‘Just a bubba in transition’
Radio host of ‘Spare Change’ reached his Texas audience indirectly
His slight slur made him sound cozy, maybe a few hours shy of sober. His straight-shooting humor was the kind I look for in my best friends. And then there were the weird monikers Larry Winters would tack onto his name when signing on or off of “Spare Change,” his KPFT 90.1 radio show: “the kind of man who’d shine your shoes for you,” “the kind of man who’d vote for you two, maybe three times,” “the kind of guy who will go to rehab for you.”
All this drew me to Larry, but explaining what kept me listening to a country music show for two decades is harder. I think it begins with a simple idea he once shared with me when I interviewed him for a school project at the KPFT studio in 2003: “There’s music with something to say in it, it has content. I thought if I played this music, this palatable music in the right order, it could make a difference and could tell a story.”
When Larry died Sept. 5, Houston lost far more than a beloved radio host. His show was a grand essay against a commercialized, debased America. He was not quite the opposite of Dan Patrick, the radio pundit turned lieutenant governor of Texas. He was never a bombastic leftist countering right-wing shock jocks. You might have even taken Larry for being apolitical because of his downhome speech peppered with “lawdie, lawdie”s and “I guarantee you”s — only there was nothing further from the truth. His politics were just beneath the surface.
He had a gift for talking to an audience not always easy for progressives to reach, but which he’d come by naturally. His family moved to the Houston from Mississippi when he was a child, and he played linebacker at Heights High on what he told his friend Duane Bradley was the last of the all-white, segregated football teams in the city. In 1986, Larry moved to the house his father had built on the family homestead in Cut
and Shoot — 6 miles east of Conroe and 40 miles north of Houston. His missing ring finger had kept him out of Vietnam, but the wave of social upheaval smacked right into him. “It was hard for me to fit in with the hippies,” he told the Chronicle in 2004, “but it was impossible to stick with the establishment. I was just a bubba in transition."
His “Spare Change” show had a strong idea of what stories to tell, and a liberal idea of who sings country: Tom Waits, Juke Boy Bonner, Tish Hinojosa, Iris DeMent, Morphine. The “country” of their songs was an Americana gothic. They were populated by freight train hoppers and one-legged lovers on the dance floor; by scapegoats, idealists, boomtown exiles and people who’d gotten far enough away that they were on their way back home.
Once I asked him if he thought of himself like “Rex Bob Lowenstein,” the deejay in a Mark Germino song Larry often played, who lived for playing local requests and cracked when preplanned, prerecorded corporate music smothered everybody’s small voices. But Larry said he wasn’t like Rex because he’d never had played requests, which made sense. Asking Larry to interrupt his carefully crafted show with a random song would have been as weird as asking Willy Nelson to add a “Hello sweetie” to the chorus of “Hello Walls.”
His weekly show changed themes with current events, but overall they championed the simple decency of giving a damn about other people’s lives and working honestly on your own. Spoiler: the people in the songs he played mostly failed at both of these things. Sometimes they survived; as often they’d die of alcohol and pills, or, as John Prine put it, the holes in their arms where all the money went. “Spare Change” could get heavy, and then Larry’d remind listeners: “Remember, Elvis died on the toilet, but you don’t have to.”
Larry knew what he was talking about. He’d had a few knock down, drag out fights with addictions, though by the time I first heard him he’d been straight more than a decade. “Larry Winters” was his radio pseudonym. His superhero identity was his real-life one: addiction counselor Jerry Sumrall. But fighting drugs wasn’t his only mission.
Like a Texan Aesop, sometimes he’d shout out a line with a point he didn’t want you to miss: “Yes! ‘Life is confusing and people are insane!’ ” Or after Brian Bowers’ “Prison Song” he’d sigh, “Now if you didn’t have some thoughts listening to that song, you need to check to see if you have a pulse.”
His death leaves what I can only call a hope-shaped hole in this part of Texas. It has to do with where he was broadcasting from: the Pacifica Foundation, formed by Lewis Hill in 1946 to promote the ideals of peace and non-violence to a variety of audiences. Hill believed that, to maintain independence, the station must be free of corporate influences and should rely completely on listener sponsorship. In a day, a Pacifica station might play “Charlotte’s Web,” a jazz show, political talk, then a show for mothers — or vegetarianism, or health care, or prisoners — and then more music. Every few months, on-air fund drives would pay for the programming. Berkeley’s KPFA went live in 1949, and, in 1970, KPFT Houston joined the Pacifica network as its fourth station. The KKK unwelcomed KPFT with two bombings in its first year of existence.
Pacifica remained unfettered by corporate sponsorship, but got mired by powerplays and constant questions about which shows did or didn’t live up to “Lew Hill’s dream.” In the case of KPFT, the national Pacifica board disapproved of its tendency to focus on strong independent music, favoring an approach that more directly addressed the political and ideological problems of the times.
You could find people on either side of that debate whenever you walked into the old Montrose station. And then you’d find Larry Winters. He was too opinionated for the news, so he translated his passion into a musical show as political as Pacifica’s flagship “Democracy Now!” but infinitely more radical in approach — slow and patient, roundabout and insistent. He could reach a Texan audience indirectly, song by song, and change them from the inside out.
“Spare Change” slid into my life on a bleary Saturday in 1998. I’d just moved to Texas and wasn’t ready for boots or a hat, but figured I better learn something about cowboy music. I searched the radio dial, like we used to do, and landed at 90.1. I lived in this tiny cottage on Laird, a street smashed between the one-way arteries of Shepherd and Durham. Back before the townhouses, it was just dirt and pine needles, with a few wild hens bumping around from house to house for entertainment. Beating flags in the nearby used car lots sounded like the ocean. It was the country in the city.
And Larry Winters’ voice fit right in. Over the course of a few hours, what I thought’d be background music elbowed up to the front of my consciousness. I thought I might even be imagining that he was telling a story, so the next week I recorded his show on my cassette deck. Then I copied my tapes and shared them with friends, with them nodding to his catchphrases like “your friend and mine” or “I assure you.” I played those first tapes so many times I can’t listen to them for this article, even though I just bought a Walkman off eBay to do it. The magnetic tape is too worn.
Luckily KPFT keeps its last two shows from each program on the website, and the ones listed for “Spare Change” this week were pulled from archives. I want to share the one Larry recorded Nov. 11, 2017 — a month after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. In it, he says the shootings are on his mind.
Music begins with three songs by Eliot Bronson, Mike Younger and the Traveling Wilburys. The songs’ narrators live in very different worlds, but each teeters between despair and determination to find meaning. These aren’t dark, they aren’t light: they’re almost upbeat songs, filled with existential question marks, a deep loneliness.
The songs are compelling, catchy. He’s got you — not with the hammer of an argument, but by sliding sidestep into lives that feel familiar, emotions we share. Then he cracks open Danny Schmidt’s “For Soon the Earth Shall Swallow,” with its environmentally apocalyptic lyrics: “If they're poaching in the ocean drag them down/Cause everything a net can fill is fair to catch and free to kill/They can until they drown and so they will.”
Tone set, what he does next makes sad sense: He loosens Kinky Friedman’s terrifying, macabre song about the Texas Tower Massacre. “Got up that morning, calm and cool. He picked up his guns and went to school …” It seems inevitable as it plays, as does the one that follows: Steve Earle’s song about a man pleading innocent because he didn’t shoot the man he shot, “the devil’s right hand” (his gun) did.
Larry doesn’t play more songs about guns, but by the show’s end he’s played songs about prison and atonement, alienation and community, hope and a lullaby by the Wailin’ Jennys. Listeners have heard a dozen or more angles on gun violence and its root causes. Yes, there are solutions in some of the songs, but it’s nothing like the news stories, op-eds and editorials you’d read in a newspaper. More likely than not, listeners come out of the show with their assumptions challenged and tested — maybe less certain but certainly wiser.
These days, if you feel ashamed by the sputtering fearmongering leaders of Texas, and their politics of pandering to primary voters, look up an old episode of “Spare Change.” Texas, it turns out, is home to its own humanistic tradition that runs deep in its songs.