Hey, it's Bob Picket. We are on our way to the legendary Broken Spoken. Come on, let's get out of the truck and head inside.
You're proud of it.
Come on, it's going side. Get ready for another tale from the Broken Spoke. Hey it's Bob Pikett. Hope you're enjoying our conversation with Bob Livingston tells Broken Spoke. Now let's uh, let's get to the final part of the conversation talking about the historic album Viva Terry Lingua more from the Broken Spoke with Monty Warden, myself, Bob Pickett and the legendary Bob Levingston. Do you ever go back and listen to Viva Terry Lingua. You probably listened to it a lot differently than we do.
I know, right, yeah, because I listened and I hear myself and I go, God, what a funky tone that is? Oh my god. But I mean I do listen to it, not if I can. I mean, I'm not going to put it on, but it has come across, you know, and and I like, you know, London Homestick Blues is such an exciting, you know song and at the end, you know what happened with that song. We didn't know it really. We rehearsed it a couple of times, but when we played it, the place went crazy, and you know,
and it there was apparently a clam or whatever. But our engineer Sundance Marty Leonard came running in with with Michael Brobskin said, the tape broke. We got to do it again. And so what you hear on the record is the second time through, and that's when Gary says, I got to put myself back in that place because it was so crazy, you know. Uh and uh by that time, everybody kind of knew the song and the crowd was singing along from the first chorus.
So is that so was that two takes spliced together?
The only thing that was spliced together was the end when the crowd goes absolutely berserk the first time through, the second time through, they didn't go that crazy for some reason. But we we spliced it right three the women you ever same badam bomb. That's a that's a splice. And then the crowd ray screams for ten minutes and then we go back into I Want to go Home.
And you know, and that's real, that's actual razor cutting take people to.
Go out to Lucenbach though, to even find Lukenbach back.
Hondo Crouch he was like his surrogate father. He met Hondo and he was just like he just imagined he wanted to be like Hondo. He would he wanted to have crows feet like Hondo. He lay in his in his swimming pool, you know, and okill squinting at the sun, and I said, what do you doing. I'm trying to get crows feet like Hondo.
Have you seen that the Hondo and Jerry Jeff statue.
I think, yeah, yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, it's amazing.
I mean it's just like you know you're doing it and you know it's a good record or it's you know, a record's good enough to tour for a whole year or something, and then you and then like I mean, I think of Beaver to Lingua. That is like the one of those major trunks of a tree, because you look at all the branches that went out from Beaver to Lingua. It is it's you know, danger created an entire genre.
Well you know I didn't, I did not say this, but I'll quote it. Hector Saldonia that has this great exhibit at the Whittliff Collection in San Marcos. I urge everybody to go see it, he said. Forget Willie, forget Whalen. Viva tre Lingual was the first Texas outlaw country album. That's why I believe that. Yeah, and it was before those guys got town.
Anyway, you sang right, and it's hard to refute that. Yeah, you know, and then you just look back and you go, that's just a piece of damn history. And then you know when you talk to somebody like you, that it was such an integral part of that record. And then you look back fifty years later and you know, of course y'all had no idea who you're happy to be making a record, you having to have a.
Gig, you know, I can't believe it's fifty And again, that's exactly I've said this many times. That's the record that made me want to.
And you think how many guitars that album sold to kids wanting to learn GC and D and see if they can write a song.
Well, you're like a real estatee. How many people did? You're the reason for Austin's growth, right, Really music, you know.
And a lot of people have said that you know when we did the fiftieth We did the fiftieth anniversary at Luke and bach I was in the band. Craig hillis Herbsteiner. But then they had Chris Gage and Steve Samuel on the drums and that guy from the Texas Music Brendan Anthony. Yeah, he's he's great pick he's a great picker. He and a few people. So it's a lot of fun. But why was I telling you? What were you? What were you saying right.
Talking about the fiftieth album? How much you've influenced everybody?
Well, it's just that we did the the Oh yeah, so they decided who could who could sing what? And of all, you know the songs and can play these songs, and so so Dennis Quaid is coming and and we said okay, because I had met him a couple of times. Maybe but he so he Dennis Quaid shows up and he's going to sing London Homesick Blues because Gary Nuns not there. Gary Nuns was not invited to this thing.
That's a whole other, you know, story episode, and so he's so Gary's not there, So who else is gonna sing London Homesick Blues? But Gary Nunn, I could never figure that out. But Dennis Quaid is society. He's gonna sing it. And what Dennis says is when I was eighteen nineteen years old, I was going to high school in Houston, and viaver Tlingua came out and we all bought it. All my friends bought it. We learned every song, we all bought guitars. We'd sit around campfires and we'd
sing song after song. It was our sergeant Pepper.
Oh that's so great, that is cool, that.
Is so cool.
And and I I remember one of the one of the first gigs I picked. It was out at the pier, you know, and I was fourteen, and so this is, you know, I'm just can't believe I have a gig. You know, I feel like I'm so excited to have a gig. And this guy comes up and like, and when you picked at the pier, the uh, the fry cook Mike overrode the PA. So you're singing a song and then it's say number twenty seven, your fries already you know.
Yeah, I didn't care showsiness, you know.
So so I remember this guy came out and he goes, hey, man, play something off of Beaver to Lingua, and I went, well, I don't. I was fourteen, and goes well, I don't. I don't know anything. Oh, come on. And then he went to his car and got the cassette and he would read off song title, go what about this one?
What about?
I said? I said no, I said I know that album. I don't know well enough to play in front of people. I don't don't I want to, you know, I didn't want to insult the thing that's insult the music. And then and then it's like and I didn't see the opening, goes well I do, like, oh my god. And so the bass player was a little bit older than me, and I'm fourteen. He's like nineteen, so he's a seasoned vet, you know. And he goes, you can you can have it. You can sing anything you want off Viaver to Lingua.
It'll cost you fifty bucks a song, And that son of a bitch sang the whole record, didn't drop a lyric. He was drunkard and hell it was great, and he paid us fifty bucks.
It it was.
It was the highest pai gig I've ever had. That time I was paid not to play. He loved that that recommend so much him. And this was when it was eight years old that he could not believe a musician in Austin didn't know it backwards and forward.
Yeah, but there's only nine songs on that record, so he didn't have to you know. Yeah, if there were fourteen, it been a double album. I retired.
Yeah, you talk about this book that we've been waiting for. The book. I know you. You've been working on it for years. It's got to be a big book, especially with the stories.
Well, they made me cut it and cut it and cut it. It's a Texas tech Press and it's been sent. Uh, they they've got it. Now. They do a thing with peer readers. They send it to five or six people that might be in your genre that have written books or writers that kind of thing. And they asked for or comments and notes and you know, should we should we? And none of them made any one who said this is great put it out?
Not long enough?
Said you see. The thing is is it can can be too long with photographs, like right now I'm looking at photographs and uh that adds to it, and they just want a shorter book. Right now. It's about well, I don't know why.
But you know what also lends itself to volume two.
Well, like val, there's a lot of stuff taken out, but it's mine is is a you know, it's being on the road, it's it's uh. I did a lot of tours in foreign tours for the US State Department. I went to India and Pakistan and all over the Middle East and Africa and played and so a lot of that is in there too.
Good now in this book because just in just this conversation, did you talk about the actual technical or lack of technology aspect of recording. I think that's so important for younger pickers and musicians to know the best music is everybody sitting in the room picking at the same.
Time, exactly. I tell As a matter of fact, my editor encouraged you know, Andy Wilkinson, I don't anyways, great guy, a great songwriter. He is my editor, and he encouraged me to write about Lubbock bands in Lubbock if they had been recording or whatever, especially when I got in a studio. What was the scene like? So, I mean I explained Murphy's mood in my opinion, Jerry Jeff's what he's like. The songs we did. Herbsteiner was a great resource because he kept a journal all these years of
everything he ever did or got paid for on the show. Yeah, great cat now unbelievable.
I wanted to ask you because there's uh as a songwriter, a platinum record is a miracle. They're so hard to get and you're just blessed if you're ever part of anything that gets any type of heavy metal. But the most fabulous story I've ever heard of a record selling a million copies of something you've written is of course hold On.
Yeah by Lloyd Bank.
That's that's so great. Do you know the story?
No?
Would you tell it? Because the album went Warrior went to number one? Yeah right, please tell a story.
Well, it's a little dicey, but Ray Hubbard and I, Ray Wiley and I wrote a song called hold On for your Life and it was back in like maybe nineteen seventy six, and we wanted to He was trying to get one for the Gonzo record that we were making a new record, And so meanwhile we're on tour with Jerry Jeff. We go to LA and down I'm up in my room and Michael Brovski, the manager, calls down the bar and says, hey, man, you need to
come down here and listen to meet these people. And they were in a band called McKendree Spring and they were from Scotland and I can't remember the lead of the group. That they were looking for songs and I said, well, I you know this song that we just wrote, and I at the bar played the song and the guy went, oh, yeah, we do it, and Broski said, let's cut it. So they cut it, they recorded, and that's the last I hear of it.
Now soon after you picked it for him, did they cut it like right away?
Yeah, they were in they were in town in the student.
So they cut it in La.
Yeah.
Okay, so this is seventy seven, seventy eight, something like seventy.
It can't be later in seventy seven. Okay, it's seventy more like seventy six, and we may we cut the we cut our thing. It doesn't come out yet. But I'm out on the road with the James the Lost Consol band had our own albums. We were on MCA in Capital and so we would have a juggle around on what we're going to do. So meanwhile, flash forward twenty years twenty five years and the phone rings in my office here in Austin, and this woman says, are
you Bob Livingston? Yes? Do you have a publishing company called doctor Livingston? I presume music. That's the name of my publishing country. He said, yees still are back then? Yeah? Back then? Still?
Okay?
Right? And did you write a song called hold On? With Ray Hubbard? And I go, well, yeah, what's this all about? And so I'll just add on my perception
of what the way I thought it happened. So there was this rap artist named Lloyd Banks and his brother and they're in New York and they're walking down some dusty street in New York and they duck into a discount record store and they're looking through it and they come upon this record by McKendree Spring and it's called Going to the Country or something like that, and they thought cool cover, and they bought it with the two or three others and they take it home and they
listen to the first track, which is hold On, and they listened to that cool groove. Let's sample it, right, So they sample and it becomes the bed of this song that they're writing, and the lyrics are absolutely filthy and I wish I could tell them to you, but I think someone come get me. But needless to say, it was somehow a big hit, and and Ray and I each had a quarter of the song, and then the two brothers had a quarter of the song. And the first quarter it sold a million, two hundred thousand.
And it's double platinum now if I'm not mistaken.
No, I really don't know that, but I think maybe.
I think on R I A A it's CERTIFI. So you're got some nice checks off of this big, big check, right, you know. And that's his whole thing is like the Angels or God goes. You know what, what the hell I'm gonna give Bob and Ray Wyler platinum record this year. Oh and the number one album, Warrior was the number one album.
You know. I don't know the song might have been, but uh yeah, Warrior, and it had all this crazy stuff, but that song was on the record. And uh, I call Michael Corcoran up, and I I said, because hay me, once in a while, i'd have a story for him or whatever. And so I call him up and rest in peace, Michael Corkoran, and I said, man, I got a story and I tell him his story. He goes, you're right, that's a great story. So he uh has
a photographer. We meet him in the hip hop record store in East Austin and they had this big display of Lloyd Banks, larger than life, like seven feet tall, and he's holding all this money and they give us all this what they call warrior money. And so we have the warrior money and we're flashing around, they're taking pictures, and that ended up on the cover of the Austin American Statesman. The day that Lance Copeland Lance what's his name,
the writer the bike rider Armstrong, Lance Armstrong. The day that that guy won the we were above him in the front page France.
And the byeline was keep Austin Weird.
Well, the byline was cosmic Cowboys hop on hip Hop gravy Train. And he told the whole story.
That when I when I heard that story, I think it was somebody in Nashville told me the story, and it's like, this is the greatest story of how somebody sells a million records. And I was like, that's fantastic.
Livingston's Saturday Night Buffett not about me, but he told me.
He says, how does Lidby. Since Saturday he has two Livingston songs, Livingston's gone to Texas and Livingston Saturday Night. I think Livingston might be a town. But Livingston's going to texa guy named Livingston. And he told me it's not about you. It's about this guy named Lannie Feel. And I don't know if you remember Lanny Fiach from Lubbook. He's a he's a musician, artist and he was friends with Buffett. He said, it's about Lanny Field. But I liked your name better.
So well, that's a compliment just to go back, just because it's so cool. So your publishing company is Doctor Levyson, I presumed.
Yeah, that's so cool. That's so cool.
Oh man, man, what.
We're gonna have to do about four of these.
When the book comes out. Let's do another one.
You know, I'll be so wild. And you know, I'm sure your publishers like four steps ahead of me, because that's not really any heavy lifting. But man, you got to do some readings, man, Yeah, yeah, they were going to Oh be fantastic.
I wish I could, you know, I have it here, I could get to it. I could read you the first chapter three paragraphs you want me to do that. Yes, yes, please, you need to be great. Nah no, yes, yes, of course. Okay, here's the first little chapter, the first, but not the last. Nineteen seventy two. He charged me, snarling and spitting and cussing and slobbering. I'd already hit him a few times, and it smashed him into my pickup door like a
rag doll. We wrestled around to the sideyard asses and elbows, all dusty and bleeding, our bodies scraping on the limestone rocks, poking like dull knives out of the hard hill country ground. I hit him hard with an almost virgin fist, and he fell back for a few moments, then came after me again. He whacked me a good one over my
left ear, the one that still rings. Some primal memory took over and I actually got into a three point stance, the one my high school football coach, Freddie Acres drilled into me at Lobocai. I threw my glasses off and crouched. Here he comes. I sprang up hard, my fist together under my chin, elbows out, a perfect battering ram up and out, smashing my forehead just under his chin. It's a wonder I didn't take his head off. I tried. He fell back in a heap, and I was on him.
He got the better of me for a while, but I ended up on top in his face. Everything I grabbed was sweaty, slippery and greasy, and I couldn't get any traction. I tried to pull his hair out from the roots, but it just slipped through my fingers. No matter how hard I tried to do real damage and rip his ears off or his eyes out, I couldn't get a hold of anything, and my efforts were for nothing. Then, with my hands around his throat and looking into his eyes,
I saw a fantastic sight. He was grinning like a gargyle and laughing through the spit and blood, his breath, reeking whiskey and beer. He was loving this. He wasn't taking it seriously at all. I was beating the crap out of him and he was laughing. It was surreal and demonic in a funny sort of way. I'd only had one other fight in my life, with Greg Cobb in the fifth grade, and here I was about to strangle Jerry Jeff Walker, and the day had started out so promising.
I cannot wait to read the book, man.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, and then the second I'll just read the the second. So that's the end of the first chapter. But then the second chapter. It's called Indian Summer. It felt as though there were two suns in the yellow afternoon sky. The air was so hot. I was in a crouch trying to find some coolness. Load to the ground. As I scuddered along the filthy, dusty road towards the railway
station in South India. I was fighting to breathe see all of a sudden boom and so I go back and forth in time, trying to make it make sense.
You know, beautiful man, man, thank you. Will you come back from the book and oh.
Yeah, or anything anytime you want to hawk anything.
It's just I don't have anything to hawk, but I could tell let me just let me hawk this one.
Give your website, people can con okay.
So my website is Bob Livingston music dot com. Bob Livingston music dot com. I'm on Facebook. I got a couple of different Facebook pages.
You know, it's so cool. We were doing something at the Saxon I think something being mind put together. I don't know what it was.
Yeah, is that what it was? Yeah?
Yeah, And and Brooks was there, our twenty year old and he's just nonplus and he's grown up in the music business, and it's like he didn't want to go to anything. It's like, you know, what's the green room food situation? You know that you can entice them with it they have cool ice.
Cream or something, you know.
And so I was like, I said, now, I know, you're really dick it this. This is really cool. You're like all right? And then he was we were done, and he had this look on it, and I had, like, really I sung some great songs and brought down the house and all this, and Brooks has had this look on his face and that was fantastic, Daddy, that was awesome. I said, well, I'm so glad you came. He goes, who the hell was that? Bob Livingston? Guy, Boy, he kicked your ass, that's.
The truth, that's and he.
Doesn't like anything anybody. And just Bob just killed him, I mean killed him. He went and got all all the all the records. It's so cool.
That's great. Yeah, so this is hard, and both of your hearts bless you.
Well, you know what I mean. You're so part of the fabric of our DNA in our life. I mean, yeah, that's why we do the stuff we do because of you.
I mean, really, every time somebody plugs a guitar into an amp in Austin, whether they know it or not, they owe a debt of gratitude to Bob Livingston. And no, that's true, that's absolutely true, and just people need to know that.
Bob Livingston Teals and Broken Spoke. More tales come up, and again, get the book when it comes out in a few months.
Tales from the Broken Spoke is recorded live but The Broken Spoke in Austin, Texas, hosted by Country radio Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Pickett and Monty Warden, recorded mixed down and produced by Mike Rivera