No Time To Quit

words by Callie Enlow
photos by Randy Cremean

Life is pretty sweet for Austin’s Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears: A top-three position on Billboard’s blues albums chart, crossover appeal to the SXSW indie set, positive comparisons to Jams Brown, sold-out New Year’s Eve shows, an upcoming European tour.  Yet, not so long ago, bandleader and soul screamer Joe Lewis nearly walked out on music.  Just as he made his exit, new band members hooked him back in for the kind of success he always wanted but never quite attained.

Back in early 2006, a skinny, 24-year-old dude strapped on a guitar once a week, walked on stage at a joint called the Hole in the Wall, and screamed, howled and sank to his knees until every eye in Austin’s famous college bar turned his way.  They did, but not enough to justify a musician’s career path to Lewis.

Back then, Lewis didn’t always have a reliable car or a place to stay.  He spent his days hustling waitstaff jobs or shucking oysters at respectable-yet-dingy Quality Seafood wholesalers.  At night, Lewis partied hard, drinking at bars or with his friends in the now-defunct country band The Weary Boys.  For a while, he refused to wear anything but sweatpants.

Lewis had enough charm to coast through the car-less days and drunken nights, he even looked OK  in sweats.  But he worried friends with talk of hanging up his musical act, moving away and finding a “respectable” career.

The infuriating thing about that speech was that, as a musician, Lewis was incredibly intuitive, a standout in a city full of talented performers.  He delivered gritty and soulful performances of self-penned songs that sounded more like crackling 1930s records than the polished pizzazz of modern bluesmen.  He and his former band, the Cool Breeze, garnered early and effusive praise from the Austin Chronicle’s music grande dame Margaret Moser and opened for Kris Kristofferson at the 2006 Austin Music Awards.  But Lewis describes his early bandleader experience as mainly frustrating.

“My band sucked,” Lewis said.  “We didn’t practice.  So I just played Sunday nights; it got old.  Now I play every night of the week.”

Lewis’ salvation came in the unlikely form of University of Texas student Zach Ernst, who in 2007 booked Black Joe Lewis and his former band to open for Little Richard at the college’s 40 Acres Festival.

“Right after the Little Richard thing, right after that, me and Zach started hanging out; we never really stopped.  I never got a chance to quit,” Lewis said in the Emo’s dressing room before a hometown show where he was opening for the New York Dolls.

Ernst became Lewis’ second lead guitarist, and a collection of college friends began playing gigs with Lewis and his true blue bandmate Darren Sluyter to form Lewis’ current backing band, the Honeybears.

This evening, Lewis and the ’bears find themselves back in Austin, in the green room, playing scales and drinking Lone Star, waiting to open their fourth show for glam rock legends the New York Dolls.  The Honeybears – mostly young, white kids – frequently embellish Lewis’ quiet, thoughtful and very short answers during our pre-show interview.  Lewis seems grateful for their interjections, and the outfit functions more as an organic bunch of funny friends than a group of professional musicians.

Many of them remember seeing Lewis during his Hole in the Wall days.

“I saw him at Headhunters a few times and was like, ‘Man, this guy is cool, but … ,’ ” says Ian Varley, the current band’s keyboardist, about Lewis’ skills on the guitar, the first and only instrument he picked up at age 20.  He looks at Lewis, “At that point, you’d only been playing guitar a couple of years.  So you weren’t real serious about it.”

Sluyter, (pronounced ”Slider”), literally Lewis’ right-hand man on the green room couch and a former member of the Weary Boys, said, “I had played a lot with Joe before, and he hadn’t really found his voice yet.  After Hole in the Wall, everything changed.” He, too, looks at Lewis and continues, “I think Hole in the Wall was the best thing that ever happened to you.”

The second best thing, bassist Bill Stevenson said, was a hazy April evening not long after the 40 Acres Festival.

“We were watching this Muddy Waters thing for his birthday and started passing around this little cigar-box guitar,” said Stevenson, who used to stand outside the Guadalupe Street window at Hole in the Wall to watch Lewis play, too young to enter the 21 and up bar.  “And then we watched this Stax record review in Europe, me and Joe and Sluyter, we were real stoned and watched it, and I remember thinking intuitively, ‘We need to do that.’ ”

“And that was the one time out of a thousand that one stoned thought led to a good thing,” jokes Varley, the animated redheaded elder of the Honeybears.

It makes sense though, listening to the group’s debut full-length, Tell ’Em What Your Name Is!. Lewis’ voice is unique, raspy like Waters’, emotive like Brown’s.  His guitar skills, once muddled, retain Lewis’ early power but with finesse influenced by idols such as Lightnin’ Hopkins.  The horn section, which comprises Sluyter, David McKnight and Eduardo Ramirez, is big and bold in the style of Booker T. and the MGs.

While they proudly cop to these classic soul and blues influences, Lewis and his gang admit a hearty affinity for everything from yacht rock to Buck Owens.  The former shows up at sound check, when the group covers Toto’s “Roseana”, and even in the keyboard and bongo intro to “I’m Broke” on Tell ’Em.  Buck Owens’ influence, born from Lewis’ time hanging out with The Weary Boys, are all over Lewis’ lyrics, which, if made out during his yowling delivery, are covertly funny.

Take, for example, Lewis’ controversial “Bitch, I Love You”, one of his earliest songs, written by a friend as a joke.  One reason the band enjoys touring with the New York Dolls so much is, as Stevenson put it, “I’m not ashamed of doing ‘Bitch, I love you’ in front of them.  You do that in front of a jam band, and there’s like, feminist chicks who freak out.  Some people don’t take that the right way.”

Lewis cracks up at this.

When asked whether the song regularly inspires heated reaction, the band collectively nods.

“Al Green fucking canned us; we were close to going on tour with him,” Lewis said.

“It’s like, c’mon, it’s a fucking joke,” Stevenson said.  “It’s funny.”

Despite Green’s worries, the song didn’t stop Lewis from achieving a career-defining moment: opening for Barack Obama at a February 2008 rally in downtown Austin.

“Yeah, but we didn’t sing that,” Lewis said.  “The dude booking the bands told me before, ‘I don’t want to have to pull the plug on you; this is a family event.’ I wasn’t going to do it though; I’ve got good judgment.”

Ramirez, whose baritone saxophone nearly rivals him in height, still marveled, “The first thing Obama did was thank us when he got on stage; it was really cool.”

By the time of that rally, the band already had experienced an only-in-Austin stroke of luck that helped put them on tastemakers’ radars.  Just a few months after officially forming, Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears played a show at hipster haven the Beauty Bar, unknowingly wowing Spoon front man Britt Daniel, who later asked them to open a local show for the band.

“Basically, they were kind of testing the waters,” Varley said.  “They did this secret show at the Mohawk and they were like, ‘We like these guys, but can we play together?’ ”

The young band were so psyched that they put on one of the most energetic shows they can remember, and Spoon asked Lewis to open the West Coast leg of their tour.

Frantic touring ensued, usually as the opening band for popular Austin acts such as What Made Milwaukee Famous and Okkervil River.  The entire band is what Lewis describes as “a riff band.” As they bust out covers and new material, Lewis is all teeth, smiling at an Ernst guitar solo or when Stevenson backs him up on vocals.  Varley’s lumbering frame leaves the keyboards to sing, too, and the horn section dance, stepping back and forth as though they were on “American Bandstand”.

Soon, labels lined up to capture the Honeybears’ sound on vinyl.  Americana heavyweights Lost Highway sealed the deal.  The label heavily promoted Lewis and Co.’s EP and recent debut album, a spring stalwart on indie radio and the source of a summer VH1 video for “Sugarfoot”. The song was referred to by more than one critic as “the best song James Brown never wrote.”

The band is still far from super famous or super rich.  Some members still telecommute for various freelance gigs, and Lewis kept his job at Quality Seafood until late last year.  He lives in a modest apartment with two roommates in North Austin.

“I don’t know, I might be able to afford my own place,” Lewis pondered before shaking his head. “I don’t want to risk it though.”

Someday though, he might not consider it such a risk.  Now fully confident in the sound he calls garage soul, he can envision a world tour someday.

“I think the future is whatever we make of it, as long as we keep playing good stuff,” he said.

His old friend and trumpet player Sluyter looks up and asks, “If you hadn’t met Zach, do you think you would have thrown in the towel?”