Cover Story / Native son comes home / In a new biography and a new album, Kashmere Gardens' Johnny Bush pays tribute to his old stomping grounds

By ANDREW DANSBY
Staff

JOHNNY Bush navigates his white van through a Houston he doesn't know anymore. Bush - a country singer and the writer of the classic song "Whiskey River" - doesn't see the buildings he once considered landmarks.

He remembers the street names well enough to get around, but occasionally he turns onto a road that dead-ends at a highway. "When I left here," he says, "there were no freeways."

Bush looks and sounds the part of storyteller with his line-drawn face, two-tone beard and deep voice. He's country dapper in a lustrous red "guayabera," bluejeans with a stylish crease stitched into the front of the legs and scuff-free black boots.

As he rolls through Kashmere Gardens, his tales fill in the sights, smells and sounds absent in the neighborhood today.

The first scene he paints is at Liberty and Jensen around 1942. He pulls into a vacant lot. "This was a teeming metropolis," he says, pointing to the former site of a jewelry store, a dry goods store, a drugstore. "There were no houses. It was all commercial."

He points out where he caught the bus to downtown, where he'd walk to the Queen Theater on Main. He calls the Queen his "escape."

"It was where I found out there were places other than Kashmere Gardens. Between the theater and radio, I knew there was a better life."

Most of the streets, he says, were unpaved. Some of the better ones were paved with oyster shells.

He finds only two buildings from his childhood. One is a shotgun shack on Conroy that his grandfather built of cedar planks from old boxcars. "Notice the satellite dish," he says, smiling.

There was no electricity or running water. His family drilled a well in the backyard "about 20 feet from the outhouse," he says. "We didn't know anything about E. coli."

As for the area's smells, he mentions a place where winds could stir up odors from a paper mill and a rendering plant. "Actually, I can't even describe that," Bush says. "When those smells meet . . ."

He leaves it to the imagination.

The neighborhood sounded better than it smelled.

The other standing building Bush knows is the Charity Baptist Church on Erastus. It once housed the Bronze Peacock nightclub, later the Peacock Studio, where T-Bone Walker and Gatemouth Brown recorded.

Bush says he could hear music from the venue at his home: blues, soul and country music that would later inform his own swinging brand of gritty honky-tonk.

This venture down memory lane isn't without cause. Bush has a new biography, "Whiskey River (Take My Mind): The True Story of Texas Honky-Tonk" (University of Texas Press), which he co-wrote with former Chronicle music critic Rick Mitchell. Mitchell also produced Bush's new album, "Kashmere Gardens Mud: A Tribute to Houston's Country Soul."

But it's not just the old Kashmere Gardens that has disappeared. At one point, Bush did, too.

BUSH says his voice didn't gradually wear out. He remembers the precise date it disappeared: April 15, 1972, just as he seemed on the verge of a breakthrough. After some success on the small Stop label, he'd signed with RCA Records in 1971 and seemed poised for the same kind of good things that would happen for his friend Willie Nelson.

Bush's voice - high and wide - had earned him the nickname "country Caruso." But that night in Weslaco, it failed him. "I couldn't get the high notes. It was choking me off."

His speaking voice went a few days later. His vocal channels slammed shut and refused to budge. To get an idea of how it felt, he suggests exhaling completely and then trying to talk.

He croaked through a few more recordings over the next couple of years, but RCA cut him loose in 1975.

Bush visited a long list of ear, nose and throat doctors. He tried speech therapy, self-hypnosis and "megadoses of Valium, and got hooked on that." Nothing worked.

One doctor insisted that the problem was in his head, caused by "marital problems and girlfriend problems."

Today, Bush sounds like a physician when talking about his condition, demonstrating with his hands the way the vocal cords and muscles work. His condition, spasmodic dysphonia, he says, afflicts one in 35,000 people.

He talks about vocal mechanics with knowing precision. He's able to do so thanks to two people.

In the '80s, an Austin voice coach encouraged Bush to practice a series of vocal exercises done by Italian opera singers. "Your vocal muscles are like any other," he says. "If you don't use it, you lose it." He said his lower register returned and his range was about 80 percent restored.

A doctor had tried Botox on Bush's vocals in the early '90s with some success, but open-heart surgery in 1998 put him back at square one.

He rallied and recorded some records, but the real breakthrough came in 2002. Another doctor tried slipping the needle down his throat and injecting the muscles on each side of his vocal cords.

In the book and in conversation Bush says his condition left him feeling helpless and desperate. Suddenly he could sing again. "He saved my life and my career," Bush says of the doctor.

His voice was working so well for Kashmere Gardens Mud that Andy Bradley, chief engineer at Sugar Hill Recording Studios, a fabled recording space, said several final recordings included "scratch vocals," those recorded early to teach the band the song.

"I think my voice is better than ever before," Bush says. "I think it has a richer quality."

OUR last stop on Bush's tour of Kashmere Gardens is the Sugar Hill studio. By Bradley's count, Sugar Hill has facilitated more than a dozen chart-topping songs and more than 130 Top 100 albums.

Here Bush recorded Kashmere Gardens Mud, which Icehouse Records will release March 6. The title track speaks directly to his youth in the neighborhood, where the streets were covered in "sticky, thick gray gumbo mud." Something about it stuck to him even after he was gone.

He also covered the fiddle favorite "Jole Blon" for the record. The song was originally recorded in 1946 by Harry Choates for Houston's Gold Star label.

Sugar Hill also witnessed the recording of "Ooh Wee Baby" in 1956. Mickey Gilley was the singer, and Bush was the drummer. (He's also a very able fiddler and guitarist).

Bush dusted off that track for Kashmere Gardens Mud, putting "an old Sam Phillips, Sun Records kind of feel to it" with a faster tempo and an echoed vocal.

But today, Bush isn't just looking backward; he's also looking forward. In the studio, Bradley plays a new song that Bush sang as a duet with local singer-songwriter Glenna Bell. He mentions his usual fee for such an appearance, but Bush knew Bell's recording budget was maxed out, so he told her instead to send a check for $25 to his church in San Antonio.

Bush's voice sounds deep, warm and seasoned, with a bit of old country hiccup. He says, "I've never gotten a vocal sound like I do here."

The song's producer, John Evans, has added his own falsetto to the track.

Bradley approves. "He's got the same range you had back in the day," he says to Bush.

OUTSIDE Charity Baptist Church, Bush plucks out a few songs during a photo shoot: "Folsom Prison Blues," "Pancho and Lefty" (which is included on the new album) and "I'll Be There."

Bush - his stage name a shortened version of his given name, John Bush Shin III - recorded his first single there in 1958, when it was Peacock Studio. He says KRCT out of Baytown was the sole country station at the time, and it played the song. "I just assumed everybody in the country heard it," he says. "I had no idea."

Collectors suggest the 45 is now worth hundreds of dollars. "It's not any good," Bush says. "It's just rare."

He found regular work in the '60s backing people like Bill Freeman and the Texas Plainsmen, then Ray Price, whose "I'll Be There" was a modest hit for Bush and a huge hit for Price. More successful was "Whiskey River," a song Bush wrote while under the gun to record an album for RCA. He'd planned to record others' songs, but the label urged him to pen one of his own.

"I thought they were crazy. You've got Harlan Howard, you've got Bill Anderson, and you've got Willie Nelson, the greatest songwriter in the world. And they want me to write?"

But "feeling the amber current flow her from my mind/and warm my empty heart she left so cold" came to him in a snap, and he finished it the same day at home.

His running buddy Nelson has recorded and rerecorded the song over the years, and he almost always plays it at concerts. "You don't set out to write a hit," Bush says. "You set out to tell a story."

Bush spills with other tales about running with this crew. He tells of a tour with an up-and-coming Charley Pride, who had made some regional headway among audiences that didn't know he was black. They toured together with Nelson and others. At one show Pride was introduced to spirited applause that Bush says "went phwup! Dead silent the minute he stepped onstage.

"But Charley said, 'Don't let this permanent tan fool you, I'm a country singer.' He had them in his pocket after that."

Many of those stories found their way into his book, which glossed over none of the randy, carousing days.

Bush remembers the old honky-tonk venues as bruising and bloody. One fight, at a club called Harbor Lights by the Houston Ship Channel, ended with a cleaver and a decapitation.

"Stop me anytime," Bush says. Since I got my voice back, I can't stop talking. I'm making up for lost time, some 30 years."

Perhaps this triumph is what prompted Bush to revisit Kashmere Gardens on the new record and in the book.

Bush, who now lives with his wife, Lynda, in San Antonio, sounds almost obsessive about the lack of thoroughfares in the Kashmere Gardens of his youth. He frequently references the current neighborhood's sidewalks and streets ("I can't imagine Hirsch being four lanes and paved.") as though it had been designed to keep its residents stuck in its mud.

But there's also something familial about the way Bush talks about the strained kinship. He mentions its roughness as though the neighborhood developed his character. Waters would rise after big storms, and he and his friends would go play in pools of standing water. "And we never got sick."

Bush also admires the simple endurance of the little house that his grandfather built, which has outlasted its contemporaries and generations of newer construction.

He talks again about the mud. How he'd get grief (and more) from his mother when he'd come home with his pants dappled with it. He recalls seeing people's shoes in other neighborhoods, bright and shined, which triggered memories of his father, who, Bush says, would just polish his shoes over the mud, as though it wasn't worth the effort to clean them first.

The little details pop when he's telling stories, and Bush's voice gets warm and tips ever so close to nostalgia. He mentions that he still has some coal oil lamps from when he was a kid.

"I like to light them up at Christmas," he says. "It's a little like candlelight, but it's its own thing. It's a warm glow."

...

JOHNNY BUSH APPEARANCES:

Concert: 7:15 p.m. March 17 at the Hideout, Reliant Astrodome. Free. More information at hlsr.com.

Book signing: 8 p.m. March 31 at Sig's Lagoon, 3710 Main. Free.

Concert: 10 p.m. March 31 at Continental Club, 3700 Main. Tickets are $15; at Sig's Lagoon or 713-529- 9899.

Concert: 6:30 p.m. April 29 at iFest, downtown Houston. Tickets go on sale March 12 at area H-E-B stores and at ifest.org. $8 until April 19, $10 after, and $13 at the gate. Tickets are $3 for ages 4-11.

Book signing: 7 p.m. April 30 at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet. Free. More information: 713-523-0701.

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