Blaze Foley’s Houston chapter: plenty of gigs and couch-surfing
Slain songwriter, subject of new film, once shared garage apartment and gigs with musician Gurf Morlix
Not long ago, documentation of Blaze Foley’s 39 years on Earth was scarce.
He was shot and killed in Austin in 1989, starting a blackout decade when none of his music could be bought or streamed, before movies and memoirs told some part of the story about the elusive songwriter from Georgia who settled in Texas and created a few great songs and an enduring mythology.
During those years between 1989 and when “Live at the Austin Outhouse” introduced a lot more people to Foley’s work in 1999, some small part of the songwriter born Michael David Fuller could still be found at the Old Quarter in Galveston, where his driver’s license sat behind the bar of Rex Bell’s songwriter’s haven. Foley’s eyes — an almost invisible blue — are framed by dark, long hair and a push-broom mustache.
The address on the card was in Houston, 1518 E. Alabama. That spot was a garage apartment at Alabama and Almeda, where Foley and his friend the singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer Gurf Morlix lived. They’d met in Austin in the late-’70s after Foley drifted west from Georgia. Foley and Morlix split the $75 a month for rent, which Morlix says was decidedly cheaper than rent in Austin.
“We played Montrose clubs almost every night,” Morlix says. He recalls times when they played about 25 gigs a month in Houston, spending the other five nights in Austin or other towns or “just watching our friends in Houston.
“That was probably ’79, ’80 and the beginning of ’81. All these clubs were walking distance. And they threw us money. It’s the best scene I’ve been involved in my entire life. It was before the oil bust, when people were out every night. And Blaze was different. He was so funny and odd that he had crowds. People loved him. I think it was the high point of success in his life.”
These days, those stories have a little more traction as Foley’s life is the focus of “Blaze,” a movie directed by Ethan Hawke, which opens in Houston on Friday.
Lyle Lovett remembers first seeing Foley on “The Little Ol’ Show That Comes on After Monty Python,” a music-centric program created by Bruce Bryant, who worked for KPRC, to fill a post-“Python” rerun void. He thought Foley’s appearance was about 1977.
“I didn’t see him as much after he moved to Austin, but I remember seeing him at Anderson Fair,” Lovett says. “I don’t remember the occasion. I was sitting in a rocking chair, and he was sitting next to me. He was this gentle giant, a big imposing figure who always was kind and gentle.”
Lovett heard Foley play “Election Day” when Foley was opening for Townes Van Zandt in College Station.
Years later Lovett would cover the song himself.
Foley spent more time in Austin in the ’80s. He and Morlix also had an apartment there. Morlix was Foley’s chief collaborator and friend but says when drinking took precedence over music, he changed the setting.
“The binge drinking started before he met Townes, but it didn’t get better after,” Morlix says. “But we used to drink beer and tequila every night, and we’d wake up sober and he’d work on songs. Then alcohol took over, and that became the goal. He started blowing off gigs. And I moved to Los Angeles. I could handle a lot, but I couldn’t stand to see him blowing off gigs.”
Not everybody in that era found Foley to be a remarkable talent. Steve Earle credits him with writing “some good songs” but suggests he was a Van Zandt associate more than a peer. Guy Clark, another dean of Texas songwriters, wasn’t convinced of Foley’s talents.
After leaving Houston, Foley bought more into the mythology of the tortured poet, and he began a downward swirl that resulted in empty gigs and occasional conflicts, one of which resulted in his death.
“Live at the Austin Outhouse” quietly brought Foley back into circulation in 1999. A muse and girlfriend, Sybil Rosen, wrote a beautiful account of their time in Georgia together: 2008’s “Living in the Woods in a Tree” filled in a lot of gaps in the Foley narrative, both creatively and personally. Hawke’s “Blaze” was more a concept than a film until he found Rosen’s book.
Houston was a chapter between the book and Foley’s time in Austin, when he was shot and killed, an event that shook friends and admirers. Lucinda Williams used it as the opening lines of her song “Drunken Angel” — “Sun came up, it was another day, sun went down, you were blown away.”
Shortly after Foley’s death, Rex Bell, the raconteur, bassist and songwriter, was cleaning up around his house when he found Foley’s wallet between the cushions of his couch. Foley was a couch-circuit musician, so no surprise there.
When Bell moved his Old Quarter club from Houston to Galveston in 1996, he put the wallet and Foley’s driver’s license behind the bar. There it sat for more than a decade. Then Hurricane Ike washed past the sea wall and pushed 7 feet of salt water into Bell’s club. The wallet and the ID card were both washed away.
“I’m sure the salt water destroyed it,” says Hawke, who also produced and co-wrote the new film about Foley. “But think about it: Even if somebody found it in their yard, would they know it mattered? Probably not. It’s just garbage to a lot of people.”
And so a relic that tied Foley down to a time and place — a rare thing — was gone. Admittedly, the expiration date looks to have been 1983, so Foley was either driving on an expired license for six years (not remarkable) or he’d replaced it. But it still speaks to a time when he was singing songs of love, longing and cheeseburgers most nights out of a month in a city where people wanted to hear them night after night.