STAR-TELEGRAM ARCHIVES/JILL JOHNSON
STAR-TELEGRAM ARCHIVES/JILL JOHNSON
COURTESY OF YEP ROC RECORDS
Posted on 07/16/2003 1:14:13 PM PDT by weegee
Ronnie's last song
Life may not give Dallas rockabilly musician Ronnie Dawson the encore he deserves, but he's not changing his upbeat tune one bit
By Malcolm Mayhew Star-Telegram Staff Writer
On March 29, Dallas rockabilly legend Ronnie Dawson performed at the Hot Rod & Kustom Kar Rally, a daylong concert and hot-rod show that took place at the Fiesta Gardens in Austin. Music journalist Dan Forte was in the front row during Dawson's performance, hanging onto every note.
"He prowled around the stage with his Stratocaster, he kicked his leg up in the air," Forte says. "He musically and physically prodded his bandmates to dig in and play harder and deeper."
Forte, a close friend of Dawson, remembers that day being exceptionally cold and overcast. Nonetheless, Forte donned a pair of sunglasses.
"I didn't want Ronnie to look out and see me, and everybody else, crying. It was a difficult, bittersweet occasion, because everyone knew that this might be Ronnie's last performance."
Ronnie Dawson, you see, is dying.
•
In rockabilly music circles, and even outside of them, Ronnie Dawson is a paradox. Doesn't drink. Doesn't smoke (used to, when he was a kid, but he quit years ago). Used to run 10 miles a day. When he was on tour, instead of filling his van with beer and liquor, he carried around a juicer to whip up health drinks -- very un-rock 'n' roll.
He ate well and never did drugs. All the rock-star stigmas attached to being in the limelight, being onstage, being the object of affection for women worldwide, Dawson simply wasn't interested in.
His highs, he says, came from performing.
In a seemingly cruel twist of fate, doctors diagnosed throat cancer in Dawson in January. His voice, one of the two things he depended on to make a living (the other was his guitar playing), would be butchered during treatment. Last fall, after undergoing chemotherapy, he thought he'd beaten it. His wife, doctors, and fans around the globe thought he had, too. But in January, it returned, spreading to his lungs, and the prognosis wasn't good.
"It came back on me pretty quick," the 63-year-old musician says from his east Dallas home. "I was told I wouldn't have much time, months."
Dawson is hoping to turn those months into years. About two months ago, he was accepted into a gene-therapy research program at Baylor University Medical Center's Charles A. Sammons Cancer Center in Dallas, where he is undergoing an experimental treatment. In an effort to shrink the tumor, doctors inject a virus into it.
The treatments are difficult. "It takes three or four days for him to begin to regain strength," says his wife, Christine Dawson. His fourth treatment will be later this month, when doctors will do another CAT scan to see if the tumor has gotten smaller.
Although a cure isn't necessarily out of the question, a little bit more time is what Dawson's hoping for. Time to be with his wife. Time to enjoy being home. Up until recently, he never had either.
"I was always traveling, always on the road," he says. "And I just married a few years ago. I've spent my whole life single. So now I just want to enjoy a little more of it, enjoy being home, not having to travel. I was lucky to be able to make my living being a musician, and I would never trade those days for anything. But there's a time when the horse wants to go to the barn. It feels good, feels good to have a wife, feels good to have a home."
•
Ask any of the numerous musicians or music-industry reps whom Dawson has crossed paths and stages with since he picked up a guitar in the 1950s and they'll all tell you the same thing: He is an incredibly nice, humble man. Unlike so many other rock 'n' roll singers, he is not, and was not, a careerist or an egomaniac. He loves music, not the extras that go along with being good at playing it.
"He is a great man," says Tony Villanueva, guitarist and singer for the Austin-based country-rock group the Derailers, which performed at a benefit for Dawson this year at Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas. "The first time we played in Dallas was opening for him. I learned something that night I never forgot. He came out smiling and gave it all he's got. And he's got a lot. He had twice the amount of energy as performers half his age. He pours out love for the music and love for the audience."
Lisa Pankratz, a drummer who toured with Dawson for several years in the early to mid-'90s, says she has not only been inspired by his playing but by his persona as well.
"He was always very inspirational to everyone in the band, now even more so," she says. "He made you want to follow him anywhere. That's what he liked about us: We would go anywhere with him and push him. He likes that. He likes you to spar with him onstage and just have fun. With him, it's all about having fun."
Dawson has been having a blast since the 1950s. Born in Waxahachie in 1939, he is the son of Pinkie Dawson, a bassist who performed in the 1930s in Dallas' Deep Ellum, before it was Deep Ellum. An only child who got expelled from Southwestern Bible School in Waxahachie for smoking cigarettes, Dawson started playing guitar when he was in his teens, performing at sock hops.
He was so good that he landed a spot at the Big D Jamboree, a weekly music revue held at the Sportatorium in Dallas. There, he won a talent show 10 weeks in a row.
At the Jamboree, Dawson also saw his share of up-and-coming performers, including Elvis Presley. For years, a rumor circulated that Presley was so nervous about Dawson's kinetic, high-energy shows that he didn't want to follow him.
In his typically humble fashion, Dawson dismisses the rumor.
"Elvis was the headliner. He wasn't worried about me," Dawson says with a chuckle. "He was flying high back then."
He will say, however, that he was anything but awestruck that Elvis was in the same building as him.
"I wasn't interested, to tell you the truth," he says. "I was so caught up with [Elvis' guitarist] Scotty [Moore], and how he was getting a particular sound. I found out that it was an amp that was made for him. Elvis did invite everyone on the show back to his hotel for a party, but I didn't go. People always ask me, 'Why didn't you go?' I tell them that I had already found out what I wanted to know."
In the late '50s, word had spread through the music industry about Ronnie Dawson's talents and his frenetic live shows. In 1959, he signed to Dick Clark's New York-based label, Swan Records.
His career was grounded before it ever had a chance to take off. Swan dropped the ball on publicizing Dawson after the payola scandal of the early '60s, in which broadcasters and DJs were accused of accepting bribes to trumpet certain artists. Dawson appeared on Clark's American Bandstand show, but Clark soon closed the label, leaving Dawson without a deal.
He did not give up. Under the name Commonwealth Jones, Dawson signed to Columbia Records and, in 1961, released the single Do Do Do.
But the deal went sour and, after a brief stint performing with local country-swing outfit the Light Crust Doughboys, he joined the Levee Singers, who had a regular gig at the Levee Club in Dallas.
Again, appearances on national TV shows made success seem imminent for Dawson and the Levee Singers. Again, though, it never came. The band never landed a deal and soon broke up.
Over the years, success teased repeatedly under different guises. Playing country music, he signed with Columbia again. That went nowhere. He then formed a group called Steel Rail, but its music was so eclectic, it never found an audience. Finally, he settled for doing commercial jingles for, among other companies, Hungry Jack biscuits and Jax beer.
In 1986, he got what so many other seemingly-done musicians never receive: another chance.
At that time, rockabilly was becoming increasingly popular, thanks to groups such as the Stray Cats. In England, it was all the rage, prompting an English producer to hunt down Dawson in hopes of releasing some of his early songs; it didn't hurt that the Cramps, an underground punk group with a rockabilly following, had just recorded a Dawson tune called Rockin' Bones.
Next thing Dawson knew, he was a star in England. While his hometown remained, for the most part, oblivious, he was performing in England with the likes of Carl Perkins. He signed with a British label and recorded a trio of discs, Monkey Beat, Rockinitis and Just Rockin' and Rollin'.
Eventually, his popularity leaked across to the United States, resulting in a performance at Carnegie Hall, an appearance on Late Night With Conan O'Brien and a deal with hipster Chapel Hill, N.C., label Yep Roc, which released his most recent disc, 1998's More Bad Habits.
"To me, he wasn't doing something that was a retro kind of thing, but something completely vibrant and fresh," says Glenn Dicker, president of Yep Roc. "Going to see him live was an awakening experience. The way he communicated, the way he works hard up there, the feeling that he gets into the audience -- it just peels off layers of stress. It's something real special."
And something, Dawson says, real eclectic. He's actually a little uncomfortable being labeled a straight-up rockabilly musician.
"I've been exposed to so many different kinds of music," he says. "I have a wide variety of musical friends. I know country musicians, people in the symphony and a lot of rock 'n' roll cats. All of that has helped my music. You can't expand rockabilly much, but I tried."
Dan Forte says he succeeded.
"I take exception to applying the term 'rockabilly' to Ronnie, and I know he doesn't view himself as a rockabilly performer," says Forte, who has been a music journalist for 27 years and is an editorial consultant for Vintage Guitar magazine. "He sees what he does as rock 'n' roll. Rockabilly isn't multidimensional enough to describe him.
"[And] there's never anything negative about a Ronnie Dawson show," Forte says. "He doesn't get onstage and gripe about royalties he never received. There's no dark, sinister vibe. It's all positive energy. I can't think of an experience that's more uplifting."
•
Ronnie Dawson has applied the same positive energy he injects into his music to his attitude about having terminal cancer.
"He's been incredibly brave dealing with this stuff," says Pankratz. "He's gone into this the same way he went into shows -- he's not going to go down, not going to give up. Whatever life he's got left, he's going to live it. Even before he was sick, he's always had that positive attitude."
What has kept his spirits up, Dawson says, is his wife, Christine. In another way, she has also, perhaps, kept him alive.
"I honestly don't know if I would have pursued the chemo if I hadn't been with her," he says. "And I remember telling her, 'If I get cancer, don't ever ask me to do that.' I just never thought I would want to take chemo. But here I am, second time around, third cycle.
"But I never got mad about it," he says. "I guess it's because I've never had this kind of thing happen to me. I've been lucky. I'd never had to go to the hospital before. When this happened, a peace came over me. It wouldn't do any good to get mad about it. I've just settled into it and accepted it peacefully. I think I've done that well."
STAR-TELEGRAM ARCHIVES/JILL JOHNSONSTAR-TELEGRAM ARCHIVES/JILL JOHNSON
COURTESY OF YEP ROC RECORDS
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