November 28, 2024 • 34 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm always fascinated when there is a story in the
news about some dude who at his house has a
tiger and a lion and forty two snakes and a rhino,
and he's just killed somebody, and he's got an exotic car,
and he has chains around his neck, and he's a wacko.
(00:20):
And it turns out his neighbors say he's a complete
and utter nut. So what happens to these animals when
they're recovered? Somebody has to take them in and the
local zoo can't do it. So we saw a story
that caught our attention because these types of personalities, and
of course exotic animals, hold our interest. This is a
(00:40):
story from KHOU.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Inside this Houston storefront, It's a walk on the wild side.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
This is Houston underground Animals.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Nick Louis independently funded rescue takes in.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Did he Is he making those noises himself.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Or is that the.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Ah he's on the line. That's him doing it one
more time, A.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Man.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I don't know if that's a real deal or not.
That's cood impressive, all right?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Play the story again, remot Inside this Houston storefront, It's
a walk on the wild side.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
This is Houston Underground Animals.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Nick louis independently funded rescue takes in creatures of all
shapes and sizes.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
Some of them are twenty thirty foot snakes. We get
exotic animals like monkeys and lemurs, We get crocodiles.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And more common reptiles bearded dragons. But just like the
dog and cat influx and shelters, space here has become
a premium.
Speaker 5 (01:44):
We typically rescue five, maybe ten animals a month. Then, ever,
since about November of last year, we average anywhere from
thirty to forty.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
A problem, he says, that's exploded in the last six months,
but can be traced back to the spike in the
pet market during the pandemic.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
The new toy kind of thing wears off, and then
they have an animal responsibility that they're taking care of.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Which can require more time.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
Bugs three days a week, doubt salads three days a week,
research two different types of light.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
They need heat, and they need UVB room. This cage
is four foot by two.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Foot and resources to wants to.
Speaker 5 (02:19):
Go in and spend seven hundred dollars when you could
spend three hundred doll quote unquote the same thing.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Then some new owners are willing to commit to.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
There's no one to take them in, so they will
literally take them and put them outside.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
It's illegal to own animals like lions, tigers, crocodiles, monkeys
over twenty pounds, and snakes over eight feet long that
are considered wild by the City of Houston, and even
those pets that just aren't as common as dogs or
cats can require weekly care and live for decades. Louis
says people need to know before they buy these animals.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
They rely on you entirely.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Zach Tawatari Cage who you eleven News, Nick Louie.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
The subject of that story is our guest, Nick, how
did you get into these exotics?
Speaker 6 (03:05):
So I've I've just had a fascination with animals my
whole life. Like when I was a kid, I would
fake being sick just to stay home for.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Me, Nick, I think it would add to the listener's
experience if about every fifteen to twenty seconds in the
middle of your sentences, you made an exotic animal sound
just randomly without just do it, and then keep going
through the end of the sentence like it didn't even happen.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
I'm serious.
Speaker 6 (03:27):
I could give it a try. Unfortunately I only speak
about fourteen languages for animals.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
We won't know the different Yeah, just in the middle
of sentences. Just do it like it didn't even happen.
Speaker 6 (03:36):
Man, I wish I could, but I'm not that talented.
That good.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Okay, all right, go ahead.
Speaker 6 (03:40):
I could do peacocks. But that's a little random.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Okay, we had peacocks, but they went away. Let's hear
your peacock.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
But you know, I'll tell you this. We we loved
our peacocks. They weren't ours. They just ended up on
our back porch and my wife was feeding them, so
they stayed. But they they had a wide range. I
have to say that their portfolio of noises, Like if
my German shepherd would come running outside, which we tried
to prevent, but if she did, they would jump up
(04:14):
to the edge of the roof and stare down and
they would just hiss and make these awful sounds. They
were so upset, like they were mad at her for
having chased them.
Speaker 6 (04:24):
Oh yeah, So people don't realize animals have a lot
of emotions. And I've even realized, specifically with peacocks, how
diverse it is. So I got my peacock as a
rescue on the side of the ten Freeway. It took
about four and a half five hours for me to
catch her single handedly. No nets, no ladders, no tools.
We don't have government fundings, so I just catch everything
(04:45):
with my hands, and so I it's quite a bit
like that. Yeah, I had to then go out of
my way and catch this peacock. And I've had her
for a good year now. She's one of the most
like emotionally intelligent animals I've had.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
So how did you take possession of this peacock? Because
those things will will scratch you, they will peck you.
What did you do?
Speaker 6 (05:13):
Yeah, exactly that. So what ended up happening was I
got a call from the Houston Police that there was
a peacock on the side of the freeway and they
didn't have anyone that was like properly trained to deal
with it. ASPCA didn't know what to do. Fish and
Wildlife said that wasn't their job, and so the police
were like, dude, we don't know what to do. So
(05:35):
that was one of our very first rescues ever. And
that's what I really realized, like how serious the problem is.
If I have the police calling me saying they need
help with an animal and they don't have an actual
organization to do anything. That's a pretty serious gap in
our our animal funding. I don't know, and so I
(05:56):
just I became that guy. I went out and I
caught this peacock with blood what in tears?
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Wow? I gotta admire that. Okay, So your place is
called Houston Underground Animals and you're on You're at eighty
six fifty North Houston, Roslin. What do you have there?
What is your facility?
Speaker 6 (06:14):
So that facility doesn't carry exotics that we're inside Houston
city limits, so we can't have anything crazy there. So
whenever we be rescues, that's typically where we bring the
smaller stuff, you know, sugar gliders, hedgehogs, bearded dragons, chameleons,
stuff like that, snakes. Whenever we rescue stuff like serval cats, tigers, monkeys, crocodiles,
(06:39):
they end up going directly to private zoos or independently
funded organizations and stuff like that. Just because I don't
have the space. My facility is only a thousand square feet.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And so what do you have right now? What do
you have on site at? Is there a website for
this Houston Underground Animals because I got a Facebook.
Speaker 6 (06:58):
I don't have a website, but I've got Facebook and Instagram,
and if you want, I can go over what we
have here. But it depends how long the interview is
because we have over a thousand live animals.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Just tell me the interesting stuff that I would least expect.
Looks like you got a lot of iguana type stuff.
Speaker 6 (07:14):
Uh, I don't do a lot of iguanas. That's one
animal that you see dumped super common, especially in Florida.
It's become a legitimate disaster. They've they're now a red threat.
They're starting to kill off all the indigenous animals. Yep
Iguanas are also highly aggressive, so people don't typically think
into animal psychology, but that's one of the things I
(07:35):
try my best to do is go inside their head,
look at the predator to pray aspect. If you're a predator,
you're walking around all day long with the big stick.
You're not worried about anyone messing with you. You know, if
someone comes and pokes you, you know, at the end
of the day, I can just end your life. So
how what do I care?
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Now?
Speaker 6 (07:56):
Look at it from the prey your whole life is
one wondering who's gonna jump on you and try and
eat you. So as you're going through and dealing with
these animals, you've got to train and think from their perspective.
Aguanas are prey their entire lives. They're prey. Even when
they're full grown, they're still prey. Who eats every time
you go to Almost every animal eats iguanas, but actually
(08:19):
a lot of people eat iguanda. Iguanatail is a delicacy
all over South America. So iguanas are eaten by everything
all the time. So anytime you go to hold your iguana,
he's gonna think you're trying to eat and eat them,
so he's gonna be biting, scratching. Now here's the big one.
They also have four to five foot tails that are
pure muscle, So think how good it feels to be
(08:41):
whipped by an iguana tail.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Nick Louis is our guest. How does this stuff come
to you? And and then do you sell that? I mean,
how do you know what can and cannot be sold?
Speaker 6 (08:55):
So I've been working with animals my whole life. I
don't mind going on the record and saying I have
not been to any medical school. I'm not a vet
nothing like that. Everything that I have learned is one
hundred percent self taught. Since I was about eight years old,
I used to run around California catching reptiles, breeding them,
nursing them back to health, releasing them, doing all types
(09:15):
of stuff, just because I genuinely loved animals. Then as
I got into it more and more and more I
started figuring out more about them. Now back to the rescue.
When we take animals in, it's one of two things.
People are either literally just dumping them outside because they're stressed,
overwhelmed and don't know what to do that, or the
other big one we get is a lot of apartments
(09:36):
don't allow exotic animals, which doesn't make sense. I understand rats.
Rats can get out breed now you have a rat infestation.
I understand fish tanks. If you have one hundred gallon
fish tank in that breaks, that's a lot of water
pouring into the living room. But what I don't understand
is how cats and dogs are okay when they are
constantly ruining apartments. I have never once heard of an
(09:58):
iguana ruining a house or a snake ruining a house.
So the other big one is apartment complexes will say hey,
you're welcome to move in, but you can't bring your pets.
So then they'll call us and say, hey, i've got
four snakes, three iguanas, two bearded dragons, and eight geckos
and they need a new home. Well, now I've got
a load at the van. Go pick up all those animals,
(10:20):
all the cages, all the equipment, bring it back to
the shop, and now I've got fifteen new mouths to feed.
So that's how a business really started out, was just
rescuing all these animals that either needed new homes or
abandon outside until the checks started coming in. When I
was getting charged six to ten thousand dollars a month
as an independently funded twenty year old, I realized I
(10:42):
wasn't going to be able to keep up with this.
So that's when we actually opened the physical location of
Houston Underground Animals so we could start bringing money in
to pay for rescues. When we have rescues that are
brought in, if they come in healthy, you can quite
easily tell by looking at them they're good to go.
So if that's the case, we just rehelme them for
very low pricing, you know, just to make a couple
(11:04):
bucks that we invested in the animal. Then you get
the severely I'll just say handicapped animals. Those are the
ones that take a lot more TLC and a lot
more experience. A lot of the problems that we see
aren't on the outside there on the inside. It's neurological problems.
It's a lot of the time behavioral problems. And the
(11:26):
other one is diseases that you can't see like A
big one is called metabolic bone disease. It's a major
calcium deficiency in the dragons that causes their bones to
become glass. So as they're just walking around, they're constantly
breaking bones. It's one of the most tragic things that
can happen to an animal.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Do you ever come across the aisle hog? Am I
ever call you to pick those up?
Speaker 6 (11:50):
I have not Gottenny calls for a hog yet. I'd
say the most interesting call I've had to date was
I had to go pull a wild mouth lion out
of an apartment complex. This pool. So they had drained
the pool because they couldn't afford to maintain it, but
a huge rain had filled it about halfway up, a
(12:10):
mountain lion ended up getting trapped in the pool and
it was too deep for him to jump out and
too shallow for him to get out, so he was
just stuck treading water all night long, and so I
single handedly had to go in and actually rescue a
mountain lion.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
So does Houston Underground Animals actually turn a profit?
Speaker 5 (12:27):
Now?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Can you live off of this business?
Speaker 6 (12:32):
That's a very complicated question. The easiest answer is no.
I've been doing this for three years and I have
made exactly zero dollars.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Then how do you see?
Speaker 6 (12:42):
So I am the only thing that I get from
my business is groceries. It doesn't even pay for rent,
or gas or anything else. So I still have to
make all my own money on the side of Houston
Underground Animals just to pay for myself. I haven't been
on a vacation in three years. My birthdays are spent
taking care of animals. Christmas is taking care of animals.
(13:05):
I'm here three hundred and sixty five days a year
for eighteen or twenty hours taking care of animals.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
So you got a little side hustle. I'm not saying
you're a dealer, but I am saying you were to
have a day job business where you could be a
pot dealer, this would be a great front. I'm just saying.
Speaker 6 (13:25):
I mean, I'm not going to say too much, but
been there, done that wasn't working out for me. It
doesn't there, it.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Doesn't pay as well as it used to. I got you,
I got you.
Speaker 6 (13:36):
Oh no, no, no, I mean I was making plenty
of money doing that. I was a dumb kid.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
You know.
Speaker 6 (13:40):
I have plenty of kids do it. They grow up,
they want easy money, so they try that. I started
getting in trouble, and I realized this just isn't for me.
And so I realized my passion was animals, and I
dedicated my whole life to animals. But now my side
hustle's trading stocks. It's a lot, it's a lot easier,
a lot more legal. I like it better.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
I noticed you got a lot of snakes on here.
You got the rat snake, You got the Mexican kingsnake,
which is an ominous looking black snake. But I guess
it's a non venomous snake, as most of them are.
Speaker 6 (14:08):
So snakes are a big one for me. I absolutely
love reptiles and snakes. Of so many different colors, patterns, personalities.
But now, to just keep it real simple, they're also
the easiest ninety nine percent of snakes. You feed them
my mouse once a week, they poop once a week,
and you're done. Ram I like the snakes. It's actually
(14:31):
surprisingly a lot like dog poop. The only difference is
they're kind of have that like bird thing where they
pooh and pee at the same time. Oh yeah, so
that's the only major difference between imagine like a dog
poo with a little like pee thing attached to it.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Well, bats do that and that bat iguana The reason
like the Wall Street bridge people go under there and
they talk about how how awful it smells. That's not
their poo that smells. That's their urine that's mixed in there,
because they're urine is awful.
Speaker 6 (15:02):
Oh I believe it.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I'm looking. Almost everything you put on here is a reptile.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (15:08):
We get more reptiles than anything else. Now here's one
of the other parts.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
What's a kinkajew.
Speaker 6 (15:13):
Kinkajews are they're very monkey like, but they're actually a
South American raccoon.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Oh thats so looking, do you how big does that
thing get? Because this one looks like a little bit
of one.
Speaker 6 (15:25):
So there's high land and lowland kinkajews. Uh. One of
them's smaller, the other one's bigger. I've got a bigger
kink cashu, and then I've got three of the smaller ones.
The smaller ones are a little smaller than house cats.
The lowland the bigger ones are a little bigger than
house cats, so they're not very big.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
Now.
Speaker 6 (15:47):
Kinkajews are actually one of my favorite monkey like species
just because of how much I can't even think of
the word for it. But you know when you play
with the dog and you could feel how light they're
touching you with their teeth, that's how the kink isshoes are.
I have never once been bit by a kink asu
Now I do know. When you do get bit, it
(16:07):
is horrific. They have very sharp teeth, they have long teeth,
and when they bite, they hold on. But I have
never been bit by a kink ashuw because they'll warn
you if you're messing with them and doing something they
don't like. They go boo boo, boo, boo boo, and
they just touch you with your teeth. They remind you, hey,
I am an animal. I can't hurt you. I just
(16:27):
don't want to. And so at that point I leave
them alone and I stop whatever I'm doing, and I
have never once been bit Monkeys, on the other hand,
are way sweeter than kink cashews. They're way more cuddly,
they're way nicer until they're not. When you have a
monkey and a bad attitude, and it's happened to me
plenty of times, they will actually attack you. Now, it's
not like some brutal thing like you hear about on TV.
(16:50):
Their bites really aren't that serious. Apes are, but like
the little under twenty pound monkeys, it's almost like a
like a baby biting you. You know, they bite you.
You could take it and actually like throw it on
the bed and it'll jump right back at you. So
they'll continue coming at you if they're angry.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
What's a sugar glider? Is that some sort of a squirrel?
I'm looking on your site?
Speaker 6 (17:12):
So that's actually a huge another big misconception. Sugar gliders
aren't even rodents. So there marsupials. They come from Australia.
They have pouches like kangaroos, so everyone calls them flying squirrels,
but they are not squirrels. We have flying squirrels here
in America. They are rodents. They carry their babies on
their back. So sugar gliders are very similar to flying squirrels,
(17:38):
but they're actually marsupials, not rodents.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Houston, but we deal with everything animals. Fascinating story. We
heard your story, and I told Brad to get you
on the line because I knew there would be I
knew you would be an interesting character. And the phone
number to reach you there is nine four nine two
five seven eighty three sixty. Is that right?
Speaker 6 (17:58):
Yep, that's US two five.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Seven eighty three sixty. Well, at some point I'll be
in your neck of the woods and I'll stop in
and see what kind of crazy stuff you have.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
You're listening to the Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
I mentioned a week or two ago that I had
watched a documentary called Brothers in Blues about Stevie Ray
vaugh and Jimmy Vaughan, And since that time, Billy Gibbons
has posted on his social media about it. Eric Clapton
has posted on his social media about it. They're both
(18:32):
interviewed in the film, and clearly they felt like this
was a story that needed to be told. And the
way this story came about is a guy that I
have a lot of respect for named Charlie Lusk. When
I was on city council twenty years ago, the city
was doing some terrible things and there was this hardheaded
(18:52):
don Quixote jousting at windmills named Charlie Lusk, who would
come down and complain and nobody seemed to care. You know,
this must be some Republican real estate guy talking about
how we spend our tax dollars. And I had the
utmost respect for this man. I didn't know him, but
I had the utmost respect for him. And over the years,
(19:13):
every time his name has ever come up in a conversation,
it's always with this just glowing respect for Charlie Lusk,
this guy. And I think I told you all a
few years ago he had been trying to get me.
He had bought the Lancaster Hotel, historic hotel in downtown Houston,
wanted me to come down and see it. So I
came down and toured and impressed this great bit of history.
So a couple of saturdays ago, I got an email.
(19:36):
I was copied on an email from Charlie, and as
I said, I know who he is. We're not close friends,
but I know who is and I have a lot
of respect for him. And he said, hey, I want
you to see this documentary called Brothers in Blues. It's
about Stevie Rayvaughn, but it really tells the story about
Jimmy Vaughan and Stevie rayvaugh that hasn't been told properly
and how important he is. Most people would know Jimmy
(19:58):
Vaughan through the Fabulous Thunder. Well, I didn't really know
the story. To me, Jimmy Vaughan was, or at least
I thought the younger brother, not the older brother, the
less successful. Well we'll get into that brother and just
some guy living off his older brother Stevie's greatness. Well,
that's a long way from the truth. I didn't realize.
(20:20):
It's not that Jimmy was drafting in Stevie Ray's greatness.
It was actually the opposite way around. It's an incredible story.
And if you love music, and particularly if you love
the Texas music scene and how this came about, and
particularly this the blue Eyed soul and the blues movement,
(20:41):
particularly of this age and this time and the collaborations
and Freddie King and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top of course,
and then Clapton comes into the picture. You'll remember, as
I told you, it was Clapton's band and manager that
were on the helicopter leaving the concert that Stevie Ray
was on and Eric Clapton stayed back. It's an incredible
(21:03):
story that I don't think has been told properly. So
Charlie says, you got to watch this documentary. It's a Saturday,
late morning, and it's a day that I have disconnected.
I'm not doing any show prep. I'm not doing any meetings, appearances,
none of it. I'm just sitting on my back porch
and I'm reading when I see this email come in.
The guy who was copied is named Kirby Warnock. So
(21:24):
I look up Kirby Warnock and he's got a pretty
darn interesting story which you'll hear about in a minute.
And he's the one that made this movie, that put
it all together, that made it happen, and it's all
kind of a unique experience that he brings to this thing.
So I emailed back and said, hey, does anybody have
a pre release copy? I assumed it wasn't available yet.
I was more than happy to pay the five bucks.
I'm not that cheap, but so I email back and
(21:46):
within a few minutes Kirby Warnock said, love for you
to watch the film. Here's a pre release version. It'll
watch one time and then it'll shut down. So I
watch it and I get on the email almost have
sent ten more emails. I'm blown away. This is an
incredible story, this wow factor. So I sent back to
Kirby and I said, Hey, not only have I watched
it and love it, and I've learned so much, I'd
(22:07):
like to have you on the air. Kirby. I looked
you up and one of the things that stuck out
was Buddy Magazine. And I'm a student of music. I
know classic country much better than the blues. Although I
knew everything that this movie was about, tell me a
little bit about as I understand it, you discovered the
Vaughn brothers in their early days in small Texas bars
(22:27):
while you were the editor of Buddy Magazine, which was
the original Texas music magazine from nineteen seventy six to
eighty two. Tell me about that.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
Well, Yes, I was working at Buddy and Buddy was
a Texas music magazine you could only get in Texas,
and this is back before the Internet and all this stuff,
so you had to go to a record store and
we had copies of them free there to people to
pick up. We only covered Texas music and were named
Buddy after Buddy Holly, the first Texas rock and roll
(22:57):
store in the polish of the magazine. The owner of
it was a guy named Stony Burns, and one night
he took me down to a place in downtown Dallas
back in nineteen seventy six, a place called the Texas
Chili Parler, and this was the original Texas Chili Partner
that Frank X Talbert and his son Frank Junior. They
cranked up and they had a band there called the
Peddlers Thunderbirds. And I went to Stony and I had
(23:21):
never seen anyone play guitar the way Jimmy Vaughan played.
He was playing with them then, and I was just
blown away because I played guitar back end also, but
the way Jimmy played it, I realized he was playing
an instrument that I was no longer familiar with. So
as we were walking out of the car, I said
to Stony, I said, I've never seen anyone play like that,
(23:42):
and he said, yeah, he's got a younger Burger is
even better than he is. And so yeah, I saw
Steve about two weeks later, and just I wrote about
that buddy all the time, because they were so different
than what was out at that time. They've got to remember,
at that time, the popular stuff was Foreigner and Journey
and Chief Trick, and that was what was being played
on Ephie Radio in Boston. But these two guys just
(24:04):
played a Fender strategastic guitar. They plugged it straight into
a Fender amp and didn't have any pedals effects or
anything like that, and they got all these incredible sounds
out of the guitar by using their hands, you know,
bending the strings and things like that. And I would
go see them playing these little dumpy clubs all over
Texas and just say to myself, why don't these guys famous,
(24:25):
you know, because I thought they could play guitar better
than anybody had ever seen. And I got the witness
a lot of great guitar players as a buddy. I
got to see Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Robin Trower, Nick Lonson,
I mean, you name them. When they came to Dallas,
we got to go to concert, and a lot of
the von brothers were as good or better than any of them.
But the thing was that they were just playing in Texas.
(24:47):
They did not move to LA or New York like
a lot of people do. They stayed in Texas and
were trying to make it there. And I just tried
to just plug them as much as I can because
I just thought they were incredible, and I learned their
entire story because they both grew up in the neighborhood
in Dallas called Oak Cliff, and I lived there for
thirty seven years and knew a lot of their craftmates
(25:09):
from elementary school and some of their relatives. And the
fact that they just came to this liberty cracker box
house in a working fast neighborhood and went to the
very top of the rock and roll heap was just
amazing to me. I just thought, this is an incredible story,
and I'd heard a lot of tales about things they
had done, and so for this film, I wanted to
(25:29):
track down all those stories and find the people who
were in the room when it happened and get them
to tell that story. On camera, and that's really kind
of the genesis of this thing. And it all started there,
and buddy, let.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Me hold you right there. Kirby Warnock is our guest.
The movie is Brothers in Blues. You can find it
wherever you watch movies, everywhere but Netflix basically, And we'll
continue our conversation about his documentary about Stevie ray Vaughn
and Jimmy Vaughan. Coming up, You've got Michael Barry Show.
The documentary is called Brothers in Blues. It's about Stevie
ray Vaughn and Jimmy Vaughan. It's a wonderful watch. You
(26:03):
can see it on every platform, I think except for Netflix.
Just look up Stevie Rayvaughn, including if you don't have
any of those on YouTube. It is worth watching. And
Kirby Warnock is the filmmaker who made it. I strongly
encourage you to watch it. So when you decided to
put this project together, I'd like to talk a little
bit about the making of the film before we get
(26:25):
into some of the things it reveals about, not just
Stevie Rayvaughn, but Jimmy Vaughn, which really gave me a
whole new perspective and respect for Jimmy Vaughn and the
love these two had for each other, and how they
inspired each other in the closeness. The book is the
movie is called Brothers in Blues. I read somewhere that
(26:45):
you did this project for seventy thousand dollars, and I
will tell you, reading this made me think of it
because you use so much music in the film. And
I thought to myself, because I am an aspiring documentary maker,
haven't done it yet, been involved with several films, been
in several films, but never made a documentary and desperately
want to. And I read that you did this for
(27:08):
seventy thousand dollars, but then you realized, oh, I have
to have music licenses, and it cost you another one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars to get the music licenses.
Talk a little bit about how that seventy thousand was
spent and then how how difficult that was to get
the music licenses.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
Well, the film itself was we shot it and edited
and had it already completed for that seventy grand and
most of our expenses were travel because we flew out
to La interviewer at Clapton. He was going to play
a concert at the LA Forum the next site, and
we interviewed him in a conference room at the hotel
he was staying ed and then we drove over to
(27:47):
Jackson Brown's studio in Santa Monica and shot his interview.
And for Billy Gibbons, we interviewed him at the Midlin
Horseshoe Arena. Zizi Toopas playing a concert that night. We
caught him, you know, there and talked to him. Just
really the most of my expense was hiring a camera
crew to come with me and shoot all this, because
I don't own cameras and lights and audience. You know,
(28:07):
you've got to You've got to get a professional crew
to do that. If you don't, you're just, you know,
you're shooting on your iPhone. So I heard a professional
crew that comes at these interviews with me, and a
lot of our expenses that then when we got to
editing it, I had to spend some money on editing software,
and I edited collaboratively with a guy out of LA
and Chase Arrington, and I got a Maam he sent
(28:28):
he Swartz and we did it to an app called
Adobe Creative Cloud and or Adobe Premiere and let you
work on a project collaborative with the online you can
all be looking at the same film and talk and
make changes there. And so that was really travel expenses
and a camera crew were my biggest expense to get
(28:50):
a shot. Then when I had it done and look
for a distributor, they said, do you have all the
music experiences? I said, we'll not get and so I
had to go get all those And what you discover
is that this is to be a confusing to people
today because you can listen to any song on your
phone through Pandora, Spotify or somebody or even YouTube, and
you don't pay them for it. But once you want
(29:10):
to use that song in a film or a commercial,
you have to get two sets of clearances. One is
the master rights, which the record cumpany owns, and the
other is the publishing rights, which the songwriting publisher owns,
And so you have to go through two rounds of
negotiations with two different entities to get that one song.
And in some cases, like the song Life by the
(29:32):
Drop that we used on the closing credits, that song
was written by two different people, Dora Brammall and Barbara Logan.
They were each represented by a different publishing company, so
I had to go through three rounds of negotiations just
to get that one song. And they are not giving
these things away anymore because you don't have to go
(29:52):
buy music anymore. You have to, like I said, you
listen to it free on your phone. So once you
want to use it in a production, they've kind of
got you with it. They want you and they they
they want to get the maximum they can out of you.
And that's I like it working with a heroin dealer.
Speaker 6 (30:08):
He's got it.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
You know, as you need it, he's gonna tell you
the price. So it's and I'm not the only one
to talk like that. Richard Linkletter said the same thing
when he made when he made Dazed and Confused. He
cannot get the rights to the song Dazed and Confused
from led Zeppelin, that they wouldn't give them the rights.
And so you know, if you can't get the song,
that's it. You know, you have no way to get
around it. You know.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
It's one of those It's one of those great stories, Kirby,
when you hear about a song that was supposed to
be in a particular movie and they had kind of
built a scene around using that song as a bed
and they couldn't get the release on that song, so
they had to put another song in, and that song
ends up working, and you go, oh, I didn't know
this was a song that would have been there originally.
(30:50):
Was there a song that you would have loved to
have had in this film Brothers in Blues about the
Vaughn brothers Stevie, Ray and Jimmy that didn't make it
because you just couldn't get to an agreement.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Yes, the song I wanted to use off David Bowie's
album Let's Dance that Stevie played on was a song
called cat People, and that in our original cut. We
used that song because that was Stevie's best guitar solo
on the entire album. We got permission from David Bowie's
people He's recording, but the song was written by Georgio
Moroder and his estate he's dead now. It was a
(31:25):
state would not grant us the clearance on it, so
I had to pull that song from the film and
couldn't use it, you know. And also there's another one,
scratch My Back and the Fad. The Thunderbirds recorded the
record company game's permission. But that song was written by
a guy named Slim Harpo. He sold his publishing rights
decades ago to a publishing house on a New York
city and they wouldn't give it to me unless I
(31:46):
paid them a fortune. And I just said, I can't
do that. I'm just one guy. I'm not Steven Spielberg.
I don't have that kind of money, you know. And
so I yank those two songs from the film. And
I was really sad because I thought they added to it.
But you know, it is what it is. As the lawyers.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Since you mentioned it, let's go right to that. A
Stevie Ray Vaughn story. Stevie Ray is asked by David
Bowie to do the guitar piece on Let's Dance. And
this is David Bowie's comeback song and it really brings
him to a whole new audience, more of a mainstream audience.
And the guitar on that is phenomenal. And so Bowie
(32:24):
is going to tour, I think a European tour in
support of that album. He asks Stevie Ray to do it.
It's a big deal. But Stevie Ray cannot promote his
first big solo album, which he's just released. I think
it was Double Vision. He can't promote that album. He
has to just be the guitar player to David Bowie.
(32:45):
And so Stevie Ray has a big decision to make,
and he makes a decision that the critics said was
the wrong one, but turns out to be the right one.
He said, well, then I won't tour with David Bowie.
I will stay here and support my Texas flood. Stevie
ray Vaughn's new album. In that album came a big hit.
Talk a little hopefully I didn't tell the whole story
and ruin it, but talk a little bit about that
(33:05):
story and how important that was to what is now
the legend of Stevie Rayvaughn.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
Yes, actually they were rehearsing for that tour, David Bowie
and Stevie Yvaughn and the whole Bowie band. They had
rented a sound stage in Los Calenas, which was at
that time had a movie studio. It's right out of Irving, Texas,
And they were there for almost several weeks rehearsing for
the tour. And so they were all ready to go,
and then when Bowie told Stevie that he couldn't promote
(33:33):
Texas food. He had throwed less stands. Stevie just said,
I want to promote the albums. So he gets fired
before the tour start, after he'd rehearsed with him for
several weeks. And at that time, you know, Stevie was
heavy into drugs and alcohol, and a lot of people
thought he had made a cocaine decision, like what are
you doing. You're turning down David Bowie, you know. But
then his album came out and he just really just
(33:53):
took off. And so at the time most of us
thought he'd made the wrong decision, but it turned out
to be the right decision because he followed his heart
and Texas Flood was a groundbreaking album that really just
set him on that whole trail, you know, the success.
But you know, like I say, at the time, most
of us thought he had made the wrong move.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
You know, we'll continue our conversation with Kirby Warnock about
his documentary is called Brothers in Blues about Stevie, Ray
Vaughan and his brother Jimmy Vaughan, and it is wonderful
I'm always fascinated when there is a story in the
news about some dude who at his house has a
tiger and a lion and forty two snakes and a rhino,
and he's just killed somebody, and he's got an exotic car,
and he has chains around his neck, and he's a wacko.
(00:20):
And it turns out his neighbors say he's a complete
and utter nut. So what happens to these animals when
they're recovered? Somebody has to take them in and the
local zoo can't do it. So we saw a story
that caught our attention because these types of personalities, and
of course exotic animals, hold our interest. This is a
(00:40):
story from KHOU.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Inside this Houston storefront, It's a walk on the wild side.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
This is Houston underground Animals.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Nick Louis independently funded rescue takes in.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Did he Is he making those noises himself.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Or is that the.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Ah he's on the line. That's him doing it one
more time, A.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Man.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I don't know if that's a real deal or not.
That's cood impressive, all right?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Play the story again, remot Inside this Houston storefront, It's
a walk on the wild side.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
This is Houston Underground Animals.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Nick louis independently funded rescue takes in creatures of all
shapes and sizes.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
Some of them are twenty thirty foot snakes. We get
exotic animals like monkeys and lemurs, We get crocodiles.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And more common reptiles bearded dragons. But just like the
dog and cat influx and shelters, space here has become
a premium.
Speaker 5 (01:44):
We typically rescue five, maybe ten animals a month. Then, ever,
since about November of last year, we average anywhere from
thirty to forty.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
A problem, he says, that's exploded in the last six months,
but can be traced back to the spike in the
pet market during the pandemic.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
The new toy kind of thing wears off, and then
they have an animal responsibility that they're taking care of.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Which can require more time.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
Bugs three days a week, doubt salads three days a week,
research two different types of light.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
They need heat, and they need UVB room. This cage
is four foot by two.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Foot and resources to wants to.
Speaker 5 (02:19):
Go in and spend seven hundred dollars when you could
spend three hundred doll quote unquote the same thing.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Then some new owners are willing to commit to.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
There's no one to take them in, so they will
literally take them and put them outside.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
It's illegal to own animals like lions, tigers, crocodiles, monkeys
over twenty pounds, and snakes over eight feet long that
are considered wild by the City of Houston, and even
those pets that just aren't as common as dogs or
cats can require weekly care and live for decades. Louis
says people need to know before they buy these animals.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
They rely on you entirely.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Zach Tawatari Cage who you eleven News, Nick Louie.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
The subject of that story is our guest, Nick, how
did you get into these exotics?
Speaker 6 (03:05):
So I've I've just had a fascination with animals my
whole life. Like when I was a kid, I would
fake being sick just to stay home for.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Me, Nick, I think it would add to the listener's
experience if about every fifteen to twenty seconds in the
middle of your sentences, you made an exotic animal sound
just randomly without just do it, and then keep going
through the end of the sentence like it didn't even happen.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
I'm serious.
Speaker 6 (03:27):
I could give it a try. Unfortunately I only speak
about fourteen languages for animals.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
We won't know the different Yeah, just in the middle
of sentences. Just do it like it didn't even happen.
Speaker 6 (03:36):
Man, I wish I could, but I'm not that talented.
That good.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Okay, all right, go ahead.
Speaker 6 (03:40):
I could do peacocks. But that's a little random.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Okay, we had peacocks, but they went away. Let's hear
your peacock.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
But you know, I'll tell you this. We we loved
our peacocks. They weren't ours. They just ended up on
our back porch and my wife was feeding them, so
they stayed. But they they had a wide range. I
have to say that their portfolio of noises, Like if
my German shepherd would come running outside, which we tried
to prevent, but if she did, they would jump up
(04:14):
to the edge of the roof and stare down and
they would just hiss and make these awful sounds. They
were so upset, like they were mad at her for
having chased them.
Speaker 6 (04:24):
Oh yeah, So people don't realize animals have a lot
of emotions. And I've even realized, specifically with peacocks, how
diverse it is. So I got my peacock as a
rescue on the side of the ten Freeway. It took
about four and a half five hours for me to
catch her single handedly. No nets, no ladders, no tools.
We don't have government fundings, so I just catch everything
(04:45):
with my hands, and so I it's quite a bit
like that. Yeah, I had to then go out of
my way and catch this peacock. And I've had her
for a good year now. She's one of the most
like emotionally intelligent animals I've had.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
So how did you take possession of this peacock? Because
those things will will scratch you, they will peck you.
What did you do?
Speaker 6 (05:13):
Yeah, exactly that. So what ended up happening was I
got a call from the Houston Police that there was
a peacock on the side of the freeway and they
didn't have anyone that was like properly trained to deal
with it. ASPCA didn't know what to do. Fish and
Wildlife said that wasn't their job, and so the police
were like, dude, we don't know what to do. So
(05:35):
that was one of our very first rescues ever. And
that's what I really realized, like how serious the problem is.
If I have the police calling me saying they need
help with an animal and they don't have an actual
organization to do anything. That's a pretty serious gap in
our our animal funding. I don't know, and so I
(05:56):
just I became that guy. I went out and I
caught this peacock with blood what in tears?
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Wow? I gotta admire that. Okay, So your place is
called Houston Underground Animals and you're on You're at eighty
six fifty North Houston, Roslin. What do you have there?
What is your facility?
Speaker 6 (06:14):
So that facility doesn't carry exotics that we're inside Houston
city limits, so we can't have anything crazy there. So
whenever we be rescues, that's typically where we bring the
smaller stuff, you know, sugar gliders, hedgehogs, bearded dragons, chameleons,
stuff like that, snakes. Whenever we rescue stuff like serval cats, tigers, monkeys, crocodiles,
(06:39):
they end up going directly to private zoos or independently
funded organizations and stuff like that. Just because I don't
have the space. My facility is only a thousand square feet.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And so what do you have right now? What do
you have on site at? Is there a website for
this Houston Underground Animals because I got a Facebook.
Speaker 6 (06:58):
I don't have a website, but I've got Facebook and Instagram,
and if you want, I can go over what we
have here. But it depends how long the interview is
because we have over a thousand live animals.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Just tell me the interesting stuff that I would least expect.
Looks like you got a lot of iguana type stuff.
Speaker 6 (07:14):
Uh, I don't do a lot of iguanas. That's one
animal that you see dumped super common, especially in Florida.
It's become a legitimate disaster. They've they're now a red threat.
They're starting to kill off all the indigenous animals. Yep
Iguanas are also highly aggressive, so people don't typically think
into animal psychology, but that's one of the things I
(07:35):
try my best to do is go inside their head,
look at the predator to pray aspect. If you're a predator,
you're walking around all day long with the big stick.
You're not worried about anyone messing with you. You know, if
someone comes and pokes you, you know, at the end
of the day, I can just end your life. So
how what do I care?
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Now?
Speaker 6 (07:56):
Look at it from the prey your whole life is
one wondering who's gonna jump on you and try and
eat you. So as you're going through and dealing with
these animals, you've got to train and think from their perspective.
Aguanas are prey their entire lives. They're prey. Even when
they're full grown, they're still prey. Who eats every time
you go to Almost every animal eats iguanas, but actually
(08:19):
a lot of people eat iguanda. Iguanatail is a delicacy
all over South America. So iguanas are eaten by everything
all the time. So anytime you go to hold your iguana,
he's gonna think you're trying to eat and eat them,
so he's gonna be biting, scratching. Now here's the big one.
They also have four to five foot tails that are
pure muscle, So think how good it feels to be
(08:41):
whipped by an iguana tail.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Nick Louis is our guest. How does this stuff come
to you? And and then do you sell that? I mean,
how do you know what can and cannot be sold?
Speaker 6 (08:55):
So I've been working with animals my whole life. I
don't mind going on the record and saying I have
not been to any medical school. I'm not a vet
nothing like that. Everything that I have learned is one
hundred percent self taught. Since I was about eight years old,
I used to run around California catching reptiles, breeding them,
nursing them back to health, releasing them, doing all types
(09:15):
of stuff, just because I genuinely loved animals. Then as
I got into it more and more and more I
started figuring out more about them. Now back to the rescue.
When we take animals in, it's one of two things.
People are either literally just dumping them outside because they're stressed,
overwhelmed and don't know what to do that, or the
other big one we get is a lot of apartments
(09:36):
don't allow exotic animals, which doesn't make sense. I understand rats.
Rats can get out breed now you have a rat infestation.
I understand fish tanks. If you have one hundred gallon
fish tank in that breaks, that's a lot of water
pouring into the living room. But what I don't understand
is how cats and dogs are okay when they are
constantly ruining apartments. I have never once heard of an
(09:58):
iguana ruining a house or a snake ruining a house.
So the other big one is apartment complexes will say hey,
you're welcome to move in, but you can't bring your pets.
So then they'll call us and say, hey, i've got
four snakes, three iguanas, two bearded dragons, and eight geckos
and they need a new home. Well, now I've got
a load at the van. Go pick up all those animals,
(10:20):
all the cages, all the equipment, bring it back to
the shop, and now I've got fifteen new mouths to feed.
So that's how a business really started out, was just
rescuing all these animals that either needed new homes or
abandon outside until the checks started coming in. When I
was getting charged six to ten thousand dollars a month
as an independently funded twenty year old, I realized I
(10:42):
wasn't going to be able to keep up with this.
So that's when we actually opened the physical location of
Houston Underground Animals so we could start bringing money in
to pay for rescues. When we have rescues that are
brought in, if they come in healthy, you can quite
easily tell by looking at them they're good to go.
So if that's the case, we just rehelme them for
very low pricing, you know, just to make a couple
(11:04):
bucks that we invested in the animal. Then you get
the severely I'll just say handicapped animals. Those are the
ones that take a lot more TLC and a lot
more experience. A lot of the problems that we see
aren't on the outside there on the inside. It's neurological problems.
It's a lot of the time behavioral problems. And the
(11:26):
other one is diseases that you can't see like A
big one is called metabolic bone disease. It's a major
calcium deficiency in the dragons that causes their bones to
become glass. So as they're just walking around, they're constantly
breaking bones. It's one of the most tragic things that
can happen to an animal.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Do you ever come across the aisle hog? Am I
ever call you to pick those up?
Speaker 6 (11:50):
I have not Gottenny calls for a hog yet. I'd
say the most interesting call I've had to date was
I had to go pull a wild mouth lion out
of an apartment complex. This pool. So they had drained
the pool because they couldn't afford to maintain it, but
a huge rain had filled it about halfway up, a
(12:10):
mountain lion ended up getting trapped in the pool and
it was too deep for him to jump out and
too shallow for him to get out, so he was
just stuck treading water all night long, and so I
single handedly had to go in and actually rescue a
mountain lion.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
So does Houston Underground Animals actually turn a profit?
Speaker 5 (12:27):
Now?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Can you live off of this business?
Speaker 6 (12:32):
That's a very complicated question. The easiest answer is no.
I've been doing this for three years and I have
made exactly zero dollars.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Then how do you see?
Speaker 6 (12:42):
So I am the only thing that I get from
my business is groceries. It doesn't even pay for rent,
or gas or anything else. So I still have to
make all my own money on the side of Houston
Underground Animals just to pay for myself. I haven't been
on a vacation in three years. My birthdays are spent
taking care of animals. Christmas is taking care of animals.
(13:05):
I'm here three hundred and sixty five days a year
for eighteen or twenty hours taking care of animals.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
So you got a little side hustle. I'm not saying
you're a dealer, but I am saying you were to
have a day job business where you could be a
pot dealer, this would be a great front. I'm just saying.
Speaker 6 (13:25):
I mean, I'm not going to say too much, but
been there, done that wasn't working out for me. It
doesn't there, it.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Doesn't pay as well as it used to. I got you,
I got you.
Speaker 6 (13:36):
Oh no, no, no, I mean I was making plenty
of money doing that. I was a dumb kid.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
You know.
Speaker 6 (13:40):
I have plenty of kids do it. They grow up,
they want easy money, so they try that. I started
getting in trouble, and I realized this just isn't for me.
And so I realized my passion was animals, and I
dedicated my whole life to animals. But now my side
hustle's trading stocks. It's a lot, it's a lot easier,
a lot more legal. I like it better.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
I noticed you got a lot of snakes on here.
You got the rat snake, You got the Mexican kingsnake,
which is an ominous looking black snake. But I guess
it's a non venomous snake, as most of them are.
Speaker 6 (14:08):
So snakes are a big one for me. I absolutely
love reptiles and snakes. Of so many different colors, patterns, personalities.
But now, to just keep it real simple, they're also
the easiest ninety nine percent of snakes. You feed them
my mouse once a week, they poop once a week,
and you're done. Ram I like the snakes. It's actually
(14:31):
surprisingly a lot like dog poop. The only difference is
they're kind of have that like bird thing where they
pooh and pee at the same time. Oh yeah, so
that's the only major difference between imagine like a dog
poo with a little like pee thing attached to it.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Well, bats do that and that bat iguana The reason
like the Wall Street bridge people go under there and
they talk about how how awful it smells. That's not
their poo that smells. That's their urine that's mixed in there,
because they're urine is awful.
Speaker 6 (15:02):
Oh I believe it.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I'm looking. Almost everything you put on here is a reptile.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (15:08):
We get more reptiles than anything else. Now here's one
of the other parts.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
What's a kinkajew.
Speaker 6 (15:13):
Kinkajews are they're very monkey like, but they're actually a
South American raccoon.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Oh thats so looking, do you how big does that
thing get? Because this one looks like a little bit
of one.
Speaker 6 (15:25):
So there's high land and lowland kinkajews. Uh. One of
them's smaller, the other one's bigger. I've got a bigger
kink cashu, and then I've got three of the smaller ones.
The smaller ones are a little smaller than house cats.
The lowland the bigger ones are a little bigger than
house cats, so they're not very big.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
Now.
Speaker 6 (15:47):
Kinkajews are actually one of my favorite monkey like species
just because of how much I can't even think of
the word for it. But you know when you play
with the dog and you could feel how light they're
touching you with their teeth, that's how the kink isshoes are.
I have never once been bit by a kink asu
Now I do know. When you do get bit, it
(16:07):
is horrific. They have very sharp teeth, they have long teeth,
and when they bite, they hold on. But I have
never been bit by a kink ashuw because they'll warn
you if you're messing with them and doing something they
don't like. They go boo boo, boo, boo boo, and
they just touch you with your teeth. They remind you, hey,
I am an animal. I can't hurt you. I just
(16:27):
don't want to. And so at that point I leave
them alone and I stop whatever I'm doing, and I
have never once been bit Monkeys, on the other hand,
are way sweeter than kink cashews. They're way more cuddly,
they're way nicer until they're not. When you have a
monkey and a bad attitude, and it's happened to me
plenty of times, they will actually attack you. Now, it's
not like some brutal thing like you hear about on TV.
(16:50):
Their bites really aren't that serious. Apes are, but like
the little under twenty pound monkeys, it's almost like a
like a baby biting you. You know, they bite you.
You could take it and actually like throw it on
the bed and it'll jump right back at you. So
they'll continue coming at you if they're angry.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
What's a sugar glider? Is that some sort of a squirrel?
I'm looking on your site?
Speaker 6 (17:12):
So that's actually a huge another big misconception. Sugar gliders
aren't even rodents. So there marsupials. They come from Australia.
They have pouches like kangaroos, so everyone calls them flying squirrels,
but they are not squirrels. We have flying squirrels here
in America. They are rodents. They carry their babies on
their back. So sugar gliders are very similar to flying squirrels,
(17:38):
but they're actually marsupials, not rodents.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Houston, but we deal with everything animals. Fascinating story. We
heard your story, and I told Brad to get you
on the line because I knew there would be I
knew you would be an interesting character. And the phone
number to reach you there is nine four nine two
five seven eighty three sixty. Is that right?
Speaker 6 (17:58):
Yep, that's US two five.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Seven eighty three sixty. Well, at some point I'll be
in your neck of the woods and I'll stop in
and see what kind of crazy stuff you have.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
You're listening to the Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
I mentioned a week or two ago that I had
watched a documentary called Brothers in Blues about Stevie Ray
vaugh and Jimmy Vaughan, And since that time, Billy Gibbons
has posted on his social media about it. Eric Clapton
has posted on his social media about it. They're both
(18:32):
interviewed in the film, and clearly they felt like this
was a story that needed to be told. And the
way this story came about is a guy that I
have a lot of respect for named Charlie Lusk. When
I was on city council twenty years ago, the city
was doing some terrible things and there was this hardheaded
(18:52):
don Quixote jousting at windmills named Charlie Lusk, who would
come down and complain and nobody seemed to care. You know,
this must be some Republican real estate guy talking about
how we spend our tax dollars. And I had the
utmost respect for this man. I didn't know him, but
I had the utmost respect for him. And over the years,
(19:13):
every time his name has ever come up in a conversation,
it's always with this just glowing respect for Charlie Lusk,
this guy. And I think I told you all a
few years ago he had been trying to get me.
He had bought the Lancaster Hotel, historic hotel in downtown Houston,
wanted me to come down and see it. So I
came down and toured and impressed this great bit of history.
So a couple of saturdays ago, I got an email.
(19:36):
I was copied on an email from Charlie, and as
I said, I know who he is. We're not close friends,
but I know who is and I have a lot
of respect for him. And he said, hey, I want
you to see this documentary called Brothers in Blues. It's
about Stevie Rayvaughn, but it really tells the story about
Jimmy Vaughan and Stevie rayvaugh that hasn't been told properly
and how important he is. Most people would know Jimmy
(19:58):
Vaughan through the Fabulous Thunder. Well, I didn't really know
the story. To me, Jimmy Vaughan was, or at least
I thought the younger brother, not the older brother, the
less successful. Well we'll get into that brother and just
some guy living off his older brother Stevie's greatness. Well,
that's a long way from the truth. I didn't realize.
(20:20):
It's not that Jimmy was drafting in Stevie Ray's greatness.
It was actually the opposite way around. It's an incredible story.
And if you love music, and particularly if you love
the Texas music scene and how this came about, and
particularly this the blue Eyed soul and the blues movement,
(20:41):
particularly of this age and this time and the collaborations
and Freddie King and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top of course,
and then Clapton comes into the picture. You'll remember, as
I told you, it was Clapton's band and manager that
were on the helicopter leaving the concert that Stevie Ray
was on and Eric Clapton stayed back. It's an incredible
(21:03):
story that I don't think has been told properly. So
Charlie says, you got to watch this documentary. It's a Saturday,
late morning, and it's a day that I have disconnected.
I'm not doing any show prep. I'm not doing any meetings, appearances,
none of it. I'm just sitting on my back porch
and I'm reading when I see this email come in.
The guy who was copied is named Kirby Warnock. So
(21:24):
I look up Kirby Warnock and he's got a pretty
darn interesting story which you'll hear about in a minute.
And he's the one that made this movie, that put
it all together, that made it happen, and it's all
kind of a unique experience that he brings to this thing.
So I emailed back and said, hey, does anybody have
a pre release copy? I assumed it wasn't available yet.
I was more than happy to pay the five bucks.
I'm not that cheap, but so I email back and
(21:46):
within a few minutes Kirby Warnock said, love for you
to watch the film. Here's a pre release version. It'll
watch one time and then it'll shut down. So I
watch it and I get on the email almost have
sent ten more emails. I'm blown away. This is an
incredible story, this wow factor. So I sent back to
Kirby and I said, Hey, not only have I watched
it and love it, and I've learned so much, I'd
(22:07):
like to have you on the air. Kirby. I looked
you up and one of the things that stuck out
was Buddy Magazine. And I'm a student of music. I
know classic country much better than the blues. Although I
knew everything that this movie was about, tell me a
little bit about as I understand it, you discovered the
Vaughn brothers in their early days in small Texas bars
(22:27):
while you were the editor of Buddy Magazine, which was
the original Texas music magazine from nineteen seventy six to
eighty two. Tell me about that.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
Well, Yes, I was working at Buddy and Buddy was
a Texas music magazine you could only get in Texas,
and this is back before the Internet and all this stuff,
so you had to go to a record store and
we had copies of them free there to people to
pick up. We only covered Texas music and were named
Buddy after Buddy Holly, the first Texas rock and roll
(22:57):
store in the polish of the magazine. The owner of
it was a guy named Stony Burns, and one night
he took me down to a place in downtown Dallas
back in nineteen seventy six, a place called the Texas
Chili Parler, and this was the original Texas Chili Partner
that Frank X Talbert and his son Frank Junior. They
cranked up and they had a band there called the
Peddlers Thunderbirds. And I went to Stony and I had
(23:21):
never seen anyone play guitar the way Jimmy Vaughan played.
He was playing with them then, and I was just
blown away because I played guitar back end also, but
the way Jimmy played it, I realized he was playing
an instrument that I was no longer familiar with. So
as we were walking out of the car, I said
to Stony, I said, I've never seen anyone play like that,
(23:42):
and he said, yeah, he's got a younger Burger is
even better than he is. And so yeah, I saw
Steve about two weeks later, and just I wrote about
that buddy all the time, because they were so different
than what was out at that time. They've got to remember,
at that time, the popular stuff was Foreigner and Journey
and Chief Trick, and that was what was being played
on Ephie Radio in Boston. But these two guys just
(24:04):
played a Fender strategastic guitar. They plugged it straight into
a Fender amp and didn't have any pedals effects or
anything like that, and they got all these incredible sounds
out of the guitar by using their hands, you know,
bending the strings and things like that. And I would
go see them playing these little dumpy clubs all over
Texas and just say to myself, why don't these guys famous,
(24:25):
you know, because I thought they could play guitar better
than anybody had ever seen. And I got the witness
a lot of great guitar players as a buddy. I
got to see Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Robin Trower, Nick Lonson,
I mean, you name them. When they came to Dallas,
we got to go to concert, and a lot of
the von brothers were as good or better than any of them.
But the thing was that they were just playing in Texas.
(24:47):
They did not move to LA or New York like
a lot of people do. They stayed in Texas and
were trying to make it there. And I just tried
to just plug them as much as I can because
I just thought they were incredible, and I learned their
entire story because they both grew up in the neighborhood
in Dallas called Oak Cliff, and I lived there for
thirty seven years and knew a lot of their craftmates
(25:09):
from elementary school and some of their relatives. And the
fact that they just came to this liberty cracker box
house in a working fast neighborhood and went to the
very top of the rock and roll heap was just
amazing to me. I just thought, this is an incredible story,
and I'd heard a lot of tales about things they
had done, and so for this film, I wanted to
(25:29):
track down all those stories and find the people who
were in the room when it happened and get them
to tell that story. On camera, and that's really kind
of the genesis of this thing. And it all started there,
and buddy, let.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Me hold you right there. Kirby Warnock is our guest.
The movie is Brothers in Blues. You can find it
wherever you watch movies, everywhere but Netflix basically, And we'll
continue our conversation about his documentary about Stevie ray Vaughn
and Jimmy Vaughan. Coming up, You've got Michael Barry Show.
The documentary is called Brothers in Blues. It's about Stevie
ray Vaughn and Jimmy Vaughan. It's a wonderful watch. You
(26:03):
can see it on every platform, I think except for Netflix.
Just look up Stevie Rayvaughn, including if you don't have
any of those on YouTube. It is worth watching. And
Kirby Warnock is the filmmaker who made it. I strongly
encourage you to watch it. So when you decided to
put this project together, I'd like to talk a little
bit about the making of the film before we get
(26:25):
into some of the things it reveals about, not just
Stevie Rayvaughn, but Jimmy Vaughn, which really gave me a
whole new perspective and respect for Jimmy Vaughn and the
love these two had for each other, and how they
inspired each other in the closeness. The book is the
movie is called Brothers in Blues. I read somewhere that
(26:45):
you did this project for seventy thousand dollars, and I
will tell you, reading this made me think of it
because you use so much music in the film. And
I thought to myself, because I am an aspiring documentary maker,
haven't done it yet, been involved with several films, been
in several films, but never made a documentary and desperately
want to. And I read that you did this for
(27:08):
seventy thousand dollars, but then you realized, oh, I have
to have music licenses, and it cost you another one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars to get the music licenses.
Talk a little bit about how that seventy thousand was
spent and then how how difficult that was to get
the music licenses.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
Well, the film itself was we shot it and edited
and had it already completed for that seventy grand and
most of our expenses were travel because we flew out
to La interviewer at Clapton. He was going to play
a concert at the LA Forum the next site, and
we interviewed him in a conference room at the hotel
he was staying ed and then we drove over to
(27:47):
Jackson Brown's studio in Santa Monica and shot his interview.
And for Billy Gibbons, we interviewed him at the Midlin
Horseshoe Arena. Zizi Toopas playing a concert that night. We
caught him, you know, there and talked to him. Just
really the most of my expense was hiring a camera
crew to come with me and shoot all this, because
I don't own cameras and lights and audience. You know,
(28:07):
you've got to You've got to get a professional crew
to do that. If you don't, you're just, you know,
you're shooting on your iPhone. So I heard a professional
crew that comes at these interviews with me, and a
lot of our expenses that then when we got to
editing it, I had to spend some money on editing software,
and I edited collaboratively with a guy out of LA
and Chase Arrington, and I got a Maam he sent
(28:28):
he Swartz and we did it to an app called
Adobe Creative Cloud and or Adobe Premiere and let you
work on a project collaborative with the online you can
all be looking at the same film and talk and
make changes there. And so that was really travel expenses
and a camera crew were my biggest expense to get
(28:50):
a shot. Then when I had it done and look
for a distributor, they said, do you have all the
music experiences? I said, we'll not get and so I
had to go get all those And what you discover
is that this is to be a confusing to people
today because you can listen to any song on your
phone through Pandora, Spotify or somebody or even YouTube, and
you don't pay them for it. But once you want
(29:10):
to use that song in a film or a commercial,
you have to get two sets of clearances. One is
the master rights, which the record cumpany owns, and the
other is the publishing rights, which the songwriting publisher owns,
And so you have to go through two rounds of
negotiations with two different entities to get that one song.
And in some cases, like the song Life by the
(29:32):
Drop that we used on the closing credits, that song
was written by two different people, Dora Brammall and Barbara Logan.
They were each represented by a different publishing company, so
I had to go through three rounds of negotiations just
to get that one song. And they are not giving
these things away anymore because you don't have to go
(29:52):
buy music anymore. You have to, like I said, you
listen to it free on your phone. So once you
want to use it in a production, they've kind of
got you with it. They want you and they they
they want to get the maximum they can out of you.
And that's I like it working with a heroin dealer.
Speaker 6 (30:08):
He's got it.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
You know, as you need it, he's gonna tell you
the price. So it's and I'm not the only one
to talk like that. Richard Linkletter said the same thing
when he made when he made Dazed and Confused. He
cannot get the rights to the song Dazed and Confused
from led Zeppelin, that they wouldn't give them the rights.
And so you know, if you can't get the song,
that's it. You know, you have no way to get
around it. You know.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
It's one of those It's one of those great stories, Kirby,
when you hear about a song that was supposed to
be in a particular movie and they had kind of
built a scene around using that song as a bed
and they couldn't get the release on that song, so
they had to put another song in, and that song
ends up working, and you go, oh, I didn't know
this was a song that would have been there originally.
(30:50):
Was there a song that you would have loved to
have had in this film Brothers in Blues about the
Vaughn brothers Stevie, Ray and Jimmy that didn't make it
because you just couldn't get to an agreement.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Yes, the song I wanted to use off David Bowie's
album Let's Dance that Stevie played on was a song
called cat People, and that in our original cut. We
used that song because that was Stevie's best guitar solo
on the entire album. We got permission from David Bowie's
people He's recording, but the song was written by Georgio
Moroder and his estate he's dead now. It was a
(31:25):
state would not grant us the clearance on it, so
I had to pull that song from the film and
couldn't use it, you know. And also there's another one,
scratch My Back and the Fad. The Thunderbirds recorded the
record company game's permission. But that song was written by
a guy named Slim Harpo. He sold his publishing rights
decades ago to a publishing house on a New York
city and they wouldn't give it to me unless I
(31:46):
paid them a fortune. And I just said, I can't
do that. I'm just one guy. I'm not Steven Spielberg.
I don't have that kind of money, you know. And
so I yank those two songs from the film. And
I was really sad because I thought they added to it.
But you know, it is what it is. As the lawyers.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Since you mentioned it, let's go right to that. A
Stevie Ray Vaughn story. Stevie Ray is asked by David
Bowie to do the guitar piece on Let's Dance. And
this is David Bowie's comeback song and it really brings
him to a whole new audience, more of a mainstream audience.
And the guitar on that is phenomenal. And so Bowie
(32:24):
is going to tour, I think a European tour in
support of that album. He asks Stevie Ray to do it.
It's a big deal. But Stevie Ray cannot promote his
first big solo album, which he's just released. I think
it was Double Vision. He can't promote that album. He
has to just be the guitar player to David Bowie.
(32:45):
And so Stevie Ray has a big decision to make,
and he makes a decision that the critics said was
the wrong one, but turns out to be the right one.
He said, well, then I won't tour with David Bowie.
I will stay here and support my Texas flood. Stevie
ray Vaughn's new album. In that album came a big hit.
Talk a little hopefully I didn't tell the whole story
and ruin it, but talk a little bit about that
(33:05):
story and how important that was to what is now
the legend of Stevie Rayvaughn.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
Yes, actually they were rehearsing for that tour, David Bowie
and Stevie Yvaughn and the whole Bowie band. They had
rented a sound stage in Los Calenas, which was at
that time had a movie studio. It's right out of Irving, Texas,
And they were there for almost several weeks rehearsing for
the tour. And so they were all ready to go,
and then when Bowie told Stevie that he couldn't promote
(33:33):
Texas food. He had throwed less stands. Stevie just said,
I want to promote the albums. So he gets fired
before the tour start, after he'd rehearsed with him for
several weeks. And at that time, you know, Stevie was
heavy into drugs and alcohol, and a lot of people
thought he had made a cocaine decision, like what are
you doing. You're turning down David Bowie, you know. But
then his album came out and he just really just
(33:53):
took off. And so at the time most of us
thought he'd made the wrong decision, but it turned out
to be the right decision because he followed his heart
and Texas Flood was a groundbreaking album that really just
set him on that whole trail, you know, the success.
But you know, like I say, at the time, most
of us thought he had made the wrong move.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
You know, we'll continue our conversation with Kirby Warnock about
his documentary is called Brothers in Blues about Stevie, Ray
Vaughan and his brother Jimmy Vaughan, and it is wonderful
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