Music

WHEN DALLAS ROCKED, THE KIRBY WARNOCK STORY

on
March 22, 2020

Stevie Ray Vaughan, 1986

“When Dallas Rocked”

Interview and editing by Paul Heckmann,

Executive Director Memories Inc.

the Kirby Warnock Story

Paul Heckmann: Good morning Mr. Warnock! I was just thinking how long we have known each other. It’s been a while.

Kirby Warnock: It has indeed. We keep crisscrossing paths. Lots of ups and downs along the way.

Paul: So how is life in Fort Stockton?

Kirby: Same old, same old. Lots of fences and javelinas and dirt.

Paul: All right, let’s get to Kirby. Where did the legend begin?

Kirby: Well, I was born and raised in Mississippi. But I was also a part-time Texan. My father was born and raised up in Fort Stockton on our family’s ranch out here. And he was an only child. And he married my mother who was from South Mississippi from a little town called Louin. They met at Mississippi College, and they got married. So, marriage being a compromise, they decided that we would live in Mississippi. But every summer and every Christmas, we’d come out to Fort Stockton to his parent’s place, my grandparents.

Kirby, the buckaroo on his grandfather’s faithful steed ‘Silver’, 1962

So, I grew up spending about a month out of every year out here in West Texas. We’d drive out here from Mississippi every Christmas for the two-week Christmas vacation, and then we’d drive out here in the summer. And usually, my parents would leave my brother and I out here on the ranch with my grandparents, and we’d stay here most of the summer.

Paul: Oh, wow, that sounds like a lot of fun – and work!

Kirby: It was, but it was a good time. So, as soon as I got out of high school, I came to Texas and became full-time Texan. As Davy Crockett said, “I wasn’t born a Texan, but I got here as quick as I could.”

Paul: Now I know where Fort Stockton is. About 100 miles north of Big Bend National Park, basically out in the middle of West Texas. But I also seem to remember that the interstate highway wasnt around back then.

Kirby: That’s correct, we took all these little roads to get to Dallas. Then we took Highway 67 out of Dallas or Highway 190 driving into Eldorado. The interstate wasn’t built yet. It wasn’t around until I was in college. But growing up, it was always two-lane blacktop.

The only time there was multi-lanes was the DFW Turnpike. We had to pay turnpike fee. That was exciting.

Paul: Well, you must have felt like you were in the big city!

Kirby: We were red-hot trotting. My gosh, when you pay money, you can drive fast. There’s lots of lanes.

Paul: So, now you’re a full-time Texan. Now what made you want to go to Baylor?

Kirby: Well, having grown up in Mississippi, I simply did not want to go to college there. I’d seen everything Mississippi had to offer.

And I always enjoyed Texas a lot more whenever we’d visit when I was a kid. It was a really long two-day drive on those little roads. So, the first day we drove from Mississippi to Dallas. We always spent the night in Dallas, there in Oak Cliff, My father’s best friend was from Fort Stockton, a fella named John Collins. And he had gone to Baylor. After he graduated Baylor Law School, he set up practice in Oak Cliff.

And we always spent the night there with them. And then the next day, we’d get up and drive from Oak Cliff to Fort Stockton and do the same thing on the way back.

Kirby at Baylor in Waco, 1973

So, every trip, we always spent at least three or four nights in Oak Cliff with them. I knew I did not wanna go to college in Mississippi, and I had no idea what I was going to do. And then dad’s buddy John said, “Why don’t you visit Baylor?”

And we got to have one day where we could take off of school and do a college visit. So, I took off a Friday, so I’d have a three-day weekend. And we drove out to Waco during Baylor homecoming in 1969. And I went to see Baylor homecoming, and I was just impressed with everything there. It wasn’t anything like they had in Mississippi. The only problem was the football team was terrible.

Paul: The Bill Beall days – ouch!

Kirby: But I liked the school, and I decided I could go here. So, I enrolled and finished in four years, which was normal back then.

Paul: So, what was your degree in?

Kirby: I majored in history but I did not get a teaching certificate. We can go back to how the world was different back then, on career day, they would tell us at Baylor, “It doesn’t matter what your degree is in as long as you get a degree. It will show an employer that you can start something and finish something.”

So, I always enjoyed – I tried to major in business, but it was just too boring. I took economics and accounting, and it just bored me to tears. But I always enjoyed the history classes there. And I said, “If I’m gonna be here for four years and get a degree, I wanna pick something I enjoy.” So, I majored in history but never intended to teach it. I just was always told if you get a degree, you can get a job. And back then, you could.

There were lots of jobs. So, I got a history degree from Baylor.

Paul: So, was it a specific history such as American or European?

Kirby: No, you had to take all kinds of history classes to get the degree. I took world history under Dr. Robert Reid. I took Texas history under Dr. Paul Armitstead. I took oral history under Dr. Thomas Charlton. I just had all these different professors, but to get that degree in history, you had to take all these different classes.

All those guys were great professors that I think that kids are missing a lot today not having – they all think history’s boring like that. But these guys made history anything but boring.

They told great stories.

Paul: Well, it really prepped you for your future too.

Kirby: Oh, yeah. And I kinda minored in journalism.

Paul: Kinda?

Kirby: Yes, I took journalism 101 and photography and public relations because I always enjoyed variety. And for history, you had to write a lot. You had to write a lot of term papers. So, yeah, I was doing a lot of writing back then.

Paul: So, you get out of Baylor. You got a history and a minor in journalism. What happens next?

Kirby: Well, later on I went up to Colorado, there was a little town called Salida, and I got a job with The Mountain Mail newspaper. It was a daily paper that only published Monday through Fridays. No weekend editions. And I got a job there selling advertising and writing for them.

And I did it because I wanted to ski more. I always enjoyed skiing, but I figured I could never get good just skiing every Christmas and every Easter. So, I went up there and got a season’s pass at the Monarch ski area and worked at The Mountain Mail, and I skied 100 days a year!

Paul: Oh, man.

Kirby: And let me tell you I got to be pretty good. But as anybody who’s tried to live in Colorado will be the first to let you know, wages are low, and prices are high. And I got tired of it. I was broke all the time. And I don’t mean just broke; I mean just an inch away from eating dirt all the time. And it just wore me down – all my friends in Texas were driving new cars and doing well. After two years, it wasn’t sustainable. So, I came back to Texas, and that’s when I got that job at Buddy Magazine.

Paul: Perfect landing spot?

Kirby: Oh yeah.

Paul: So the Buddy Magazine era begins. Was Stoney Burns the big dog at that time?

Dallas Notes, 1970

Kirby: Oh, yeah. He was the publisher. Oh yes. He had run the ‘Dallas Notes’ prior to that. His dad had a printing business which gave him and insight to cost and how to physically make it happen.

He was one of the anti-war kids from the 60’s and helped sponsor several of the protests.

Yeah, he was the end-all be-all at that.

Buddy had a little ratty office down on McKinney Avenue at some apartments. There were some cheap run-down apartments there, and he rented two apartments there and used those for offices. They had adjoining doors. So, our office was in an apartment building at that time.

Paul: Who else was there at that time?

Kirby: A guy named Ben Ferguson was one of the writers, and Jesus Carrillo and Ron McKeown were photographers. And there was another girl we had there selling advertising named BJ Ellis. Her real name was Bette Jean, but she went by BJ. And she was there. Oh, and Evelyn Adams was a typesetter. And Louie Salganik was the office manager. He did payroll and all that stuff.

Paul: So, you’re at Buddy Magazine. And what was your first job there?

Kirby: I sold advertising. Stoney would let you write as much as you wanted as long as you sold ads.

Paul: Self-propagating.

Kirby: Yeah, nobody was just a full-time “writer.” We all had to sell advertising. Since it was a free publication, it all depended on ad sales. So, we all wanted to work at a rock-and-roll magazine, but we had to be able to sell ads.

Paul: So, how long were you there?

Kirby: I was there eight years.

Paul: No kidding! Now, didn’t you move up to editor at some point?

Kirby: Yeah. I did. I wasn’t there that long, this was within a month or to after I got there. There was a guy there named Bill Douglas who was the editor. He and Stoney had somehow fallen out for one reason or another, Stoney fired him and told me I was the editor.

Paul: With a massive pay raise, right?

Kirby: Ha!

Paul: I’ve heard stories about Stoney. He was pretty tight wasn’t he?

Kirby: Yeah, he was very cheap. But he could be generous when he wanted to. I remember one Christmas, we had a really good year. We sold a butt-load of new advertising that year, 1977 I think. And he gave me a $2500 Christmas bonus.

Paul: Holy cow!

Kirby: Now $2500 back in 1977 was a lot of money.

Paul: You must have thought you had died and gone to heaven. That’s crazy.

Kirby and Charla Stephenson at a Buddy event in 1978

Kirby: It was. He gave everybody in the office a bonus, we all got at least a $2000 bonus that Christmas.

Paul: Is there any other good stories you can tell me about Stoney?

Kirby: Yes. He was probably one of the, well, interesting is too tame a word. The guy just enjoyed having a good time and didn’t really care what other people thought.

Paul: It sounds a lot like somebody else that I know, wink, wink, nod, nod.

Kirby: Hee hee hee… His main thing was he thought that a lot of what society frowned on back then were what he called victim-less crimes. He thought everybody should be able to do drugs, have sex as much as they wanted without the cops getting involved.

And he had been very involved in the anti-war protest back then at Lee Park and everything. So, he thought the draft was a horrible idea. He thought that society put too many restrictions on our freedoms. And he wanted to be able to do what he wanted as long as he wasn’t hurting anybody…but himself.

Paul: So, you’re there at Buddy Magazine. And how did it kinda end of end for you at Buddy Magazine?

Kirby: Well, I reached a point where I was pushing 30. And I just thought – I don’t think I can do this all my life. I don’t wanna be 40 – for one thing, I didn’t know the music business would continue the way it did. I thought I don’t wanna be 45 years old and still standing up at a Rolling Stones concert. I just thought I wanted to – I don’t know, whats the word I am looking for… OUCH… like “serious”? Or to get a career or something like that. I just felt like I needed to move on. So, I just made a decision that I would quit one day. And I gave him my notice and quit and that was it. It was all self-inflicted.

Paul: Oh, wow. So, you left Buddy Magazine. Is that when you went to Bally’s?

Kirby: No, I did a publication called MetroSport which was a startup magazine. And then I went over to the President’s Health Club, aka Bally’s, and we did SportsPulse. It was all modeled after Buddy, but it was all about health and fitness. It was a free publication. We existed on sales. I was still in publishing but it was in a different arena. That was all.

Paul: That’s with Fred Clapp and Sonny Reiser?

Kirby: Yeah. I remember you and I were there about the same time. Those guys were really nice to me. I know some people had other different experiences with them. Especially Sales.

Paul: That was a different thing when you had to report numbers to them.

Kirby: You had to meet a quota. You had to meet a gross, but I was blessed that we were always managing to have the magazine profitable. We sold enough advertising, so, they liked me. I always had a really good relationship with both those guys. I wonder where they are now because they were nothing but good to me. I can say that.

Paul: The last I heard, they were up in New York.

Kirby: Oh, yeah.

Paul: About how long were you at Bally’s?

Kirby: Damn, now you’re making me think. Yeah, I’m gonna say four years or something. I’m guessing that’s what it was. Yeah, somewhere around there – four or five years. It was ‘83 up to about ‘88.

Paul: So, you left Bally’s. What’s the next step?

Kirby: Well, I got a job. Believe it or not, since I’ve always been a writer, somehow – I don’t remember how. It was through a temp agency. I was looking for something to do. A temp agency needed contract writers for proposals for EDS. So, I signed up for that. And I got on and worked up here as a contractor writing business proposals for about two or three years. And they finally made me a full-timer and like that.

And then not too long after I got on full-time and got health insurance, they had a bad turn in the stock price, and they laid off like 10,000 people in one day. Their CEO was Dick Brown who came from cable and wireless, and he immediately slashed jobs.

So, after that, some of the people that had left there went over to ACS, Darwin Deason’s company. And they called me and said, “You wanna come over here?” And I said, “Sure.” So, I went over there and worked over there for several years – well, for a few years. And then the same thing happened. They had a bad stock quarter, and they had to slash jobs – like 5000. I was gone in one day.

Paul: Oh, wow.

Kirby: The whole team I was with got cut except our supervisor. She kept her job, thank goodness. And then from there I just went into another proposal writing at Deloitte Consulting. So, I did proposal writing for almost 14 years after leaving Buddy like that, which was a lot dryer kinda work. But it paid pretty well. I’ll tell you that. I was able to raise three kids and buy a house off of it. And it was not the most exciting work in the world, but it was a steady check with benefits. And I wasn’t just some hippy in an old apartment now, you know? Well, once you have children, you’re through the looking class. Everything changes.

You gotta provide. You go from being just an earner to a provider. That’s a big change. A really big change.

Paul: So, here come the 90s. I know you started working on your first documentary back then, didn’t you?

Kirby: Yes. I did. That was when I was working still doing proposal writing like that, but it already kinda fell together. I put out “Return to Giant” in ‘96.

James Dean screentest for “Giant”

Paul: Well, how did that come about? Did something spark that?

Kirby: Well, because coming out here to Fort Stockton – we’re not that far from Marfa. And all my life growing up I’d heard about when Hollywood came down to Marfa – Rock Hudson and James Dean, Liz Taylor.

And you gotta understand that back then I was kid, back in the 50s and 60s, they didn’t make a lot of movies in Texas. All the movies about Texas, they were in California or Monument Valley. So, the fact there were these in Texas was a big deal.

And I’d always heard about that all my life and thought the people of Fort Stockton drove down there to see the filming of the movies and all that stuff. I always thought it was a real interesting story when Hollywood came to a little bitty small town, and the stars had to rub up against the small towners. And I was lucky. I just put out some feeders and found some people who had photographs and stories and home movies. I tried to make a good little documentary, so I put it all together.

Paul: It sounds like it was fun.

Kirby: It was.

Paul: So, now you are – at this point you are sensing something new. You had been a writer all your life, so no film editing in your background.

Kirby: No, I had to hire an editor for that one. But after watching what he did and everything like that, I felt like – yeah, I can do this.

Paul: Sure.

Kirby: So, I edited my next two films. And it’s gotten a lot easier. Back then, you had to have an AVID. And you shot on an beta camera. Those things cost $20,000, even a cheap one. And then you had to digitize all the video. On an AVID system, you had to have a huge storage capacity and everything like that.

Now, you can just about do it it all on a laptop. Everything’s on the cloud. And a digital movie camera – you can buy a really great Cannon one for $2500. Or you rent them a camera, tripod, and a light kit for like $500 a day. And you just rent it. It’s all gotten a lot – the cost of entry has gotten a lot cheaper to film making.

Paul: It certainly has. So you have broken into the documentary scene. What comes next, “Border Bandits”?

Kirby: Yes, it was. Well, that was based on a story my grandfather told me about when when he was a working cowboy down in South Texas near Mission and Pharr down there in the Red River Valley, he witnessed Texas Rangers murder two Mexican Americans. And he knew both of these Mexican Americans. One was named Jesus Bazan, and one was name Antonio Longoria. And they lived not far from the ranch he was working on.

He knew them, and he knew they weren’t banditos. They weren’t revolutionaries. But what happened was the Rangers were trying to find the Mexican banditos that had raided the nearby McAllen Ranch. And they were trying to catch the perpetrators. Well, they couldn’t catch them all. So, they found these two old guys and said, “They’ll do,” and shot them and killed them.

Paul: Wow..

Kirby: They thought they were helping the bandits. My grandfather buried their bodies a few days later. They shot and killed them not far from the bunkhouse where the cowboys slept. And he said that he had to go out and bury them because of the stench from the human remains rotting. It just stunk so bad, they couldn’t sleep. They buried them beside what was a cow trail. Now it’s a road down to the Valley.

I’d always been fascinated by that story because I was always raised watching the Lone Ranger and John Wayne like that. Texas Rangers were supposed to be really straight arrows and like that. So, this went totally against what I’d been told growing up. And I knew my grandfather was telling the truth. So, I knew I had to verify his story. I tracked down documentation and any kind of witnesses like that. I had the story, but now I said, “I wanna prove it.” So, I spent almost all the documentary proving it up. And it’s all there. And it happened exactly the way he said it did.

Paul: Now, you remember that besides Baylor I went to Texas A&I down in Kingsville. I know Eva Longoria went to Texas A&I. Don’t I remember hearing you telling me that she is a descendant of Mr. Longoria?

Kirby: Yes, Antonio Longoria is one of her relatives, but I didn’t realize that until they had this special on PBS with Dr. Louis Gates and Harvard. “Finding Your Roots”

I’ve been dying to meet her and talk to her about this. I’ve sent a few letters to reach her, but I’ve gotten nowhere. She’s got a lot going on, but I would very much love to tell her what I’ve found. I’d just like to make her aware of this film, and I’d like to hear what she heard growing up and just go from there.

Paul: I’ll reach out to our Alumni group, and we’ll see what happens on there.

So, you’ve done “Border Bandits.” Now, is this when you started working on “When Dallas Rocked”?

Kirby: What had happened, Stoney had died. And Bugs Henderson had died. All these people that I knew from that old scene were all dying.

So I told myself, you know, we better get this story told, or everybody’s gonna be gone. Because there’s no book out about the glory days of KZEW. There’s no book about the history of the Texas Jam or about Big State Distributing record – nothing about that. It was all just people’s stories, people on bar stools talking. So, I thought we need to catalog this while there’s still people alive.

So, I just started interviewing people that I knew basically from my Buddy days. We kinda took it for granted I guess, that we kinda thought it would be rock-and-roll all the time. On the big music scene there were a lot of clubs, the bands, the records deals, and KZEW out here. So, it was just all sitting in front of me, I just wanted to kind of record that and get it out there. It wasn’t that I was trying to show up Austin. Some people said it was sour grapes. It wasn’t like that at all. It was just to say, ‘hey, this happened. We’re trying to save it and record it and go from there’.

Paul: Exactly, the same thing we are doing at ‘Memories of Dallas”. Let them say it in their words, not ours. Let’s pass this information on before we all take that long dirt nap.

So Kirby, we’ve gone through “When Dallas Rocked.” Next up, the “Vaughan Brothers.” Tell me about that.

Kirby: I’ve always wanted to do a documentary on them because I’ve watched them go through all their phases. They were playing dingy old clubs, then they each got a record deal, then all the other stuff Stevie does. I just always thought since they were from Oak Cliff, this might be a cool story.

Paul: Sure.

Kirby: I heard about Jimmie Vaughan growing up because he was in The Chessmen and I was in high school at the time. Whenever we’d come through Dallas, we’d hear about the Chessmen with KLIF or something like that.

So, I had watched their career all my life. And I always thought that it was just a fascinating story because I play guitar, and millions of us did after the Beatles. But those guys – when they played, it was like a totally different instrument. It became a part of their them, really an extension of their body.

When I saw them, you understand, this was back when people played live. You didn’t watch it on YouTube. You had to go to the club and see them play in person. And they just had a presence or a skill set that was just above everybody else. It was just Jimmie and Stevie, and there was everybody else.

And you gotta remember, when I was at Buddy, I saw so many people in person, a lot of really good guitar players – Robin Trower, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page. I saw all those guys, and I just always thought even back then, “These dudes are better than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

‘The Vaughan Brothers” Buddy Edition

And the fact that I’ve played guitar and knew how damn hard it was to play that well, and I said, “They could do everything Jimmie Page or Eric Clapton can do.”

And the fact that they came from a little cracker box house in Oak Cliff. They didn’t have wealthy parents that could just buy them whatever they wanted to play. Some kids were playing guitar when I was growing up. Their parents bought them any amp they wanted, any guitar.

Not in that family. And then Jimmie Vaughan opens for Jimi Hendrix when he’s a 15-year-old kid. That’s mind-boggling.

So, I was just always totally taken with their story and wanted. I said this is a fascinating story that needs to be told. That’s what got me going on that documentary.

One of the 9′ tall panels Costo built in Spain

But I actually started on the Vaughan Brothers Artwork Project before I started the documentary. Both are kinda coming around the same time, but it wasn’t planned that way.

But I got the idea for the artwork when I was doing “When Dallas Rocked.” I’d done an interview with Bugs Henderson for Buddy about a year or two earlier, right before he died. I remember him telling me a story. He said he was invited to the opening of the House of Blues when they first opened in Dallas. And Dan Aykroyd was there. He came in from out of town, and he had a big show and money. And he said Dan Aykroyd made a big deal about these speckles of dirt on the ground where the building was gonna be built. It came from Muddy Waters’ house in Mississippi.

And Bugs said, “I like Muddy Waters, but I was thinking – why the hell aren’t we sprinkling dirt for Freddy King?”

And he said, “There should be a statute of Freddy King in the House of Blues.” Bugs Henderson said that.

And I thought about that. I thought, ‘you know, he’s right’. And then I thought about it more and more, really, there should be some kind of a statue or artwork out on the Vaughan brothers in Oak Cliff. And that just got me to thinking like some ignorant naïve dummy. So, I contacted the office of cultural affairs, and I asked about it. They showed me what I needed to fill out. And you gotta do this and you gotta do that. It was just like your business proposals.

You gotta go to lots of meetings, and really, its drudgery is what it is. But if you just keep your head down and stay with it, I didn’t know it was gonna take this long to be honest with you but it’s now been five years. I can’t believe I started this thing five years ago.

Paul: I remember you trying to raise money.

Kirby: Yeah, we raised the money pretty quickly. It turned out that it was the easy part. The hard part was getting it all done with so many layers of bureaucracy. And also every time you wanna do something, it’s gotta be put out for bid and goes to the lowest bidder and things like that. So, it’s not for the faint of heart, I’ll just tell you that.

Unloading the panels in Dallas

Paul: So, you have got this really cool looking piece of art that’s gonna be down there. Absolutely unique. And from what I saw, it’s gonna be really tall.

Kirby: Yeah, nine feet tall I think. So, that was one of the delays. They originally had designed it to be seven feet tall. So, they hired the company to build the foundation. They’d gone out for bid, and they won it. But then when they got the first panels back from Casto, they were like nine feet tall. And they said, “Well, the foundation’s only built to hold a seven foot one.”

They had to put down for bid again and start the process all over. So, that delayed everything there. So, the first delay was all the money we raised. The IRS wanted to keep 30% of it. And we said, “You can’t do that.” So, we had to through attorneys in the city and all, nine months to finally get that taken care of before they could even send in the money. It was just one thing after another. I could write a book on all the delays we had.

Paul: So, why did the IRS want 30%?

Kirby: I don’t know the reason, it was something crazy. I finally just said “Kelly, (city liaison) find some way around this.” They wanted to withhold that much when we gave the check to the artist. So, I couldn’t explain it to you, but it took over nine months to get that worked out.

And then they had a certified engineer to approve the design of the foundation, and that took forever. And they were screaming about who’s gonna pay the insurance when the artwork was shipped over here. Would Casto Salano (artist in Spain) pay it? Or would the city pay it? It was just tons of little things like that, just one after another that just had to be resolved.

And I don’t know why everybody kept saying to me – why didn’t you put this on private property? And my best story, I said, “Do you remember those Tango frogs they used to have on top of Tango?”

Paul: You bet.

Stevie Ray in his iconic poncho pose. A Mosaic by Denise Joslin. Donated to “Memories of Dallas”

Kirby: When things got sold to Taco Cabana, they took those frogs down and sent them to Carl’s truck stop down in Hillsboro. I said that’s the problem with private property. If it’s ever sold, the new buyer can do whatever the hell he or she wants because ownership is ownership. If we build this thing on private property and it’s gets sold or repossessed or bankruptcy, whatever, that artwork will be gone. I’ve seen it happen before. I said, “If you put it on public property, it takes an act of congress to remove it,”

It is so hard it is to remove artwork from public property. It’s damn hard. And I wanted this thing to have some performance to it. And that was why I chose to go this route.

Paul: It’d probably take a Mack truck to knock those babies over from what I’ve seen.

Kirby: You are probably right.

Paul: Wow. So, I guess we’re kinda coming here to the end. Is there anything else you wanted to tell me about some of your projects over the years?

Kirby: Just that I’ve always enjoyed them. I’ve always enjoyed doing them. I’m just not rich yet. I’m hoping this Vaughan brother’s documentary will do well. It’s just not out there but just about there. We just got a million legal clearances. But I’m hoping it’ll be out by late April. But I’m thinking it will do well because we’ve got some star power in it.

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Kirby: We’ve got Eric Clapton, Billy Gibbons, Jackson Browne and so many more. We’ve got some great stories. But most importantly, people that see this film are gonna learn and see things about the Vaughan brothers that they did not know – something that’s never been published before, home movies, photographs. And the biggest thing we got is that it’s Jimmie Vaughan himself the story about he and Stevie. He’s never cooperated on any biography or film without Stevie ever. So, we’re the first ones to get him to open up and talk to us.

Jimmy Vaughan

Paul: I guess it helped that you have known him for so long.

Kirby: Yeah, but he was reluctant to about the issues. People don’t understand this. That’s his younger brother that died, and they shared a bedroom together as kids. And he grew up with his mom telling him to watch out for your little brother. Some people wanna criticize him for not doing more Stevie legacy, they just don’t understand. How would you feel if it was about one of your siblings?

How would you feel if somebody in your family died, and all of a sudden all these people are coming out printing T-shirts and selling them, making money? And you’re saying – wait a minute, that’s my brother.

Paul: It’s really hard to imagine, especially when there is no relief in sight. The SRV saga will be right there alongside Jimmy V for the rest of his life. The good and the bad.

Well, I’ve seen the Vaughan Brothers documentary you did, and I thought you did an excellent job on it. I really did.

Kirby: Thanks! Well, we’ve got it about ready for primetime now. We tightened it up a little bit. We had to cut some of it out and got it down to an hour and 46 minutes. Yeah, the first one I showed you was over two hours long.

Paul: Oh, yeah. I remember that.

Kirby: And I thought it was fine, but people’s opinions I trust told me, “You gotta get it under two hours.” You gotta do it. So, I went and did it because the people who told me, they were people’s opinions that I value.

Paul: It hurt too, didn’t it, cutting that stuff out?

Kirby: Oh my god. Everything I cut hurt!

You’re taking the good stuff. If it was bad stuff, you wouldn’t have put it in there in the first place. You’re cutting good stuff. It’s painful.

Paul: Yeah, it’s kinda like – well, in the endgame, what contributes the most to the whole story. So, it’s kinda one of these give and takes.

Well, listen, I know you’re a busy guy. I don’t wanna take up too much more of your time there, so, if you need me to make any announcements for you, let me know.

Kirby: Hell, yeah. Let them know how to watch “When Dallas Rocked.” Because that’ll explain to them why this Vaughan brothers artwork is needed because that’s the first step in recognizing our music history in Dallas.

Paul: I will add links to that and your other projects. And due to the Corona virus, the Vaughan Brothers Art Project dedication was delayed. We will put a notice up on “Memories of Dallas” when it is rescheduled.

Kirby: Yes, sir. And Jimmy was coming for the original date on March 20th so we need the stars to align and get him there for the reschedule.

Paul: And Kirby will be there too signing autographs.

Kirby: Oh, yes. I’m driving in for it, yeah. All right, man. Thank you for your call and talk to you soon.

Paul: All right, buddy. You take care.

Kirby on his windmill in Fort Stockton. Looking over his heard of wild javelinas that he runs with a lasso made of a dozen live rattlesnakes…

Links to Kirby’s projects:

Border Bandits

When Dallas Rocked

You can also order a DVD for When Dallas Rocked from Kirby – Mail $24.95 to: Trans-Pecos Productions, P.O. Box 193, Fort Stockton, TX 79735

Return to Giant

Because he sold the documentary to Warner Brothers, Return to Giant is only available on bonus disc of the Giant DVD or Blu-Ray

The Vaughan Brothers Art Project

 


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2 Comments
  1. Tommy STAFFORD

    March 23, 2020

    Paul, thanks, and to all, Kirby, that was so cool, growing up knowing SRV from his 1st band and a real smart azz , but then Jimmy sure didnt take up for him, he was 14 sitting in the corner while everyone else was practicing, so i ask the drummers girl, who is the little kid, she said Jimmys little brother, Jimmy made a rude comment about how he was, SRV looked up at me and said, when yall get through goffing around, let me know, ill join in…..and my thoughts of Stony WERE so right on….he went skinny dipping the day the cops raided Lee Park….i was on General Lees horse with my girl, until everyone left….i wasnt supposed to be at Lee Park, but i was on the front page of both news papers on the horse, BUSTED, THANKS for all you did….great post, great movie

  2. BLAKE STOWE

    April 14, 2020

    KIRBY, YOU ROCK!!!

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