Pictured: Joe Ely [© Jay Blakesberg]

Edstock or Else!

By Bucks Burnett

It should have been easy. It should still be easy. It was not easy, and it will never be easy. This story condenses several stories into one. This is the story of the Mr. Ed Fan Club, the story of how I became almost famous for a few years, and the story of how I crashed and burned, and then learned to survive disaster. This is the story of Edstock, which is celebrating its 24^th anniversary this week. Let me guess; you don't know what an Edstock is.

By Spring of 1984, my 9 year old Mr. Ed Fan Club, (which I had started as a gag to impress the members of Monty Python during their 1975 visit to Dallas), was riding high; I had personally registered over 1,000 paying members as well as most of my heroes, including T Bone Burnett, Tiny Tim, Iggy Pop, Talking Heads and Pete Townshend, to name a few. The club was invented as little more than a conversation starter (I had never seen the Mr. Ed TV show until a club member mailed me a VHS tape full of episodes in 1983), and I had about $3,000 in the club's bank account generated by membership fees and t-shirt sales. The 15^th anniversary of Woodstock was approaching, and I got a bright idea; "Why not do a satire of Woodstock and call it Edstock after the horse?" I knew immediately I should do it at Dallas' best concert venue, the 3,000-seat Bronco Bowl indoor bowling lane and concert auditorium, which had been ceremoniously opened by Jayne Mansfield in 1962.

I had never promoted a concert before, or even thrown a party for that matter, so I made it up as I went along. I settled on a date, July 7^th, because it sounded lucky - 7/7. I called T Bone Burnett and he said yes. I called Joe Ely and he said yes. I called Tiny Tim and he said yes. All in a day's work. In the next several days I called managers for Rank & File, Richie Havens, and Neil Young. Those bookings did not work out for various reasons. I called Alan Young, who had played Wilbur Post on the TV series. He said, "Hell yeah, pardner." Wilbur loved to cuss when on the phone to Texans.

This was sounding just way too easy, so I hired some warm up acts; Jim Dixon and The Incredible Shrinking Band from Tyler, Texas, and famed Texas illustrator and Ed fanatic Guy Juke from Austin, who had started a band called Blackie White and the Half Tones. I decided to also conduct an awards ceremony, which I named The 1984 EdWards. "There. That should be fun."

I used all the t-shirt money in the club account to wire deposits to the acts, and booked the Bronco Bowl. The shirts, designed by Guy Juke, were selling like hotcakes, and I was betting all the shirt money on the show. The press was catching wind and I soon was giving interviews to local and national papers. Edstock got great publicity right from the start. We had a front page story in a Colorado paper a month before the gig. I had even flown Tiny Tim into town to cut a version of the "Mr. Ed Theme," which was pressed on colored vinyl with a Guy Juke picture sleeve, for sale at the show. I hired a 3-man camera crew to film the event, and fans could even watch "Mr. Ed" reruns on monitors between the acts. It was a hell of an undertaking, and before it was over, I would need an undertaker.

By the week of the show, massive publicity had been generated, but only 200 tickets had sold for a 3,000 seat venue. I was advised to bow out, take a small hit, and cancel the show, as opposed to going through with it and risking far greater damage. I could see the logic, but by this point, I had put far too much time, energy and money into it to cancel. I just couldn't imagine calling T Bone, Tiny or Joe and saying, "Never mind, I can't do it." So I drew a line in the sand. Everyone involved with the show stood by me. On July 7^th, we all met at the Bronco Bowl at 6 a.m. The sound crew, the lighting crew, the road crews. By that time it was obvious the ship was going to sink, and everyone quickly began demanding money as news of low ticket sales started to spread. I started calling friends and asked them to bring whatever cash they could manage. "My light crew is leaving in 1 hour if I don't get $1,000 from you." Not a fun day. But I still choke up when I remember the people who showed up and put $100 or even $1000 in my hand, knowing they would not see it again. That kind of mercy stays with you for life. And so does the guilt of not repaying it. My dad, a dentist, showed up about 4. Never one to get gushy, he put his arm around me and said, "You did all this? You hired all these people?" He looked at the stage which was being set up. "I've never been prouder of you than I am right now. And I never want to see this money back." He handed me a check for $1,000 with my name on it. He had given me $100 for graduating high school seven years earlier. My dad was not wealthy by any means, so it might as well have been a million. Understanding like that remains with you for several lifetimes, and not even money can pay it back. My hero does not play a guitar. My hero pulls teeth and makes bad jokes.

The show? In the midst of all that pressure, of all that failure, I actually forgot about the show. But the show did go on, and it went on at 6 and ran until 2 a.m. All of the artists showed up on time. Ed Ward, my music writer friend, accepted the first EdWard, for being named Ed Ward, and thanked his dad, Ed Ward. I handed him a trophy. The last EdWard went to T Bone, who made a short speech and picked up a guitar and played a blistering set I'll never forget. 30 minutes earlier, we had watched Tiny Tim take over the universe from behind the stage curtain and T Bone said, "Bucks, I'll make you a deal. I'll forgive the rest of my fee tonight if you promise to never make me follow Tiny Tim onstage again. I'm not capable of it or worthy of it. No one is." "Not even the Stones, T Bone?" "Especially not the Stones." We had a deal.

Joe Ely came on and scorched the place, and brought out the evening's unannounced guest star, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. They jammed on some piece of mindbend for 20 minutes, the Cowboy jumping and hollering while Joe played a toy horn and smoked cigarettes. It was unbelievably cool, and that was the end of the show. 8 hours after it started, Edstock concluded. I went onstage and took a bow, and some girls I knew screamed my name and hugged me from the foot of the stage. The saga had played out to barely over 300 people, an empty house full of heat and heart. I went to a party after the show, stunned beyond any sort of comprehension. I woke up the next morning $25,000 in debt, afraid to look out from under the covers.

Since 1984, I have paid back about 70% of the debt. My mom took out a $7,000 loan for all the print, TV and radio advertising, and had to default on the loan when I couldn't pay it back. I've given her money, not nearly enough, along the way, but she's never asked for it. I don't see how I can pay it back anytime soon. She forgave the debt a long time ago, and that's what makes me want to pay her back. She forgave the debt.

So, I could've saved us all the grief, all the debt, all the heartache, and yes, it still hurts to this day. You don't lose your friends' money, or your family's money the easy way. If I had cancelled, as I had been advised, I would've lost $5,000 instead of $25,000. But by the time I had that choice to make, I was trapped between two worlds of regret; the regret of doing it, or the regret of not doing it. Edstock nearly killed me. It still tries to kill me. The footage was confiscated, understandably, by the film crew when they found out I couldn't pay them (J. Daniel Jones, where are you?). The box of XL Edstock t-shirts was stolen that night, and a year later, I gave the box of small shirts to a girl who ran an orphanage in Georgetown. She wrote me several letters through the years, telling me again and again how much the kids loved the Edstock shirts. One more time; mercy cannot be bought, not true mercy. You cannot define mercy until it has saved your hide, or someone else's.

A few weeks later, Rolling Stone ran a full page story on Edstock, the entire back page, in fact. In the late 90's, a guy stopped me on the street and said, "Hey, you paid my sound company back five years after Edstock. Man, I really appreciate that." An Edstock poster can be seen on a door in Richard Linklater's film Slacker. I gave Bruce Springsteen an Edstock poster from the foot of the stage after his set at the Bronco Bowl in the late ‘90's. T Bone Burnett is playing Dallas on July 7^th this year, and for me, it's no accident. The legend lingers, but not so loud. I had my own personal Alamo, and let me tell you, that Mexican army you always heard about was built to win. The Bronco Bowl was bulldozed a few years back to make way for a Home Depot. Goodbye history, hello garden hose.

The famous Texas concert promoter Angus Wynne listened to my Edstock story about a year ago. He's the one who staged the Texas International Pop Festival with Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk and Jimi Hendrix near Dallas in Lewisville in 1969. If you cut Angus, he bleeds legend. After I finished, concluding with the debt that money can't repay, he just smiled and said, "Bucks, Edstock was your badge of honor." "What's that, Angus?" "That's when you lose $10,000 of your best friends' money in one night, and you still have your best friends the next day."

I had to choose between two worlds of regret. After 24 years of feeling pain, loss and failure, and enjoying some great memories, stories and friends, and most of all, forgiveness, from my mother, my father and myself, I have learned that either choice was correct, the world without Edstock would've been safer and cheaper, and the world with Edstock is pretty fucking great. Either path will take you home. I cannot regret my choice of regrets. I am lucky and thankful that I even got to choose. Not everyone stands between such extremes. And every time I see a concert, I think, "Someone is taking a chance tonight. I hope they win."