Ricky didn't have a clue that all those thoughts and emotions were running through my mind. When I tried to show NO feelings on my face, it usually resulted in something resembling smug. That was misleading because I was completely okay with the fact that he was going to be moving soon. (That was his big news.) Ricky and I had gone through so many good times together that I wasn't sure there was anything he could really do that could break our deep bond of the soul. Mystical bonding aside, there was no normal way to describe how I'd come to feel about "everything" Ricky, so I invented one. I didn't mean it in a bad way, but I was simply "RICKY'D OUT!"  My life, schedule, and success had been measured in "Ricky's" for too long. It was time to let it go and move on. 

Ricky and I had come to that big fork in the road almost two years earlier, when he told me he was unhappy and would be leaving Savvy. Metaphorically speaking, he told me to wait at the fork and he'd send for me. That silliness went on for more than a year before I finally committed to my own path, and we reformed Savvy without him. I suppose the rest of the guys in Savvy had long since moved on. After all,  they only saw Ricky on chance, rare occasions after his departure from the group. But I was still living with him. We had rent and utilities in common. Ninety percent of the messages on my answering machine were still for Ricky. I never knew when I was going to come home to a house full of his new friends, fans, cronies, and band mates. I'm sure he felt the same way about me. That great old house on Lester had become a boarding house with too many rules. With NO rules. The Ricky Lynn Project was on the road so much that Ricky needed a storage facility more than he needed a house. I was relieved that the ultimate surgery had been scheduled that would finally separate Ricky Lynn Gregg from his weary shadow. He would have to find a new one. NBD.

I stopped by Rick Miller's house one night in late June. After a good heart-to-heart talk, I came away knowing that he would be calling it quits soon. He mentioned that the internal hassles and character conflicts were getting to be too much to deal with. It was becoming hard to watch him struggle to keep from quitting. I was able to put my "human" hat on and see that he'd embarked on a new adventure too. I didn't buy the stuff about hassles and conflicts. I could see Rick's heart as if I were wearing X-ray glasses. As he sat there, kicked back in his EZ Boy recliner, I don't know if Rick Miller had a clue how highly I thought of him - how much I envied him. He had a beautiful, expectant wife, a great home, and a successful family business. He also had a contract with himself that said if he hadn't "made it" in music by the time he turned thirty, he'd get out. This wasn't rocket science. Rick Miller was subconsciously making funeral arrangements for Savvy. It was more obvious to those of us around him than it was to him. 

Rick Miller (in red) talks club business with 
Savvy Nightclub manager Larry Patton.

As June '84 wound down, RJ mindlessly (and relentlessly) started a new campaign to replace Rich. He had no idea of how much damage he was doing, or the help he was giving Rick Miller in making his decision to dissolve Savvy. Since things had gone nasty and we'd all seen each other's dark sides, everyone seemed to be able to reel their demons back in except for RJ. I believe he had become completely consumed by the frustration of seeing Savvy fail. He'd known that we'd been so close - and yet so far away from breaking through. RJ had many reasons for wanting, and needing to succeed in the music business. Before joining his first full time band, he'd had various blue collar jobs, but nothing came close to satisfying him the way playing music for a living did. He'd had a very tough childhood and had things to prove to himself, but  he was never all that concerned about what others thought, as long as he was pleased with his own progress. 

RJ and I had come a long way together since playing with Don Hudson and the Royal Kings in the dives of Hemphill on Ft. Worth's tough South Side. For some reason, we'd been blessed with never having to worry about having a place to play, while many of our friends who were phenomenal players spent their entire careers looking for decent gigs. We complimented each other perfectly. I was Jerry Lewis to his Dean Martin.  But I wore my heart on my sleeve, while RJ never showed his deep emotions. My guess was that the lifestyle of a musician allowed him to shut himself off from his tormented youth. He was able to sleep in, play his bass, be his own boss, have plenty of girlfriends, smoke, drink, and enjoy his various other vices when he wanted, and to hell with anything that tried to bring him down. That was RJ. That was the music business.   

RJ was usually pretty intense, both on and off the stage.

When Ricky quit, RJ became disgruntled and mean. We used to laugh at a line in the movie version of "The Twilight Zone" where Burgess Meredith  (Penguin on Batman TV series) narrated a scene in which Vic Morrow played a guy with a lot of problems. The narration went, "You're about to meet an ANGRY man."  RJ had become the angry man. I understood his frustration. I knew this was the only thing in life he wanted to do. It was the only thing he had left. It afforded him a way to stand out from the faceless crowd and be special. Most importantly, it allowed him to forget things he didn't want to remember, and be someone he never thought he could be. 

I'd been in RJ's crosshairs a few times since even before Ricky quit. But Rich Mauch had found himself locked in them and couldn't seem to free himself. RJ was on a crusade to save the band, but it was beyond saving. He just couldn't seem to understand that replacing Rich Mauch with the hottest new kid in town wouldn't fix things this time. We weren't making any new fans. We weren't getting any younger. And we weren't about to undergo makeovers to look like the bands on MTV. We'd made a lot of adjustments, and rolled with a lot of punches, but there was only one member of Savvy who might have even remotely considered dying their hair blonde and teasing it into a rat's nest for the sake of looking "MTV" contemporary. That was the same person RJ was gunning to replace - Rich Mauch.

RJ's attempts to replace Rich, or anyone else in Savvy had become futile.  He soon realized that nobody was listening and he'd been de-clawed. It would have been like cutting off an arm to treat nose cancer. And without Rick Miller's blessing, none of it would matter anyway. We had to make the best of it for as long as we had it. There were some positives. Ambrose had been the perfect replacement for Dave Davis, who had decided to spend more time with his family. Dave continued to help out with sound around the club from time to time, but his ears had become very sensitive to loud sound, and bands were getting louder and louder. Dave's knew he had no future running sound for loud rock bands any longer. 

We still had the club in Ft. Worth as our base of operations. And we still had many fans who would stick with us until the bitter end. It turned out to be a bad time to try and count blessings. One of our blessings was being fortunate enough to have Little Bryan on our crew. We were shocked to learn that he'd suffered two heart attacks over the weekend! He would pull through, but would have to make major changes to his lifestyle if he wanted to have a normal life.  No more smoking, drinking, or living his life in nightclubs. For the time being, a friend named Bruce ran lights for us. Rabbit had given up on Ricky and was back on our road crew. 

Bryan "Little Bryan" Weston. Savvy's 
beloved light man and friend.

My personal life was a mess too. The closer I got to leaving the music business, the more I realized I'd been bouncing around relationships the way a steel ball bounces around in a pinball machine. I'd been having a good time and avoiding anything stressful, or that might require thought. My family didn't know what to make of my personal life either. It really came to a head when mom found out I wasn't bringing Rhonda to my brother Ray's wedding. She'd never said a word to me about any of the girls I'd dated before, but she used that incident to let me know that if I didn't latch on to Rhonda, I was going to lose her and I'd be sorry. There was a lot of wisdom in what she said.

I was giving a LOT of thought to what I might do when the band folded. Of course there was always the Ronald gig. If I could make enough money, I wanted to try to take some classes at UTA. I even contacted friends who owned their own businesses to put the bug in their ears, in case any of them might take pity on me and give me a job. It became quite depressing if I thought about it too much. 

Ricky was on the road again, leaving me to take care of his dog this time. Nigel had recently become infested with fleas again, so I spent all day Wednesday going to war with the little bastards. On Thursday, I waxed my car, but didn't do it correctly and areas were discolored. I began to think about putting my own band together after Savvy. I could front a group and get back to some of the old novelty and variety type shtick I'd done before. I thought of doing something that would rival Vince Vance and the Valiants, a local band that did a lot of comedy and crazy stuff. 

June had been much better than May as far as audience responses were concerned. We'd played at Ft. Worth Savvy's, Cardi's in Austin, Bandy's in Corpus Christy, and ended up back at Tango's in Dallas. Little Bryan made a miraculous recovery and was on the road with us again by the last half of the tour. We tried to tell him he would be better off getting his life together somewhere else, but he was persistent so we let him stay. While playing Bandy's, two of the guitar players from Night Ranger dropped by and sat in with us. We played "Don't Tell Me You Love Me." I enjoyed Corpus because of the big band condo on the ocean. I could go out and fish off the docks all night. It had been a long time since I'd been fishing. I met a couple of girls in Corpus who were in town for the Night Ranger show. One of them was named Debbie Montgomery, and she was from Stephenville.

A week after the gig at Bandy's, I was doing a McDonald's gig in Stephenville for their Fourth of July FunFestival event. While there, I ran into Debbie, the girl I'd met in Corpus. We had a chance to chat for a while. She had a boyfriend so chatting was the extent of it. Debbie had been a contestant in the Miss Stephenville pageant. We were booked back into the Ft. Worth Savvy's club for the first two weeks of July. On one of those nights, three girls jumped on stage and danced during several songs. It was a little strange, but the crowd seemed to be into it so we let them do their thing. But all of a sudden they broke out fighting! The three girls were in a big cat fight! The band stopped playing and the bouncers made their way to the stage, but by the time they got there, we had already managed to drag the girls out the back door into the alley, where they continued fighting until the cops came. 

I got a check for $964 from McDonald's. I put it in the bank. I'd been thinking about getting Health Insurance. After the bad wax job on my car, I decided to try to compound the finish to see if it would help. I went to fly RC airplanes with Dad and Chris, and I finally flew one of them. We had a band rehearsal and worked up a song by Rush called "After Image." Rhonda came over. 

I'd been working on seeing how I could do on writing some originals of my own. Things at the club had gone well for the past few weeks, but then we had another one of those bumps in the road. One night at Savvy's, a resident thug - and his cronies, stood over by the side of the stage and actually "boo'd" us after several songs. This particular individual  had made a name for himself as being a major supplier of cocaine around the area. Those who did the drug had to pretend to be his friend. I didn't. In fact, I'd been delighted when he had followed Ricky's band and stopped coming to Savvy's for a while. But now he was back. I had a feeling that I knew what he was doing and why. I could easily picture him thinking that he was somehow showing allegiance to Ricky's band by trying to heckle and humiliate us. If he could lead a movement to get us booted out of Savvy's, then Ricky would be able to take over as the house band. With us out of the picture, this thug would have his favorite band playing at his favorite club.  He'd just overlooked one thing. The club owner was also our drummer. It would take more than booing us to run us off. But it did help move things along a little. I just didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he'd had an effect. Having them behaving that way tore me up inside. Those were the most depressing moments on stage I'd had with Savvy. 

One of the people who had been calling Ricky for years trying to get him to join another band was Mike Pike. I'd talked to Mike on the phone many times when he'd called for Ricky.  It seemed that Mike was upset with Ricky for not joining up with him, because he showed up at Savvy's bragging on his band, and bad-mouthing Ricky to us. He even told me to pass a message on to Ricky. The message was that Mike thought Ricky had made a mistake by quitting Savvy and not joining with Mike. A few nights later Pike showed up singing a different tune. He said he'd quit his band and wanted to make up with Ricky. He presented his entire case to us in the dressing room on break. As soon as he left, we all looked at each other and thought the same thing. "WHO CARES?" 

Van Halen and Michael Jackson were playing in town. Not together of course. And the overpass at Campus Drive and Hwy 820 collapsed. After an interesting night of playing at Waco Savvy's, I headed back home and was able to stop in at a club just inside the Ft. Worth city limits called "Little Bit Of Kounty" in time to catch the band's last song. The band was made up of three of my ex band mates from the Desperados; Jim Wise, Jerry Coker, and Carlton Tanner. It was great talking to them all again. Jim and I went to Denny's and then to Putt Putt. They had an all night arcade there where we played Punch Out, a boxing game. I got home at about 6:20 in the morning. I realized that Jim was still a great friend, and perhaps the most sane person I knew. He was always a great listener. 

Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro won the Democratic nomination. If they were to win the election in November, she would become the first female Vice President in our nation's history.  Mondale's nickname was "Fritz".  Several comedians began referring to the duo as "Fritz and Tits."  Then on July 18th, 1984, an event would take place at a McDonald's Restaurant in California that Police would say was the worst one-day massacre in the history of the U.S. to date:

On July 18, 1984, 41-year-old James Oliver Huberty walked into a McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, a suburb of San Diego, California, and opened fire with an arsenal of guns, killing 21 people and wounding 19. Huberty's murderous rampage ended 257 rounds and 77 minutes later when he was shot dead by a police marksman stationed on the roof next door. The victims ranged in age from eight months to 74 years. Huberty was a welder in Massillon, Ohio, when he lost his job and decided to move to California with his wife and two children. He worked as a security guard in San Diego but was fired for failing to perform his job properly. One week later, he called a mental health center asking for an appointment, and a receptionist took his name but did not call him back. The next day--July 18, 1984-- Huberty took an Uzi submachine gun , a shotgun, and a semiautomatic pistol to McDonald's and killed 21 diners. It was the worst one-day massacre in the United States to that date. Huberty's wife later filed a $5 million suit against McDonald's, claiming that her husband's rampage was caused by eating too many Chicken McNuggets. McDonald's tore down the San Ysidro restaurant and gave the property to the city, which eventually opened a community college campus on the site. In front of the school is a memorial to Huberty's victims that consists of 21 hexagonal granite pillars ranging in height from one to six feet.

The whole world was going crazy. It wasn't just my little slice of it. Twenty one people had been shot to death while eating at a McDonald's. I guess I had to realize that I didn't have it so bad after all. We were scheduled to play at Cardi's in Lake Charles, Louisiana the following week with Lita Ford. Rick pointed out that the World's Fair was currently going on in New Orleans, and if we wanted, we could drive over and check it out after the Cardi's gig. And while we were there, we could also check out Bourbon Street! Suddenly I was excited to be on the road again!

NEXT CHAPTER: A Savvy Trip to the World's Fair

SAVVY STORY INDEX

BACK TO JONESLAND

SEND EMAIL