with Kris Kristofferson and Bonnie Raitt before recording his first of five solo albums in 1993. Burnett cemented his reputation as a producer with the multiplatinum touch on the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack in 2000 and then seven years later topped it with “Raising Sand” by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

Burnett became a West Coast music biz honcho; Bruton settled into the pace of Barton Hills, where for 20 years he lived, wrote songs, produced records and dressed for gigs at the Saxon Pub.

“We’ve always stayed in touch,” Burnett said. “And when ‘Crazy Heart’ was a go, Stephen is the first person I called.”

Although Bruton had been diagnosed with cancer in early 2007, Burnett said the hiring of Bruton for “Crazy Heart” had nothing to do with trying to raise the spirits of a sick friend.

“Stephen was just the right person for the job,” Burnett said. “Through his experience, he knew more about who Bad Blake (the Jeff Bridges character) was than anyone else.”

Stephen Bruton and Jeff Bridges were inseparable on the set of “Crazy Heart.”

Before a song was written for the project, Burnett hosted five or six months of listening sessions at his Brentwood, Calif., house in 2008. Burnett, Bruton, Bridges and Cooper constructed a timeline of Blake’s life leading up to the time covered by the film, when he’s a 57-year-old alcoholic playing bowling alleys with pickup bands. Ryan Bingham, up for a Golden Globe on Sunday for best original song (“The Weary Kind”), also dropped in at times.

Bridges soaked in all the honky-tonk, blues, Western swing and Bob Dylan songs played during that prep time, just as his character would have growing up.

The sessions reminded Burnett of the hours he and Bruton would spend in Record Town, the store Bruton’s father, a jazz drummer, opened near the Texas Christian University campus in 1957.

“Back then you couldn’t order records unless you had a record store,” Burnett said. “So Stephen could get, like, old blues and bluegrass records from the Library of Congress that nobody else could get.” The teens would thumb through catalogs and then wait for records by Charley Patton, Mississippi John Hurt and Howlin’ Wolf to arrive.

At night, the underage pair and their friend Delbert McClinton would dive into the musical melting pot that was Fort Worth, hiding under pool tables to catch sax great King Curtis and slipping in some Jacksboro Highway roadhouse to hear Ernest Tubb.

“From my point of view, Stephen embodied the soul of Texas music,” Burnett said. “He went deep into what made it unique. I learned so much from him.”

Asked what was it about Fort Worth that made it special, Burnett recalled a scene from “The Last Picture Show,” when the main characters are sitting out by a desolate stock pond.

“The ground is gray and the water’s gray and the trees are gray, and the Ben Johnson character says, ‘Isn’t this beautiful?’” Burnett said. “(Fort Worth) didn’t seem like much to most people, but it was a magical place to us.”

It’s a town Bad Blake could’ve been from.

“Jeff (Bridges) looked to Stephen to keep him honest and believable at all times,” Bruton’s manager, Ken Kushnick, said. An Oscar favorite, Bridges is among those up for a Golden Globe award Sunday for best actor in a drama.

Estranged from his wife the last few months of his life, Bruton threw himself into the film, even making a few reality-heightening suggestions to Cooper during filming in Santa Fe, N.M. The Sparkletts bottle Bad Blake empties after a 300-mile nonstop drive – that touch came from Bruton. But his chief contribution was crafting such songs as “I Don’t Know,” “Somebody Else” and “Fallin’ & Flyin’” that would fit Blake’s career.

Songwriting royalties from the soundtrack album, which comes out Tuesday on New West, will go to Bruton’s estate, with proceeds split between Sumter Bruton and Bruton’s wife of 13 years, Mary.

“The challenge was to not just write good songs,” said Kushnick, “but to write songs that sounded like they’d been big hits 25 years ago. Playing so many years with Kris (Kristofferson) definitely served Stephen well” in that capacity.

Bruton’s résumé also included work with Billy Joe Shaver, another Bad Blake model, whose influence is heard in an a capella version of “Live Forever” by Robert Duvall, which plays during the credits, when “Crazy Heart” is “dedicated to the memory of Stephen Bruton.”

The project, expected to garner several Oscar nominations next month , just seems to be blessed, Burnett said.

“It feels like all the events of the past couple years have been pulling towards this vortex,” he said.

Burnett said Bruton showed signs of improving health during his first couple of months in L.A.

“He had good doctors and he was putting some weight on and driving again,” Burnett said. “But in the last week, he took a turn for the worse.”

On the night of May 9, Bruton told his loved ones keeping a vigil at his bedside that he was going to sleep. He never woke up.

Leaning up against his bed was that old beat-up Epiphone Texan, his favorite guitar. It’s the one he plays in the score of “Crazy Heart.”

The Austin-based group, which defiantly stands by its right to speak out, is still feeling the repercussions with an upcoming summer tour selling like hotcakes – at an Atkins Diet conference. Pollstar has reported that shows in Memphis, Indianapolis and Oklahoma City were canceled due to poor sales. Meanwhile, the group is hotter than ever in North American countries that did not invade Iraq, selling out a 20,000-seat arena in Toronto in eight minutes.

The new album, “Taking the Long Way,” is doing pretty well, selling more than half a million copies in its first week in May – it’s currently at No. 4 on the Billboard charts – but it’s projected to sell only about a third of the 10 million copies sold by each of the two pre-protest albums.

Professionally, Maines blew it when she decided to get political onstage. But her financial blunder was not even in the Top 10 of the worst career moves in pop music history. Let’s count them down, starting with No. 10:

10.The video for “The Way You Make Me Feel” tries way too hard to make Michael Jackson come off as macho. Instead, he looks like a stalker, following an attractive woman down a darkened street, thrusting his pelvis in a sexual way. Later, he and his dancers give new meaning to the term “pounding the pavement.” Though the crotch-grabbing nonsense started with the previous video “Bad,” this one made it clear that Jackson had issues with his sexuality. Cool song, though.

9.David Lee Roth records solo EP “Crazy From the Heat” in 1985, while still a member of Van Halen. Tensions within the band were already boiling, but when Diamond Dave had a couple of solo hits with “Just a Gigolo” and “California Girls,” he was sent packing soon thereafter (he says he quit; they say he was fired). Although Roth initially found success as a solo artist, with 1986′s “Eat ‘Em and Smile” going multiplatinum, the rest of his records tanked. Last we heard, he’d been fired after just a few weeks as Howard Stern’s replacement on New York City’s K-Rock.

8.Public Enemy makes Chuck D’s childhood friend Professor Griff a member of the group. There’s a reason Vince Chase of “Entourage” doesn’t let Turtle do interviews. In 1989, at the height of PE’s prominence, Griff set off a media firestorm by making a slew of anti-Semitic statements to a Washington Times reporter. An indecisive Chuck D didn’t make things better when he first stood by his soldier, then fired him, then briefly disbanded the group.

7.Paul Westerberg gets sober. He probably saved his life, but lost the crazy energy that made the Replacements so cool. Westerberg’s solo albums are dreadfully monotonous and boring. We want a ‘Mats reunion! We demand it.

6.Prince changes his name to an unpronounceable symbol. The little funk genius hits the height of pretentiousness. If Prince’s goal was to become a fixture on Jay Leno’s daily monologue, he succeeded brilliantly. He was hard to take seriously for awhile.

5.Hootie and the Blowfish don’t retire in 1996. Just think: “Cracked Rear View” sells 15 million records, and when critics ask when the next one’s coming out, Darius Rucker says, “Never.” He leaves music to pursue a lifelong dream of getting his PGA tour card and nobody ever finds out that the guy and his band make incredibly boring music. Instead, they line up to buy the deluxe reissue of “Cracked Rear View,” with the bonus disc of solo acoustic versions, and the drummer’s tell-all book, “Who Gives a Hoot?”

4.”Neither Fish Nor Flesh.” Terence Trent D’Arby was a rising superstar in 1988, hitting No. 1 with “Wishing Well” and touring with an explosive live show that blew Michael Jackson off the stage at the Grammys. Then he made one of the most arrogant mistakes a young artist can: He released a pretentious concept album, subtitled “A Soundtrack of Love, Faith, Hope & Destruction,” as the follow-up. This record, which makes “sophomore slump” seem an inadequate term, sunk like a bowling ball in Town Lake, and D’Arby’s career never recovered. Recently, he changed his name to Sananda Maitreya and sells his albums on the Internet. And, for a time, he was going to be the next Prince.

3.Mick Taylor quits the Rolling Stones. Or we could put “Jason Newsted quits Metallica” for our younger fans of the head-banging persuasion. It always looks dumb when a minor member leaves an enormously popular band, but to leave the Stones to play jazz fusion (badly) gets the blue ribbon of ridiculousness.

2.Peter Frampton “stars” in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Everything was going blazing bazookas for the blond-tressed guitarist who had both rock cred (ex-Humble Pie) and teeny-bopper hooks. “Frampton Comes Alive” was a monster hit, the best-selling live album of all time and then, uh-oh, Frampton steps into this mess, and it was all over.

1.Garth Brooks becomes Chris Gaines. Folks were hoping, praying for “marketing genius” Garth to go AWOL in the membrane, and boy did he deliver with this fictional Australian rock singer alter ego, who was just a transparent attempt to make country music fans sick of Keith Urban before he’d arrived on the Nashville scene. “Garth Brooks . . . In the Life of Chris Gaines” not only went straight to the cut-out bin, but the Garthster seemed a candidate for the loony bin. By the way, you might have been expecting to see Pete Best, the No. 1 symbol of blown chances here, but he was fired by the Beatles; he didn’t quit.

Honorable mention: The Kiss solo albums.

If you want to make President-elect Barack Obama smile about something that has nothing to do with Tuesday’s election, ask him if he remembers the address of Lex Brodie’s flagship tire shop in Honolulu. He should immediately answer “701 Queen Street,” no matter how much other stuff has filled his mind since growing up in Hawaii in the 1970s. It was easier to avoid the sun on Oahu than Brodie’s low-budget commercials, which all ended with the proprietor staring stone-faced into the camera and intoning, “Thank you (pause) very much.” Maybe Barry Obama, who lived in the dense, charmless compound of high-rise apartments near the corner of Beretania and Punahou streets in downtown Honolulu, wasn’t much of a TV watcher.

We know the left-handed shooting guard is crazy about basketball, so you can be sure he can name at least three of the University of Hawaii’s “Fab Five,” who took the Hawaii Rainbows to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 1972, when Obama was 11. The all-African American starting lineup of Bob Nash, Jerome Freeman, Dwight Holiday, John Pennebacker and Al Davis were bigger stars in the Islands than Don Ho and Hilo Hattie.

I moved to Oahu with my military family in 1971, the same year Obama moved back to his birthplace after four years in Indonesia. I wonder if we were at the same Jackson 5 concert at the Honolulu International Center arena in September ’71.

Although the Aloha State has become so Mainlandized that one pundit in the ’90s called Oahu “Stockton with palm trees,” the transformation was just beginning when Obama returned to live with his maternal grandparents and attend the prestigious Punahou School. The scholastic/athletic powerhouse can boast an impressive alumni roster that includes AOL founder Steve Chase, surfing icon Gerry Lopez, professional golfer Michelle Wie and football notables Norm Chow, Mosi Tatupu and University of Texas defensive back coach Duane Akina. By most accounts, Obama was an unremarkable student.

Born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961, to a pair of University of Hawaii students – Barack Obama from Kenya and Kansas native Ann Dunham – Obama Jr. would seem to be the product of a bold and fearless union. But, racially, 1961 in the melting pot of Hawaii was not 1961 on the Mainland. In a culture where missionaries married native Hawaiians and “minorities” were the majority, the marriage of a “papolo” (black) to a “haole” (white) was not a big deal.

After divorcing Obama’s father, who left his young family to attend Harvard and then return to Kenya, Dunham married Indonesia native Lolo Soetero and moved with her son to Jakarta in 1967.

Obama moved back to Honolulu when the opportunity to attend Punahou, which has kindergarten through high school, presented itself.

His grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who would go on to become the first female vice president of the Bank of Hawaii, got Obama into Punahou on a partial scholarship. Dunham died Nov. 3 at the age of 86.

Since I’m five years older, one of seven kids, and attended public schools instead of the Pacific’s most elite private one, my experience on Oahu was no doubt different from Obama’s. But we had Ala Moana Center, then the country’s largest shopping mall, in common. That’s where you’d go to “spock da chicks” and eat at McDonald’s, which was brand-new to the Islands at the start of the ’70s.

And we also had TheBus. Nicknamed “the Fasimobile” or “Frank’s Limo” after Mayor Frank Fasi, TheBus made all of Oahu accessible to anyone with two quarters (which many kids carried in their ears). Before TheBus debuted in 1971, public transportation was a mess of private bus companies that weren’t invested in the public interest and so they aimed their rickety carriages on passenger-heavy downtown. The glistening fleet of city-owned buses changed everything.

Hawaii became part of the United States in 1959, but in the ’70s, it still felt like its own country. “Pakalolo” – marijuana – was king in the state whose biggest cash crop had nicknames like Maui Wowee and Puna Butter. The pungent odor of marijuana could be smelled everywhere: movie theaters, Waikiki sidewalks, the Kam Drive In swap meet. Obama’s admitted drug use is no surprise. Everybody in Hawaii was getting high in the ’70s.

But several militant native Hawaiian groups were also getting political. The struggle for independence from the United States – or at least some reparations – became a major issue around the time Obama was in his early teens. Perhaps most prominent was Protect Kaho’olawe Ohana formed in 1975 to protest the military using Kahoolawe, the smallest of the eight main Hawaiian Islands, for bombing practice. In a 1977 attempt to occupy uninhabited Kahoolawe by paddling his surfboard from Maui, Ohana leader (and wonderful falsetto singer) George Helm was lost at sea. But eventually, his group won, the bombing stopped, and the island and its waters today can be used only for native Hawaiian cultural and subsistence purposes.

With the native Hawaiian identity coming back to life in the 1970s, the soundtrack of this revival was headed by guitarist/singer Gabby Pahinui, who is to Hawaii what Bob Marley is to Jamaica. Suddenly, “homegrown” did not just refer to the hemp fields, but to the music scene, as the native “slack key” guitar sound was everywhere. The mellow pop sound of Island faves Cat Stevens and the Eagles, was given a local flavor by such incredibly popular groups as Country Comfort and Cecilio & Kapono, who each could sell out the 10,000-capacity Waikiki Shell three nights in a row.

The 1970s also saw a comedy boom in the Islands, with pidgin English-spoofing Booga Booga packing the Territorial Tavern nightly and even taking their act to the Mainland. In a bit the trio called “Hooray For Haolewood,” they talked about going to a swank West Coast party, but then complained there was “no mo’ macaroni salad!” True Islanders can’t be fully satiated by a meal unless they have mac salad, a staple of the plate lunch joints like Chunky’s Drive In in Obama’s old ‘hood.

I wonder if the world’s most powerful man in waiting ever said, “I like grind,” which is what locals say when they want to get something to eat.

The most famous and enduring comedy bit in Hawaii was by Booga Booga co-founder Rap Reiplinger. His “Room Service” routine, from the 1978 album “Poi Dog,” is the “Who’s on First?” of local humor, making catchphrases out of “Nuh-ting!” and “I’m gonna kerrang your allas.” The lead character is a clueless room service operator of “tita” (tough girl) descent who mangles an order of a cheeseburger, French fries and a chocolate shake.

The hilarious spoof of Hawaiian culture and language was on the radio constantly when Obama, who called himself B-Rock during those nascent years of hip hop culture, was a junior and senior in high school.

Ask Obama how the room service operator pronounced the name of Mr. Fogerty, and he’ll laugh and say “Mr. Frogtree.”

You can’t shake an upbringing in the state during the time it was also growing up. Even if you’re on your way to becoming the 44th president of the United States.

Sorry, but you’re not an Austin musician until…

… you’ve been rejected by SXSW, seven years in a row.

… you know your order without looking at the menu of the Tamale House No. 3.

… you’ve played a five-act bill at the Saxon Pub for a piece of the door.

… you’ve worked at Thundercloud.

… David Cotten doesn’t return your phone calls.

… you’ve snuck a case of beer out the back door after a gig.

… you’ve been fired by Bob Schneider.

… you’ve had a keg party at your house to stuff Austin Music Award ballots.

… you’ve looked forward to playing out at the airport because at least that gig pays.

… you’ve paid more for parking than you made that night.

… Raoul Hernandez ignores your friend request.

… you’ve ever spent the night with someone because they have hot water.

… you’ve ever kissed Michael Corcoran’s ass, while muttering “clueless cocksucker” under your breath when he walks away.

Like this only screaming.started sobbing uncontrollably and our minds went blank. Eventually he stopped crying, but that proved to be just a rest. We were in for a long night.

I had the first shift, and when our freshly-circumsized bundle started airing out those hacky-sack-sized lungs again, I held him and rocked him and tried to feed him, but he wouldn’t stop crying. He felt a little warm, but I was too nervous to even consider a rectal thermometer. “Soothing music,” I remembered. “That will help him sleep.” But I didn’t own any New Age CDs. Probably the softest thing I had was the Velvet Underground, but I was afraid if I played that, my child might grow up to be a junkie. If he lived through the night, that is.Then I remembered receiving some Hawaiian slack key guitar records from George Winston’s Dancing Cat label in the mail a few days earlier. Since my son was conceived on a previous trip to Maui (don’t ask why I’m so sure), I thought there might be some sort of spiritual bond.

Even after living in Hawaii for 15 years (or maybe because of it), I had never really liked Hawaiian music, but the time was right for tolerance, so I put on “Sonny Solo” by Sonny Chillingworth and felt the anxiety lift with the first track, “Moe Uhane.”

Jack was soon sleeping, and I kept the music playing because I was afraid that when it stopped he’d wake up and I’d once again feel pink and helpless. Sitting there in the dark, listening to Chillingworth sing “Hi’ilawe,” (the 1955 Gabby Pahinui hit that’s to Hawaii what “Jole Blon” is to Louisiana or what “Rocky Top” is to Tennessee) while my little boy slept in my arms, is perhaps the most beautiful memory of that crazy and invigorating first leg of the parenthood journey.

The sounds of Hawaiian music have been with me ever since.

Slack key was invented in the 1830s on guitars left behind by Spanish and Portuguese cowboys hired by King Kamehameha III to teach Hawaiians how to handle the Islands’ growing cattle population. It was a self-taught style influenced by flamenco colorings and native Hawaiian chants. Tunings, with names such as “Taro Patch,” “Wahine” and “Mauna Loa,” were often closely guarded family secrets, and those who wanted to learn slack key had to earn the trust of a master before they could intern.

Pops. Gabby Pahinui.

In the early ’70s, a slack key renaissance was sparked by a growing Hawaiian sovereignty movement and the rediscovery of Gabby “Pops” Pahinui, whom George Winston calls “the vortex of Hawaiian slack key guitar.” Gabby is to Hawaiian music what Bob Marley is to reggae. You could also compare Pahinui, who died of a heart attack on the Kahuku Golf Course in 1980, to Willie Nelson, in that Gabby was an adored man of the people, who could play a state dinner for a visiting prime minister then walk across the street to jam with the blalahs at the Alakea Grill. Both folk heroes were also heavily influenced by jazz, especially Django Reinhardt’s gypsy guitar playing, and they infused elements of the improvisational style into their otherwise traditional music.

As a boy, Gabby Pahinui didn’t really like the music of his people. “(My parents) would bring out some old Hawaiian music, and I’d turn it off,” he said in a 1977 interview. “To me Hawaiian music all sounded the same.”

When our military family moved to Hawaii in 1970, I felt the same way. Almost as grating as the traditional Island music were the wildly popular mid-70s Hawaiian pop groups like Cecilio and Kapono, Kalapana and Country Comfort who incorporated slack key guitar playing into their update of Seals and Croft. These groups used to sell out the Waikiki Shell (capacity 10,000) three nights in a row. Meanwhile, when the Talking Heads played Honolulu in 1978, it was at the Little Orphan Annie’s nightclub, where a crowd of about 300 paid $1.50 to get in. When I tell people that I lived in Honolulu for 14 years, they invariably say, “That must’ve been nice.” But it wasn’t, really. The things I

Sonny Chillingworth was a paniolo.

remember most about living in the Aloha State were poverty, sunburn and cover bands.

One of my earliest mentors, Bill Mann, (now a TV critic for one of the dailies in San Francisco) used to call Hawaii “the world’s most highly technologized banana republic,” and it sure felt that way when even the people at the bank spoke pidgin English. “We no can cash dees check wit’out one drivah’s license.” Whatever rebellious streak I was born with was intensified by spending vital years, from 10th grade to age 28, in a city, a state, a culture, where I didn’t fit. My old stomping grounds were made of sand.

But in recent years, beginning with that experience with the Sonny Chillingworth record on April 28, 1994, I’ve grown into affinity for Hawaiian music, especially slack key guitar. I’ve also taken to speaking in pidgin to the three of my four sisters who still live on Oahu. Sometimes you need to get away from a place to really appreciate it, and maybe I can get a witness from someone from Lubbock.

Return of the non-native

It was the longest, scariest afternoon of my life — the 71/2-hour flight to Hawaii that Jack and I took a couple of weeks ago. He’s a good kid, but he’s 3 years old and I was ready for the requisite one meltdown per three hours quota. To keep fellow passengers from hating me when the inevitable “I want my MOMMY!” shrieks rang through the cabin, I had planned to say, “Remember what I told you, Jack? Mommy’s in heaven with the angels. Let’s look out at the clouds and see if

Jack, age 3. Not a happy kamaiana.

we can find her.” Luckily, it never came to that. He had a couple of outbursts, but in terms of keeping Jack occupied, the bag of plastic dinosaurs I bought the night before proved to be the best $4 I’ve ever spent. Once the pain in my side (from turning toward Jack and reading book after book) subsided, it was a piece of cake.

Having a child turns you into a tourist of the world. You end up going to all the places you’ve been driving past for years, like Schlitterbahn and Chuck E. Cheese and that place past New Braunfels where you feed the animals out of your car. Taking Jack to Hawaii meant first-time visits for both of us to Sea Life Park and Waimea Falls and photo ops with hula dancers and parrots. But the main reason why we made the trip was because Jack hadn’t yet met his aunts, cousins or grandfather who live in Hawaii.

I scheduled our father-son sojourn to coincide with the 15th annual Ki Ho’alu (Slack Key) Festival, every year on the third Sunday of August. Dedicated to the Holy Trinity of slackers: Gabby Pahinui, Atta Isaacs and Sonny Chillingworth (who died of cancer soon after the release of “Sonny Solo”), the all-day fest attracted many contemporary greats, ranging in age from 14-year-old Inaika Brown to the legendary Ray Kane (who was a World War II hero when he swam a mile off the coast of Nanakuli to rescue an American pilot who’d been shot down). Also on the bill were Gabby’s sons Cyril and Bla, the duo of Dennis Kamakahi & George Kuo, Ozzie Kotani, Brother Noland, Nedward Kaapana and more.

I was excited for the chance to see the type of show I had passed on for years. The reason baseball is better in person than on TV is because you don’t have the constant close-ups of players spitting. I felt the same way about slack key music. One thing I don’t like about the Dancing Cat solo records is the squeaking of fingers as they slide between frets. In a live setting, with backing musicians, that irritating sound would be buried in the mix.

On paper, the whole thing looked promising, but the show ultimately proved to be a dumb thing to plan a trip around. In previous years, the festival was on the beach in Waimanalo, where Gabby, Atta and their bassist Joe Gang had spent countless hours through the years picking and singing and drinking Olympia beer, or at the McCoy Pavilion in Ala Moana Beach Park. This year it was on the grounds of the Bishop Museum, in conjunction with family-oriented “Fun Day” festivities. Presenting such soulful indigene in an ossified museum setting is akin to holding a blues festival in the ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel. With kids running around everywhere, or waiting in the lengthy shave ice line, the music seemed to take on a secondary role. The

John Cruz (L) and a 19-yearold Matt Swalinkavich, now known as Makana.

performers all looked so uncomfortable and the hoped-for magic didn’t materialize. That is, except during one glorious and scintillating 15-minute set pairing 19-year-old Matthew Swalinkavich and local hitmaker John Cruz. The recipient of a State Foundation on Culture and the Arts apprenticeship grant that enabled him to spend a year under the tutelage of his Pearl City neighbor Chillingworth, Swalinkavich is well-versed in the classic slack key numbers. But he’s flashier than his mentors, as proven by the adrenalized instrumental that closed his segment, when he played the guitar with various parts of his arm, including his elbow. Slack key guitarists have been known to lay a needle on their strings, as it dangled from thread held in their teeth, and to play guitar behind the back, but Swalinkavich’s re-energization of the genre had more to do with his blazing fingerwork than any gimmickry. Respectful, even when he’s ripping, the Portuguese-Hawaiian “Ki Ho’alu Kid” could end up doing for slack key what Stevie Ray Vaughan did for the electric blues.

I tried to talk to the kid after the set, and thanks to the legendarily lax Hawaiian security I was able to stroll backstage unquestioned. But Matt just fixed himself a plate lunch, covered it with foil and drove away, even as another teacher, Ray Kane, was set to take the stage. It was that kind of show, with little of the reckless joviality and camaraderie that you can be sure was present at the festivals held in Waimanalo.

Cruz, who’s all over Hawaii radio with “Island Style,” did stick around for a little while, so I was able to get the info on his 19-year-old partner. I wondered if he wasn’t a little surprised there weren’t more people on hand for a free show featuring such a tremendous lineup, to which Cruz replied, “People here are used to it. Slack key’s been around forever and will always be part of Hawaiian music, so there’s no real rush. They know if they miss this year, they can always catch it next year.” But you wonder how many people thought the same thing in August ’93, when Chillingworth played his last Slack Key Festival. I interviewed him by phone in May ’94 and was able to tell Sonny Chillingworth about how his music soothed a nerve-wracking situation. He was pretty sick and weak, so he let me go on and on, and when I was done talking he just said, softy, that hearing stories like mine meant so much to him. “It’s not the way the guitar is tuned. It’s not the movement of the fingers. It’s the soul,” he said. “That’s where it comes from.”

Like it or not, Hawaii’s where I’m from. That’s where I came of age. Slack key is sweet Hawaiian soul music, calling an adopted son back home.

An addendum: When Jack was about 8 or 9, I picked him up from school and he was in the back seat on the drive home. Someone had just made me a mix CD of Hawaiian music and I was playing it, when a cut from “Sonny Solo” came on. I remembered that long, long night as the slack key instrumental played and looked back to see if it registered with Jack at all. He was sound asleep.

But then one day I read that Billy Lee Brammer, who wrote “The Gay Place,” had died from taking meth and after that I would think I was dying every time I snorted some. I would have the symptoms of a heart attack, the numbness in the fingers, the pressure on the chest, the cold sweat, and I would have my brother drive me to the emergency room. I’d almost never go inside, because Suzee said they’d pump my stomach, but I’d sit on the grass at Waterloo Park and just being that close to help would calm me down.

By June ’88, I was just done with crank, which meant I was done with Austin. Everybody in my circle was doing it- all the bands, all the writers. It was a performance enhancing drug and we were all trying to outdo each other. Some silly shit, it turns out.

Besides the Chronicle column I had also started writing for Spin and one of the best things I wrote was an album review of “If I Shall Fall From Grace With God” by the Pogues. My girlfriend at the time was a British stage actress/ Austin waitress and we would always joke around about me being a drunken Irish bastard- Joe Doerr and Rich Brotherton had a band of the same name- so I made that the theme of my Pogues review and when it was published, I was suddenly hot fucking tuna. Mike Lacey of New Times in Phoenix called Spin and tracked me down and offered me a job just like that. And I was getting bigger assignments. Nobody knew I had spent 15 hours on that one crummy record review- three hours writing and 12 hours retyping. They just thought I was supremely gifted. Rollo called speed “talent” and that became our code. “Hey, man, do you know where I can get some talent?”

Spin wanted me to follow-up on my Pogues record review with a big feature on the band. I was supposed to go on tour with them through the south- from Austin, where they played Liberty Lunch, to New Orleans to Birmingham, Ala. to Memphis. But after a night of doing mushrooms and coke and drinking with the band in the French Quarter they didn’t want to have anything more to do with me- or me them- so I ended up with 3-4 days to kill before my flight back to Austin. The only folks I knew in N.O. was the band Dash Rip Rock, so I went with them on some crazy, fun shows in Baton Rouge and Lafayette and by the end of it we were talking very seriously about me moving there and managing the group, which at the time had the classic lineup of Fred LeBlanc (now Cowboy Mouth) on drums and Hoaky on the bass, with the mainstay Bill Davis on guitar. They were really fucking good.

So when I got back to Austin, I started packing. But then I got a call from Brent Grulke, or maybe I just ran into him somewhere and told him my plans. “Me and Scott (all-round good guy Anderson) are moving to San Francisco. Why don’t you come with us? We’ll rent a big house together.” I told Brent I was going to manage Dash Rip Rock and he gave me a big ladle of reality on what my days would be like and how they’d never be grateful, and Brent knew because he’d worked with a lot of bands. Two days later I was in a van heading to SF. When I called Bill Davis and told him I wasn’t going to be able to manage the band, he seemed kinda dumbfounded, like he’d already forgotten about that conversation we’d had on the drive back from Lafayette.

So here’s the problem I had in San Francisco: I had written all these great articles on speed and I was the hot young music writer. But I quit the stuff and didn’t know how to write without it. Spin called and offered my first cover story, Bon Jovi, which actually turned out okay because it was a total rush job- something else had fallen through- so I made it a Q&A piece with an intro of about 500 words. Everybody loved it, especially Jon Bon Jovi, who ended up bonding with Spin honcho Bob Guccione Jr., which made me the Gooch’s favorite writer. I wrote three more cover stories in the next six months- the Bangles, Edie Brickell and New Bohemians, Tom Petty- but only the Petty story was any good.

Brent and Scott and I rented the third floor of a big, old house in the Mission, which had access to a large attic (once a hideout for the Symbionese Liberation Army we were told). That’s where I would go to write, or try to write. I’d sit up there for six hours and maybe get a page done. I smoked weed and drank lots of coffee and eventually I had enough to send in. But my time as the next Lester Bangs- or at least the Texas Legs McNeil- was over. I mean, I’d still get work, but there was a definite drop-off in the amount of time I would spend on an article or review. It took about four years for me to get the drive back.

One day I got a call from Bart Bull, who was one of my editors at Spin before he met Michelle Shocked and fell in love and eventually married her. He said he put my name in at  the East Bay Express in Berkeley to replace music columnist Bill Wyman, who was moving to Chicago. Sure enough they called and I got the gig, a weekly column that paid fairly well. One problem was that I lived in SF, not Berkeley or Oakland, so I’d have a hard time keeping up with the local music scene, which was dominated by Pebbles, MC Hammer and Tony Toni Tone. But there was a 16-year-old kid named Doyle Bramhall II making some noise in a band called Texas, and the Gilman Street punk scene was always worth 10 inches of space whenever I went there, so I was able to at least give the appearance of being in touch.

But the bulk of the column, called “Don’t You Start Me Talkin’,” as I was finally able to correct the “Talking” mistake. was retyped bits from my Austin version. Before the Internet you could get away with shit like that. Nobody in Berkeley had even heard of the Austin Chronicle, so there was little chance of someone reading that stuff for a second time. It was all fresh to them.

I did that column for about five months, then was rescued by a beautiful law school student in Chicago who was so moved by my final AC column, the one where I admitted to having a problem with meth, that she also tracked me down. We wrote letters back and forth and fell in love. Then, like Wyman, I was on my way to Chicago in Nov. 1988. I pitched a story on Ministry to Spin and Warner Brothers paid for the whole trip.

One thing about the East Bay Express that I should say was that it was so unlike the Chron, as far as office atmosphere. Every day for lunch, the whole staff would go upstairs and prepare a feast for all. They had a kitchen/ dining room and you’d sit at this table and everybody would be passing around bowls of, like, garbanzo beans and scalloped potatoes and cobb salad. It was all healthy stuff and it made me a little uneasy, this communal setup, so I usually slinked away when it was suppertime. All I ever ate in SF was pizza and those big burritos that they used to only have up there, but now they’re everywhere, with Chipotle and Freebirds.

The Divine Miss C

the Austin High product now living in Manhattan isn’t a bigger star. Besides world class talent, she’s got her own sound and look and songs like “Hold Of the Night,” “Raincloud” and “Race Car” you leave the venue humming. There were times, as on the breathy “Hot Shot,” when Choffel and her combo seemed too good for the room.

But the sight of a handful of folks in the good seats leaving at the hour mark attested to the one down side of Choffel’s Brazillian-tanned pop songs. They tend to sound the same as the night wears on. Having her old sidekick Laura Scarborough come up on accordion here and there, added a strolling sidewalk cafe air. Plus, it was a great surprise when Ephraim Owens of the Mumford Horns sat in on trumpet on “Stumble.” But an hour and 40 minutes is just too long to see any act that has been on “The Voice,” even one with the grace of going out on a Bob Marley song.

Choffel played every track from her sensationally ignored 2011 album “Steady Eye Shaky Bow,” did a couple of passable new songs solo electric and dragged out blind audition number “Landslide” for those who hadn’t yet chosen Team Sealy. But the set could’ve used  a rocker or another cool cover (Is “To Sir With Love” too much to ask?) The slinky nova mood set early with the marvelous “So the Story Goes” needed a restart or two. Choffel’s trio has got down the dynamics within a song, but the sequence, which ended all weird with “Archer,” lacked a knockout punch. There was a standing ovation at the end of this quite lovely evening of South Americana, but the set should’ve closed with “Landslide,” about half an hour earlier.

But there’s no shame in serving up too much of a good thing. And when the contract says to play ’til 10, well…