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Huey P. Meaux: The Crazy Cajun

 Huey Meaux [b. March 10, 1929] grew up outside of Kaplan, Louisiana, a small community surrounded by rice fields near Lafayette. His parents and siblings were poor sharecroppers who spoke mainly Cajun French, worked hard in the fields all week, and played harder on Saturday night, when Creoles and Cajuns would push back the furniture in a house, get roaring drunk, and dance to a band all night long.

He moved with his family to Winnie [Texas] at the age of twelve, part of the Cajun migration west across the Sabine River to greener rice fields and better jobs. His father, Stanislaus Meaux (known to all as Pappy Te-Tan), played accordion and fronted a group with teenaged Huey as the drummer. "I wasn't worth a damn," Huey told me once, but the excitement of being in a band stayed with him. In his twenties, he cut hair at the barber shop by day. "A barber is like a bartender, he knows who is screwing whose wife, when, and what time. I dug all that because I was part of something," he said. After hours, he was a disc jockey, hosting teen hops in Beaumont [Texas] and promoting dances all over the Golden Triangle.

His colleagues on the local music scene included singer George Jones, pianist Moon Mullican, and disc jockey J. P. Richardson, a.k.a. the Big Bopper.  A local promoter and record producer named Bill Hall taught Meaux the nuances of the business of music, mainly by never paying Meaux what he was owed. "That was my college education in the bidness. I didn't think people were supposed to get paid for having fun. So Hall would take my records, put his name on them, and take them to the record companies. When we'd go to Nashville, he'd tell me to keep my mouth shut. He said they'd laugh at my accent up there. And I believed him," Huey said.

In 1959 Meaux produced the first hit with his name on it, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, a maudlin lament by Jivin' Gene, as Meaux had rechristened Gene Bourgeois. The song's hook, he liked to tell people, was the vocal's echo effect, which was accomplished by "sticking Gene back in the shitter, surrounded by all that porcelain." Subsequent hits such as Barbara Lynn's soul stirrer You'll Lose a Good Thing, Joe Barry's swinging I'm a Fool to Care, Rod Bernard's This Should Go on Forever, T. K. Hulin's As You Pass Me By Graduation Night, and Big Sambo and the Housewreckers' histrionic The Rains Came were all expressions of teen sincerity tailor-made for belly rubbing on the dance floor. The sound was dubbed swamp pop in honor of the region the artists came from.

Huey P. Meaux with Jane Doe  and Sunny Azuma

Meaux was on his way to becoming a one-stop hit factory; eventually he would own many labels and Sugar Hill Recording Studios and manage artists; he would publish his artists' songs, collect their royalty checks, and promote their records to radio stations. The way Meaux told it, his first royalty check, $48,000 for Barbara Lynn's You'll Lose a Good Thing, attracted too much attention around Winnie. "Even today people think I made that money selling dope," he told me years ago. "I never sold any dope in my life. Sold some whiskey before, took some dope, but never did sell none." He shifted operations to Houston, where peers like Don Robey at Duke and Peacock Records and H. W. "Pappy" Daily at D Records were cutting and selling hits as if the town were Nashville and Memphis combined. Among such company, Huey was well known for his good ear and even better known for his promotional talents. "The song is number one. The singer is probably third or fourth," he explained to me. "The song makes the singer and the producer. Promotion makes all of it. It's up to the man behind the desk, spending money here and there, taking care of favors, just like you elect a president or governor."

As a promoter, his most brilliant stroke was co-opting the British invasion of the early sixties by finding a Tex-Mex rock band from San Antonio, dubbing them the Sir Douglas Quintet, dressing them up in British mod outfits, and even releasing their record on the London label. The record was She's About a Mover, which broke onto the Top Ten pop charts in 1965. Image was everything. "He used to make the married members of the band take off their wedding rings before going on stage," recalled organist Augie Meyers. "He didn't want to spoil the illusion."

Thanks to Meaux's relentless efforts, an all-Mexican San Antonio band called Sunny and the Sunliners broke the racial barrier on television's American Bandstand by performing a bluesy version of Little Willie John's Talk To Me in 1962. Soon after, Meaux had another hit--a slow and thoroughly teen rendering of Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome, I Could Cry by a young white band from Rosenberg called the Triumphs, fronted by a pimplefaced kid named B. J. Thomas.

"The reason why I had so many hits was that around this part of the country, you've got a different kind of people every hundred miles--Czech, Mexican, Cajun, black," Meaux said. The names came and went--Roy Head, Chuck Jackson, Ronnie Milsap, Mickey Gilley, Lowell Fulson, Joey Long, Doug Kershaw, Clifton Chenier, Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Copeland, Lightnin' Hopkins, Archie Bell and the Drells, Tommy McLain, Cosimo Matassa, and Jerry Wexler--all of them made records or worked with Meaux at one time or another. For two generations of Gulf Coast rock and rollers--or any musicians from Baton Rouge to San Antonio--he was the pipeline to the big time.

Leo O'Neil, Huey P. Meaux and Micky Moody

But for every Dale and Grace topping the charts with perfect pop hits like I'm Leaving It Up to You, there were twenty failures. Meaux's magic never worked for two talented young boys from Beaumont, Johnny and Edgar Winter, whom he recorded under the names The Great Believers and Texas Guitar Slim. "We'd put them on a local television show called Jive at Five, and their records would stop selling like you turn a light switch off," Meaux said. "People would freak out, being as they was albinos." He said he never got credit for his part in the discovery of ZZ Top and years later took great pleasure in suing the band and manager Bill Ham on behalf of Linden Hudson, a songwriter who was never paid or credited for a song the band recorded. Huey had a copy of the settlement check framed on his wall.

The flip side of his skills as a producer and a promoter was his willingness to take advantage of his artists. An artful con man, Meaux would mockingly warn his acts, "I wouldn't sign that if I were you" at the contract table. Another time he said, "I like to keep my artists in the dark so their stars shine brighter." The artists, hungry for fame and fortune, never balked-and many enjoyed long friendships with Meaux even though he took advantage of them. Gulfport, Mississippi, songwriter Jimmy Donley was a sentimental lyricist who sung in what Meaux called the heartbreak key. Donley sold compositions such as Please Mr. Sandman, Hello! Remember Me, and I'm to Blame to Meaux (and to Fats Domino, among others) for $50 apiece because he needed the money and figured he could always write another song. Even though Donley hardly profited from the relationship, he and Meaux remained close friends; Donley called him Papa. In the liner notes Meaux wrote for the Donley memorial album, Born to Be a Loser, he says that in 1963 Donley called him to thank him for all he'd done for him; 45 minutes later, Donley committed suicide.

One night when I was in the studio watching him do his radio show, he auditioned two new singles he'd just released on his Crazy Cajun label--Country Ways, by Alvin Crow and the Pleasant Valley Boys, from Austin; and Before the Next Teardrop Falls, by Freddy Fender, a fifties-era Tex-Mex rocker from San Benito. Before the Next Teardrop Falls was the unlikeliest country and pop hit of 1975, eventually reaching number one on Billboard's Hot 100. The follow-up, a remake of Fender's 1959 regional rock hit Wasted Days and Wasted Nights, went to number eight. 

By the end of the ride, in 1980, Fender was strung out on dope and booze and bankrupt with $10 million in debts. He was also accusing Meaux of taking advantage of him through unscrupulous contracts. Huey, who had previously specialized in one-hit wonders, was ready to sever the relationship too, blaming Freddy for squandering his earnings. In 1981 Meaux survived a bout with throat cancer. Save for one last novelty hit--Rockin' Sidney Simien's 1985 zydeco ditty (Don't Mess With) My Toot-Toot-Huey more or less bailed out of the producer-manager-promoter realm and moved into music publishing. He augmented the Crazy Cajun song-publishing catalog by purchasing, among other tunes, Desi Arnaz's signature song, Babalu, and a number of soul composer Isaac Hayes' songs from the Memphis bank that assumed ownership of them after Hayes went bankrupt.

Source: Joe Nick Patoski, Sex, Drugs, And Rock & Roll, Texas Monthly, May, 1996 - Vol. 24, Issue 5, p. 116 (10 pp.)

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