Roy Head
Biography Roy Head
Roy Head
Born on January 9th, 1941, in Three Rivers, Texas about halfway between San Antonio and Corpus Christi, Roy Head grew up in a musical family that surrounded him with country sounds. They moved to San Marcos and he began singing country music in the family group by 1950. Around 1957 Head’s fascination with country music was overshadowed by his growing excitement for the more driving sounds of James Brown’s hard-edged R’n’B and the pioneering rock records made by Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Elvis. In 1958 he organised The Traits, his first band, and they soon became a popular attraction in local high school gymnasiums, at teen canteens and sock hops. In addition to the standard four-piece rock quartet line up, The Traits also boasted a hopping three-piece horn section, a rarity for white bands back then, forty-one years ago.
Roy Head & The Traits went into the recording studio later that same year, emerging with “One More Time”, the kick-off tune for Edsel package. A scorching R ‘n’ B-inflected rocker written by Head (with the band receiving credit), “One More Time” deserved national exposure but, unfortunately his label T&T Records San Antonio, didn’t have the clout. Nevertheless, “One More Time” did become a regional hit, enabling The Traits to become an extremely popular group in central Texas, western Louisiana and southern Oklahoma.
Little wonder, this writer recalls seeing The Traits engaging in red hot “battles of the bands” during the early 60’s and they absolutely smoked! Not too many groups worked up their own material back then, but in addition to “One More Time”, The Traits presented other originals along with sizzling versions of early rock and black hits. These events replete with “Applause Meters”, generally pitted The Traits against The Triumphs, led by Head’s contemporary B.J. Thomas, and you could feel the competitive nature of the two singers take charge as each tried to outdo the other.
As I recall, Head and The Traits usually emerged victorious, primarily because Roy was a frenzied on-stage dervish, jumping into splits, spinning, dropping to one knee, screaming, shouting, sweating and pacing the stage in constant motion. Thomas, though a kinetic on-stage performer, simply couldn’t match the San Marcos wildman.
And so it went throughout the first half of the 60’s - The Traits stood atop the pyramid of regional bands with all but Head also holding day jobs, playing weekends and earning pretty good pocket money now that they had moved up from high school gyms to frat parties, clubs and even opening slots for touring national stars. The group issued a series of unsuccessful records for a number of small Texas labels.
Everything changed in a hurry when Head and Traits’ bass player, Gene Kurtz, came up with a little ditty they thought had the potential to bring them greater success. But rather than this writer’s ramblings let’s let Roy tell the story, as he related to Bob Claypool of the Houston Post, back in 1975: “The song was called ‘Talking About A Cow’ then and it was pretty risqué. We’ve been doin’ it on-stage for awhile. We were advised to ‘clean it up’ so we cleaned it up, rhymed it and titled it ‘Treat Her Right’. It cost about $200 to record and the tapes were eventually taken to Don Robey by Charlie Booth”.
Houston impresario Robey was primarily known for issuing records on black artists like Bobby “Bland” Blue and Junior Parker on his Duke and Peacock imprints, but he decided that “Treat Her Right” was worth a shot, so he issued her the record on his new Backbeat label in the summer of 1965.
“Treat Her Right” blasted its way to #1 on the R ‘n’ B charts and to #2 on the pop list, prevented from hitting the top spot only by “Yesterday”. Since then Otis Redding, Sandy Nelson, Joe Stampley & The Uniques and plenty of other artists have covered the song and in 1971 country queen Barbara Mandrell racked up her first Top 15 country hit with her adapted version entitled “Treat Him Right”.
Suddenly Roy Head and his Traits were a hot commodity, before long they were sharing the bill will such stars as Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley and Tony Joe White and appearing on national TV shows such as “American Bandstand”, “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig”.
Looking back those days in late 1965 marked the apex of Head’s fame. He had two additional hits that year, “Just A Little Bit” and “Apple Of My Eye”, both Top 40 entries, but never was able to post anything resembling a pop hit in 1966. And before much of ‘66 had unreeled, his life began to unravel. Let’s turn again to Head for the story: “I had a group, The Traits, who decided they didn’t want to travel, so I went ahead and worked without them because I thought, ‘I’m not going to make any money sitting on my ass, they all have regular jobs’. They don't want to travel as they wanted me to stay and work, like weekends with them. So I went out and did a lot of everything, recordings, plus television, movies, whatever I was lucky enough to get into. They thought they were right, I can’t put them down for their beliefs. It kind of put a damper on my career and I’m very hard headed and I said, ‘Hell with ‘em, I’m not going to record nothing’”.
The dispute wasn’t resolved until late 1967 but by them Roy had developed nodes on his throat so he went from the clutches of lawyers to the embraces of doctors, telling journalist Leon Beck: “I busted up my vocal cords and that laid me up for a while and I went back to work too soon and did it all over again. So then I was like a cube of ice. You get cold in this business, you just forget it, especially with rock ‘n’ roll. If you’re not on top of the market constantly you’re a dead loser. . . I got into the bottle pretty good. I guess I just used it as a crutch because I would get on stage and there would be 30 or 40 people in the house and I would think, ‘Hell, I’m killing ‘em’ and the only one I was killing really was me”.
There’s just one thing worse than being a drunk and that’s being a mean drunk who wants to fight and that’s what Roy Head became in the late 60’s. My favourite quotes on this subject come from the man himself, as told to Claypool and Beck in the mid 70’s: “My personal problems were that I liked to fight and drink. It was nothing I could put my finger on, but I just got into acting crazy. I was banned in a couple of states for my fighting - I broke a club owner’s jaw once, broke another guy’s knee. I had a bad, bad reputation from it. I drank a lot, but I wasn’t an alcoholic or anything like that, regardless of what you’ve heard...I like to fight, just getting down on the gravel out in the street. I’d love to walk down the street right now and pop a dude in the mouth...I got a reputation to where a lot of dudes would come in the clubs looking for it. Like I was working at one place and a dude walked up in the middle of the floor show and said something to me. Well I just broke his jaw and then, when I hit him, everybody jumped in it....Not too long ago some dude was tailgaitin’ me so I threw on the brakes and we locked up in the street. I just did a facial on him”.
As you might suppose, these charming tactics did not endear Head to club owners or fans so it wasn’t long before he found himself unemployable. In addition, he didn’t like the way the music of the early 70’s sounded. “They came out with all that fag rock, with lipstick, rouge, earrings and all that. I’m not knocking it but it’s not my bag. People kept saying, ‘Why don’t you change, do what’s happening now?’. But I didn’t feel it and I still don’t - I just got lost in all that psychedelic stuff”.
However, by 1974 he realised that winning bar battles might perhaps be counterproductive so, guided by a patient manager, Houston club owner Lee Savaggio, he staged a comeback in the country field, singing the music he had grown up hearing. “Baby’s Not Home”, included here and on the other Edsel release, “Country Crooner”, became his first country chart entry late in 1974 for Mega Records, then he fashioned three more minor hits in 1975 on the Shannon label. Head moved over to major label ABC-Dot the next year and tallied ten hits there, including his biggest success “Come To Me” (#19 in 1977). He changed labels to Elektra in 1979 and scored four minor chart entries there before losing that deal: “me and Jimmy Bowen (Elektra Boss) got sideways”, the singer recalled in late 1998.
He posted an additional six charters from 1981 to 1985 on a string of successively smaller labels, beginning with Churchill and ending with Texas Crude Records. Alas he then dropped off the national music radar screens and though he has continued to perform regularly, in fact he maintains two separate bands, one to play his country material, one for his blues shows, he hasn’t been able to fashion a fresh comeback into the national limelight. When I spoke with him in late November 1998, he said “I’m still doing music, still having a good time. Doin’ a show with B.J. (Thomas) in December, that’ll be like a real reunion”. At 57 however, he admits that “It’s starting to get a little thin, if it doesn’t pick up I might have to get a job. I dunno what I want to do, though, I love music so much.”
Roy Head remains one of the finest on-stage performers this writer has been privileged to witness work his on-stage magic. He’s a vastly underrated rock/soul pioneer and a man, who were it not for some bad breaks and the lack of good management or production when he was in his 20’s and 30’s could easily have become as famous and critically regarded as his Texas contemporaries such as B.J. Thomas and Delbert McClinton: for when it comes to white soul shouters Roy Head was one of the very best. Let’s all hope life has some pleasant surprises slated for him yet! (John Lomax III, November 1998)
