George McClughan

George McClughan

          The day after I arrived in San Antonio in August 1972 to work for Star Attractions, the good old boys in suits at the office gave me directions to a tract house in an older suburb inside North-Central Loop 410, where a number of Star Attractions roadies stayed the one week per month they were in town. Management was eager to get me out of the hotel where they’d put me up. I met George McClughan, who was to be my partner, there at the roadies’ house.

          McClughan was a shortish, confident blond fellow with a strong chin and straight white teeth under a reddish-blonde moustache. Both his parents were retired Army generals, he told me. His mother had been one of the first woman generals. He had a sort of Colgin-esque, frat-boy-gone-wrong way about him.

          As I remember it, they sent McClughan and me out on tour the next day or the day after. I left my car (with cardboard boxes intact) and my little dog Naomi with John and Vicki Kuehne at their newly-built house outside Loop 410 (which was the far suburbs in those days), and flew with McClughan from San Antonio to Panama City, Florida, where the tour’s equipment was being stored. I found out that McClughan liked a bit of pot from time to time, so the job seemed like it was going to be cool. McClughan told me some fun stories about acts and tours of the past. I immediately began to yearn for the month I would work a tour with such T&A acts as the Gold Diggers or the Ding-a-Lings. McClughan’s favourite, he told me, was Jaye P. Morgan, because she was funny and cool and a lot of fun to tour with.

          Treevie Lang, the chief roadie, met us at the Panama City airport. Treevie was a recently-retired Army NCO club manager and had a colourfully thick Appalachian accent. He gave the impression that he was more at home drunk and laughing than sober and serious, and referred to all male humans as “swingin’ dicks”. McClughan thought he was a riot, and I had no reason to argue.

          McClughan and I took the company van and the company horse trailer loaded with light and sound equipment and went to a local hotel, where I learned about the way that nearby paper mills smell. Treevie took off in the company Lincoln Continental — the Star Car — to Memphis to meet that month’s tour’s star.

          When McClughan and I drove up to Memphis the next day, we had to pull over with a flat tire on some two-lane blacktop state route somewhere in rural Mississippi. The spare was flat, too. A redneck in a pickup stopped to see what was going on. There I was, bearded and Jewish and coming down off an hour-before joint and fresh out of LA and in the Deep South for the first time. I recall feeling apprehension.

          But the Bubba was more polite than anyone I’d encountered for years and, not only did he take our flat back to Mudville, or wherever, to get fixed, but he insisted on helping us put it back on the van when he returned. It was then that I became convinced of the overwhelming importance and beauty of Good Manners. We don’t have to like each other, Good Buddy, we may even despise each other, but we can mask our dislike behind Good Manners. If that’s our culture. If that’s the sort of people we are.

          In Memphis we met the acts we were touring with (Norm Crosby, the doubletalk comedian who had opened for Tom Jones, and Patti Something-or-Other, a 40ish Vegas-all-the-way singer-dancer-‘entertainer’. I quickly learned to handle the PA cables and to operate the spotlight, and we were off on tour. McClughan knew the circuit well — which places were cool, where the clubs and the groupies were, and all that. He didn’t look all that at-home in the blue suit he wore when we were working, but he could introduce the acts slicker’n shit, projecting a disc-jockeyish, smile-in-the-voice “It’s Showtime!” attitude that went well with his strong jaw and self-assuredness. He swam laps in hotel swimming pools whenever he could. He ordered steaks from room service and spread lavish amounts of butter all over them.

          The first time we drove from Biloxi to Montgomery we got out-of-it stoned, McClughan driving, on an arrow-straight two-lane state highway going across miles of flat Alabama cotton fields. McClughan put the van on cruise control, put his feet up on the dash, the steering wheel gripped between his knees, and we talked shit for a couple of hours. ‘Honky Cat’ by Elton John came on the radio, just released, and we got lost together for a few moments in the piano solo.

          Being on tour was all right. We worked hard when we worked, drank hard, ate well, smoked plenty of dope, and laughed a lot when we were free. We didn’t go wenching together, though, as I got involved early in the tour with the hotel desk clerk who’d checked us into the Sheraton Biloxi, named Helena. Toward the end of that tour McClughan figured out a way for us to have separate rooms in the hotels where we stayed, instead of having to share. He had an eye for beating the system, whatever it was. Cool.

          Back in San Antonio we split up. Before we did, we went out to the suburbs and I met his dad. They talked together like old club-mates. Pals. Chuckling over “the local talent”, nudge-wink, and all that.

          I took my loaded Ford Ranchwagon and Naomi to Biloxi to move in with Helena. McClughan picked me up in the company van on the way from Panama City to Memphis, where we met Treevie for the September tour. The headliner this time was Jimmie Rodgers, the one that did ‘Honeycomb’, not the Singing Brakeman and the Father of Country Music. That Jimmie Rodgers died in 1933, the year this Jimmie Rodgers was born. McClughan and I agreed that Norm Crosby had been more fun.

          Jimmy Rodgers was going through a rough patch. There had been an incident in 1967 in which he’d been beaten up with a tire iron by an off-duty LA cop. His eyesight had gone bad, and he’d got religion in a big way. He carried around a large-print version of the New Testament. McClughan told me that once when Jimmy had been getting out of the Star Car he’d seen him hit his head slightly against the door frame, and the sound, according to McClughan, had not been a natural one. Metal plate, with a knowing nod. Anyway, there’d been a court case, and I think some compensation. Jimmy had an entrepreneurial vision of forming a film company for producing wholesome family features, to be called ‘Kids’ Stuff.’ I don’t think it ever happened. The competition, and all that. As they say in Hollywood, “Don’t fuck with The Mouse.”

          When we got to Biloxi I stayed with Helena in our new rented house on Santini Street, rather than in the hotel, where she’d been staying our first time through. The morning after the last Biloxi show McClughan showed up with the van, a bit late. Jimmie Rodgers’s backup band was travelling in the van with us. No more getting stoned with the accelerator on cruise control and listening to music on the FM radio while the cotton fields had rolled by.

          Anyway, I got into the back seat of the van. McClughan, it seems, had been getting into some kind of stoush with the band’s drummer, who was on one of the middle seats. I think it was over the inconvenience of having to make the detour over to Helena’s house to pick me up. I didn’t notice at first the tension crackling between them.

          Now, McClughan wasn’t one to rely on tact and diplomacy when faced with aggression. Stroppiness was not, however, the optimal tactic for him under the circumstances. He was driving. The drummer was behind him. The drummer was Sicilian, or at least Neapolitan, and therefore unlikely to take kindly to McClughan’s sarcasm or use of pejoratives. And, although the drummer was small, it’s generally unwise to mix it up with someone with arms that pound sticks on drums for two or three hours a night.

          I had to pull the drummer off McClughan. I was twice his size and used to humping amplifiers and p.a. speakers around, but it wasn’t that easy and he came off McClughan with a big handful of George’s hair. I wondered that the whole incident had happened in the first place. It seemed to be about me, but it had nothing really to do with me at all.

          And so we went on our merry way. The tour and the job ended in Atlanta, where we were playing in a hotel in the suburbs. The news came in that Star Attractions had lost its ass with a major tour of Air Force bases with the Supremes, who they’d signed right after Diana Ross had gone off on her solo career. No Diana, no full houses, as it turned out. Star Attractions owed money to everybody, including the hotel where we were staying. Bankruptcy was imminent, if not actually already the case. According to Treevie, even the paychecks he gave to McClughan and me were probably no good. McClughan and I figured that the best way to deal with our final paychecks from a bankrupt company was to cash them at the hotel desk and head off on the next Greyhounds going our way — his to San Antonio and mine to Biloxi.

          A bit less than two years later I found myself in San Antonio again. I was alone again and had a job with On Stage, a company trying to do what Star Attractions had done. On Stage, true to its model, went belly-up not long after I got there. One of the first things I did when I got to San Antonio, however, was look up George McClughan.

          He drove down to Laurel Heights and picked me up at the furnace-like furnished room where I stayed for a week or so when I first got to town. He had my brown felt, Phillip Marlowe-style fedora hat that I had left behind in the hotel room in Atlanta. Saved it for me somehow. He also had a pleasant blonde woman with him named Debbie.

           They were living in a place out in the country, but not that far out in the country, maybe 35 km (about 20 miles) from my place off North St Mary’s Street. It’s probably suburban sprawl by now. They had two Afghan hounds, which were getting in trouble for worrying some local cattle. Debbie apparently had two kids, and I think there was some problem with custody because of her relationship with McClughan.

          They seemed to be in love, but he described it to me in a way I thought odd. He was impressed with the way she handled business, she passed the test “in the looks department”, and so he’d decided, why not?

          Somehow, in the turmoil of my looking for a life in that city, we drifted apart after a while. Maybe it was him being so far out of town, I don’t know. I remember hearing something from somebody that he’d moved up to Austin.

          When I tried to get in touch with him in 2003 I got a letter back from his father. George “just keeled over” and died of a heart attack in 2002. He was 54 years old at the time.

          Spreading butter on steak?