I tried to show an interest in his impressive collection of cars but his assistant, Bob, was much, much more absorbing.
Bob was a large man who had bought a pair of jeans when he was not quite so large. However, rather than diet or throw them away, he had simply done them up under his arse, letting his shirt tails protect his modesty.
That was fine until he bent over. It was quite a sight, Bob’s butt. It’s a
Bill was talking. Did I want to take a drive in his stunningly restored El Camino SS, a 7.4-litre 430-bhp machine that was actually built at GM’s Arlington plant in Texas?
Well not if Bob’s been driving it, I thought, but voicing such a thought seemed rude, so off I went. ‘Just don’t take it through Niggertown,’ called Bill, usefully, as I roared off.
It was a great car — well pickup actually — with exhausts that sounded better than any Fender Strat. It didn’t handle and looked like it was on a day-release from the seventies but I adored the pre-political correctness turn of speed. As Bill’s T-shirt said, ‘If you haven’t seen God, you’re not going fast enough.’
When I took it back, I asked if Bill was worried about his cars being stolen. ‘No sir,’ came the reply. ‘If a nigger tries to come in here, we have the right in Texas to vigorously defend our property, up to and including killing him.
‘I found a nigger trying to break in here once. He got an overdose of lead that night.’
‘You killed him?’ I asked.
‘Sure did,’ came the reply. ‘Ain’t no loss to society.’
The man was a social time bomb, a point that was proved as we interviewed him on camera. It took ten takes before we got a sentence without the words ‘nigger’ or ‘fuck’ in it.
My word, we thought, as we left. What an unusual person. Oh, how wrong we were. In Texas, Bill’s a korma in a sea of vindaloo.
Take Stanley Marsh. Stanley is the boss of a TV station and, despite the sartorial elegance of a tramp, a respected figure in the local community.
He drives a pink Cadillac and spends his time dreaming up curious slogans for a series of road signs that you’ll find all over his home town. You arrive at a crossroads and there, instead of a ‘give way’ sign, will be the familiar, authentic-looking diamond shape bearing the legend, ‘Two-headed Baby’ or ‘Hear the Fat Lady Sing’. Odd, but not much use if you want to know the way somewhere.
Stanley’s house was full of university drop-out types, one of whom had modelled himself on Bob from Lubbock. He wore his trousers so low down that you could see the top of his penis. I don’t know why but I kept wondering if Douglas Hurd would ever do that.
I was still wondering when Dennis, our rather thoughtful director, summoned up every ounce of energy from his politeness genes and said to Stanley, ‘Sir, I think it would probably be a good idea if you were to drive…’
Dennis was shut down by a huge shriek from Stanley. ‘WHAT IN THE HELL DO YOU MEAN, “PROBABLY”? IF YOU WANT ME TO DO SOMETHING, COME OUT WITH IT STRAIGHT, BOY.’
No one has ever talked to Dennis like this, and at 51 years old, it’s a long time since anyone called him ‘boy’.
It seems that Stanley likes straight talking. He doesn’t mind being told to do something so long as it’s in plain English.
Plain English is a Stanley speciality. When I asked him if there were more eccentrics in Texas than anywhere else, he was off. ‘No. I’d say there were a higher percentage of dull people living around fish, living on islands.’
Was he, perchance, talking here about Britain?
‘I sure am boy. I don’t know how you can live on that stupid little island. It smells of fish and is covered with scales.’
Turns out that Stanley’s no great limey fan, and he can prove our uselessness when you get him onto the subject of Stonehenge.
You see, up by the interstate near his house — called Toad Hall — he has partially buried ten Cadillacs, nose-down, in a field. Why, I asked him, did you do such a thing?
‘I wanted to build something better than Stonehenge,’ came the reply. ‘Took about a week.’
He now has a thing for burying cars so that on his immaculate lawn at home a bright orange VW Beetle is buried up to its windscreen. Crazy guy. No he really was. He’s the only Texan we met who didn’t have a pickup truck.
I was in a state of despair about Texas until we arrived in Austin, which is the state capital. You know that because the government buildings are an exact replica of the White House, only in true Texas style the dome is slightly larger.
I knew I would like this place when we were told that the only statue in town was there to honour Stevie Ray Vaughn, the local boy who became a guitar legend.
Music is the thing here. Walk down 6th, any time of day or night, and you will hear everything from the blues to C and W to old time rock and roll. Every building is a bar and every bar has a live band. Forget Duval in Key West. This is it.
Strangely, for America, the road is pedestrianised and the only vehicles allowed are horse-drawn. People have to park elsewhere and walk — a word you don’t hear too much anywhere in the US.
I did a lot of ‘walking’ around the back streets and couldn’t believe what I was seeing — no pickups. Well, there were a few round the back of Country bars, but everywhere else the parking zones were filled with Hondas and Toyotas and little Dodges.
It turns out that Austin has the largest university in America with more than 50,000 pupils from all over the States. That gives it a cosmopolitan feel. I liked it because for two glorious days I forgot I was in Texas.
Eventually though, it was time to leave because back in Houston we had our biggest-ever
This had taken months of preparatory work, even down to a discussion with their manager about Dusty’s perspiration problem. It was explained to us that he sweats freely and that we would need to break from filming every few minutes so that the make-up girl — who we would provide incidentally — could powder his brow.
Odd, then, that the venue for this interview should be a non-air-conditioned Tex-Mex joint in one of Houston’s rougher zones, on one of the hottest evenings of the year. It was 114 degrees outside, and about twice that under our lights. Dusty had a big problem.
We tried tightening the shot on Frank and Billy while the make-up girl mopped Dusty down, but by the time we’d swung round to film his answer to a particular question it was Niagara time all over again.
Then someone produced a hand-held Pifco fan and suggested Dusty used it to stay cool until the camera was on him. Then he could lower it, answer the question, and all would be well. Great idea. Dusty liked it too, and even Murray, our sound man, said its gentle hum was no big deal.
I was busy talking to Billy when the inevitable happened. The fan somehow wound up in the beard and it took an hour to get it out again.
This was a testing point. If these guys were arsehole rock stars, they’d be out of the place like a shot. But they stayed. Billy couldn’t do much else. He was laughing the laugh of someone who was about to burst.
They are car nuts. In their early days, they found a big, wire-mesh ball with a seat inside. God knows what it had been built for originally but they invented a game where someone would climb inside, shut the mesh door and then be pushed off the back of a speeding truck.
After Frank survived an 80-mph roll-off, they wrote the song ‘Master of Sparks’.
Today, their interest in cars is diverse. Frank has a collection of Ferraris, including a 250 GTO which he’s turned into a convertible.
Dusty has a big, fat, chopped 1950s cruiser.
It’s Billy’s collection everyone knows best. Every day, he uses an old Mercedes SL but he owns the Eliminator, the red hot-rod from those astonishing videos.
At nine o’clock the interview finished, and then the acid test began. A year earlier, after talking to Bob Seger, he’d joined us for dinner, so what would ZZ Top do?
Dusty was out of there but Billy and Frank hung around telling tales and bumming fags. They may be the rock
