Doug Sahm / Sir Douglas Quintet – The Return Of Wayne Douglas / San Antonio Rock: The Harlem Recordings 1957-1961 / The Sir Douglas Quintet Is Back! / Soul Jam

Fate had it that, like most of us, he died alone in a place that was not Texas. But it was only the untimely, unacceptable fact of this death — sudden, and removed from the friends he had across the Lone Star State and wherever honest music is played — that made the new Doug Sahm record, The Return Of Wayne Douglas, his last, and thus made his very last music just as his very first was: hard country.

Some will find that ironic; it was a neighborhood he visited only rarely in recent years. Sir Doug would not have. He was not big on irony or distance or halfway measures. Doug Sahm’s face, voice and music offered a wide-smiling, half-smart-ass-nodding YES! to every sort of music and pleasure of life that came up the pike.

And he surely found pleasure in straight country, well-played, soulfully sung. Wayne, it turns out, was Sahm’s middle name; he first used the Wayne Douglas pseudonym playing steel guitar for Alvin Crow. The Return Of Wayne Douglas, released June 27 on Tornado Records, offers straightforward, catchy renditions of Texas country shuffles, ballads and swing, most songs written within these modes by Sahm himself, several grabbed from earlier parts of his complicated career (“Texas Me”, “Dallas Alice”, “Cowboy Peyton Place”) and remade this way. The single most repeated theme is love of his home and the complicated people in it, in everything from “Beautiful Texas Sunshine” to “Can’t Go Back To Austin Anymore”.

Pumping, twanging piano from Ronnie Huckaby and Augie Meyers, fiddle from Bobby Flores, steel guitar from Tommy Detamore and bass from David Carroll lead the way, but there’s the expert guitar work you’d expect — 12-string electric and acoustic from Sir Doug, aided by Bill Kirchen, no less, on many tracks. It’s all touching and smooth, and even a song you’ve heard a thousand times (Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”) gets some sweet real life. On the other hand, there’s occasionally a small loss in vocal exactness here over typical Sahm efforts; expressive as ever, yes, but sometimes apparently weakened physically. It makes you wonder if anybody noticed.

Country was actually Doug Sahm’s first home; by the age of 5 (in 1946), “Little Doug” was a recognized prodigy on steel guitar, mandolin and fiddle. He was a Louisiana Hayride regular on national radio by age 8, played with Webb Pierce and Faron Young, appeared with Hank Williams, had his first single in 1955 (“A Real American Joe”), and turned down an invitation to join the Grand Ole Opry. The cowboy-hatted little kid in a photo on the new Norton set San Antonio Rock, playing steel with western swing stars Jimmie Revard and Curley Williams, had been bitten by the sound across the street. He donned shades.

Like so many Southern boys in the mid-’50s, especially poor boys who grew up in mainly black and Mexican neighborhoods as Little Doug did, the magnetic pull of teenage cooliosity and lust was too much. The clothes were better; the date potential was palpable. It was on to the R&B lounge.

San Antonio Rock collects on CD for the first time this sound of wild young Doug and friends in bands such as Doug Sahm & the Pharaohs, Doug Sahm & the Mar-Kays (not the famous ones, in either case!), Doug Sahm & the Dell Kings, and Doug Sahm & the Knights, revealing a teenager who made some extraordinary ’50s rock and R&B, utterly without notice.

This Doug Sahm is a clear creature of the Third Coast; the biggest influence is the New Orleans roll of Allen Toussaint, and of the great Dave Bartholomew/Huey Piano Smith bands that backed the hard Specialty Records acts (Little Richard, Larry Williams, Fats Domino). Doug’s voice is higher, younger of course, and utterly adept at handling tough R&B demands, over blowing saxes, popcorn-popper walking piano riffs — and here, unusually, lead guitar over New Orleans-style rockers (“Crazy Daisy”, “Sapphire”, a “Slow Down” cover that beats the Beatles’ later try rhythmically) and ballads.

Those ballads, some doo-wop-tinged, some pure ’50s rock style, are already masterful, the smooth tones pure and expressive, mindful of many but something of their own. Sahm did not really the change the way he did these for 40 years. Amazing. And it’s a very good CD, not just a document.

Holed up at San Antonio’s lowdown Ebony Lounge or Tiffany Lounge, Sahm was soon playing with (and learning from) Texas electric guitar king T-Bone Walker, and from Junior Parker, James Brown and Bobby Bland. Doug and his ever-changing gang of San Antonio locals took in the oncoming R&B, the Tex-Mex border music, the blues, the western swing, the rock ‘n’ roll, the folk scare, the polka. The instrumental mastery only increasing in thousands of live dive stands, Sahm wrote songs, played, opened for the Dave Clark Five and…waited.

He waited until 1965, when Huey P. Meaux, Third Coast would-be music maven, had a vision: If he could find an American band who could pass as one of these British Invasion outfits the kids were going crazy for, he could make a bigger fortune than Sam Phillips.

Under the influence of Thunderbird, ambition, and Texas-Louisiana roots, Meaux detected the extremely hidden “secret” of the music of the Searchers and the Beatles: They were “only playing Cajun two-steps.” Informed by this spectacular error, he summoned Sahm’s now long-haired crew, dubbed them the Sir Douglas Quintet, began to record them, and actually believed somebody would think these guys were English.

Sahm’s voice was by now one of the most flexible tools in rock, able to both growl and croon, and his blues guitar playing was among the very best in the hands of a young Caucasian anywhere, at that time or later. The rhythm section (Johnny Perez on drums; Jack Barber and future-Byrd John York on bass) took them beyond the league of the Bobby Fuller Four, or Sam the Sham, or, for that matter, the Searchers.

Above all, there was Sahm’s lifetime buddy Augie Myers, with the Vox organ that one moment emitted squeaking pellets of percussion and the next a stream of tone as smooth and gooey as huevos rancheros at a roller rink. It was proto-garage punk, jagged folk, bent country, screaming blues, Tex-Mex cosmic whoop-ass, wig-out, rave-up rock ‘n’ roll.

This sound, finally comparable to no one’s, would take them to the charts with “She’s About A Mover”, and more. As Edsel’s two-disc Crazy Cajun Recordings showed last year, their experimentation set an agenda for the rooted side of popular American music for decades. From 1965 to the early ’70s, they recorded an “In The Pines” that predicted Nirvana’s; an electric “John Hardy” a quarter-century before Uncle Tupelo’s; an electric Woody Guthrie (“Philadelphia Lawyer”) before Dylan or Arlo; and rock covers of Conway Twitty (“Image Of Me”, before the Burritos, it appears) and Jimmie Rodgers (“In The Jailhouse Now”). There were smashing versions of everything from Walker’s “T-Bone Shuffle” and “There’s a Man Down There” (before the Allmans) to “A Quarter To Three”.

The new Sundazed release The Sir Douglas Quintet Is Back! duplicates only a couple of cuts from the Edsel set, offering instead a fresh look at some fascinating SDQ tracks previously unreleased or rarely heard. The big news is some hard 1965 last-stand electric-blues romps (“When I Sing The Blues”, “Blues Pass Me By”) in the mode of Buddy Guy’s then brand-new, leading-edge wail and sometimes, very credibly, predicting the Jimi Hendrix sound still a couple of years away. Sahm’s guitar work is on the mark, and inspired.

There are distinctive, organ-driven lost B-sides that should have been rock hits (“She Digs My Love”, “In Time”, “She’s Gotta Be Boss”), the electric “John Hardy”, and a version of the old country ballad “Little Sadie” (Old Bill Baetty). They add one of those supposedly British Invasion two-steps (“Sugar Bee”), and a Doug-penned ballad that actually sounds like one (“Love Don’t Treat Me Fair”). The set adds a new dimension to the available picture of what this broad, deep outfit really had to offer.

Soul Jam, a seemingly hastily-assembled collection of hard soul music covers by the Quintet recorded in the ’70s and ’80s, adds another utterly credible, infectious takes on James Brown and Otis Redding and even “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” without an ounce of imitation, given the full Muscle Shoals/Memphis horn treatment. As always, the material’s been digested, not regurgitated. It works.

The multi-directional Doug Sahm was known, comically, by many working monikers: Little Doug, Doug Saldana, Sir Douglas, Wayne Douglas, the King of Tex-Mex, the Formerly Brother. And he must have had more albums called The Return Of… or …Is Back than anyone in recorded history. Whatever it was, he had already been there.

But the man and his music could not be subdivided and targeted. He played country, at the end, with the same from-the-soul, from-the-life conviction as he did those late Tex-Mex sets with the Texas Tornados, or Dylan covers with the Gourds.

It’s a mark of Sahm’s humnanity that he stops in the middle of The Return Of Wayne Douglas to remind us in a spoken ramble of the songs and music of a classic country artist he covers, Leon Payne, and respectfully points us in Payne’s direction.

It’s not all sweetness and light, though. In the comedic high point of that final disc, amid a perfectly rendered Ray Price-style shuffle, Doug shoots a few darts at some of mainstream country’s most deserving targets:

I just turned on my CMT today
Man, my mind was blown away
There was a young dude walkin’
‘Cross the stage like a gazelle
I bet he never even heard of Lefty Frizell.
Oh no, not another one
I’m a real country fan, son
Oh no, not another one.

Nobody ever mistook Doug Sahm for “another one” of anything. All of this music, from one true voice with many real faces, is what we have of him now. There’s a world there to love.