The Wild Times of Roy Head, Rebel Rocker
by Andrew Dansby
Copyright (c) 2007   Houston Chronicle

originally posted on the Houston Chronicle website at
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/music/4893574.html

Two dogs run alongside the four-wheeler that Roy Head steers off a paved road and into the swamp. In a thicket, he drives around bigger trees, over some smaller ones. He stops, stands up and looks around.

After a few minutes, Head spots his hog trap. It's empty but for a few crawfish hulls he left as bait. He walks over anyway, dropping little warnings in his crackling, cigarette-seasoned voice.

"I'll go first . . . look out for snakes. That'd be something if we got you snakebit, wouldn't it?"

Not 10 feet from the trap he points out some hoofprints in the muck. They've been close, but no bacon today. Maybe he needs different bait.

He's not disappointed, though. Checking the trap gave him something to do, kept him moving.

Back on the ATV, Head motors toward his Humble home. Only one dog trots alongside the four-wheeler.

Head doesn't seem concerned; Whiskey, a rangy mutt, knows the territory. He'll find his way.

The backyard of Roy Head's home, a quiet two-story place surrounded by green, is a menagerie: several dogs (ranging from dachshunds to a Pyrenees), a few chickens, a tiny kitten.

His son Sundance — an American Idol contestant earlier this year — mentions they haven't had much luck with cats. A short list of predators includes alligators, bobcats, snakes and hawks. Cats are often last seen trotting toward the San Jacinto River.

Being off the four-wheeler and seated on his back patio doesn't slow Head down. Neither does the heat, which tips into the 90s. He's antsy like a teenager, his appendages swirling and flailing: Crooked smiles crack from the corner of his mouth. He offers cold beverages time and again. His arms wave, sometimes to emphasize a point, other times to light up one of several Marlboro Red 100s. His legs, wiry and a little bowed, are quick to spring him into a little jog away from his seat when a tale requires physical retreat for emphasis. Stories are interrupted for other stories before he wraps them up with punchlines.

Then on to the next story.

Head's not the handsome young devil he was 42 years ago when he sat one chart position from the top of the world. His song Treat Her Right, a riotous soul classic recorded at Houston's Gold Star studio (now SugarHill), was a No. 2 pop hit, a million-seller kept from the top by the Beatles' Yesterday. Its singer was a dapper, rubber-legged madman with a devilish eye, a bruiser's nose and a sturdy chin.

And he could move. YouTube offers evidence of that, with clips of an acrobatic showman whose moves suggest a white James Brown.

Roy Head looked like a superstar. He looked like a wildman. He looked like rock 'n' roll. He looked like trouble.

Head lifts his glasses and points out the flattened bridge of his misshapen nose. More often than not the dings were caused by an exchange of punches. Occasionally it was a microphone.

"If a guy's off a stage 20 feet away, I can throw the microphone this close to him," he says, putting his index finger and thumb about an inch from his face.

He's hit people in the ears and nose. And he's hit himself. He tells the story of bloodying his nose with that trick, throwing a Band-Aid over it and carrying on with the show.

The next night some people returned for an encore. "Do that thing where you bust your nose," they asked.

Otherwise, Head looks to be spry at 66. His jaw, once as sharp and solid as the line of a diamond, has loosened some. His dark hair is dyed an auburn color. But he has only minimal paunch with thin, limber limbs.

He still performs, though not as frequently as in the barnstorming days. "God's kept me healthy, I'm still doing flips and splits," he says.

Still, there are certain precautions his family would like him to take because, as he puts it, "I admit, I've had some fun." He coughs and spits. "Maybe more fun than the law should allow."

For his 65th birthday, Head's wife, Carolyn, got him a doctor's appointment for a prostate exam.

When presented with the particulars of the process at the doctor's office, he split.

"I still ain't had it checked," he said. "When they find a new way, thump it or something — when they come up with something new, then I'll have a prostate check."

Head had sturdy genes even before he hardened himself with a lifetime of boozing and brawling. He jokes that "I want to die early," but his mother lived into her 90s. His father died at 98.

According to Head, his father was a "German out of Chicago." He moved to Texas, where Head was born on Jan. 9, 1941, in Three Rivers. Head's father worked as a sharecropper. "I remember the first big check he got," Head says. "$1.50 . . . that was for a week."

Head grew up around Crystal City, which is where he "used to listen to the farm workers out there singing at night.

"I used to love to hear them sing. The melodic flow they had, it sounded like a lone wolf at night. They sang about pain and hurt, all that sort of stuff."

When Head was a freshman, the family moved to San Marcos. In high school, he was a pint-sized defensive lineman, who earned the position through hard-hitting fearlessness.

He would sing on the bus on the way to games. Head says a teammate brought him to Cuz Tavern on one of the backroads between San Marcos and New Braunfels. It hosted the likes of Jimmie Reed and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown.

"I thought it was the size of Carnegie Hall," Head says. "Turns out it was the size of my shed."

As a teenager he occasionally sang with a local band called the Traits. After a stint in the Army reserves, he became a full-time frontman.

The blue-eyed soul tag has been used to describe Head's music, but it's a poor fit. Used to signify white soul singers, its best-known practitioners were balladeers like the Righteous Brothers. Head's early music had nothing to do with that sort of sound. It wasn't smooth or mellow, it was part of an edgy Gulf Coast R&B sound. Head's singing and onstage cavorting was closer to the fiery gospel stuff, the churchy country soul of James Brown and Otis Redding (the latter even covered Treat Her Right in 1966).

During this time, Head and the Traits would do band battles with B.J. Thomas and the Triumphs at venues like East Bernard Hall between Sugar Land and Richmond.

Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top used to take in those shows.

"They both had full big bands playing full-blown R&B," he recalls. "They were both great singers. Roy was a contortionist and an acrobat and a volatile-ly voiced singer."

Gibbons bought, and still has, the first Treat Her Right 45 to arrive at his local record store.

He mentions that Head and the Traits' second single, Just a Little Bit, had a B-side instrumental called Tush Hog, which Gibbons says "was a Gulf Coast regional slang term that meant 'extra-fine' or 'deluxe.'"

The first half of the phrase would later appear as the title of a ZZ Top song.

Head had one more hit in 1965 — Apple of My Eye — but his life on the pop charts lasted just three months.

The halt in momentum could be attributed to a lawsuit filed by some of the Traits. The band's bassist/guitarist Gene Kurtz (who now plays with Dale Watson) says some of the Traits weren't interested in breaking beyond a regional act. They had day jobs. He says Head signed a partnership agreement with the band, prompting a legal battle.

"Roy was like a big kid doing this stuff," Kurtz says. "It's why he was a great performer, but it didn't serve him very well businesswise. He'd pretty much sign any piece of paper put in front of him."

Early on, Head's music mixed up styles. So it wasn't any big shock in the '70s when the Brylcreemed soul shouter turned into a mutton-chopped country singer.

Head plans to release a new record early next year. It will be his first since 1986, when he walked away from the recording industry altogether. He says he has no regrets. But he also admits, "I've spent a lot of time fighting myself."

Roy Head is transparent about his shortcomings. He frequently follows a tale by leaning forward and saying, "Please don't print that."

Sometimes he's kidding.

Recently his day started with some yard work and a Bloody Mary. He tells tales of drunkenness without a blush, like the time he fell face down in a flower bed at his home.

Kurtz says somewhere in there is a story about Head biting Elvis on the ankle. He speaks lovingly of Head's "rascal moods."

If pride caused Head trouble before, he's well past that point now. His catalog of onstage embarrassments is lengthy.

There was a show when he tricked an audience into expecting a guest appearance by Tina Turner (she was in the same town that night), only to step out in drag. He performed What's Love Got to Do With It, the only one in the room unaware that his privates were dangling out of his fishnet stockings.

His dynamic dancing could also cause humiliation. There was the time he thought he'd swing onto the stage from an overhead pipe. He found, the hard way, that it carried hot water. He remembers falling from a stage and being caught on a hook by his belt. He dangled until he undid the belt. There was the time he tried to leap from a horse to the stage and came up short. The time at a rodeo that a horse was supposed to deliver him to the stage, only to leave him on his back, in a jumpsuit, in a pile of its excrement.

Head's playfulness, his unfailing politeness and his gift for spinning yarns can obscure the fact that for much of his life, he could be pugnacious and mean.

He's the first to admit it. He makes no excuses, though he points out his surname prompted him to learn to fight. It offers myriad profane and vulgar permutations; he's heard all of them. He offers them one at a time. Conversation will turn to another topic, but he'll remember two or three more.

"I fought everybody," he says. "I even fought little girls in the bathroom."

He tried to teach Sundance the same fist-fronted self-sufficiency.

Their banter has the timing of a crack comedy act.

Head tells of the time Sundance spit out a school-bus window and hit a girl in the eye.

Roy: "They put him off the bus, he couldn't ride it for a week. So I go to the bus barn and jerked the guy's buttons all off. He rode the bus the next day. We got all that out of the way."

Sundance: "My dad was a monster, dude."

Roy: "I was not! I weighed 167 pounds!"

Sundance: "My coach in seventh grade put me in a locker. I was joking and told dad he locked me in for the entire practice because I smarted off. Dad went to the middle school and beat the (expletive) out of my football coach."

Roy: "He retired."

Sundance: "They also had to ban him from Little League baseball because he was ragging on the kids."

Roy, feigning sadness: "They made me leave, embarrassed me in front of all those people!"

Head says he was tipsy when he taught his wife how to throw a proper punch. She'd grown irritated by his habit of grabbing her arm mid-haymaker. Properly schooled, she promptly popped him on the chin. "About that time," he says. "I shut up."

Sundance recalls another time she "stabbed him in the (butt) with a screwdriver." Head wouldn't confirm this. Though he did point out they've been together 39 years.

"I take what he says and divide it by two," Sundance says of the stories. "Then maybe something's right with it."

With the benefit of hindsight, the stories are humorous. But if Head's affinity for different types of music made him difficult to market, his quickness to physical confrontation made him difficult to work with.

After making some headway in country music, he walked away from it in 1986 because of a dispute with producer and label head Jimmy Bowen.

Left behind was an unfinished contract worth tens of thousands of dollars.

"It was the dumbest damn thing I ever did," he says.

Despite the comfort of his successes and his wild tales, Roy Head's past doesn't provide great security.

He says any Treat Her Right windfall — it's been covered by dozens of artists and featured in several films — was blown away by his first marriage. "My daughters got the rights to that when I got unhitched from my first disaster," he says. "I didn't know about all this (expletive)."

Head's home is a museum, albeit an incomplete one.

The remnants of Hurricane Rosa, which came up from Mexico, stalled over the area caused the San Jacinto to overflow in 1994, flooding his house.

Head pulls a few old Harvey Krantz jumpsuits from a closet. Carolyn Head says they need a proper cleaning; they got moldy from the flood. But, she points out, you don't take 30-year-old jumpsuits — sequins, rhinestones and all — to the $1.75 cleaners.

Head admires Krantz's craft, though he says all the things stitched into the pants would cut his legs to tatters when he'd dance.

The flood washed away a poster of a Los Angeles gig Head played with an up-and-coming Jimi Hendrix. He estimates about half of his memorabilia was lost. A plaque for Treat Her Right — 1 million copies sold — hangs on the wall. "A friend of mine found that down the river," he says.

It was the rare case of outside forces causing Head's troubles. For so long, he was best at doing that himself.

Head recalls a phone call he got from the Chronicle when his old friend and producer Huey P. Meaux was on trial for child pornography and other charges. "They asked me, 'Do you have anything to say?' I said, 'Yeah, tell him I'm (peeved) at him that I wasn't in any of his movies.' They hung up on me."

He pauses a beat.

"I was smart," Head says. "That's why I'm such a big star.

"You know, I could've been, but I didn't want to be. I screwed up my own career. Just when I get going good, I screwed it up. I guess I didn't want to work too hard."

Head seems more committed to nurturing Sundance's career than he was to his own. Sundance is Head and his wife's only child. Sundance vaguely references some trying times in their past, but it's clear that Head is crazy about the 28-year-old.

"He and I cry," Head informs. "We can't watch Little House on the Prairie for giving each other towels and whatnot."

Carolyn's son and Head's stepson Michael, a photographer, was killed just a mile from home in 1988 when his truck flipped while he was returning from a concert.

Amid hours of hot-air jest and tall tales, Head suddenly gets quiet. He cusses and pauses. "He was a good kid," he says, choking a little and his eyes watering. "A damn good one."

He says Willie Nelson was fond of Michael's photos and would allow him to shoot from the side of the stage.

Sundance was also around music early. He began singing onstage with his father as a kid. Head recalls the time his son, then 10, was singing Superlove onstage. A woman rushed the stage and flashed her breasts.

"He never sang that song again," Head chortles, springing back to life.

Sundance is close to signing a significant label deal with Universal. But 19 Management, which has a right of refusal deal with American Idol contestants, isn't so quick to let him go even though he didn't make the show's final 12.

It wasn't clear during Idol what sort of artist Sundance wanted to be. His audition was one of the show's best, a soulful Bobby "Blue" Bland cover, and later he nailed Mustang Sally. But old soul with a fresh face doesn't sell today.

That's probably why Sundance isn't planning to make a fresh-faced, old soul record. Decades after his father recorded at Gold Star, Sundance recorded some songs at SugarHill Recording Studios with producer Joe Hardy, who has worked with ZZ Top. Carving Your Name and Medicate Me are bracing on first play. Sundance came across as a little reserved on Idol, peculiar since he got to the stage so young. But these songs have no identity crisis. They could sound at home on modern rock radio, something like a soulful and Southern Soundgarden.

If only he could get freed from the TV show that launched him. Lucrative performance opportunities have been missed. It's a source of tension that comes close to bubbling up. But despite his professed track record of combativeness, Head keeps his cool.

"The waiting's killing us," Head says. "It's like, 'You've won a super prize! . . . But it's going to be a few months.' But I won't say anything bad about American Idol. It's been great for us. In a way he had a bigger hit than I had with Treat Her Right. He had 39 million people hear him sing."

Sundance and his wife and 6-month-old child live at the Head residence; they have for some time. He's in no hurry to move.

"As soon as I get my first million, they're out of here," Sundance jokes. "Maybe I'll build them a place on the lot."

It's the house he grew up in, and he likes the convenient hunting and fishing. Sundance comes across as more guarded than his father. More shy.

He says he prefers fishing alone.

"I have to, my dad just wants to (talk) so much.

"He'll talk to the dogs, whatever, whoever wants to hear his (expletive). He tells me something new every day. We'll be doing something that reminds him of something. 'You know what son . . .' I just say, 'Hold on, let me grab a beer.'

"He won't stop talking and he won't damn sit down. He's got to be moving all the time."