Former Austin DJ's wit, humor remain through new cancer battle

February 2002: In a room full of people in love with the sound of their own voices, Joe Gracey's silence turned heads.

He had almost backed out of this reunion of the AM radio station where he had briefly worked in the 1970s, when his broadcast star was rising. At the last minute he decided to come anyway, the former boy wonder whose story everyone knew.

His youth was gone, of course, and a graying beard partly concealed where the surgeons had ravaged his neck and jaw. Still it was hard to think of Gracey as a middle-aged man. He was working the crowd with his usual puckish charm, a beer in one hand and a kid's Magic Slate in the other.

We talked for a while — or rather, I talked and Gracey scribbled, rapidly filling the slate, erasing it and writing more. This is the drill since losing his voice to cancer in 1978: When Gracey "talks," he's actually writing.

The son of a Fort Worth trial lawyer, Gracey had always been a talker, fluent with words and fascinated with sound and music. As 13 he had his own "pirate" — i.e., illegal — radio station and by the time he started in commercial radio at 15, he had a baritone voice that "kind of jumped out at you," recalled Texas writer Joe Nick Patoski.

Radio men called such voices "ballsy" and admired Gracey's insouciance, his smart grasp of the disparate styles — Western swing, blues, alt-rock — forming an eclectic music scene that would become Austin's signature. The sound of "progressive country" was born at KOKE-FM, where Gracey spun the records.

"He played a compelling mix of Texas musicians, the Allman Brothers, Hank Williams Jr.," Jan Reid wrote in "The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock." "His playlist was brash, seamless and almost all Southern: Listen up, here, this was the direction country music was going, and Nashville had better hop to and pay attention."

"Joe was the real deal," said Patoski. "If he liked something, you knew it was pretty cool. He was evidence of something that was happening here that was unlike anywhere else."

Now, tonight, Gracey was bursting with all that he could not say. "This must be hard for you," I said.

His hand wrote furiously on the slate: "I'll never get used to it."

Not who he is

July 2011: Kimmie Rhodes, Gracey's wife, is lounging by the pool of the Hotel ZaZa in Houston while Gracey naps upstairs in one of the rooms reserved for outpatients at nearby MD Anderson Hospital. He has been living here since his latest cancer — esophageal this time — was diagnosed in February.

"I don't think this should be about Gracey's cancer," Rhodes says. She often calls her husband by his last name, as does everyone of a certain age in the music business in Austin. "One of the hardest things about it is, people define who you are by it. That's not who he is."

Rhodes and Gracey were both married to other people when they met in 1979. Gracey had teamed up with Bobby Earl Smith, a newly minted lawyer who had blown off the law to play music. In a makeshift studio in the basement of KOKE dubbed Electric Graceyland, they recorded a pantheon of local musicians, including Jesse Sublett's seminal rock band, the Skunks; Stevie Ray Vaughan, Alejandro Escovedo, Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Alvin Crow, the LeRoi Brothers, Asleep at the Wheel.

Rhodes was a born artist who painted, sang, wrote poetry, plays — and, as it turned out, music. With Smith's and Gracey's encouragement, she became a successful singer/songwriter, crafting songs in such profusion she has trouble remembering them all.

Gracey had a roguish reputation, but his marriage to Rhodes in 1984 thrived. "One of the reasons we've stayed together so long is we had a really great friendship before we got married," Rhodes says.

It is Rhodes — energetic, wired to be positive — who roused Gracey this morning and readied him for a photo shoot in the white linen jacket he wears "just to thumb my nose at fate." It's Rhodes who slogs with him through the slough of chemotherapy; Rhodes who strategizes how to get him home to Austin for the weekend, leaving this all-cancer, all-the-time world behind.