To Sir Doug With Love

Since the trio has enough originals in our sets that I feel I can hold my head up, we've started adding cover material that puts our little combo in some kind of context. As a few of you noticed, we're covering the Sir Douglas Quintet's two biggest hits, "She's About A Mover" and "Mendocino".

Doug Sahm is definitely one of my patron saints. He refused to hold still long enough to be classified, and when he failed, he did so with such style that his adventures were generally worth the flawed results.

He was a child steel guitar whiz born in 1941, grew up in San Antonio, made his first record at age 11 (on the Sarg label, for whom Floyd Tillman also cut, played steel later that year on the show that turned out to be Hank Williams' last, and as a teenager was a player on the Westwide of san Antonio's very interracial R&B scene. He was a mainstay. Norton did an anthology of his early stuff. He'd revisit the style until his death.



In 1965, producer Huey Meaux decided he needed his own Beatles, and reached out to Doug. With organist Augie Meyers in tow, the Sir Douglas Quintet -- named to seem British -- was formed, and the immutable "She's About A Mover" was cut.


Things were going okay until Doug got clipped for pot in Corpus Christi, and he took off for Northern California. He formed an experiemental jazz/blues/etc band featuring brilliant but ultimately doomed pianist Wayne Talbert, which resulted in the flawed but fascinating Honkey Blues album in 1968. Word: all that bullshit Gram Parsons jawed about cosmic music, Doug really had happening. Like Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills before him, Doug was Unified Field Theory. And his music was much better than Gram's. Doug said, "I’m a part of Willie Nelson’s world and at the same time I’m a part of the Grateful Dead’s. I don’t ever stay in one bag."



His career went however, until 1990 when he formed the Texas Tornados, basically the SDQ augmented by Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimmenez, with both of whom he had recorded a bit by then.



About two weeks before his death in 1999, I saw what was his last show in the LA area, at the City of Industry Equestrian Center. Freddy was out of the band at that point, and Little Joe -- who opened the show (!) -- took his place, revealing his amazing latent R&B ballad singing chops. Doug hardly played guitar. Later I found out that his fingertips had been tingling for weeks, and the inevitable heart attack got him. A month later, Curtis Mayfield returned to heaven. Two of my biggest, greatest heroes, snatched.

I met Doug a couple of times -- Ray Campi introduced us. So -- as I had once with Curtis -- I got to tell him how much his music means to me. Even better with Doug cuz I got to tell him face to face. He sang "Cowboy Peyton Place" to me in the kitchen at Jack's Sugar Shack. Very, very cool.

Doug Sahm understood that fiddles and Vox organs and accordions and saxophones were already mingling, and he put everything together in the most joyous, fraternal way. He was a spiritual godfather to those of us who love music for its own sake.