The book, Music River of Life, by Tabby Crabb is currently in production. Tabby has decided to come clean about many of the people and characters he interfaced with over time. He realizes that this will involve a soul searching and transformational rendering of the truth, at least as he saw it while in the company and often the employ of Mickey Gilley, Johnny Lee, The Urban Cowboy Band, Keith Urban, Hank Cochran, The Judds, David Allan Coe, Bronson Herrmuth, Sam Neely, and many others. Tabby says, "Many of these people are not what they seem. It's taken a lot of soul searching to finally break the Code of the Road. I want this, my side of the story to be told. I think people deserve to know. I want every aspiring musician and potential recording artist to read this book and learn from it. It will be a roadmap to success if you dare follow it." Music, River of Life By Tabby Crabb Being in the recording studio was the dream for musicians like me who came out of nothing in the 1960s, wanting to play music all the time and reach a wider audience. But being in the studio in those days was expensive and mostly only the well heeled owned them. Multi-tracking was virtually non existant and in the small joints like Ben Parsons Studio in Columbus, Georgia, with its' two track Scully deck and a home made board, it was hard to get the sounds you were looking for and had to take what you could get. The engineers didn't want to hear the opinions of musicians and since time was so expensive you usually just kept your mouth shut and took what you could get in three hours which was the standard session booking in those days. For years early on my pal from my hometown, Billy Tye, and I had various bands from duos with just Billy and me up to a full band during high school. This was a ton of fun and I will always love making music with Billy perhaps more than the rest but he decided to grow up and went to pharmacy school. Maybe the best band I was in in the sixties, The Acoustics, never saw the inside of a recording studio either. The Strange Bedfellows that I joined later after The Acoustics broke up had a national recording contract but the label brass, Shelby Singleton, flew Doodle Faulk, our lead singer, out to LA to cut with some studio guys, so it really didn't feel like we were a recording band, even with the record in your hands. During my tenure with the bedfellows, as everybody liked to call us, our manager booked us dates as The Sir Douglas Quintet and The Boxx Tops. I don't know how he got away with it but we went along with it. Once we were Billy Joe Royal's back up band. I loved Billy Joe and I'll never get tired of hearing Down In The Boondocks. Anyway, he was always in financial trouble and we later heard from The Bushmen, another of his bands, he was taking a deposit on gigs and not letting us know and then taking a cut out of the cash we got for playing each night. We even did a benefit for him at Leon Dumas Sugar Shack in Lagrange, Georgia to help pay his phone bills before we found out. The once friendly relationship with him chilled after that. Welcome to the music business!!! So, I dropped out of the bedfellows band and went back to college and became the first college grad in the Crabb family since the American civil war. I wanted to do that for my daddy. Then two years later he was dead. Killed in a plane crash with mystereous circumstances in Alabama. So much for the family. My oldest boy was born during my days with the bedfellows and my youngest just a few days before daddy was killed. Everything just sort of went to hell after daddy died. My children's mother started getting involved in something called the inner peace movement. I was still in a state of shock over loosing my daddy in such a violent way and let her talk me into moving out of the house so she could continue her involvements unfettered by an unelightened husband. We divorced, or more to the point, she divorced me driving the second stake into my heart in less than a year. At a total loss for direction, I had stopped playing music professionally for almost two years and worked for a company that her daddy owned, I couldn't continue there. I decided to go to New Orleans with Sandy Dimon, a singer from Columbus, Georgia who's claim to fame at that point had been her year as a member of Up With People. I wanted to try to break back into playing music and thus joined the New Orleans local of the union, The American Federation of Musicians. A new friend, also named Gene Autry (no relation), a mate on a tug in Houma, LA, helped me get 3rd class seaman's papers so I could get work on his boat to make $45 a day when I needed to. It was tough duty but I carried my fiddle onboard and would sit in the wheelhouse with the captain and saw away on some new Cajun music I was being exposed to. The Captain's name, Horace Brousard. . In New Orleans; The Wrong Place Saloon on Rampart Street attracted folk musicians, poets, photographers and writers from around the country in 1971. Sandy and I became regulars there along with Steve Hill, Leather, Tirk Wilder, the aforementioned Eugene Autry, Charlie Blue, Larry Lucas and a host of other talented singers, writers and musicians. It was the best of times and the worst of times. We were working for tips at The Wrong Place so Sandy Dimon, Steve Hill, Bob Webb and I formed a pseudo bluegrass band called Swamp Grass and we went to South Vietnam as a USO show. That itself was an incredible experience and I'm better off for doing it. Having never served in the military it gave me a better idea about the world that I would have never seen if I hadn't persued this path. Sandy had been with the USO prior so she knew the routine and we were contracted to be the final show to travel to southeast Asia, but still no recording to speak of with the exception of one unreleased session with producer, Traci Borgess, at his studio there in the Big Easy. After New Orleans fizzled out we said goodbye to our friends at The Wrong Place. I moved to Columbus, Georgia to live in a house behind Sandy Dimon's daddy, Hobo Dimon's place. Hobo was an old commodities trader with a highly developed taste for whiskey, black eyed peas and hoppinjohn made from tomatoes, onions and peppers soaked in vinegar. Those were great days and we grew a garden and took some time off but when I got a call from a musician I knew in Texas looking for a bass player I drove to Houston where I eventually met up with two guys, Paul and Ruckles. It was 1973. In Texas, the music scene was exploding. Willie and Waylon were going to Luchenbach, Texas and in Houston, The Texas Opry House with B.W. Stevenson and Gilley's in Pasadena were giving Texas music a real audience hungry for the sounds of the outlaw country singers and bands. More on Gilley's later but the independent band scene in Houston was fantastic. There was a saying in Houston, If you can't make it in Houston, you can't make it anywhere. And so I started making good money again almost as much as with the bedfellows but it had taken five years to get going again after dropping out and going to college. The college degree had yet to prove its' worth. In those days, Houston truly was a musical wonderland. There were bands and bars everywhere. Texas oil money was flowing like the oil in the wells and it wasn't too long before the trio of Paul, Ruckles and Tabby expanded into a five piece band called Medicine Wheel playing all the big clubs with a huge following and finally we had a recording contract with SJC Records cutting an album in Dallas for a man named Stan Corbitt who owned the label. Stan was actually in the oil business, and seemed to be rolling in money. He became our executive producer which in show business lingo means the guy who puts up the funds in return for ownership in the project. My pedal steel playing hadn't developed yet so we hired Larry White to come in and play steel on the album. Larry came in to set up and brought out a huge chunk something that looked like tar and set it on fire with a small propane torch. I later found out it was opium filling the studio with smoke. It was my only experience with opium and I don't remember much about the recording for a couple days. This was sometime in 1973. A few days later when the studio cleared out, I was cutting my last fiddle track overdubs and Paul and Ruckles were sitting in the parking lot in the band truck listening to a Dallas radio program we had taped earlier that day. I was in the tracking room with the headphones on and when the song ran out the tape just kept rolling until it flapped off the end of the roll. I tried to find the engineer and producer in the control room and they were rolling around on the control room floor having a fist fight. They didn't even know why they were fighting. It was a mistake to have two producers on the project. I had tried to convince them that we could do it ourselves. Nobody seemed to be able to get it right and none of us knew what we were doing. Then our executive producer got indited for selling non existant two oil in the international market. It seems those huge tanks were actually empty. I later heard on the news he had left the country, Brazil, I think it was. Another seeming dead end. But Paul had a connection with Jack Craw so we sent the tapes out and those tracks from the Dallas sessions through Jack, caught the attention of Joe Johnson in Nashville. Joe Johnson had been Gene Autry's manager and bought Four Star Music from Gene. He had a huge building right on Music Row across from The Universal Tower in the early 70s. It was fantastic to think that it all started with a singing cowboy, my favorite, Gene Autry. So, to me, it was all worth it just to be associated in a small way with Joe, Jack and Gene. I'm still in awe of who you get to meet and sometimes even get to know and become friendly with all because of music. I read once that music was the answer to a question that is never asked. It's taken me a long time to understand what Chang Tzu meant when he wrote it but I think I finally get it. I guess you could say that we basically got a free trip to Nashville where we recut five of the songs at Ray Steven's Sound Lab and signed over the publishing on them to Four Star Music. That was about the extent of it. Later in the year before our record came out, I heard Joe Johnson and Jerry Lee Lewis were discovered by the law trying to roll the dead body of a musician friend into a dumpster late one night. The man had fallen from the high balcony into the atrium area of the Four Star Building earlier that night and in a drunken panic they were trying to take care of the body themselves. It was a real shame. Joe was a great human being. I never lost contact with him over the years in Nashville and had a late night drink with him many times at The Tavern on the Row there on 16th Avenue in the 80s but this single event started the ball rolling down hill for him and he had to sell out and retire. A true gentleman, it was a great honor to have worked with him even though in the end what I gained was more experience dealing with defeat. Oddly, I'd have a brush with Jerry Lee Lewis many years later. So still, there was nothing really to show for all those years and I came back home to Georgia again. It was 1975 and Jimmy Carter was running for President from my home county. My mother helped me buy a new car, a Chevy Malibu station wagon with room for all my music gear. We bought it from the man we had bought all our cars from, Son Jones. A rosy faced man I had known since I was a kid. I wouldn't have gotten one from anyone else and always trusted him. I always just told Mr. Jones what I needed and he would tell me which one to buy. Made it easy. I guess that's why I always came back home. I appreciate the feeling of continuity. Of having relationships that endure. I'd been playing a lot and had gotten pretty good at several instruments and I was carrying a fiddle or two, several electric and acoustic guitars, a dobro, a five string banjo and a pedal steel.. While Medicine Wheel was recording in Dallas, steel player Larry White took me over to the MSA Steel Guitar factory and introduced me to Maurice Anderson who was the M in MSA. Maurice sponsored Larry and Larry was able to convince Maurice that he should sponsor me too and so they gave me a beautiful single neck 12 string with nine floor pedals and five knee levers. It was set up with Maurice's so called Universal tuning. It was a fantastic guitar. I was able to do things on it that no other guitar or tuning would offer but it was a trade off. I missed the sound of my little Sho Bud Pro but I had already sold it. My children moved to Massachustetts with their mother where she was either starting or joining a new age commune depending, on who I talked to. So, I loaded my new 1976 Chevy wagon with my guitars, pedal steel, banjo, fiddle, a couple pairs of jeans, some old cowboy boots, three t-shirts and my daddy's old sweater. I had no idea how cold it would be in New England in the winter and no idea that I would end up homeless and sleeping in an abandoned building in Amherst at night. I would have gone anyway. I missed my boys so bad I ached all the time. Mulky McMichael from my hometown helped me put some promo material together. Mulky is a photographic genius and these pictures really helped me get a leg up. A brocuhre he put together for me actually got me in to see the head of Black Swan Records. Mitchell Fox who sent me over to The Lone Star Cafe many years later he had remembered that brochure so well. I'll have to remember to thank Mulky again next time I see him. Amherst was a brave new world to steal a phrase from Aldous Huxley. The December landscape was covered with snow and the population with heavy layers of wool and canvas. Everyone on the street looked down at the sidewalk as they passed. At first I thought them unfriendly but later learned they were watching for dangerous patches of ice on the sidewalk after having my feet slide away a few times. I spent my first few nights sleeping in my new station wagon behind a large house near the university. Tom Clarke, a local carpenter, showed me how to crawl under an old building and out through a hole in the floor into what had been the examining room of a doctor's office. I slept on the exam table at night under a child's quilt that my oldest boy had given me. Either my chest was freezing or my feet. I absolutely could not get warm. After a few months of freezing and starving hell in Amherst I decided to venture into The Fretted Instrument Workshop where the owner gave me $800 for a rare Gibson five string banjo that I owned and had been playing for a few years, a Gibson Mastertone RB-4, ball bearing that I bought off Roger Sprung, a noted banjo player from NYC. The Fretted Instrument Workshop later sold it for thousands but the $800 enabled me to move into a motel and run some ads in the local papers letting people know a genuine southern pedal steel playing, guitar slinging, fiddle shredding picker was around and I started getting some calls and went to work, rented a room in the local piano tuners house and met Andy May who lived across the road and was a heck of a mandolin player. The snow was finally melting and it was spring, 1976 and Mr. Carter was our new president. Andy and I partnered up and barnstormed New England for a while playing every music gig offered to us from concerts opening for Merle Haggard to playing two weddings and a contra dance in a day and working for the New Hampshire schools as their music program. I've always loved Andy and appreciate the contribution to my life in New England but even more significant was meeting a kindred spirit, Joe Delano. After I sold the banjo and started making a few bucks I was able to actually buy breakfast every morning at the coffee shop in downtown Amherst around the corner from the university. It was fate that had Joe sit at the counter next to me one day and fate that got us to talking. Joe ran a leather shop around the corner and had started a ranch out in the hills where he trained quarter horses. Like me, he was wearing beat up cowboy boots and old jeans. We became friends. He introduced me to his brother Chick, a tough talking ex NYC cop who was part owner of a restaurant there bearing their family name, Delano's on Main Street. Joe talked Chick into giving me free sandwiches in exchange for setting up and playing on Thursday nights at the restaurant. They built me a special stage and Thursdays became Delano's biggest night for awhile, I became famous with the college kids at the university and I was in sandwiches for life. I will always be grateful to both Joe and Chick Delano, two of the best people I met along the road. One day Andy and I were setting up for an audition at a club in Northampton, MA. Two women were sitting at the bar and one of them struck up a conversation with me after our audition set (we got the job) and invited us to come by the Renaissance Community recording studio in Turners Falls. Andy didn't want to have anything to do with the community. For some reason they had some sort of bad rap in the area but that didnt't bother me. I liked bikes, tatoos, pretty hippie girls and most of all I liked recording studios. If these girls could get me into one I wanted to do it but when I ran this by my new friend Joe Delano he didn't want any part of it either. I went anyway. The girls, Heidi and Margie, worked at the community's restaurant, The Noble Feast, and they had suggested to me that I come by there when I got to Turner's Falls. I felt so at home from the moment I walked in. These were wonderful people and I was actually shocked that my new friends in Amherst couldn't give it a chance. They fixed me a nice plate of beans, rice and salad and sent for someone from the studio to come over. Built in the old Turner's Falls opera house, this studio was really impressive and the engineer, a perfect ray of light named Jim Skiathitis welcomed me into the control room which was filled with about thirty or so members of the commune assembled to see what this southern music man was all about. Though I didn't know it at the time, the leader, the charasmatic Michael Rapunzel, was present to observe this stranger. I borrowed a guitar from a man named Tater, who was soon to become a good friend, and proceeded to play one of my original songs. When I got done, Michael said, You better have written that song! Believe it or not, I had written it while laying on the floor unconscious after being slain in the spirit at a Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship Revival in my hometown. I believed then and now that the Holy Spirit had actually given me the song as an answer to a yet unasked question and so they welcomed me and gave me all the free studio time I wanted with the best musician's the community had to offer; Tater, Peter Hackel and the other members of the Spirit In Flesh band. It was an incredible opportunity and to be surrounded by such loving and fair people was an additional blessing. It had taken nearly ten years to get to this point. Thus started my recording career. It was 1976 and from then to late in 1979 I played in bands around New England and recorded some 30 songs with my friends at the community. I'm fortunate that I have ten of the tracks preserved today and available on the cd, Coming Of Age Express. Michael sent them to me before he passed away in Woodstock, NY a couple of years ago. I couldn't miss him more if he was my natural brother. Just to clear things up, I was born in the U.S. Navy hospital onboard Patuxent River Naval Air Station in 1945 at the end of WW2. At age 6 weeks I was moved by train to my hometown, Americus, Georgia, where my daddy was born, raised and went to war from. After being a young pilot in the U.S. Naval Air Transport Service during World War II, he brought his wife and young son home to pick up the pieces of his life after the big war that changed the lives of everyone in America. The longer I live the more I appreciate being raised by the people of that generation. Thankfully, I was raised in a small community where you got a chance to know a large part of the population. All the grown ups watched out for all the children. It was really amazing. Kids could run and play over many square miles and you were safe. I'll always be grateful that I was brought up during those times. That strong, character building raising saved me many times during my years on the road, going from town to town, band to band, recording project to recording project. In 1979 things were going along pretty smoothly for me. My oldest boy was living with me in Amherst and my college diploma finally paid off. I was teaching in the local Junior High School by now and worked hard at being a popular local musician plus recording at every opportunity at the Renaissance Community recording studio, teaching a folk music course at The University of Massachusetts and playing with a popular regional band, Timberlake. My boy's mom had remarried and started having more kids and she and her new husband moved to Detroit. Ironic when you learn the reason, this created a major hardship for me. At the end of the fifth grade, she demanded the boy fly to Detroit to live and since I had no legal rights I had to let him go. I hadn't lost him once. It was now twice. Things went from bad to worse in a matter of hours after I put him on the plane in Hartford. I'd lost my will to endure the hardship. I moved to Amherst to be near both my children and survived and grew because of my ability to touch people with music helping to create a music scene in that happy valley. I approached it as though I would be there forever and made friends and worked to establish roots in the community, real friends like back home in Georgia, then beyond my control, they moved away and I was left alone. Later, I would attempt to move to Detroit myself and tried to get a job playing piano with Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band but even though they liked me and seemed to admire my ability there was no opening in the band so I took a chance and flew to Houston where another friend from the Texas Opry House days had called and told me that he had pitched one of my original songs to, Johnny Lee, who wanted to do it in a new movie they were just setting up to shoot in Pasadena and Houston - Urban Cowby - and they all liked it and wanted to meet me. Many times in my life as a musician sometimes entertainer, I would experience those moments that I would describe as welcome to the music business moments though I didn't actually learn the phrase until sometime in the 1980s when Jimmy Key from Nashville was my agent. So, in mid 1979, I put my belongings in Joe Delano's barn and boarded a flight to Houston. My friend picked me up at the Houston Intercontinental Airport and we drove around, getting something to eat, he took me to a boot shop and bought me a new pair of real cowboy boots. Several years in New England had taken its toll on my traditional cowboy footwear; by now I was wearing a pair of Frye boots and Paul, who was doing well, was always a very generous person so I didn't think much of it. After two days of just doing absolutely nothing but riding around getting a detailed tour of the Houston expressway, having lunch and dinner in the best Houston steak houses and buying boots, guitars and cowboy hats I finally asked Paul why we hadn't gone out to Gilley's Recording Studio to meet the guys and see what they were doing with my song. My heart sunk into the bottom of my new boots when he admitted to me that he had gotten carried away and what really had transpired was that Johnny Lee had said that he liked the song and wanted to meet me. That was all, nothing about it being in the sound track of the movie or anything like that. He was very embarrassed about it knowing that I had actually quit my school teaching job to a big send off by the students and faculty alike wishing me luck for the future knowing that first and foremost I was a musician before anything else. We were driving across the Houston ship channel bridge at the time. I wanted to grab him by the neck and dive off the bridge killing both of us but instead I asked him if we could at least go to the studio and see it all and meet Johnny Lee. Welcome to the music business. First show business rule: Never get your hopes up until something is already in the past and then it still might not be true! Seems like I remember my grandmother likening it to something about chickens and it all made dreadful sense to me during that pivotal moment riding across the Houston ship chennel bridge. Gilley's Recording Studio was buzzing with dozens of people when we got there. The studio was situated tucked into the Spencer Highway side of Gilley's Club. The years earlier in Houston playing country rock never brought me to Pasadena, or Stinkadena as the locals called it due to the high content of crude oil refineries and I didn't know much about it. Everyone I met was super nice. I was amazed. After the rough start with Paul, somehow I expected them to be arrogant and haughty but it was nothing like that. Even Mickey Gilley himself welcomed me to the studio and they all knew Paul because I think he had helped several of them with mortgage money at one time or another. Everyone liked him which was a plus and I just blended into the background and started looking around. Kenny Fulton, a young overall wearing singer was especially friendly and started showing me around. I admired his ability to spit thick tobacco juice between his front teeth. The side door to Gilley's Club was right behind the studio. Insiders knew to go out the back door of the studio and walk ten feet to a heavy metal door that opened into the dark side of the five acre nightclub. Once inside you didnt even know the door was there. Gilley's Club was HUGE. Film crews were setting lights around the club and there was about a hundred cast members milling around doing nothing. Everybody knew Kenny. He was very popular. I later learned what a fine entertainer and good friend he was to become but I had only known him for about an hour when we walked out the front door of Gilley's Club into the parking lot. The parking lot was huge, dusty swirls moving in the wind. We walked away from the club and stopped. I'd been telling Kenny my sad tale and he brought me outside and pointed to a big sign - EXTRAS WANTED - They were looking for 400 extras for the duration of the filming. The men must look like cowboys, later to be called urban cowboys. They were describing me. I went looking for Paul. Paul later agreed, on looking at the sign himself, that it was a good idea and he took the next day off from the bank and we were in Gilley's parking lot early and signed in. They hired us both but Paul said he was only available for one day so they waved him off but gave me a job as a background extra for $35 a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner and beer. I went right to work playing pool and drinking beer with a stranger named TJ. Our only instruction was to play pool and drink beer between the words Action and Cut. Paul loaned me a car and was putting me up at a condo he owned in Houston's Westheimer district. The car was an old beater and I fit right in with the other extras who drove in ever day for the filming. They days went into a blur of sameness and while the beer stayed cold it wasn't too bad. One day the girls playing waitresses, who were really the waitresses at Gilley's Club at night, started bringing us hot beer it was just too much. The pool games had just become us knocking the balls around the table when they said action so after about four gulps on a hot beer I told TJ I was going to give myself a new job and headed off toward the large dance floor up near the stage about 75 yards away. The crowd was about four or five thick as I worked my way politely to the front at the edge of the huge dance floor filled with couples and lines of dancers moving as a flock of birds around the dance floor doing what I would later learn was the Cotton Eyed Joe, a favorite east Texas and west Louisana folk dance. The power of the movement was hypnotic and I moved unconsciously onto the dance floor and separated myself from the crowd by about a yard. Cut. The music stopped. The crowd of dancers parted and I looked up at the stage where I noticed a pretty red haired woman and a wirey looking man were having an animated discussion and she was pointing at me. My heart sank. Busted, I thought. These people are sharp to notice I'd left my post at a pool table you couldn't even see from there. She was walking briskly toward me. I wanted to turn and run but my feet were frozen to the floor. Can you dance the Cotton Eyed Joe? The woman I would later learn was Patsy Swayze the great dance choreographer (and Patrick Swayze's mother) was saying this as she walked up to me. The Cotton Eyed Joe, so that's what it's called I thought as I heard myself saying, Yes, maam. She grabbed my arm and pulled me halfway across the dance floor up near the stage and put me in line with a couple, a pretty young woman named Heather and a young man named Bubba. Bubba looked like he could spit tobacco juice with Kenny whom I hadn't seen in days. I had heard he was on the road with The Red Rose Express, Mickey Gilley's band. A man tapped me on the foot. I looked down and a gaffer was putting a piece of thick tape on the floor. He asked me what my initials were and I heard myself say, TC. He wrote them in big block letters with a marker on the tape and Bubba shoved his hand into mine and introduced himself by saying, Hey TC, I'm Bubba, this here's Heather. I looked down to the floor to confirm this. I was sweating. I had lied my way onto the dance floor thus assuming a higher profile. My immediate problem was I had never, not once danced in my life since one slow dance in high school at the senior prom. In a mild state of panic I quietly blurted out my secret. Heather said to just do what she did and that it was eight steps forward and four steps back all the way around the dance floor. I heard someone yell, action, and we were off. I almost caused the entire line to cave in the first change over because I couldn't remember if it was eight steps forward or was that, eight steps back? We did this for endless days on a stretch and I experimented with just lifting my feet entirely off the floor while part of a long line of dancers during The Charlie Daniels Band part of the film. It was during that segment that I danced my way out of the line and fell into position at the side of the stage and at a crutial moment followed this large man onto the stage. This large man was Killer, Mickey Gilley's body guard and bouncer in the film version of Gilley's Club. During the part of the film where John Travolta and Debra Winger get in an argument during a dance scene, Killer has to push a cowboy out of the way to stop the fight. That cowboy was me and he and I struck up a friendship. I had moved myself from background pool player to the dance troupe to the stage with the music. I stationed myself behind Taz, the piano player with The Charlie Daniels Band and at the appropriate time I waved to my mom and kids. If you watch the film, you can see me waving in the wide shot. I was determined that if they were not going to hear my song in the movie at least they would see me. I had felt so stupid telling everyone early on that one of my original songs was going to be in the sound track of the new John Travolta film. I had believed it in my niave way not understanding how the business worked and not verifying what Paul had told me. I guess I wanted it to happen so bad I was willing to believe. Some thought I was foolish for even trying, and I did have a good life in New England, that is until my oldest boy left for Detroit. Continued, Click Here..... Go Home!