An Exclusive Excerpt from Still Here: Chapter 7 - The Compound

When I started writing Still Here, I assumed I was writing a memoir about Texas Music.

Somewhere along the way I realized I was really writing about other people, different places and songs.

Places where songs became friendships. Places where strangers became family. Places that looked ordinary until enough time passed to realize they had quietly become history.

One of those places was simply known as "The Compound."

It wasn't a venue. It wasn't on a map. It was just a dusty patch of ground behind River Road Ice House where songwriters, dreamers and drifters somehow kept finding one another.

Before Still Here officially makes its way into the world, I wanted to share this chapter to give you a taste of the book's style. It's my Brad's Corner style turned inward and then back outward again. The first presales were shipped out this morning and I'm reopening orders at this LINK. They will be on hand at River Jam as well.

I hope you enjoy it.

-Brad

Chapter Seven

The Compound

“I live out on the highway between insanity and Texas… and home is just a phone call away.”

— Dub Miller

What eventually became known as “The Compound” did not announce itself as anything special. And it wouldn’t look like much to anyone driving by. It was one step above a bring your own tools junkyard. A myriad of band vans, rusted out Winnebagos, borrowed campers and half working vehicles tucked behind River Road Ice House. No gate, no sign, no plan. Just a place where people who made music happened to land when the night was not finished with them yet.

Most nights, I would work the front door until closing time, check the last few IDs, haul trash out back, and then wander toward the glow of whatever fire was burning behind the bar. That was where the energy shifted. Where the music stopped being a job and became a conversation. Guards were let down and spirits were sent up. The crowd noise from the venue would slowly fade behind you and be replaced with quieter sounds. Acoustic guitars. Laughter. Beer cans cracking open. Stories already halfway in motion before you sat down.

At any given time, there were three or four songwriters living back there. Not visiting, actually planting shallow roots and living. Guitars leaned against tires. Coolers doubled as furniture. Ashtrays overflowed. Songs floated in and out of half finished conversations. Nobody kept score. Nobody rushed anything. There were nights where somebody would start playing around a fire and two hours later nobody could remember exactly when the “set” had started or ended.

Doug Moreland was the de facto mayor.

He did not claim the role, but it was understood. Doug knew everyone. He was the Hondo Crouch of River Road. He introduced people. His gregarious nature, unforgettable laugh and willingness to help anyone and everyone connected the dots. He set the tone by simply being himself. If someone new showed up, Doug made sure they felt welcome. If someone needed space, Doug respected it. He was the constant in a place that thrived on impermanence.  I was always taking notes.

Before long, The Compound began drawing a certain kind of gravity.

Jason Boland passed through. Bleu Edmondson lingered. Dub Miller made it home base. Cody Canada showed up. A young bull rider named Ryan Bingham wandered in long before most people knew his name. He had one song about being south of heaven. It lasted around eight minutes and we clamored to hear it again the moment he finished each time. He played it no less than five times a night. Nobody complained. We wanted another round every single time. Even then, there was something in his voice that sounded weathered beyond his years.

These songwriters did not arrive with résumés, entourages or expectations. They arrived with guitars, stories and an openness to whatever the night might offer. Most of them looked half broke and fully alive.

Doug’s closest running mate was a guy named Bubba Daniel.

Bubba shared Doug’s interests almost across the board with one notable exception. He did not sing and he did not perform. But he could spin a yarn that would hold a circle quiet, and he could take a chainsaw to a slab of wood and turn it into something worth stopping for. Bubba was the life of the party. If Doug was the mayor, Bubba was the unofficial master of ceremonies, historian and entertainment committee all rolled into one. If there was laughter somewhere behind the Ice House, odds were good Bubba was at the center of it.

Anyone who has spent time on River Road knows that it attracts characters the way a porch light attracts moths.

Big Steve. Amigo Mel. The River House Ghost.

Stories stacked on stories. Some true, some embellished, all told with complete conviction. Outlaws and escapists. Good timers and hard timers. River Road has always carried a certain mysticism, and The Compound became its nerve center for a brief, unforgettable stretch. Looking back, The Compound may be the most influential chapter River Road ever produced.

Bonfires burned there night after night. I have no idea what happened there during the weekdays while I was in class in San Marcos or polishing clubs for the rich folks hacking their way around Quail Creek Country Club. But Friday through Sunday was a different story.

Songs were written there without anyone thinking to write them down. Ideas were tested, discarded, refined. Careers took shape quietly without announcements, strategy meetings or anyone using the words “brand” or “influencer.”

What Cheatham Street was to Tuesday and Wednesday nights, The Compound became for the weekend crowd of travelers. The Oklahoma boys would talk about a Yellow House and The Farm with the same kind of reverence. Different geography with the same spirit.

There were nights when I would be standing on the porch of River Road Ice House, ring toss game in hand, doing the easiest job I will ever have in my life. I was getting paid to glance at IDs, keep half an eye on things and mostly just stand there listening to my favorite music in the world while attractive young coeds drifted in and out of the Hill Country night.

And I was getting paid cash for it. I would have paid Ken Jenkins for the opportunity to do it all.

It was sublime.

Some nights the air would settle just right. The river close enough to feel but not see. Music spilling out of the Ice House and mixing with laughter and conversation on the porch. Cigarette smoke curling upward into strings of white Christmas lights. Beer bottles clanking into trash cans somewhere in the distance. It felt like time had slowed down just for all of us there in that moment.

And maybe it had.

Because I’ve never experienced anything quite like it before or since.

Dub Miller played the Ice House a lot. Probably because he needed to pay for room and board. Probably because it was home base. Probably because he simply had to. Something in the universe was pulling him to that place and that time. Some artists chase rooms and others need them. Dub needed that stage.

By day, he bartended at Riley’s Tavern and whatever else he fell into. Former Aggie Corps member. Observant, sharp, well read. By night, he was building something powerful. At that moment in time, Pat Green and Cory Morrow ruled Texas. Cross Canadian Ragweed and the earliest incarnation of the Randy Rogers Band were still forming. Jack Ingram and

Charlie Robison already felt like stars.

But Dub was carving out something on the ground level as he ascended next to guys like Kevin Fowler and Roger Creager. He was building it from the grassroots one roadhouse at a time.

He was backed by a band called The Highway 6 Band and without question they were the best live band of that era. As previously mentioned, they featured a baby-faced Brady Black on fiddle, Les Lawless on drums, Adam Odor on bass and Matt Skinner on guitar. Skinner would often spin off to play his own shows and in his stead was a Kansas transplant named Josh Hamilton.  He was a guitar player, not a prodigal baseball player.  The group was formidable in any layout. Names would rotate in and out, but that core lineup was almost always there for a spell.

And what a spell it was.

Dub was a master songwriter and an enigmatic frontman, full of wit and restless energy behind the microphone. He could work a crowd with humor and then pull the rug out emotionally with a lyric nobody saw coming. Combined with Dub’s songwriting and frontman charisma, they barnstormed the emerging Red Dirt circuit. Tight, fearless, relentless. The kind of band that recalibrated what a live show could feel like.

Every Highway 6 Band show at the Ice House ended the same way: John Prine’s “Lake Marie.”

It was a blazing cover. Not ironic or precious. Full tilt and fearless. The kind of song choice that told you everything you needed to know about what mattered to them. Story first. Truth over flash with enough intensity to level a mountain.

On especially good nights, something extra happened.

Matt Skinner would step out front and take the lead on his own song, “Paying the Fiddler.” Skinner is one of the most gifted pickers and singers I’ve ever been around. When that moment came, the entire room shifted. It didn’t matter whether they were on the outdoor stage, the indoor stage or the makeshift setup by the to go beer cooler near the front door.

People stopped talking. Bartenders slowed down. The whole place locked in.

And when that final note faded, there was barely enough time to breathe before they launched straight into “Lake Marie.”

I can still close my eyes and hear Dub shouting “shadows!” into the Hill Country night.

Standing on that porch, ring toss forgotten, listening to that song spill out into the darkness while my friends laughed beside me, I had no idea how good I had it.

None of us did.

Even now, I can still hear that John Prine cover echoing somewhere deep inside me.

At the height of it all, Dub stepped away. Brady and Les went on to join the Randy Rogers Band. Adam Odor became a producer whose fingerprints would shape countless records. Matt Skinner moved to Colorado and continues singing for his supper in the mountains.

History did what it always does.

It moved forward.

But if you caught The Highway 6 Band between 2001 and 2003, you know. There has never been another like them. Not before. Not since.

At the time, none of this felt historic. It felt like hanging out behind a bar on River Road. Sharing beers. Watching songs take shape. Listening to stories that would later sound larger than life.

The Compound did not look like history.

But it most certainly was.

I was lucky enough to have a front row seat to one of the most transcendent moments in Texas Music. And it all happened because three college kids decided to take a drive and listen to music.

River Road Ice House endured for another twenty years or so. At one point it was a hotter ticket than Gruene Hall. I remember massive shows featuring The Charlie Daniels Band, Ragweed, David Allan Coe, Gary Allan, benefits, reunions and careers launched and relaunched. Chris Stapleton even played there post “Tennessee Whiskey” superstardom.

We hosted a sold out Galleywinter River Jam there around 2013 featuring Uncle Lucius. It remains the biggest event we’ve ever put on. I’ll never forget weaving through that sold out crowd of thousands and overhearing a drunken girl say she could not believe Kevin Galloway could really whistle like he does on “Keep the Wolves Away.” She thought it was some sort of studio trick.

River Road Ice House always seemed to have the answers. Until it didn’t.

It eventually fell into the hands of people who did not understand what made it matter. The live music landscape changed. Housing developments crept closer. Noise complaints followed. And now it more closely resembles the carcass of the old Oasis we stumbled onto all those years ago.

One day the walls will probably come down in the name of progress. Tract homes will go up. Another little piece of Hill Country magic will disappear. Another chapter in the story of River Road.

Progress has steered us wrong plenty of times

.

Music never has.