By Chelsea Schmid
Staff Writer who is Special to LIVE!
February 21, 2008

The Music

“We have been very specific about who we want to come play here, especially in the first month,” says Rex Rogers, owner of The Deadhorse (210 S. Chadbourne St, San Angelo). “We’re not booking just anybody. There’s got to be something fun there . . . there’s a snap to it. It’s got to make you—I don’t want to say drink a beer, but . . . ”

It has to be fun, especially in West Texas. We’re very finicky about our music out here, and if it doesn’t have mass appeal, it usually doesn’t take. The rockabilly and psychobilly genres operate in a few select regions where there is a “scene.” The rest of the music is largely underground. It’s something that a lot of people have to travel to see, and more and more people are taking the stroll down Chadbourne Street to check it out.

“This rockabilly/psychobilly stuff is nothing new, it’s just a fresh take on the same thing they’ve been doing forever,” Rex says. “A lot of people seem to like it. This is something we felt like we could do that a lot of other people aren’t really doing.”

While Reverend Horton Heat is reputed to be the godfather of psychobilly, the industry has grown significantly since he emerged on the scene in the ‘80s. The modern psychobilly culture has been tied into the retro-hotrod scene, and they really go hand in hand, Rex says.

Another interesting aspect of the genre? Many of its women have pin-up figures, or at least idolize them. Unlike the size 00 waifs that pervade magazine racks, rockabilly pin-ups are real women with real bodies. It’s female empowering, as opposed to what some view as the traditional “Hollywood Diet.”

“There’s a whole cool culture of stuff out there,” Rex says. “There’s a lot of bands that call themselves psychobilly that aren’t that extreme, but there’s a punkier edge to some of them that’s really cool.”

Rockabilly and psychobilly are sub-genres under the umbrella of rock, but each has its own derivatives and offspring. Ranging from Misfits-inspired horror, to “cowpunk,” “greaser punk,” “roots,” and “gutterbilly,” the variations on style are endless. But what really defines rockabilly or psychobilly is the guitar and the upright bass.

“They usually play a big hollow-body, usually a big Gretch,” Rex says. “The amp isn’t real distorted, it’s got a lot of reverb.” Though Rex says there are a few bands that don’t play on an upright bass, it’s hard to call them rockabilly—even though they are. “The stand-up bass is pretty important. It really makes a difference. There’s a certain sound. And it’s truly Texan.

“A lot of Southern groups—the traditional stuff, old country—they brought the stand-up bass, they started playing it like that so it could be heard, so it could be louder,” Rex says. “It was actually kind of frowned upon back when it started.”

Now it’s more of a shock, although this time in the rock and roll sector. Unless you know a little bit about rockabilly or have seen it live, it’s always a surprise to walk in and see a group of people jamming out with a giant bass on stage.

“We’ve always liked it,” Rex says. “I don’t know if it’s out favorite type of music, but it’s so fun. That’s really what it is for me.”

Rockabilly of Love

It’s the classic love story: high school sweethearts; rock and roll; Austin, Texas; kids; relocation…a story that might have gone in a different direction if Rex Rogers’s phone hadn’t rung one day 13 years ago. “We dated in high school for three years and we were in love, seriously in love,” says Lanie Rogers, who owns The Deadhorse with her husband, Rex.

They’d dated from ’86 to’89, but after graduation, the couple parted ways: Lanie went to San Marcos to pursue a career in retail management, and Rex stayed in Austin to play guitar for industrial metal band Ribcage, and ‘80s metal-inspired War Party. It wasn’t until five years later that the pair would reunite, this time for good.

“My older sister had dated one of his best friends, band members, back in the day,” Lanie says. “She was at a party and she decided to call information and get Rex’s number in Austin. I had no idea this was going on…he called my parents house, and I went over the next day and my mom said, ‘oh I just talked to Rex for 30 minutes on the phone.’ I’m like, ‘What?’”

In the years following their break-up, Lanie married and divorced her first husband and gave birth to her eldest child, Brandon, who is now 17. After five years of separation, the couple reconnected via telephone and within a week met back up in Austin. A month later the two wed, and 13 years later they’re more in love than the day they met.

Rex and Lanie Rogers lived in Austin for the next two years, and moved to San Angelo after Rex received a job offer from an online risk management firm. The family had begun to grow in ’96 and Lanie stayed home to raise and home school their children. Their first born was a female, Llexi, who is now 12. The Rogerses also have two other children, Hunter, who will soon be 11, and Ireland, who is now 4.

The idea of opening The Deadhorse was a dream that the Rogerses shared for a while before it became a reality. Having come from the live music capital of the world, they sought bring a little piece of their past to the present by opening up a venue.

“After being here for 11 years we just decided—we missed the music scene in Austin—so we decided to open something out here that reminded us of Austin,” Rex says. “We love San Angelo, but that was the only thing that we missed—the music scene really.”

Thrifty Centsability

Sometime in May of 2005, the Rogerses’ plans for opening their own live music venue went to the drawing board. The idea focused on a small club with music at its core, but just like an artist’s scribbles may turn into a masterpiece, so The Deadhorse went from a room with a stage in it to the hippest rock and roll bar in town.

“Originally we were going to have it be very simple, pretty much standing room only, and just sell beer at the back,” Rex explains. “I think what changed everything was . . . we went to the Elk’s Lodge auction when it closed and we bought that bar right there. We got the whole thing for $100. The whole bar. It’s a vintage bar.”

One-hundred bucks is a hell-freezing-over kind of a deal, and it must have taken a time to thaw: Over the next two years, Rex and Lanie furnished their bar with all kinds of pauper-priced finds.

“We would pick up odds and ends—bar equipment—from people going out of business, garage sales, musicians selling things cheap. Whatever we could find that we thought would work, we would buy it,” Rex says. “Like the ice machine I found in a barn out in Grape Creek. And there are tables out there that we got for a couple of bucks each at a garage sale.”

The project stalled when a more pressing matter presented itself. “We bought a school—an old private school—and converted it to our house,” Rex says. “We were under a time limit . . . and we had to stop all of the work here to do that.”

That wasn’t the only interruption: the Rogerses had found a building on South Chadbourne Street, and, as a partner of HR&R Risk Management Group, Rex and his constituents began the work of moving their offices to the upstairs portion of the Deadhorse location. Combined, these two factors set back the grand opening for the better part of a year.

The building was built in 1889, and during the 1950s a dressmaker had moved the storefront back from the curb to install glass cases for his dresses. Rex and Lanie brought the storefront back to be level with the rest of the block.

“We brought [the furniture] in and we started looking around and we were like, ‘you know we could really do this cool,’ and it just kind of went from there,” Rex says.

Cool is right. Looking around the place, one would think they’d hired a designer or an artist to do the decorating. Yet the place almost looks as if a spendthrift furnished it, adorned with collages from the couple’s past.

“We took magazines, pictures, old tickets—there are old tickets from when I was a teenager and stuff, rock bands, pictures of us,” Rex says, pointing to a spot on the wall behind him. “Here’s a Def Leppard ticket from ’87. [We] basically just Xeroxed, and then we cut out all the different pictures, and then [Lanie] glued them on. And then we clear-coated it. The tables were kind of worn out and stuff, but it was a way just to give them a little character but to be able to use them. Pretty much everything in here was home-made, refurbished, do-it-yourself.”

Even the vintage black tiles from the bases of the dress cases were reincorporated: They constitute the surface of the side bar that runs down the wall of the venue.

“When we opened, we didn’t have a lot of overhead,” Rex says. “We had spent money along the way but we had done so cheaply. I used to restore old Volkswagon cars, so I sold off some of those to make a little money to get us started. One of them I sold—there’s a picture of it on the bar somewhere—a guy from England bought it. I used to drive it around here—a bus—and he bought it and drove it to the coast and shipped it over there.”

Utilizing MySpace

With venue work done, it was time to bring the people in. There are a lot of social aspects to opening a place of business one has to consider in order to be successful: advertising, hiring, booking. All things that cost money, once you run ads and devour minutes on the cell phone contacting people. All things Rex and Lanie chose to use an alternative medium for.

“What we haven’t done is a whole lot of is advertising,” Rex says. “But what we have done is we’ve utilized MySpace a whole bunch. Lanie always likes to point out that we hired our whole bar staff from MySpace. We didn’t take an add out in the newspaper or anything.”

The largest social network on the planet in terms of users, MySpace is no stranger to musicians or music aficionados.

“There are millions of people using MySpace for communications,” says Thomas Trevino, head of National Promotions for Big Six Records in Las Vegas, Nevada. “It’s a great promotional tool . . . it doesn’t cost you anything, just time and effort.

“As much effort as you put into your MySpace is as much as you’ll get back. When you tell two friends, they’ll tell two friends, and so on. We’ve always said that the best promotions are word of mouth, hand to hand, and, in this case, MySpace has that ability.”

Virtually everyone has a MySpace page these days, and with access to networks of friends with similar tastes, a multitude of information on music, and a plethora of free advertising, it’s no wonder businesses, bands, and otherwise turn to the Internet for promotion.

“That was one of the first things I did,” Rex says. “I made up the logo and started a MySpace site before we had even actually bought the bar. It was a little logo and a brief description, and people started finding it. When it came time to start hiring people, we actually were getting e-mail from people asking us to work here. We put a bulletin out.”

“It was nice because then you have people that know what we’re doing, like the kind of music, and are already kind of in it, instead of Joe Blow walking in off the street, saying, ‘I want to work here,’” Lanie says.

Apart from hiring and getting the word out about the opening, The Rogerses also utilize MySpace to book all of the bands that go through the venue.

“Every band we have has been booked through MySpace,” Rex says. “It’s great, because we can do research.”

And research is important when you’re booking live music.

Keeping The Momentum

The Deadhorse has seen a good deal of business since the venue opened a couple of months back, with rival nights for attendance being the grand opening and Jan. 12, when the Flametrick Subs brought the house down.

“We actually had people standing outside that night,” Lanie says of the grand opening. “We were at capacity.”

The doors may be open but the work is not done. Rex and Lanie are keeping their options open for expansion and are brewing all kinds of new ideas to keep the place popping during the week as well.

“We’ve got a contract on the building next door—we haven’t bought it yet. If that goes through, we’ll have the option to go through the wall here and move that way if we want to,” Rex says. We’re a little hesitant because it’s working so good like it is, but we’d love to be able to get more people through the door.”

Rex and Lanie are also discussing holding “hoot nights,” which is like an open mic night, for bands with a theme. Bands would be picked beforehand and everyone would do their rendition, swap members, and ultimately just end up jamming, on, for instance, Johnny Cash. This was an idea spawned from the rock and roll days back in Austin where Rex used to participate in hoot nights on Sixth Street.

“Our kids all play instruments, too,” says Lanie. “That was another reason we decided to open the venue, as kind of a musical outlet for our family.”

With Brandon on drums, Llexi on keys, Hunter on guitar and drums, and little Ireland singing, the Rogerses have almost a full band, all they need is a bass player…

“Well I’m a guitar player but I’m saving up to get a stand-up bass,” Rex says. “That’s what I want to do now. It looks like so much fun.”

The Deadhorse is a venue with a truly comfortable, upbeat-but-warm vibe. It’s like Olive Garden: “When you’re there, you’re family.” The Rogerses have seen a good response from both those who come to drink and those who come to jam.

“Every band that has played here—every single band—has said how much they like the place,” Rex says. “Many of them have said it’s like their favorite place to play, or it’s been the best show they’ve had. And they say the crowd’s great. Every band who’s been here has asked to come back.”

And most of them will. To check out The Deadhorse’s calendar for that next show you don’t want to miss, go to myspace.com/thedeadhorse.