Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 8 - Blaze Foley - full transcript
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So far in this series,
we've focused on the
country music outlaws,
artists who refuse to follow
the rules of the record business
or the rules of polite
society, for that matter.
These have all been pretty big names,
but we're gonna end this season
with a guy who was every
bit the outlaw artist
in his own way,
but who never quite achieved
that same level of fame.
And to be honest, it just seems wrong
that hardly anybody knows his name.
Willie Nelson
recorded one of his songs
alongside Merle Haggard.
In fact, Merle called it
the best country song
he'd heard in 15 years.
Lucinda Williams wrote
a song about the guy,
and Townes Van Zandt
called him a brother.
Blaze Foley.
_ _
He was the nicest asshole
you'd ever meet.
And that's something, with his looks,
you'd never guess.
He was a very scary-looking guy.
Scary-looking guy, yeah.
Hank Sinatra and Chuck Lamb
witnessed the magic of Blaze Foley
more times than either
of them can count.
They remember Blaze as an intimidating
presence on first impression.
Blaze walked with a big limp,
and that even made him more scary,
more pirate-like, you know.
He even scared some of the bikers.
He was just a big 'ol goon.
And when he started singing,
you just completely lost
all thoughts of...
what you thought
when you first saw the guy.
Blaze had a bet with somebody,
a hundred dollar bet with somebody
that he could get
kicked out of every bar
that had live music in Austin.
Yeah, he literally got thrown
out of every bar in town.
The Outhouse was the last place.
I was not gonna help
Blaze win that bet.
So we managed to put up with him.
Met this character, Blaze Foley,
back in 1977,
and, uh, he had this guitar
in this case
that he wanted to show me.
Actually, he wanted to sell it to me.
Singer-songwriter Gurf Morlix,
maybe the greatest name
in country music history,
was playing a gig when Blaze Foley
approached him with a proposition.
I was in the middle of a set,
and he came up to me
and wanted to talk to me,
like, in between songs.
And he's, like, six-three,
six-four maybe,
long hair, cowboy hat,
just looked like a weirdo.
And I said, well, you know,
"When I take a break,
can we talk then?"
And a little later on, he showed me
this guitar that he wanted to sell me.
It was an old acoustic guitar
from the early 1900s,
and, uh, I found out later
it wasn't his guitar.
He always had to borrow
somebody's guitar
to play most of the time.
Yeah, I don't know if he
ever actually owned one.
I guess he sold that guitar
to about four different people.
And none of 'em ever got it.
A few days later,
Blaze played his first-ever
performance in Austin,
the city where he would
build his legend.
He got a gig in a...
it was in a disco,
just a ridiculous place for him to be,
and we kind of sat around,
and he had a valise
with a bunch of stuff in it,
and he would pull out pictures
and say, "Well, here's the
person from this song,"
and he'd play the song while the
picture was being passed around.
One of the
pictures he pulled out
was of himself as a kid,
for a little number
he called, "Fat Boy."
He used to tell me
about when he'd be at home as a kid
that he'd sit down and
eat a stick of butter.
He'd just sit down for a snack
and he'd just eat a stick of butter.
And of course,
you do things like that,
it's gonna pack some weight on you.
I first met Blaze
when I was working the Sears store,
when I was in high school.
Lindsey Horton
was in automotive.
Blaze, or Michael Fuller,
as he was known then,
worked in paint and hardware.
He was a big kid
from Malvern, Arkansas,
who had a thing about his weight
and his name, apparently.
He started introducing
himself on stage
as Deputy Dawg, like the cartoon.
Deputy Dawg, of course, was destitute,
so I went with him a few places
around trying to sell the guitar.
Someone said, well, you know,
Kinky Friedman buys guitars.
He might be interested in that.
Kinky was playing down at the
Armadillo World Headquarters,
so, uh, we sent word in
that we'd like to talk to him,
and sure enough, he came
out and sat down with us.
And Blaze showed him his guitar,
and Kinky played it a while,
played a few little, little runs of
this and that and whatever on it.
And, uh, said,
"Well, thank you very much
for showing me your guitar."
And got up and went back inside.
I don't remember precisely
meeting anybody.
I'm sure it was on the gangplank
of Noah's Ark, you know,
but, uh, you'd have to tell me
and then it comes
back to the Kinkster.
There was one night when we went to a,
a Willie Nelson concert,
and somehow we ended up
right in front of the stage
with this guitar.
At some point, Willie Nelson,
you know, sort of leaned down
and Deputy said to him,
"Would you like to buy
this guitar?" you know.
Nobody would buy it.
In 1974,
Michael met Sybil Rosen
while performing
at an artists' commune
45 miles west of Atlanta.
It was during that time
that he was working on the name,
Blaze Foley.
It was just like, you know,
watching someone being born.
He called himself
the illegitimate son
of Red Foley,
a country music legend
who was an inveterate drunk,
and Blaze Starr,
a stripper whose specialty
was a stage effect that produced smoke
from between her legs.
We was in love.
At some point, I thought
that it was probably time
to introduce him to the folks.
Here's my middle-aged,
middle-class Jewish
parents from Brooklyn.
You know, they sweated blood
to send me to college.
And I come in with this big cowboy
with boots and a hat,
this big handlebar mustache,
and he has my IUD in his ear.
I'd gone to, you know, Planned
Parenthood and asked for an IUD,
and my body couldn't tolerate
it, so they removed it
and they gave it to Blaze, and
he put it in his ear, you know.
And my mother, God bless her,
she takes one look at Blaze,
turns around, goes into the bedroom,
starts crying.
But Blaze starts singing these songs,
and, um, once he sang,
they really couldn't resist him.
Blaze was with Sybil
when he first visited Austin,
home of sorts to another
singer-songwriter,
a hard-living crooner who
would become a legend,
Townes Van Zandt.
Blaze was a homeless person, I think,
you know, intentionally.
I always got the impression,
he just slept on people's
couches all the time, you know?
And that must have been
a horrible feeling.
But he seemed to be
comfortable with it.
Harold Eggers spent 20
years booking Townes Van Zandt
and trying to stay sane.
He tried several times to get
a record deal for Blaze.
They were gonna put him
on the road with Townes
when Heartland Records,
we made the record deal,
they had said well, you know,
"Can you keep a lid on him?"
And you know, I always
say yes to everything.
It's like, "Sure, man, we can keep a lid
on Townes and the two of 'em," you know.
But to be honest with
you, there's no lid for
those guys. It was...
They were full tilt.
If the two of them
weren't bad enough,
they used to run around with this guy.
I used to manufacture methamphetamine.
I used to be a pretty good chemist.
The reason I learned to
make methamphetamine...
because I liked it more
than anybody else.
Leland Waddell claims
that his side business
kept him in skins and
sticks as a drummer.
I met this guy, he turned me on to it.
I said, "Damn. Where'd you get that?
That's good."
He said, "Oh, I made it."
"You what?
You made it!"
You know, and I didn't let
that motherfucker leave my sight
until I learned how to do it.
You know, I mean, I said goddamn,
this is the best thing...
I said, this is the best thing of all.
It's like goddamn, why do I
have to worry about money?
I can actually make fucking speed.
That was Waddell in 2002.
This is him now.
He survived,
mostly intact.
Blaze was staying with Townes.
Townes lived like four blocks
from me at the time.
And so, um, Townes called me, he said,
"Come on over, Blaze is here, man.
We got some Kamchatka Vodka,
come on over, man."
Kamchatka is the cheapest
vodka that you can buy.
It's like a dollar and 60 cents
for a half-pint.
So I went over there to Townes',
and the minute I showed up,
Jeanene, who's Townes' wife,
you know, she knew
what was about to happen.
Pretty much at that time,
they were pretty much best friends,
running buddies.
So Townes says, "Hey, man,
"I'm gonna die pretty soon.
"I want you and Blaze to go out
and help me find a gravesite.
Let's go today, because I know
I'm gonna die any minute."
So I said, "Sure, man,
let's go take a look."
Well, we went to Texas Cemetery,
where all the senators and...
and all of those were buried,
and way too hifalutin.
Stopped by the liquor store, got
us a half a pint each or whatever,
spent another 30-45 minutes
looking around.
We were right over here
off the interstate.
Blaze looked over, he said,
"Man, there's a cemetery right there."
So we said, "All right,
let's go take a look."
Well, Blaze stumbled out,
sat down on a gravestone.
Townes couldn't walk,
so Blaze grabbed his feet
and I grabbed his arms,
and we drug him through that cemetery.
And every time we'd get to one
of them old crosses, you know,
"Damn, man, what do you
think about this, man?"
"Ah, yeah, man, I like
that, but let's look."
So we went to the back
of the cemetery,
and as we went over that hill,
there was an encampment
of homeless people
right at the edge of the cemetery.
As we drug him across there, man,
they was headed out of there.
They thought he was dead.
So finally, "We found you
the one we like."
"Um, this is...
What do you think about this?"
Well, that... by that time,
he was totally out,
so I told Blaze, I said,
"Well, let's go back,
get in the car
and go get some more booze,
and we'll come back and get him."
So we left him leaned up against
that headstone in that cemetery,
passed completely out.
He looked as dead
as anybody you ever seen.
Blaze says, "Hey, man,
I think we did all right, don't you?"
Townes went on to live...
another 16 years.
The first time I remember
actually seeing him
or knowing who he was,
he was asleep under the pool table
at a singer-songwriter
bar here in Austin.
Larry Monroe was a local
DJ who frequented the Outhouse
and became friendly with Blaze.
I remember he had
Mercurochrome on his face,
you know, just... he had
painted his face with it.
And he was sprawled out on his back,
people just playing pool,
and every time somebody
would make a ball
and it would drop down
and then roll across,
it would wake Blaze up
just momentarily.
And he'd kind of rouse up
and hit his head on the
underside of the pool table,
and then he'd just sprawl back out
and go back to sleep.
When I met Townes, I was just kind of
thrown into Townes' world overnight,
and one of the first things
we did was go find Blaze.
And he was sleeping
under that pool table.
It was early in the morning, Blaze comes
crawling out, you know, "Good morning,"
and, you know,
"Who's this little darling?"
And actually, I was quite frightened.
You know? I'm like,
"What in the hell?"
Blaze also had another
kind of bizarre habit:
duct tape.
He used a lot of duct tape.
Duct tape...
He had some outfits
with duct tape lapels...
Yeah.
This craze developed around
the movie Urban Cowboy.
All of the sudden,
people are showing up,
wearing expensive
country and western jewelry,
and accouterments,
as Blaze would call 'em...
silver collar tips,
and silver boot tips,
and they were going to these bars
and spending all this
money on this stuff.
And Blaze, he would talk
about how ridiculous it was
that these people were spending
hundreds and hundreds of dollars on...
on these pieces of silver,
when duct tape was almost as good.
So he started duct taping his
collar tips and his boot tips,
and then it kind of...
it took off from there.
He started making clothes
out of duct tape.
He made shoes out of duct tape,
made a set of cowboy boots.
Nobody questioned it.
I mean, I never asked him
about the duct tape.
Maybe that duct tape was the
only thing holding him together.
At some point, he stopped living
under pool tables and
other people's couches
and moved into an actual car.
It was a wood panel,
avocado green Esquire station wagon.
And, um, I remember one time
my car had broken down,
so he, like, generously said,
"Oh, you can use my car."
So, Townes and I and some other girl
were out partying all night,
and we were, like, talking
and stuff, and I look up
and there's another exact car,
avocado green, wood panel,
Esquire station wagon
on the other side of the road
and it jumped the median
right when I looked up.
It was like, boom!
Pretty bad wreck.
And we couldn't figure out which
car was whose afterwards.
But then, one of the first people
on the street after
the wreck is Blaze.
And I'm standing in the median,
crying, "I'm a home-wrecker!"
'Cause he lived in the car.
"I'm a home-wrecker!
I wrecked your home!"
And so we gave him a key to the house
and gave him permanent
couch privileges.
By 1978, Townes Van Zandt
was working on his
seventh studio album.
Blaze couldn't get arrested.
Well, in the figurative
sense, at least.
Harold Eggers had been trying
to get Blaze to do an album,
and Blaze was...
not happy about contracts.
So him and Harold had gone around
and around and around
about selling his soul
to the devil, you know.
Yeah, I would say, "Now, look.
If Townes is willing to sign it,
come on, you can't be that
paranoid," I said, you know.
Then finally he signed it, and
threw it on the floor, and said,
"There it is, man! Now you
own me like everybody else."
So Harold, one night says,
"Okay, I want to do a video
on the front porch with Blaze."
I was like, "You bet, man,
no problem."
So here they came,
and I started videotaping.
Well, Blaze is shit-faced,
totally smashed.
And he's got that album cover
sitting here beside him on the chair,
and Harold says, "Well, hold up the
album and talk about it, you know."
And, "You got to straighten up. Come
on, this is serious, you know."
Blaze just reaches down there
and picks up that album cover,
"Screw your album. Screw your contract.
Screw you."
And... Poom! Like a Frisbee.
Knocked his hat off. It
was that close... Schoomp!
I told him, I said, "Blaze, you do that
one more time, I'm gonna kill you."
And he laughed, you know, and, uh...
Well, he could've been a
Vaudeville character, you know.
At the height of
Houston's oil boom,
Gurf Morlix remembers that
Blaze found some money guys
to back his first real studio session.
It was an oil trading company
named Zephyr Records,
who were looking to, uh,
lose some money, I think,
and so they formed this record
company and signed Blaze.
He had met Kinky Friedman somewhere,
and Kinky invited Blaze to come to
New York City and open for him.
And so Blaze talked Zephyr Records
into buying him a ticket,
and of course, it was a disaster.
As we say in New York,
"Never 'hoid of him!"
Fuck, I don't know. I have forgotten
the first half of my life.
By the time that I got up to New
York to play these shows with Blaze,
he was ensconced
in the Gramercy Park Hotel
and up to no good.
Amphetamines and binge drinking.
He just had this amazing
ability to fuck it up.
Zephyr Records went bust
with the energy crisis,
but not before pressing some 45s
of the best song
Blaze had in his repertoire.
I remember him playing, "If I Could
Only Fly" for the first time,
and both of us crying,
and, you know...
I see that song as, um,
sort of a lament about...
the consequences of rootlessness.
You know, he was saying,
"This is who I am."
Blaze got singles pressed
and so we had,
we had thousands of 'em,
and Blaze, of course, was trading
them for drinks in bars.
I never knew him to have a job.
He said, "I have vowed
never to have a day job,
because it would interfere
with my artistic pursuits."
His best friend had made this
hard-living lifestyle work for him,
to a certain extent.
He was making decent bucks
at the time, Townes was.
He had entrée into a lot of circles
that Blaze didn't have,
like the Kerrville
Folk Festival.
The Kerrville Folk Festival
had hosted artists like Townes,
Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams,
and Peter, Paul & Mary, since 1972.
It's a big event around here,
especially for us songwriters.
You got on the campground,
people jamming,
everybody's singing their own songs.
Singer-songwriter Ky Hote
hosts the Underground
Kerrville Review,
and has been playing
the festival for decades.
Rod Kennedy runs
the Kerrville Folk Festival,
and Rod's kind of a...
He can be a little...
reactionary.
A few people have been
kicked out of there
for swearing on-stage, you know,
banned for years, you know, just for,
for saying "fuck"
or something, you know,
and Blaze wasn't gonna
shy away from any of that.
He had these songs and he
was just gonna play them.
Townes got him
a guest spot at Kerrville,
and he sang the song about Idi Amin.
Idi Amin was the dictator
of Uganda at the time.
He was all over the news
with rumors of having killed
hundreds of thousands
of his own people
and engaging in cannibalistic rituals.
Rod Kennedy told him, "You're
banned from here for life.
You cannot ever come back here."
That was his response to...
the "Springtime in Uganda" thing.
Rod got the hook
and got him off stage.
Folk singer Carlene
Jones and Ky Hote
were both there when Blaze tried
to come back to Kerrville.
It was the middle of the night,
we're all camping out there.
So I wake up early in the morning
and I'd been up late,
and I'm tired, I haven't had coffee.
I walk over to this campfire,
I sit down.
I look to the left of me
and here's this big woman,
I think.
Ugly, ugly.
I just look away.
He decided to put on
a disguise, and, uh,
he painted his fingernails
this god-awful color of maroon,
and he had this batik skirt,
and a frilly white blouse,
a bandana around his head,
you know, lipstick.
And then I hear this voice, "Ky...
"It's me, Blaze.
I'm incognito."
Rod Kennedy threw him out again.
But as the man himself remembers,
that wasn't nearly the end of it.
I think it was probably
two or three months later,
we were in Emma Joe's, and he spat
across the room
and hit me in the face.
He just spit on him.
Blaze had a bad habit of,
when he'd get really wasted,
spitting on people.
He never did it to me.
I would have vomited on him.
Rod Kennedy was a badass,
- and Blaze took a beating on that one.
- Yeah.
I'd been out of the Marine
Corps too short a time
to control what was an instantaneous,
almost involuntary reaction.
And I think I flew through the air
and hit him about chest high.
He was sitting at a table,
and grabbed him by the ears
and slammed his head on the floor
until somebody pulled me off of him.
I'd heard that he had spent
the Christmas holidays
of 1988 in jail,
that he had beat up somebody.
And it sounded out of character to me.
He was always really sweet
to children and older people,
and anybody he thought
had soul and was cool.
He liked this older man,
an elderly African-American gentleman
named Concho January.
I said, "I heard you just
got out of jail. What happened?"
And he said, "Well, I know
this old guy named Concho,
"and his son beats him up
"and takes his Social Security
money and spends it on heroin.
"And I just won't let him do that.
And we got in a fight
and I kicked his ass."
And I said, "Well, Blaze,
you got to be careful."
He said, "Well, this kid may kill me,
but I'm not gonna let
him beat up his dad."
Apparently, there had been
several confrontations,
and the reason I know it,
it happened more than once,
was that Mr. January's son
actually took out a restraining
order against Blaze.
He was supposedly not even
supposed to be over there anymore.
Concho, he loved Blaze, he really did.
Blaze was the person
who cared about him,
and who was trying
to take care of him,
trying to protect him.
It was his character.
That's the way he was
right up to the time
that he was shot.
You know, he was
defending another guy.
On the first day
of February, 1989,
the day the government checks arrive,
Concho January's son
came to the house.
By the time he left, Blaze Foley had a
bullet wound in his
liver from a .22 rifle.
He was dead within hours.
The day of the funeral,
once some songs got sung,
people decorated the casket
with the duct tape,
and I remember as it was
being lowered down that...
that Blaze probably would have got
a kick out of seeing that happen.
They labeled him
the Duct Tape Messiah.
Seven months later,
Concho's son was acquitted
of first-degree premeditated murder.
Even though the old man could not have
been more clear in his deposition,
the jury found that Concho's son
shot Blaze in self-defense.
The spookiest thing about it
was before Blaze got killed,
he finally got a song
covered by Merle Haggard.
He recorded, "If I Could Only Fly."
Blaze was just so proud
that he was actually
gonna have some success,
and this was gonna open
a lot of doors for him.
I think he got one royalty check,
and actually for the first time,
he rented a room in a
house in South Austin.
And I came back from LA,
where I was living,
and he took me into his room,
and he showed me his room,
and he was so proud of it.
And then, a couple of weeks...
two or three weeks later,
he was dead.
_ _
In the '70s,
I was fucking 25 fat girls
to get 'em to go get diet pills.
All the fat girls in town
was over at my house.
I'd say, "Baby, go on over there
and get them pills, now,
and come on back over here."
And, I mean, I had all
the fat women in town
bringing me speed in the '70s,
till they cut that out,
you know, in about '73.
No one, no one.
You couldn't get no diet pills.
So far in this series,
we've focused on the
country music outlaws,
artists who refuse to follow
the rules of the record business
or the rules of polite
society, for that matter.
These have all been pretty big names,
but we're gonna end this season
with a guy who was every
bit the outlaw artist
in his own way,
but who never quite achieved
that same level of fame.
And to be honest, it just seems wrong
that hardly anybody knows his name.
Willie Nelson
recorded one of his songs
alongside Merle Haggard.
In fact, Merle called it
the best country song
he'd heard in 15 years.
Lucinda Williams wrote
a song about the guy,
and Townes Van Zandt
called him a brother.
Blaze Foley.
_ _
He was the nicest asshole
you'd ever meet.
And that's something, with his looks,
you'd never guess.
He was a very scary-looking guy.
Scary-looking guy, yeah.
Hank Sinatra and Chuck Lamb
witnessed the magic of Blaze Foley
more times than either
of them can count.
They remember Blaze as an intimidating
presence on first impression.
Blaze walked with a big limp,
and that even made him more scary,
more pirate-like, you know.
He even scared some of the bikers.
He was just a big 'ol goon.
And when he started singing,
you just completely lost
all thoughts of...
what you thought
when you first saw the guy.
Blaze had a bet with somebody,
a hundred dollar bet with somebody
that he could get
kicked out of every bar
that had live music in Austin.
Yeah, he literally got thrown
out of every bar in town.
The Outhouse was the last place.
I was not gonna help
Blaze win that bet.
So we managed to put up with him.
Met this character, Blaze Foley,
back in 1977,
and, uh, he had this guitar
in this case
that he wanted to show me.
Actually, he wanted to sell it to me.
Singer-songwriter Gurf Morlix,
maybe the greatest name
in country music history,
was playing a gig when Blaze Foley
approached him with a proposition.
I was in the middle of a set,
and he came up to me
and wanted to talk to me,
like, in between songs.
And he's, like, six-three,
six-four maybe,
long hair, cowboy hat,
just looked like a weirdo.
And I said, well, you know,
"When I take a break,
can we talk then?"
And a little later on, he showed me
this guitar that he wanted to sell me.
It was an old acoustic guitar
from the early 1900s,
and, uh, I found out later
it wasn't his guitar.
He always had to borrow
somebody's guitar
to play most of the time.
Yeah, I don't know if he
ever actually owned one.
I guess he sold that guitar
to about four different people.
And none of 'em ever got it.
A few days later,
Blaze played his first-ever
performance in Austin,
the city where he would
build his legend.
He got a gig in a...
it was in a disco,
just a ridiculous place for him to be,
and we kind of sat around,
and he had a valise
with a bunch of stuff in it,
and he would pull out pictures
and say, "Well, here's the
person from this song,"
and he'd play the song while the
picture was being passed around.
One of the
pictures he pulled out
was of himself as a kid,
for a little number
he called, "Fat Boy."
He used to tell me
about when he'd be at home as a kid
that he'd sit down and
eat a stick of butter.
He'd just sit down for a snack
and he'd just eat a stick of butter.
And of course,
you do things like that,
it's gonna pack some weight on you.
I first met Blaze
when I was working the Sears store,
when I was in high school.
Lindsey Horton
was in automotive.
Blaze, or Michael Fuller,
as he was known then,
worked in paint and hardware.
He was a big kid
from Malvern, Arkansas,
who had a thing about his weight
and his name, apparently.
He started introducing
himself on stage
as Deputy Dawg, like the cartoon.
Deputy Dawg, of course, was destitute,
so I went with him a few places
around trying to sell the guitar.
Someone said, well, you know,
Kinky Friedman buys guitars.
He might be interested in that.
Kinky was playing down at the
Armadillo World Headquarters,
so, uh, we sent word in
that we'd like to talk to him,
and sure enough, he came
out and sat down with us.
And Blaze showed him his guitar,
and Kinky played it a while,
played a few little, little runs of
this and that and whatever on it.
And, uh, said,
"Well, thank you very much
for showing me your guitar."
And got up and went back inside.
I don't remember precisely
meeting anybody.
I'm sure it was on the gangplank
of Noah's Ark, you know,
but, uh, you'd have to tell me
and then it comes
back to the Kinkster.
There was one night when we went to a,
a Willie Nelson concert,
and somehow we ended up
right in front of the stage
with this guitar.
At some point, Willie Nelson,
you know, sort of leaned down
and Deputy said to him,
"Would you like to buy
this guitar?" you know.
Nobody would buy it.
In 1974,
Michael met Sybil Rosen
while performing
at an artists' commune
45 miles west of Atlanta.
It was during that time
that he was working on the name,
Blaze Foley.
It was just like, you know,
watching someone being born.
He called himself
the illegitimate son
of Red Foley,
a country music legend
who was an inveterate drunk,
and Blaze Starr,
a stripper whose specialty
was a stage effect that produced smoke
from between her legs.
We was in love.
At some point, I thought
that it was probably time
to introduce him to the folks.
Here's my middle-aged,
middle-class Jewish
parents from Brooklyn.
You know, they sweated blood
to send me to college.
And I come in with this big cowboy
with boots and a hat,
this big handlebar mustache,
and he has my IUD in his ear.
I'd gone to, you know, Planned
Parenthood and asked for an IUD,
and my body couldn't tolerate
it, so they removed it
and they gave it to Blaze, and
he put it in his ear, you know.
And my mother, God bless her,
she takes one look at Blaze,
turns around, goes into the bedroom,
starts crying.
But Blaze starts singing these songs,
and, um, once he sang,
they really couldn't resist him.
Blaze was with Sybil
when he first visited Austin,
home of sorts to another
singer-songwriter,
a hard-living crooner who
would become a legend,
Townes Van Zandt.
Blaze was a homeless person, I think,
you know, intentionally.
I always got the impression,
he just slept on people's
couches all the time, you know?
And that must have been
a horrible feeling.
But he seemed to be
comfortable with it.
Harold Eggers spent 20
years booking Townes Van Zandt
and trying to stay sane.
He tried several times to get
a record deal for Blaze.
They were gonna put him
on the road with Townes
when Heartland Records,
we made the record deal,
they had said well, you know,
"Can you keep a lid on him?"
And you know, I always
say yes to everything.
It's like, "Sure, man, we can keep a lid
on Townes and the two of 'em," you know.
But to be honest with
you, there's no lid for
those guys. It was...
They were full tilt.
If the two of them
weren't bad enough,
they used to run around with this guy.
I used to manufacture methamphetamine.
I used to be a pretty good chemist.
The reason I learned to
make methamphetamine...
because I liked it more
than anybody else.
Leland Waddell claims
that his side business
kept him in skins and
sticks as a drummer.
I met this guy, he turned me on to it.
I said, "Damn. Where'd you get that?
That's good."
He said, "Oh, I made it."
"You what?
You made it!"
You know, and I didn't let
that motherfucker leave my sight
until I learned how to do it.
You know, I mean, I said goddamn,
this is the best thing...
I said, this is the best thing of all.
It's like goddamn, why do I
have to worry about money?
I can actually make fucking speed.
That was Waddell in 2002.
This is him now.
He survived,
mostly intact.
Blaze was staying with Townes.
Townes lived like four blocks
from me at the time.
And so, um, Townes called me, he said,
"Come on over, Blaze is here, man.
We got some Kamchatka Vodka,
come on over, man."
Kamchatka is the cheapest
vodka that you can buy.
It's like a dollar and 60 cents
for a half-pint.
So I went over there to Townes',
and the minute I showed up,
Jeanene, who's Townes' wife,
you know, she knew
what was about to happen.
Pretty much at that time,
they were pretty much best friends,
running buddies.
So Townes says, "Hey, man,
"I'm gonna die pretty soon.
"I want you and Blaze to go out
and help me find a gravesite.
Let's go today, because I know
I'm gonna die any minute."
So I said, "Sure, man,
let's go take a look."
Well, we went to Texas Cemetery,
where all the senators and...
and all of those were buried,
and way too hifalutin.
Stopped by the liquor store, got
us a half a pint each or whatever,
spent another 30-45 minutes
looking around.
We were right over here
off the interstate.
Blaze looked over, he said,
"Man, there's a cemetery right there."
So we said, "All right,
let's go take a look."
Well, Blaze stumbled out,
sat down on a gravestone.
Townes couldn't walk,
so Blaze grabbed his feet
and I grabbed his arms,
and we drug him through that cemetery.
And every time we'd get to one
of them old crosses, you know,
"Damn, man, what do you
think about this, man?"
"Ah, yeah, man, I like
that, but let's look."
So we went to the back
of the cemetery,
and as we went over that hill,
there was an encampment
of homeless people
right at the edge of the cemetery.
As we drug him across there, man,
they was headed out of there.
They thought he was dead.
So finally, "We found you
the one we like."
"Um, this is...
What do you think about this?"
Well, that... by that time,
he was totally out,
so I told Blaze, I said,
"Well, let's go back,
get in the car
and go get some more booze,
and we'll come back and get him."
So we left him leaned up against
that headstone in that cemetery,
passed completely out.
He looked as dead
as anybody you ever seen.
Blaze says, "Hey, man,
I think we did all right, don't you?"
Townes went on to live...
another 16 years.
The first time I remember
actually seeing him
or knowing who he was,
he was asleep under the pool table
at a singer-songwriter
bar here in Austin.
Larry Monroe was a local
DJ who frequented the Outhouse
and became friendly with Blaze.
I remember he had
Mercurochrome on his face,
you know, just... he had
painted his face with it.
And he was sprawled out on his back,
people just playing pool,
and every time somebody
would make a ball
and it would drop down
and then roll across,
it would wake Blaze up
just momentarily.
And he'd kind of rouse up
and hit his head on the
underside of the pool table,
and then he'd just sprawl back out
and go back to sleep.
When I met Townes, I was just kind of
thrown into Townes' world overnight,
and one of the first things
we did was go find Blaze.
And he was sleeping
under that pool table.
It was early in the morning, Blaze comes
crawling out, you know, "Good morning,"
and, you know,
"Who's this little darling?"
And actually, I was quite frightened.
You know? I'm like,
"What in the hell?"
Blaze also had another
kind of bizarre habit:
duct tape.
He used a lot of duct tape.
Duct tape...
He had some outfits
with duct tape lapels...
Yeah.
This craze developed around
the movie Urban Cowboy.
All of the sudden,
people are showing up,
wearing expensive
country and western jewelry,
and accouterments,
as Blaze would call 'em...
silver collar tips,
and silver boot tips,
and they were going to these bars
and spending all this
money on this stuff.
And Blaze, he would talk
about how ridiculous it was
that these people were spending
hundreds and hundreds of dollars on...
on these pieces of silver,
when duct tape was almost as good.
So he started duct taping his
collar tips and his boot tips,
and then it kind of...
it took off from there.
He started making clothes
out of duct tape.
He made shoes out of duct tape,
made a set of cowboy boots.
Nobody questioned it.
I mean, I never asked him
about the duct tape.
Maybe that duct tape was the
only thing holding him together.
At some point, he stopped living
under pool tables and
other people's couches
and moved into an actual car.
It was a wood panel,
avocado green Esquire station wagon.
And, um, I remember one time
my car had broken down,
so he, like, generously said,
"Oh, you can use my car."
So, Townes and I and some other girl
were out partying all night,
and we were, like, talking
and stuff, and I look up
and there's another exact car,
avocado green, wood panel,
Esquire station wagon
on the other side of the road
and it jumped the median
right when I looked up.
It was like, boom!
Pretty bad wreck.
And we couldn't figure out which
car was whose afterwards.
But then, one of the first people
on the street after
the wreck is Blaze.
And I'm standing in the median,
crying, "I'm a home-wrecker!"
'Cause he lived in the car.
"I'm a home-wrecker!
I wrecked your home!"
And so we gave him a key to the house
and gave him permanent
couch privileges.
By 1978, Townes Van Zandt
was working on his
seventh studio album.
Blaze couldn't get arrested.
Well, in the figurative
sense, at least.
Harold Eggers had been trying
to get Blaze to do an album,
and Blaze was...
not happy about contracts.
So him and Harold had gone around
and around and around
about selling his soul
to the devil, you know.
Yeah, I would say, "Now, look.
If Townes is willing to sign it,
come on, you can't be that
paranoid," I said, you know.
Then finally he signed it, and
threw it on the floor, and said,
"There it is, man! Now you
own me like everybody else."
So Harold, one night says,
"Okay, I want to do a video
on the front porch with Blaze."
I was like, "You bet, man,
no problem."
So here they came,
and I started videotaping.
Well, Blaze is shit-faced,
totally smashed.
And he's got that album cover
sitting here beside him on the chair,
and Harold says, "Well, hold up the
album and talk about it, you know."
And, "You got to straighten up. Come
on, this is serious, you know."
Blaze just reaches down there
and picks up that album cover,
"Screw your album. Screw your contract.
Screw you."
And... Poom! Like a Frisbee.
Knocked his hat off. It
was that close... Schoomp!
I told him, I said, "Blaze, you do that
one more time, I'm gonna kill you."
And he laughed, you know, and, uh...
Well, he could've been a
Vaudeville character, you know.
At the height of
Houston's oil boom,
Gurf Morlix remembers that
Blaze found some money guys
to back his first real studio session.
It was an oil trading company
named Zephyr Records,
who were looking to, uh,
lose some money, I think,
and so they formed this record
company and signed Blaze.
He had met Kinky Friedman somewhere,
and Kinky invited Blaze to come to
New York City and open for him.
And so Blaze talked Zephyr Records
into buying him a ticket,
and of course, it was a disaster.
As we say in New York,
"Never 'hoid of him!"
Fuck, I don't know. I have forgotten
the first half of my life.
By the time that I got up to New
York to play these shows with Blaze,
he was ensconced
in the Gramercy Park Hotel
and up to no good.
Amphetamines and binge drinking.
He just had this amazing
ability to fuck it up.
Zephyr Records went bust
with the energy crisis,
but not before pressing some 45s
of the best song
Blaze had in his repertoire.
I remember him playing, "If I Could
Only Fly" for the first time,
and both of us crying,
and, you know...
I see that song as, um,
sort of a lament about...
the consequences of rootlessness.
You know, he was saying,
"This is who I am."
Blaze got singles pressed
and so we had,
we had thousands of 'em,
and Blaze, of course, was trading
them for drinks in bars.
I never knew him to have a job.
He said, "I have vowed
never to have a day job,
because it would interfere
with my artistic pursuits."
His best friend had made this
hard-living lifestyle work for him,
to a certain extent.
He was making decent bucks
at the time, Townes was.
He had entrée into a lot of circles
that Blaze didn't have,
like the Kerrville
Folk Festival.
The Kerrville Folk Festival
had hosted artists like Townes,
Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams,
and Peter, Paul & Mary, since 1972.
It's a big event around here,
especially for us songwriters.
You got on the campground,
people jamming,
everybody's singing their own songs.
Singer-songwriter Ky Hote
hosts the Underground
Kerrville Review,
and has been playing
the festival for decades.
Rod Kennedy runs
the Kerrville Folk Festival,
and Rod's kind of a...
He can be a little...
reactionary.
A few people have been
kicked out of there
for swearing on-stage, you know,
banned for years, you know, just for,
for saying "fuck"
or something, you know,
and Blaze wasn't gonna
shy away from any of that.
He had these songs and he
was just gonna play them.
Townes got him
a guest spot at Kerrville,
and he sang the song about Idi Amin.
Idi Amin was the dictator
of Uganda at the time.
He was all over the news
with rumors of having killed
hundreds of thousands
of his own people
and engaging in cannibalistic rituals.
Rod Kennedy told him, "You're
banned from here for life.
You cannot ever come back here."
That was his response to...
the "Springtime in Uganda" thing.
Rod got the hook
and got him off stage.
Folk singer Carlene
Jones and Ky Hote
were both there when Blaze tried
to come back to Kerrville.
It was the middle of the night,
we're all camping out there.
So I wake up early in the morning
and I'd been up late,
and I'm tired, I haven't had coffee.
I walk over to this campfire,
I sit down.
I look to the left of me
and here's this big woman,
I think.
Ugly, ugly.
I just look away.
He decided to put on
a disguise, and, uh,
he painted his fingernails
this god-awful color of maroon,
and he had this batik skirt,
and a frilly white blouse,
a bandana around his head,
you know, lipstick.
And then I hear this voice, "Ky...
"It's me, Blaze.
I'm incognito."
Rod Kennedy threw him out again.
But as the man himself remembers,
that wasn't nearly the end of it.
I think it was probably
two or three months later,
we were in Emma Joe's, and he spat
across the room
and hit me in the face.
He just spit on him.
Blaze had a bad habit of,
when he'd get really wasted,
spitting on people.
He never did it to me.
I would have vomited on him.
Rod Kennedy was a badass,
- and Blaze took a beating on that one.
- Yeah.
I'd been out of the Marine
Corps too short a time
to control what was an instantaneous,
almost involuntary reaction.
And I think I flew through the air
and hit him about chest high.
He was sitting at a table,
and grabbed him by the ears
and slammed his head on the floor
until somebody pulled me off of him.
I'd heard that he had spent
the Christmas holidays
of 1988 in jail,
that he had beat up somebody.
And it sounded out of character to me.
He was always really sweet
to children and older people,
and anybody he thought
had soul and was cool.
He liked this older man,
an elderly African-American gentleman
named Concho January.
I said, "I heard you just
got out of jail. What happened?"
And he said, "Well, I know
this old guy named Concho,
"and his son beats him up
"and takes his Social Security
money and spends it on heroin.
"And I just won't let him do that.
And we got in a fight
and I kicked his ass."
And I said, "Well, Blaze,
you got to be careful."
He said, "Well, this kid may kill me,
but I'm not gonna let
him beat up his dad."
Apparently, there had been
several confrontations,
and the reason I know it,
it happened more than once,
was that Mr. January's son
actually took out a restraining
order against Blaze.
He was supposedly not even
supposed to be over there anymore.
Concho, he loved Blaze, he really did.
Blaze was the person
who cared about him,
and who was trying
to take care of him,
trying to protect him.
It was his character.
That's the way he was
right up to the time
that he was shot.
You know, he was
defending another guy.
On the first day
of February, 1989,
the day the government checks arrive,
Concho January's son
came to the house.
By the time he left, Blaze Foley had a
bullet wound in his
liver from a .22 rifle.
He was dead within hours.
The day of the funeral,
once some songs got sung,
people decorated the casket
with the duct tape,
and I remember as it was
being lowered down that...
that Blaze probably would have got
a kick out of seeing that happen.
They labeled him
the Duct Tape Messiah.
Seven months later,
Concho's son was acquitted
of first-degree premeditated murder.
Even though the old man could not have
been more clear in his deposition,
the jury found that Concho's son
shot Blaze in self-defense.
The spookiest thing about it
was before Blaze got killed,
he finally got a song
covered by Merle Haggard.
He recorded, "If I Could Only Fly."
Blaze was just so proud
that he was actually
gonna have some success,
and this was gonna open
a lot of doors for him.
I think he got one royalty check,
and actually for the first time,
he rented a room in a
house in South Austin.
And I came back from LA,
where I was living,
and he took me into his room,
and he showed me his room,
and he was so proud of it.
And then, a couple of weeks...
two or three weeks later,
he was dead.
_ _
In the '70s,
I was fucking 25 fat girls
to get 'em to go get diet pills.
All the fat girls in town
was over at my house.
I'd say, "Baby, go on over there
and get them pills, now,
and come on back over here."
And, I mean, I had all
the fat women in town
bringing me speed in the '70s,
till they cut that out,
you know, in about '73.
No one, no one.
You couldn't get no diet pills.