FREDDIE KRC

From psychedelic rock to punk to country, this jack-of-all-genres plays it all with a panache reminiscent of the late, great Sir Doug.

By Rob Patterson

Texas Music, Fall 2008

Just what decade is this anyway, man? The place is Momo's on West Sixth in Austin, up above the faux deli. Yet the era keeps hopping around like a 60's go-go girl doing the frug – and there just happens to be one onstage, dancing away.

The man with the plan and the band onstage, playing a 1960s Vox teardrop guitar up at the mic, is Freddie Krc (pronounced "kurch"), fronting his Freddie Steady 5. Perhaps best known in some Texas music circles for his two stints drumming for Jerry Jeff Walker, Krc is a musician of many facets and talents, among them, on this particular evening , a bandleader, shifting time. So when does the acid kick in? The band's cool, and they rock with whiffs of psychedelia. The songs take you back to that jingle-jangle morning Bob Dylan wrote of in "Mr. Tambourine Man," yet some four decades and so many years afterwards, it all still sounds fresh and even relevant.

Flashback gets flip-flopped when 15-year-old Jenny Wolfe gets up and nails a Yardbirds song right into that stage floor, with copper nails, no less. Then it's back to the 60's when Dennis Potter [sic, Dennis Keller], the singer for Houston psychedelic rockers Fever Tree, comes up to sing.

Supercharging the electric six-strings is Cam King, someone – in a town where hot licks are so overserved that you can yawn, if not slumber, to technically great guitar – whose playing makes your ears perk up and dig it, man. He hails back with Krc to their early-80's punk era band, the Explosives (which, then and now, also backs Roky Erickson).

Whatever decade it may be, the combo has chops galore and the songs they play are filled with hooks. Some are Krc originals, and others are classics from God's own jukebox of cool rock 'n' roll tunes (reference the Nuggets garage rock collection, the Beatles, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Sir Doug Sahm to get an idea of the oeuvre from which Krc pulls his covers).

A fun night of time-defying pop-rock with the Freddie Steady 5 is merely one facet of Krc's many musical activities. In addition to the afore-mentioned Explosives, he's also the leader of Freddie Steady's Wild Country, which is, yes, a country band, though all of its members, aside from Krc, are English. Throughout the '90s and into the early years of this decade, Krc also fronted the country-rock Shakin' Apostles.

Then there's his record label, SteadyBoy, which Krc started in 2003. He's since released albums by the Freddie Steady 5, Wild Country (including the brand new Ten Dollar Gun) and the Explosives (one of their own earlier recordings and another of live material with Erickson from 1979-'81) along with CDs by his production clients, Austin teen rockers Jenny Wolfe & the Pack and Chicago-based singer-songwriter Pamela Richardson. Krc's past includes serious drum-stool time playing and recording with Texas singer-songwriter heroes Walker (1977 to 1979 and 1990 to 2000) and B. W. Stevenson, as well as album sessions for everyone from Carole King to Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, along with Texans like Steven Fromholz, Tish Hinojosa, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock and many others.

Krc, a native of La Porte, comes by a musical career and franchise-building honestly, if not genetically. "My father's mom, my paternal grandmother, her name was Annie Krenek," Krc says. "She played with the Krenek Orchestra, the oldest family band in the United States. They've been together since 1864."

The Kreneks came to Texas from Czechoslovakia through Galveston in 1863, and restarted the polka group they had back home the year after. The last time Krc saw the group in the 1970s, there were four generations of Kreneks in it. "They made records for RCA in the mid-'40s, and you can find some of their stuff on those Arhoolie Czech Bohemian collections," Krc says. "I'm a vinyl junkie and I find their 78's occasionally." Instead of Daddy sang bass, for Krc it was Grandma Krenek that played upright bass "until she wanted to start dancing with boys. So when she was 16 or 17, she quit the band."

So how'd the Texan Czech get rock 'n' rolled? Born in 1954 – the year Elvis entered Sun Studio and rock 'n' roll went large – Krc recalls how "Music was always around because of the family band and when we'd go to family functions. I was always interested in music. But really it was the Beatles that inspired me, and like millions of other teenagers who heard them in 1964, I said, 'I wanna do that.' That was it."

He got some drums and almost immediately started playing in a band. "The Sound Kings. I was 10," Krc recalls. That same year he went to see his first live rock show, the Sir Douglas Quintet. Krc would also catch the popular swamp-pop show band the Boogie Kings in Galveston at the Bamboo Hut. "I couldn't get in because I was way too young. But I could stand outside and watch through the bamboo." Lightnin' Hopkins played his high school for Black Heritage Week.

"Where else in the world?" Krc sagaciously points out of his deep Texas roots, ones from which the British Invasion bands he was so inspired by in fact drew some of their own sounds. "Growing up in La Porte, everything was around me. Whether I dialed it in on the radio or not, it was there. Country was all around me. Joe Tex was across the river in Baytown. I loved soul music, and blues music was very prevalent, as was Cajun music, just by where I was geographically, and of course I heard a lot of Czech polkas and Mexican music."

By his early teens, Krc had also picked up the guitar and become a fan of Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys, digging on their jazzy time signatures. He did four semesters in one year at Lon Morris College in Jacksonville, concentrating on theology with the aim of becoming a Methodist minister. (Krc likes to point out that the school's other famed musical alumni include Johnny Horton, K.T. Oslin and Michelle Shocked.) But in the end, his call to play rock 'n' roll was stronger. "I simply couldn't stop playing music," he confesses. "I just knew that was what I needed to be doing."

He left college and did a year in Dallas where he couldn't find work drumming but played in an acoustic guitar duo. Then Krc put another year in on the kit with a cover band playing the Holiday Inn lounge circuit. He finally landed in Austin in January 1974.

His first gig was an acoustic solo show at a barbecue joint on Route 183 when it was the very northern edge of the city. "I got a free plate of barbecue and whatever I could make from passing around the tip jar, which I was too shy to do." After a year drumming in a Dixieland jazz band, Krc hit the road with B. W. Stevenson for two years, and recorded Stevenson's We Be Sailin' album with him for Warner Bros. Then in 1977, he signed on with Walker and played with the wild man of cosmic country until 1979, when, inspired by how the punk and new-wave movement recalled his '60s rock roots, he left to start the Explosives with King and bassist Walter "Sonny" Collie.

By the early 80's, the Explosives had finished their (first) run. Sessions in Austin with the British twang guitarist Wes McGee resulted in an invitation to come to England, where, from 1984 to '86, Krc spent half of each year living and playing, and also recorded his first Wild Country album, which came out in 1987 on the Austin indie label Amazing Records. By the end of the decade, Krc was back on drums with Walker, with whom he would play until New Year's Eve 2000. Meanwhile, he would perform and record with his Shakin' Apostles in-between his Jerry Jeff commitments.

As if he weren't busy enough already, in recent years Krc also did time as an instructor at Austin's Natural Ear Music School, where he discovered Wolfe. "She was a great kid and had a great voice at the age of 12. I would throw her bluesy inflections and she'd get them," he says with wonderment about the artist with whom he recently completed production of a second album, slated for early 2009 release. "Oh my God, she can sing. And she's learning guitar and doing some writing with me. I just think she could go as far as she wants to go and she's got a really good perspective.'

For all the styles and flavors of music that Krc knows and has played, at the core of his aesthetic remains the Fab Four. "None of the Beatles read music," says Krc, who mastered trap charts for the drums by age 12. "But I consider them some of the best musicians ever. I try to teach the teenage kids in the band I mentor, Jenny Wolfe & the Pack, that it's important to read music simply because it's a way to communicate. But it's not necessary to making music. And those guys understood at a very young age the value of a song – that everything comes from a song. I still believe that if it's not a great song to start with, you don't have anything. And they all served the song.

"George Harrison and Ringo Starr – both of them technically (are) not the best, not the fastest guns in the West," Krc notes. "But I'd step over a dozen Claptons to get to a George Harrison because on every song the notes he played pertained to that song. And Ringo Starr did the same thing."

But for all his musical Anglophilia, his eclectic point of view is decidedly Texan. "I wouldn't trade it for anything, growing up here," he says. "It's something I took for granted until I grew up and started meeting people from other parts of the country. The music that is just a breathing part of me is so exotic to some other people. And I'm going, 'It's country music, they play it all the time! Its's blues!' And that's especially true over in England and Europe."

When he was a teen, Krc says it was entirely natural for him to "listen to Led Zeppelin's new record and then Bob Wills. I just do not see the difference in that stuff," he insists. "Personally, I value and love those styles of music equally. I just can't be, 'I just do blues' or 'I just do rock, man.' We're human beings and we have emotions of all different kinds."

So it's only natural for Krc to shift from style to style without seeming musically schizophrenic. "My muse changes," he concludes. "Right now I'm doing the Freddie Steady 5 and it's about rock 'n' roll and it's about having fun. But the most recent album I released is a country record. I'm trying to get more into entertaining people than simply showing them all the songs I have. I'm just trying to do something that moves people and that they enjoy."