I just realized I had a song with my sister in it!
Back in Abilene, Texas about 50 years ago, there was a movie theater on Butternut Street where I went almost every Saturday afternoon. The place was actually a surplus quonset hut, one of those old WWII military buildings that looked like a big piece of corrugated pipe cut lengthwise. They used to show the old black-and-white serials in between the double features, and sometimes there was a family of accordion players who tried to lead sing-a-longs with the little bouncing ball on the screen. That was pretty awful but never lasted long, and soon it was back to westerns or science-fiction. I think we must have gotten pretty rowdy a few times, though, because I remember the manager coming out and lecturing us. Imagine something like that happening in a movie house today, if you can.
Sometimes Teresa and I went together. She would have only been about 10 or 11 years old at the time, so I had to look after her and was very conscious of the responsibility. One afternoon we ran into a couple of smart-aleck friends of mine, Mike and Charles. Only semi-tolerable in the best of circumstances, this time they outdid themselves, sneering:
“Well, looky here, Farr’s at the movie with his little sister…”
At which point they proceeded to call her names right there in front of me. I can’t remember what they said, because that’s when I got furious and started pummeling them both with my fists! I had the element of surprise with me, because that was the last thing they expected, plus the two of them could no more fight than fly. As it was, I wasn’t much of a boxer, and I’m sure I didn’t do any real damage. But my reaction was ferocious enough that they retreated, and I felt like a hero.
Many years later in the ’80s, I was pretending to be a rock & roll songwriter and came up with this little reggae-flavored number that hearkens back to that time. There are just a couple of verses, but maybe I’ll finish it someday. (It’s kind of a memory hologram song.) What you’ll hear when you click on the flash player below is a demo recorded in David Eske’s basement with John D’Aquino on lead guitar and Dale Trusheim on drums. I have a mix of this with a great organ track, but that’s on cassette, and my stereo is long-disabled. Someday, someday…
Here you go, then. “Butternut Street,” from about 25 years ago:
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Sounds kinda like a Neil Young outtake… and as Neil himself would say… “Pretty innaresting.”
The version with the organ track is better, I think. But still definitely an outtake!
very nice, john. go see her again, quick!
Hi, Katy!
Yes, I think I’d better. At least one more trip while she’s still good with company. I talked to her two days ago and she sounded pretty good. Austin is a trip, too, after all these years.
I got you an Oat Willie’s bumper sticker, but it’s not the old classic one. You probably have one of these new ones, but if not, I have it for ya!
Very nice, John. Your writing is especially good when you’re in a reminiscent mode. I’ll christen you the Marcel Proust of Taylor County!
In the unlikely event any of your readers have a further appetite for Abileniana, here are a few supplemental notes…. That theatre was strangely called “The Metro”. Nothing less suggestive of Parisien urbanity can be imagined. The place overflowed with a howling mob of children on Saturday afternoons. In the earliest days I went there the admission was only 9 cents, and that left you with a penny for a stick of candy, which you tried to linger out over nearly 5 hours, what with 2 features, 2 cartoons, a serial, previews and sometimes a newsreel. I remember walking with my dime in my pocket down the length of South 14th, turning at the corner where the Banner Milk Company faced the Dixie Pig, walking past Roberts Hat Shop (with the neon fedora in the window), gazing longingly at the bicycles in Moore’s Bicycle Shop and arriving finally at the Metro. The place was owned and operated by two unmarried sisters of a certain age (one was stout, one skinny as a rail) who ruled with an iron fist, one from the ticket booth, the other from behind the candy counter. Both could wield a wicked flashlight, however, if there were malefactors in the darkened hall. Kids would be packed into the lobby, waiting for a seat to open up, and some would be sitting on the floor just below the screen looking virtually straight up at giant foreshortened figures. You could never get away with that today.
I visited the place once in the 80′s with my oldest son. The ladies claimed to remember me, said that they had many adult visitors those days, returning with children of their own. Said that this made them very proud. One of the ladies was near tears, I thought. This in turn touched me. These two had somewhat tragic pasts, I had heard, and they probably set out only to scrape together a living doing a business noone else wanted to do. Yet they created a beloved institution. Life is full of ironies. How many of us can say that we have accomplished anything like that?
Another thing: For many of us this was a window on the world, flawed as it was by being viewed through Grade B westerns and horror flicks, war and crime movies. But also some genuine adult fare: I remember seeing “On the Waterfront”, “The Wild One”, “Kiss Me Kate”, “Marty”, “Mister Roberts”, “Some Like it Hot”. The ladies told me that they ordered up some movies just because they wanted to see them. They said they could trust Hollywood in those days not to do anything too unsuitable for children.
Time passed. Even in the 80′s the dairy and the hat shop were closed up. The theatre didn’t last much longer. The Dixie Pig still thrives, but no longer with the long lines of the after-church crowd stretching down Butternut Street. Kid culture moved to the malls. Businesses moved, following the kids and their families. Yet how many thousands remember the excitement, expectation and even some smidgens of understanding of the world that came to us in the many Saturday afternoons spent in that quonset hut.
Speaking of memory, I remember distinctly that either Charles S. of Mike F. once warned me, “Don’t mess with Farr”. I guess I didn’t entirely heed that warning, but now I know where it came from!
Excellent song, John. You should send royalties to those guys. I know where one of them lives, but have lost track of the other. I think you all at one time lived up on Grand Avenue, around South 13th. Right?
K.W.
I think you outdid me on remembrances of things past! But thank you so much for this wealth of background material. Now that you mention it, the manager who came out to tell us to behave when we razzed the accordionists was a woman…
I don’t remember exactly where we lived, address-wise. First in a motel with kitchenettes, then in a rented house up by Abilene High, next in base housing at Dyess, after that a house my folks bought, and then another rental, this one on the south side. All that in three and a half years.
“Don’t mess with Farr”??? Wow. Do you have any idea how much I could have USED this nugget over say, the last 50 years?
Well, I’ve got it now, don’t I. Thanks!
John I lived in Abilene,in the fifties 1953 or so,my uncle was the contractor who built all the runways of what became Dyess AFB.I went to college heights elm. school.I only remember two theaters that were down on pine st.WE lived up on Hickory street,on the North side of town,near the Hardin Simmons university.I like the Butternut song. too.Have you any new old material?I wonder if your friend KG, might like the lyrics of the West Tevas songs.Leo
LEO! Jesus Christ, you’re kidding. Not you too. Abilene!
Glad you like that song. It comes from my Free Audio page, like the John Clay & the Lost Austin Band songs you mention.
Yeah, didn’t sound half bad cranked up loud. I need to digitize my cassettes and see what the other mixes are like after all these years.
SWEET! I freakin’ remember my dad playing this when I was kid…Zoo Pilot FTW! Nice up Uncle John.
Hey Jesse! Thank you sir. And how excellent to hear from you…
I was born in Abilene in 1955.The best times I had was at FairPark and The Metro. My brothers and I would go every saturday(it seemed)and it cost 15 cents for under 12. When I did turn 12(very proud)I paid 25 cents.I wish I could see a picture as it was in the 60′s. Good times at the Chicken Shack too. I went back several times and all the homes(3)are still standing. I went in one and got so overwhelmed I had to go outside. Selling coke bottles and buying penny candy was a daily job. Not to forget the Real Ice Cream Man. Does anyone remember the T.V.show “Gandy’s(something like that)We save the tops to Gandys milk and would get prizes.I guess the TV station. My Dad was the Abilene Reporter News Ad.Man so we got a lot of free tickets.
I remember the Metro as well, born in Abilene in 1948 and my mom dropped us off at the Metro on Saturday and it was a all day deal. Penny candy, nickel pop….15 cents to get in….we both got quarters and we went to town…Ms. Coleman and her sister ran the show…you could get a pop on the head with the flashlight if she had to correct more than once…
Nancy, I think the show you’re remembering was called “The Calvin Keewee show”. Featured a puppet of that name and a balding emcee-puppeteer named Pat Kettelson (?) and was put on in the hangar-like building on the San Angelo highway outside Abilene (which South 14th became) where KRBC built their studio when television first came to Abilene in the mid-fifties. The show was about as 50-style hokey as it gets. Every kid in Abilene appeared on it at some point, sitting in the bleachers (usually about 30 or 40 kids at a time) and laughing at the lame shtic of the puppet and then getting tongue-tied when Kettelson went around with his mike to talk to them. Some would give dumb little recitals and performances of one sort or another. A few minutes of fame. The sponsor was Gandy’s Dairy, and I do recall something or other about prizes for milk carton tops.
Fair Park was a shrunken place when I was last there. The football stadium moved in the late 50′s, and then the zoo in the 60′s. The old Civic Auditorium (where Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and Gorgeous George used to come) no longer functioned. The place had become just some standard playing fields, playground equipment and picnic benches. The action had moved elsewhere. I felt like I was visiting the ruin of an ancient civilization. I remembered how in my bed at night as a kid I sometimes heard the growls of the lions from a mile away.