Shindig! #167 – The Heard

With ‘Exit 9’, their none-more-garage blast of recorded greatness, east Texan garage band THE HEARD left their mark on the world, one that continues to reverberate 60 years later.

CHAIM O’BRIEN-BLUMENTHAL hears about police busts, electric shocks and flushing toilets from guitarist Andy Clendene

Fresh sounds and styles were in the air, and even psychedelia couldn’t escape east Texas. “We all loved The 13th Floor Elevators and ‘You’re Gonna’ Miss Me’. It got a lot of play on the radio and Roky Erickson was big. But it was pretty strange stuff, the way they’d play the jug, the amplification. Very different. I remember playing The Catacombs and they had this room; it was like going into a cave. With different coloured wax all over the place. They called it the psychedelic room.”

Perhaps it was the new directions in music that inspired The Heard to start writing their own material. Andy and his brother teamed up to pen a song; Andy writing the lyrics and melody, and Randy coming up with the guitar part. The result was the now classic ‘Exit 9’. As captured on The Heard’s lone single, it’s a sonic blast of brilliance, that’s still reverberating all these years later, thanks to fandom from garage heads and covers from bands like The Chesterfield Kings. But how did it come about? “We recorded it in Robin Hood Brians studio, in Tyler. Basically, a home studio. He was classically trained, and a big gearhead. ZZ Top ended up recording there, as did The Five Americans.

 “The Heard booked a session in the evening, at like four or five o’clock, in June ’67. It was strange, because we’d never really done the song before. In fact, I added the opening lines right there on the spot, because Robin said we needed an opening. We had our parts figured out, but this was our first time in a recording studio. I’ll never forget Robin had put egg crates on the ceiling for acoustic baffles! So, we went in and in four or five hours, put the tracks down. And we brought our friend, guitarist Bugs Henderson with us for moral support. He’s a renowned Texas blues musician, and we’d worked at the same music shop with him. My brother actually offered for Bugs to solo on ‘Exit 9’. But he wouldn’t have anything to do with that, telling us it was our song, we should do it.”

Thanks to his brother, the band had a special sauce ready to bring up things a notch. “He had a fuzz distortion box, no pedals like today. And back then, those were hard to get.” Together with producer Brians’ interest in new technology, the result was a record that sounded like nothing else coming out of east Texas so far that year. But the band had one more trick up their sleeves, “We had the idea to take one of Robin’s expensive mikes, a Neumann, hang it over the toilet and record the sound of flushing to finish the record.” But Robin Hood Brians convinced the band to cut the offending flush out, knowing full well that no radio deejay would play the record.

After the session, the band asked Robin what was next. “We asked him if anyone would be interested in putting out the songs, and as it turned out, Robin told us that Dale Hawkins was coming in tomorrow.” Hawkins was an old pro in the music business, penning the classic ‘Suzy-Q’. “He came up from Shreveport to do some recording with Robin, and we all came back the next day. Dale was a real straight, suit-and-tie kind of guy, which surprised us. And after he listened to the record, told us he didn’t think it was right for the market.”

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