![]() He and Mary Jane invited some of us back to their place after the show, where we were wined and dined, plates of tacos and beans and rice, cervezas and endless music talk, records pulled from shelves and spun on the big hifi to appreciative shouts of approval, commentary on the players, a mad jabbering festival of food, booze and music and passionate talk, nodding heads, waving arms, tall tales, cries of disbelief, guffaws and groans, and then another disc, another round of crazed talk, more beer, and then finally, a four am series of goodbyes, and a bleary-eyed ride back to the hotel, the Allen Park Inn, sitting beside the Allen Parkway, that winding old road shooting west from downtown, that runs alongside the equally winding Buffalo Bayou, grab a few hours of oblivion prior to a late Monday afternoon check out, and an eight hundred mile drive to Atlanta, Georgia, back once more to that town that had so changed my life a scant eighteen months before. This particular evening Freddie came down with some of the guys from his band, The Cold Cuts, and Freddie sat in, playing Ray Sharpe’s ‘Linda Lu’ for all he was worth, short intensive flurries of notes from his guitar, and then into the call and response “ Oh Yeah, My Baby’s Gone’, another Ray Sharpe tune that Freddie had just recorded for Hammond Scott’s cool new Black Top label, under the name of Little Junior One Hand And His Magic Guitar with The Cold Cuts, an appellation that just has to be one of the best stage names ever. I remember Albert looking me in the eye at the end of that night, saying, ‘Man, if I had this band, I’d be a millionaire’ … One night, a year or two later at Fitzgerald’s rival club Rockefeller’s, we had Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Koko Taylor and Albert Collins all up on stage at the same time, shaking the joint with Koko’’s Wang Dang Doodle’. The very sharply dressed and very silver-haired Freddie Cisneros with his beautiful wife Mary Jane might show, maybe Pete Mayes, immaculate in a white suit and big hollow body guitar, possibly Johnny Copeland, perhaps the T-Birds, Lou Ann Barton or Stevie Ray Vaughan. ![]() Those nights were usually working nights for local musicians, but Sunday was often a night off, and Roomful being a musician’s band usually drew some very cool cats. Playing those Texas dance-halls and clubs on a Sunday night had a little something that didn’t usually happen on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. ![]() G.B.Fitzgerald took the place over in 1977, and by the time we played there that September, the joint was being run by his daughter Sara. Rolling into Houston at the end of the afternoon, a sticky four hours from Dallas on I-45, south all the way, we pulled up outside Fitzgerald’s, an aging building dating from 1918 and originally a home for Polish music.
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