Music

The lawyer with a mean guitar lick

Bobby Earl Smith is the guy to call when you need help on stage or in the courtroom

By Dave Harmon
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, March 17, 2006

Sixth Street, 2004. The SXSW music festival is reaching its crescendo. A Los Angeles band called Ozomatli spills out of Club Exodus, with a conga line of fans behind. Austin police arrest two band members and the band manager.

Someone with BMI, the company that sponsored the show, calls someone from the festival, explains the trouble. The festival liaison says, give lawyer Bobby Earl Smith a call.

Smith, 62, gets a lot of those calls. Most aren't as high profile as the Ozomatli debacle, which made national news, or the arrest last year of Modest Mouse's drummer at Austin's airport on weapon and drug charges. Most are guitarists and drummers and backup singers who saw the flashing lights behind them as they drove home from a gig, a beer or two past legal.

Smith understands. He's a musician, too. Maybe you weren't around when he was the shaggy-headed bass player for one of the hottest bands in town, when folks would pack the One Knite and the Split Rail to see Marcia Ball's Freda and the Firedogs play. They were one of those new long-haired country bands, hippies playing cowboy bars. And they were this close to being huge.

Smith is OK with his footnote in Austin music history, and he's fine with being another misdemeanor lawyer in a courthouse that's crawling with them. He's done the big show there, too, standing before a jury when his client was facing life in prison.

That's pressure. Singing country songs to a few hundred people in a bar? That's just playing. And a good 20 years after most folks thought they'd seen Bobby Earl Smith on a stage for the last time, he's playing some shows again.

Strumming again

The Broken Spoke, last November. The hair's still a little shaggy, the face has gone softer. Smith's in a button-down shirt, black pants and white running shoes. He has all his friends behind him — Alvin Crow on fiddle, Floyd Domino on piano, Casper Rawls, John X. Reed and Gabe Rhodes on guitar, Tommy Detamore on the steel, Freddie Krc on drums. His son Eric's there, too, playing bass behind dad.

Smith looks back at the band as he shuffles to the mike. "Walkin' the dog, come on, one-two ..."

He breaks into the first verse, his voice deep and a little nasal. And the crowd is dancing, boots sliding on concrete, everything washed in neon.

His mother is sitting at a table next to the dance floor, smiling. Clifford Antone, the city's blues king, stands way in the back, his head bobbing. He knows Smith from way back, when Antone's was on Sixth Street.

"He's the real deal," Antone says. "This is how a country band's supposed to sound."

Raised on country

All the way back, now, to 1964 — and the girl. Smith's sort of studying at Abilene Christian College, but mostly playing in a series of rock bands and singing songs the dean — and a lot of people who remember him from the Church of Christ choir in San Angelo — would not endorse.

Smith had been raised on country, listening to KPEP in San Angelo while driving his uncle's produce truck, but he'd been hooked on rock since age 13 when he heard Elvis and Little Richard and Chuck Berry. His father, a lawyer and later a judge on the state 3rd Court of Appeals, indulged his only son with a $40 Martin guitar.

Enter the girl. Smith's in the Grill, the burger joint on the Abilene Christian campus, and up walks Judy to introduce herself. She's the daughter of a flatland cotton farmer and her brother knew Smith and told her she should meet him. So she did, and as she says now, "That was it. Well, for me it was. Bobby continued to date other people."

Not for long, though.

Bobby Earl and Judy married a year later. They moved to Austin, got a garage apartment on a hill near the University of Texas where the LBJ Library now stands ($72 a month, thank you), and Smith started working on a master's degree in public administration while Judy studied to be a teacher.

Smith never got the degree. He left Austin for a job with NASA in 1966, working as a buyer for the Gemini and Apollo space missions. Judy got a student teaching gig at a Pasadena high school.

A year later, in 1967, he decided to go to law school. He's still not sure why, beyond thinking at the time that it would be a good thing to do. So back they went to Austin, where Judy got a teaching job at Reagan High and Smith made extra cash driving an Austin school bus.

The city's music scene beckoned. Smith sat in with bands at the Split Rail on South Lamar Boulevard. Some guys invited him to play a party with them, and he made more that night than he could in a week on the bus.

"I told Judy, 'I think I'm gonna start playing,' " he said.

Law career on hold

He joined a bluegrass band. Gigs led to other gigs, then another band — the Ant Hill Mob, playing a hodgepodge of country, soul and rock. "At that point," he says, "my hair's getting a little longer, and I discovered the magic herb."

He crammed for the bar exam between gigs and passed it in 1970. Then did nothing with it — he was having too much fun with music.

Playing bass for Dub and the Dusters, Smith was at the One Knite one night when the drummer came in from a break and said he'd met this girl, a tall, skinny library worker at UT, who could really sing and wanted to sit in with them. The girl had listened to the band, amazed at how they could mix Van Morrison, Merle Haggard and B.B. King songs in one set. She wanted in.

Marcia Ball climbed the stage and asked, "Do you know 'Me & Bobby McGee'?"

"She started singing," Smith remembers, "and I just got chills."

Ball and Smith teamed up, and for Ball, the chills came when they started singing harmonies together while she played the upright piano in her apartment. Smith taught Ball country songs. She taught him the bluesy rock she learned growing up on the Texas-Louisiana border, and the blend would make them the hottest thing in town.

Early 1972 now, and the band's coming together, with guitarist John X. Reed and drummer Steve McDaniels and lap steel man David Cook coming aboard.

They needed a name. Smith liked the name firedogs (he didn't know firedogs were called Dalmatians). What goes with firedogs? he asked the band. Someone said, "Freda." That was it.

Ball's friendship with a UT shuttle bus driver named Guy Herman led them to become the unofficial house band for the union drivers, who were striking and needed cash. The band played for free at their fundraisers at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Herman helped them haul Ball's piano from gig to gig, and the drivers gave the band an instant audience.

The band clicked almost immediately, and before long they were packing every house they played. "We were a hot little band in a hot little town," Smith said. "It was exciting."

Then came their big shot. Doug Sahm introduced them to Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records — the guy who produced Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. Wexler wanted to cut a demo, so off they went to Tyler, where they spent three days recording four originals and some cover songs.

Wexler liked what he heard and wanted to release the record. The band balked; they thought they'd have another crack at making a more polished record. Then they wanted to haggle over contract stuff like royalties and artistic freedom, Smith said.

The deal fell through. Atlantic didn't release the record. His last last gig with Freda (other than a reunion show at Soap Creek Saloon in '79) was Willie Nelson's picnic in College Station in 1974.

Smith moved on to other bands. He played with (and managed) Alvin Crow for four years. Then he played with Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore while producing records for local bands.

His first son, Jon Marc, was born in 1975. Eric came two years later. The long nights started wearing on him; he wasn't seeing his boys enough. The lack of money didn't help. By the early '80s, Smith told his wife, "I've got to do something to make some more money."

"You've got a law degree," she said.

"I don't even know where the courthouse is."

Yes, he's a lawyer

The phone rang late one night in 1982 or '83, and he had his first client. A roadie he knew who worked for Stevie Ray Vaughan had been arrested for drunk driving. Smith listened, then told the man: "I don't know how to get you out of jail."

Fortunately, he'd kept up with his dues at the State Bar of Texas, so he drove down to the jail, and a deputy walked him through the process. The next morning, he got another call from his client, who informed him that he had missed the arraignment before the judge. Smith had no idea there was an arraignment.

As luck would have it, the judge was Herman, the former UT bus driver who had helped haul Ball's piano around — he's now Travis County's longtime probate judge. Herman gave him a pass and rescheduled the arraignment.

A legal career was born, pretty much by accident.

He struggled at first. Other lawyers tossed him a few cases, and he went to the judges, asking to get appointed on misdemeanor cases such as DWIs. He liked criminal work. He was helping regular folks who'd made mistakes. "From Day One, I thought he was a talented lawyer," said state District Judge Jon Wisser. "Being a trial lawyer, you're a performer."

He was comfortable in front of juries. It was like playing a club. Tell them a story and hope they're listening. Look for that eye contact, the bobbing heads. If you start losing them, change the tempo a little. Pick your spots to improvise.

Before long he was doing a lot of felony cases. Robberies. Sexual assaults. Aggravated assaults. The judges seemed to like his work, so they appointed him to bigger cases. He got his first murder case, then another.

He did court appointments for 15 years before it wore him down. He was representing people who hurt kids and robbed convenience stores and sometimes even killed. He remembers one client turning to him after a not guilty verdict. "What does 'acquittal' mean?" he asked Smith.

"It means not guilty."

"I've never been found not guilty."

He went back to doing mostly misdemeanors. Businessmen driving while drunk. College girls shoplifting blouses. Couples whose fights got the neighbors on the phone to 911.

But most folks today want to ask him about Ozomatli. He still shakes his head about it. People were dancing in the streets!

"That's what offended me the most about the Ozomatli arrest," he said. "If they're not dancing, they ain't listening."

Jiro Yamaguchi, the percussionist facing the most serious charge — felony assault for allegedly whacking an officer with a drum — said Smith "just made me feel real comfortable. I felt like I was in good hands and I felt like I wasn't alone."

Yamaguchi pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and was placed on deferred disposition — if he stays out of trouble, the charge goes away.

Last year, Smith defended Jeremiah Green, a member of Modest Mouse, after he was accused of carrying a weapon in an airport and possession of a controlled substance. The weapon turned out to be a really big ring (that charge was dropped) and the substance was a prescription pill (that led to a drug and alcohol class and community service).

"Bobby Earl is someone we all know, we know as a friend, so we all go to him," Ball said. "Now when our kids get in trouble, we call Bobby."

Freda calling

All along, he kept playing. Never lost those guitar string calluses.

Thirty years after the Freda and the Firedogs recording session, Ball called Smith and said it was a shame that Freda didn't have any recorded legacy. So he called Wexler and asked, what ever happened to that demo? Two days later, the tapes arrived in his mailbox. It was released as a CD in 2002.

Five or six years ago, Smith started singing some of his own stuff again. He thought about all the songs he'd written but never recorded, or didn't get right the first time. He called studio owner Freddy Fletcher, the drummer from Dub and the Dusters. I want to record again, Bobby Earl told him. Will you play? Fletcher agreed. So did Flaco Jimenez. And everyone else he asked.

"Rearview Mirror" was released in 2001, and Smith headlined a gig for the first time in more than a decade. The Broken Spoke, of course. More than 400 people showed up. He had so much fun he put together "Turn Row Blues" last year and played the Spoke again. Now he's working on another batch of songs, heading to Luckenbach on April 15 for his next gig.

"Now I can just sing," Smith said. "It's fun."

dharmon@statesman.com; 445-3645