photo by John Anderson
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By Hook or By Crooks
Not long ago, former
Steamboat owner
Danny Crooks was, quite literally, ready to die. "I got to where I didn't think I had another six months left on the planet," says Crooks, who was diagnosed with
hepatitis C in 1998. "I kept getting sicker and sicker." Making matters worse, the treatment for hep C, a grueling regimen of pills and injections, is nearly as debilitating as the disease itself. "You feel like you've got the super-flu, where you're always tired, always sore, always sleepy," explains Crooks. He underwent months of treatment to no avail, continuing only at the urging of his wife,
Leslie. Besides family support, Crooks figures he was able to withstand the treatment because of his prior experiences with a very different drug. "Luckily I did
LSD in the Sixties, and no matter how messed up I was on acid, I could always tell myself, 'It's just a drug, you're gonna come down in eight hours or so,'" he chuckles. "That's kind of what I did with this stuff." Even on the second course, Crooks was within a month of ceasing treatment, when his doctor told him his
ALTs – a measure of hep C's profusion – had dropped dramatically. "Then he told me, 'You need to stay on this stuff,'" Crooks says. "And after the 10th month, it was gone. There was no trace of the disease in my body." Saying he feels better than he has in 10 years, Crooks, who sold Steamboat for $5,000 in October 2002, says he's already looking for a new nightclub, preferably on
Sixth Street. "I want to get a place between the
Black Cat and the old Steamboat," he says. "I'm starting over just like anybody doing it for the first time." Contact Crooks at
ljcrooks@hotmail.com
illustration by Nathan Jensen
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Brown-Eyed Handsome Men
When
Chuck Berry duckwalks across the
Paramount Theatre stage Saturday night, his backing band will look familiar to Austinites, especially fans of
Banana Blender Surprise. "I'm super pumped up," says BBS drummer
David Beebe, who'll join fellow BBS founder
Allen Hill on bass, and honorary member
Pete Gordon on the Yamaha Grand, behind rock & roll's founding father. Berry's modus operandi has long been to recruit – rather, have the promoters recruit – sidemen from the local talent pool of wherever he plays, with the exact songs unknown until the opening bars. That stated, Beebe and friends have an advantage: they already backed Berry at Galveston's
Mardi Gras in 1998. "He doesn't tell you what he's going to play, or what key it's in," says Beebe. "He just starts the song and you have to figure it out." Berry isn't much on small talk or other formalities offstage either, says Beebe. "He would drive himself to the gig in a
Lincoln provided for him, with somebody following him," he says of the Galveston date. "It was him wearing a captain's hat, carrying one guitar, and he pulls up and proceeds to sit out in the car for 45 minutes until they cashed his check. Somebody tried to give him a check from the
Moody National Bank and he's like, 'This isn't cash.' When they got him his money, he put it in his coat or pants or whatever, got out of the car, and walked straight onto the stage. We introduced him, and he plugged in and played."
Riverboat Gamblers
photo by John Anderson
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Climbing the Walls
With frontman
Mike Wiebe again doing his best
Spider-Man impression, the
Riverboat Gamblers offered an explosive preview of their new
Volcom album, as yet untitled and due in April, last Tuesday at
Emo's to kick-start another week of first-class local shows. The
Arm and
Crash Gallery's opening post-punk diorama, the former torn and frayed, the latter sleek and seamless, was excellent. So was Thursday at
Stubb's, where roots was the new indie:
Brothers & Sisters butting
Bright Eyes against the
Mamas & the Papas; the
Black conjuring the
Band; and
Knife in the Water, gone too long but meticulously paced and gorgeously forlorn (welcome back). Saturday,
Lomita began the sold-out
Ghostland Observatory CD release at the Ritz with a set both cavernous and intimate, before TCB hopped over to the
Parish for
My Education's intricate instrumental miasma and the
Black Angels' decade-warping drone. Could 2006 turn out to be even more fertile than Austin's watershed 2005? It's early yet, but there was more quality in those 31Ú2 shows than most cities see in a month