Welcome to the San Antonio Files.

I'm Sanford Nowlin, editor in chief of the San Antonio Courant.

During his decades behind a typewriter, San Antonio iconoclast Sam Kendrick chronicled Texas's outlaw country music scene and a whole lot more.

A former San Antonio Express-News columnist, reporter, and music writer, Kendrick founded the independent publication action Magazine in 1975, covering now legendary musicians including Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Kris Kristofferson, Augie Meyers, and more.

Kendrick's memoir Outlaw Country Reporter, misfits, madams, and Hangin with Willie was released this summer by Texas A&M University Press, and now his archives are part of the Wittliff collections at Texas State University.

We welcome him today to class.

Glad to have you here, Sam.

How are you doing?

It's good to be here.

So talk a little bit about your upbringing.

Contrary to the outlaw image you had with action magazine, you were raised in a religious household in junction, Texas.

Talk about some of the influence I grew up and in junction, Texas, with a very religious mother who was a devout Baptist.

And my dad died when I was like few months old.

I never knew my father.

So I was raised by my mother.

And, a lot of influence came from an old cowboy by the name of Red Smith.

Red was, he kind of filled in.

He was a surrogate father.

He just filled in for the stuff that I needed to learn.

He taught me how to.

How to shoot a gun.

He taught me how to ride a horse.

He taught me the things that I needed to know.

And he taught me how to defend myself.

I've got a kid picking on me on the schoolyard.

You know, Red was, he was a original cowboy, and he said that what you do is you get a stick and go upside his head.

And I didn't know what that meant, but he explained it to me, and, and that kept the bullets off.

It worked.

But I'll never forget Red.

He's buried in a little graveyard up on the South Llano River.

I took my wife out to visit his grave.

Years and years ago.

But he had a lot of influence on me.

He taught me what I needed to know.

Don't punch women.

Don't hit, inferior people.

Try to help people the best you can.

Mind your own damn business.

And, these are the things that, that that I attribute to Red Smith.

And he's.

He's important.

He's got a big part in my book.

I've got a good picture of him in there.

It sure is.

Yeah.

You ended up going to Seoul.

Ross University and a professor there recommended that you pursue journalism and transfer to Southwest Texas or Texas State, as it's called now.

At what point did you know that journalism was the right field for you?

I don't I didn't really know until I got into Southwest Texas, and then I wasn't sure either.

I didn't have a major, that that a professor name was now, and I was writing, doing themes for other guys and charging them $10 apiece.

How much money did you make doing that?

Not very much.

But he called me in one day and he said, I know you're writing these themes and you're not fooling anybody.

And he said, I see a little bit of talent there.

He said, well, I think you need to do is transfer to San Marcos.

I got a friend there.

His name is Joe Vogel, and, he just started up a little journalism department, which was kind of a one man journalism department.

And he said, I really think you should transfer to southwest.

And that's what I did.

And that's when I met Joe Vogel, and he interested me in, in the journalism business.

And that's kind of how it got started.

So you jumped around to several small papers before you ended up at the San Antonio Express-News where you had, a column called Off Beat, right, which was known for, chronicling some of the area's most colorful characters.

I'm thinking of Bunny Eckert, who was a pimp and, a gangster, and, Teresa Brown, who was a madam who was, had a lot of clients coming in and out of her, Castle Hills home, including politicians and business people.

What was it that attracted you to to sort of writing about and reporting on those kind of people, people on the margins?

I got the idea from a from an editor at the San Angelo de Standard-Times named Tom Steph.

Tom said, everybody writes about the heroes.

Write about the losers.

Nobody ever writes about the losers.

And so that when I got here to San Antonio, I was drinking beer over here.

Neurotic right around the corner.

And a place called the Melody Room Lounge.

And there was a cowboy over there.

He was a Choctaw Indian, and he followed the rodeo circuit.

He never, never, never managed to write anything that he got thrown off of everything he got on.

They called it Coyote Perry because he used to yip like a coyote when it hit the ground.

And I thought, why don't I write an article about the losing his cowboy on the RCA tour?

And I did, and Perry said, well, here's the deal.

He said, I got into rodeo because he got tired of riding the tractor out on the reservation, and I have a bad back.

And anyway, the story was about the losing his cowboy on the on the tour, and it hit the AP wire wound up on the front page of the London Times.

I think I was totally dead anyway.

But you also had a, a piece or a series, that was nominated for a Pulitzer during that time.

Is that right?

That's true.

And the man on the Pulitzer committee that nominated me was Charles Kilpatrick, who was the executive editor of the Express-News, who in later years fired my ass.

That was after Murdoch took the paper over.

Right the day after Murdoch bought the paper, I got fired.

And that, led you to found action magazine?

Right.

I had to do something.

I had three kids at home.

No way to feed them.

And I got fired without any severance pay at all.

Wow.

I had written another book.

The first book that I wrote, and they gave me that in lieu of severance pay, paperback.

And, so I, I left Express-News with a big resentment.

Yeah.

As I understand, you were not shy about talking about, Mr. Kirkpatrick and his, his antics.

That's true.

You had your son throw the initial copies of action magazine inside the Express-News building to just sort of make a point.

No.

Son didn't.

I did, or you did it.

Okay.

So you're like, here I am, you know, like, well, like Daniel standing in front of lambs demons, flipping of the billboard.

That's like Charlie even knew about it.

One other thing I noticed it was interesting in your book was you had an opportunity after you got fired from the Express-News to relocate to another newspaper in another city when you were covering Willie, a lot of the action going on there was up in Austin.

Yet you decided you wanted to stay in San Antonio.

What is it about San Antonio that made it important for you to stay here and sort of make it your home base?

I had a job offer at the Houston Post that that was the deal.

And I even went down to Houston, walked around on the streets, and I noticed all that green motion in the, in the, in the gutters and, and along the street.

You know, it's very humid in, in Austin, I mean, in Houston.

And you got a lot of malls and stuff.

And I looked at the looked at the ground.

I said, I'm going back to San Antonio.

So talk a little bit about, how you got action funded, right?

Because you were let go without a severance.

You know, journalism is not a high paying job.

How did you how did you get the money together to start publishing your own magazine?

Well, Harriet Jersey was the head of Lone Star beer at the time, and I knew Harry wasn't too, too fond of express news.

So I went to him and I told him, I said, I want to, I want to start this non-existent entertainment paper, and, I don't have any money.

And I told him, I said, I'll write about Willie, I'll write about George, Jeff, I'll write about Rusty Weir and all these people.

But I need I made books to get it started, and he wrote me a check for $1,000.

I went to a San Antonio press, and there was the owners.

And the prince at that time was Joe Martin, and he and his two brothers were running this printing press, and I told them what I wanted to do.

And, I told them I didn't have very much money, had heard they had given me enough money to get that first print.

And they said, okay.

And so thank God for Joe Martin and his brothers.

And that's how action magazine got started.

And there was a Lone Star beer ad on the back of every Mac.

Back covered for years.

Started out with Lone Star.

And your mom, as I understand it, refused to read it because they had a beer.

Advertising.

That's right.

I don't know that she ever read it.

The, action magazine is remembered for chronicling what was then the nascent outlaw country scene.

And you mention those some of those figures, Willie and Jerry.

Jeff, what was it about that music that attracted you and made you want to write about it and broadcast its importance to the to the rest of the world?

It was free freedom, freedom, music.

It was unfettered.

Those guys just walked into studios and started cutting records.

A lot of left Nashville, and Willie did at that time.

Willie said, well, if they won't record me in Nashville, able to record me in Austin.

And, you know, he started out over in Bandera and then moved on over to Austin.

And I didn't know that this redneck rock thing was forming a progressive country or outlaw country or whatever they just name.

It was just a bunch of raggedy musicians that didn't cut their hair and smoke dope and and cussed a lot.

And, they were just different.

They were different from the sequins and the and the glitter and the the Nashville scene.

And they called them outlaws.

So did did they remind you of the the outsiders that you wrote about in your column at the Express-News?

To some degree, of course.

Yeah.

They were outlaws, too.

By outlaw, I don't mean that they were lawbreakers, but they broke the the whatever you want to call it, the the aura, the country music.

Became disorganized.

And that was that was the beginning of the of the movement.

They call it progressive country.

I don't think that was good.

I think I think redneck rock was about the best.

Was that was that your description of it?

Redneck.

Right.

I called it redneck Rock.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You got to know Willie pretty well during that time period.

And we were just recalling that when redheaded stranger had not come out yet, he, he played a cassette of it for you.

Yeah.

And, you weren't quite sure that, that, the listeners were ready for that yet.

We were friends back when when, when it all started and we pulled up behind a, nightclub over on Pert Bottom Road called the Foxy Lady Saloon.

And that's where I heard the tape when we sat out there and his car play, he played the tape and, all the way through, and he had the concept albums before, and I told him I didn't think that thing would really sell that.

Well, of course, that term would do what, platinum and everything else.

So it was the biggest one he had at that time, maybe the biggest one he ever recorded.

Recorded.

I don't know.

So red redheaded stranger, took off despite your, your predictions.

Yeah, but I never knew anything about music anyway.

Yeah, that's an interesting thing about, the kind of coverage you were doing in action.

You're very much writing about the musicians as personalities, as opposed to reviewing records.

Why didn't you review records like a lot of other music publications did?

I never thought I was qualified to review anybody else's work.

So I never did try to either record review people.

This didn't appeal to me at all.

Everybody everybody did it on his own.

Gets his own shot at it, and, whatever you think is good may or may not be what I think is good, but the whole deal was that, I liked the freedom of it.

And, people like rusty.

Where in those guys were writing their own stuff.

And, I always lean toward the writers, and that's what attracted me to Nelson.

I don't know anything about the music, but I heard the lyrics, and I knew there was something there.

And.

He attracted an interesting, interesting crowd back then.

I think in the book, you talked about him sort of adopting strays.

Could you talk a little bit about the crowd Willie attracted in in the 70s?

The very first woman Nelson picnic, which was held in Dripping Springs.

That's when the rednecks and the dopers all got together, drank beer and smoke dope, and became friends at.

That was actually what merged the two of the two factions.

And it was right there in that cow pastored at Dripping Springs on the stage.

It wasn't just country western musicians either.

I Leon Russell, you pointed out, was was a surprise appearance.

Yeah, it was a huge rock star of the day.

Leon Willie were friends for years.

And, those guys didn't label music like the public does.

I mean, a good musician was a good musician.

Willie always said to just two kinds of music, good music and bad music.

And he didn't he didn't like labels, and neither did Leon.

And, Leon was a genius.

He was another musical genius.

At that time.

In the book, you talked about a lot of the the drug use that was going around and on Willie's bus that was the time you saw the devil?

Yeah.

About that.

I went from alcohol into a as Ray Wylie Hubbard used to say.

We decided that cocaine might be the answer to our drinking problem, and that's when we switched over.

And that was the beginning, the beginning of the end for me.

And, so everybody was a lot of people were doing hard drugs at the time.

I'm not talking about the needle.

I'm talking about snorting cocaine and and methamphetamine or or whatever, but, that that's where I got introduced to that stuff.

Men and women snapped off quick.

They put a ban on it real quick.

So no hard road smoke all over it.

Marijuana you want to do, but no drugs.

And he had a sign in the bus and said, if you're wired, you're fired.

So what we were doing, we were hiding from Willie at that time, and I went on the road with him for a short time.

Those those experiences, that sort of, drug, drug lifestyle, that was something that, in the 80s, while you were running action, you were writing stuff critical of, the sheriff at the time and his law and order ordinances and whatnot.

And my understanding is that, there was a pretty, pretty widely publicized bust where you ended up getting thrown in jail.

Exactly.

I made the front page.

I made the front page of the San Antonio lot and, the inside page of the Express-News.

That was the first time I got busted.

And then after that, another bust after that.

They had me all ready for prison, and I was supposed to go to prison.

And that's another long story.

But I didn't get to prison.

Yeah, that made a big difference in you, in your life.

As I understand it from the book, you you, sort of made a made a promise to, to a higher power.

I quit doing anything in a stronger than a Tylenol on October the 16th, 1989.

And, I was I was in jail, and they were getting ready to sentence me to ten years.

And I remember that that I had it made and made a plea.

At that time, I asked God to, get me out of that trap.

And I was in a holding cell in the back Bay County jail.

And there was a gigantic inmate in that cell with me, and, he was he was doing his number two business on the one toilet in that little tiny room.

And it smelled horrible.

And it was hot in there.

And I was going to prison on you.

And I looked over at that guy, and I said, God, if you'll get me out of this trap, I'll never snort another line of cocaine or methamphetamine, and I'll never take another drink of whiskey.

And I never did.

And, obviously that was not what kept you writing.

I mean, you continue to write.

You came out with this this, memoir.

Don't ask me why I wrote that book, because I can't answer me.

I wondered about it myself, really.

But it came out, and there's so much more that I should have put in it.

How much of telling that story?

I know you said you didn't necessarily think through why you did it, but how much of that story, now that you look back on it, is about relating your experience, with sobriety to other people?

My my whole story is recovery story.

Yeah.

It's, I got in into a God based outfit, an organization, and I'll keep it anonymous.

I don't talk about it.

Although Hubbard got into the same, same one that I did and criss cross in two.

We can talk about Chris now because he's passed on, but he had over 42 years in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And so I'll let people figure out how I got sober.

But, when I say sober, I don't mean I'm just not doing drugs and and drinking alcohol.

There's more to sobriety than that.

And it's a God based program.

And, so what I more or less did I have done is turn my will and my life over to the care of a higher power.

And that's that's that's our that's our nickname for God.

And and it's worked, worked pretty good for me, so I, I haven't had a drink or put anything in you stronger than an aspirin in my system since October the 16th, 1989.

Well, congratulations on that.

Yeah, yeah.

When you look back on that, that era you chronicled in Texas music, what do you think you'd like people to know about it?

Because it's so legendary in a way now, so many people, sort of look at Willie and Wayland and Kris Kristofferson as icons, but you you knew them as people.

Yeah, they were people that and there's there's still people like them out there.

But I didn't didn't set out to become an icon.

And that Kristofferson or any of those guys, they were just out there having a good time, basically.

But some of the stuff they wrote in the is indicative of, but an uprising is what it was.

It was a, it was a protest to the rinky dink stuff, you know, that Nashville was putting out.

So people like, well, Leon Russell was another one, complete different lifestyle and evolves today.

And you see new, new ones here with the kids with the green hair and all that stuff.

I don't look down my nose at any of those people because you don't know what.

You don't know what you're looking at out there.

So.

So when you see those kids with the green hair, do you think what they're doing is more akin to what was going on in outlaw country than the stuff that's going on in Nashville right now?

Oh, it's all just a protest.

Right.

But when you when you say protest, it was was it just against Nashville or do you think that there were bigger things they were saying about Americans, society and our priorities as a country and where we should be headed?

No, I don't think, oh, what they thought went into it.

I think it was a spontaneous thing.

It was freedom.

And, Janis Joplin sang it and it was Kristofferson song.

Freedom is just another word from nothing else to lose.

And that's kind of what the whole thing was all about.

When you, look at the book that just came out, is there something that people should take away from it in terms of a larger philosophy of Sam Kendrick and the way you view the world?

No.

It's entertainment.

I wrote it for entertainment.

And if somebody can get some kind of a spiritual thing out of it, that's fine.

Or it wasn't meant that way.

I just wrote it and it came out and, if I write any more, it'll be the same way.

It's just got to be spontaneous.

That's why the book, I didn't have a beginning and an end.

It just worked out that way.

Right?

Right.

You've also, as you point out in the book, even through sobriety, I mean, that you you faced life challenges.

You've lost two sons, you've battled cancer, but you have, a great relationship with your wife for more than 30 years now.

Could you talk a little bit about how sobriety has helped you endure some, some, some rough times?

Was that right?

Yes.

I'm sobriety.

I wouldn't have lived if I hadn't gotten sober.

And, my first wife passed away.

And the one I've got now, I've been with her for over 30 years, and we have a super.

I've called it a kick ass fairytale life.

That's what it is.

The, the outlaw country movement.

I hear people all the time in Nashville.

I hear people all the time elsewhere.

Drop in Willie Nelson's name, mentioning Jerry Jeff, all these kind of people like that.

What do you think?

That the legacy of that music is, that you chronicled through the 70s and 80s?

Freedom.

Freedom to express themselves where they wanted to.

And that's why I never tried to critique any of it.

It was coming out naturally, and that's why it was so great.

And it still is.

And you still have some, some local guys that still do it to write their own music.

Guys like Claude Morgan and, Hector Saldana, these are my friends.

So it's exciting for you to see another generation continuing to embrace music that's not cookie cutter music that's not produced in a factory in Nashville.

Look, Hector and Crayolas includes his brother.

It started with his brother.

Now it's his kids and evolves and they pass it on.

Just like the recovery from drugs and alcohol, we pass it on to the people that are coming up.

So the message is, there's a power greater than us, and that's going to be the answer.

It's a spiritual thing.

Anything else you want to touch on about, about that, that, that era or any of the musicians that you came into contact with?

The musicians.

Had so much to do with my life.

And I looked up to Nelson and, and all of them.

I mean, I learned from all of those.

God.

But some of the local people, you know, that have had a lot of influence on me.

People like like Hector, Hector and his brothers.

I remember I wrote the very first story ever written about Hector Saldana when he wasn't old enough to drink, and at a place called the Warehouse Club.

And there was Hector with his little brother.

And they're sitting in there making, making, Hispanic type rock and roll, whatever you want to call it.

And those, those people, they attracted me, and they still do.

I love them all.

Oh, thank you so much for, for talking with us about that, invigorating period in, Texas music and about action magazine and your very interesting life.

Thank you, sir.

It's a pleasure.

Thank you for joining us on the San Antonio Files.

I'm Sanford Nowlan.

Happy trails.