Blaze kept playing, drinking and drugging, and getting kicked out of bars and beer joints for being obnoxious, abusive, or going on rants. He’d been arrested so many times on drunk and disorderly and vagrancy charges that when he called to report a fire and told the dispatcher he was Blaze Foley, the dispatcher hung up. Or so the story goes.
His reputation as a carouser belied the empathy that drove him. He was the first person in Austin to befriend Pat MacDonald and Barbara K, a Wisconsin couple who became known as Timbuk 3 and scored a pop hit in 1986 with “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”. He was a regular at the Supernatural Family Band’s regular gig at the Shorthorn Bar. And he took to an unheralded singer from Lubbock named Kimmie Rhodes.
“I guess it was the first time I ever saw inside a person you’d normally try to get away from if you saw him walking down the street,” Rhodes said. “He’d come over to our house. For my daughter’s second birthday, he brought her a giant teddy bear and a flashlight he got at Goodwill. I thought, ‘Now that’s wisdom. He knows what a two-year-old needs.’ He was real, he was a good person, and he was an artist.”
Kimmie met Blaze through her husband Joe Gracey, who had been recording Blaze cohort Calvin Russell. “I loved to sing harmony with him,” she said. “He had one of those voices like Waylon — real deep, straight out of the heart. I loved his songs. He had an honest way of building songs from the ground up.
“He’d come to this art gallery I was working at and show me his artwork while tripping on acid wearing that duct tape suit. It got to where I’d save my daughter’s broken toys for him because he had the whole ceiling of the back porch where he was staying covered with hair curlers and broken toys and old 45s. You could have put that room in the Pompidou in Paris. When he got his first royalty check for Willie and Merle, he bought all these colored rolls of duct tape.
“There was something painful in his center, but he never talked to me about it. I knew he was rough and could fuck you up, but I was never scared of him. He was very polite. He was happy to be my friend.”
He was happy to be the friend of an older man down the block from where he lived on a couch on the back porch at 904 West Mary. Blaze Foley met Concho January in June 1988 while singing in a backyard song circle. They immediately took to one another. Concho liked to drink as much as Blaze did, and when Blaze believed Concho was being jacked with by his son, Carey, known as J.J., he was moved to defend him.
J.J. was paid to be Concho’s caretaker, which meant showing up on the first day of the month to take Concho’s veteran’s and welfare check, which he usually spent on himself. Blaze told J.J. he better make sure Concho was getting fed and all he needed with the checks. There were confrontations on the first day of the month for several months. Blaze chased off J.J. brandishing a table leg one time, prompting J.J. to call the cops and file a complaint.
But the friendship between Concho and the big bearded guy from down the block endured. Blaze would hustle rides to take Concho to the store or to the laundry. He liked hanging with the old man as much as the old man liked hanging with him.
Blaze sobered up for most of the fall of 1988. He ran into Gurf Morlix and informed him, “I’ve stopped bathing.” Gurf asked him what the women thought of that. “My days of sport fucking are over,” he declared.
Gurf could tell Blaze had changed. “We stopped in at the Austin Outhouse and I had a beer and he had a coke,” Morlix said. But not long after the encounter, Blaze fell off the wagon in a bad way.
In November, David and Leland Waddell, the rhythm section behind Townes and Billy Joe Shaver, organized a session at Spencer Starnes’ Bee Creek Studio in Driftwood for Blaze, who wanted to make a country demo tape. The demo might lead to a record deal that could be his calling card on a European tour he said he was going to do with Townes. Charlie Day, brother of Willie’s pedal steel player Jimmy Day, was recruited to play pedal steel. Joe Gracey played acoustic guitar.
Ten tracks were recorded live the first day. The second day was devoted to overdubs, including adding Kimmie Rhodes’ voice to “If I Could Only Fly”. A contract was prepared with Heartland Records, a small British independent label run by Pete Flanagan. But Blaze signed only one of three copies.
On December 27 and 28, Foley cajoled Lost John Casner into recording performances with his four-track Yamaha cassette deck at the Austin Outhouse, the only club he hadn’t been 86ed from. Blaze invited Rich Minus, Sarah Elizabeth Campbell, Champ Hood, Pat Mears and Tony DiRoadie to join him, along with Outhouse bartender and co-owner Ed Bradfield on harmonica. Some overdubs were done at Casner’s home studio on Karen Street in north Austin.
“We ended up with 110 minutes, mixed and edited,” Casner said. “I took it to Blaze, who was opening up for Timbuk 3, who were playing Hole In The Wall as Fred & Wilma. He said he wanted to sell it for five dollars, but with a dollar of that going to the homeless.”
He had a good heart, but he was also on a tear. “I knew he wasn’t going to last long,” Kimmie Rhodes said, “when I went over to his place on the back porch and he had three bottles of bad wine — one he’d just finished, one he was working on, and one that he was going to drink.”
Foley visited Kimmie at Lone Star Studios, where she’d asked him to sit in on her recording session. He opened the studio door and stuck his head in to tell her he couldn’t. “I’m in a car I’ve borrowed and it won’t turn off; if I leave it running, it’ll get stolen,” Kimmie remembers Blaze telling her.
“The last thing he said to me was, ‘I’ll be right back.'”
