Thorne Dreyer : Houston Was an Unlikely '60s Hotbed

The staff of Space City!, Houston's late '60s-early '70s underground newspaper. Cover photo -- from the paper's June 8, 1971, issue -- by Jerry Sebesta. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Boys From Houston:
Bayou city was unlikely '60s hotbed

Houston may not have had a center, but it certainly had a heart. Montrose, still one of the great neighborhoods of the world, and long a haven for artists, homosexuals, and iconoclasts, became a bohemian mecca in the Sixties.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / August 15, 2013

[The following is reprinted from Vicki Welch Ayo's new book, Boys From Houston, about the city's thriving '60s music scene. Houston native Dreyer, now editor of The Rag Blog and host of Rag Radio, was active in alternative media and community organizing in late '60s-early '70s Houston. Also see Ivan Koop Kuper's Rag Blog review of The Boys From Houston.]

Houston was a fairly unlikely Sixties hotbed. A sprawling adolescent boomtown, the city had no real center and little sense of actual community (unless you were River Oaks old money and/or in the oil bidness). Austin, on the other hand, had long been a focus for literate and iconoclastic traditions and populist/left activism, geographically and culturally tied to the campus of the University of Texas.

Austin was a major point of origin for the massive student rebellion against the War in Vietnam, for the psychedelic music phenomenon, and for the underground press and comix movements. Austin, too, was très cool; it was beautiful and progressive and everyone in Texas who was born with the weird gene wanted to head for the hills of Central Texas.

Houston, not so much.

But by the late 1960’s/early ‘70s, Houston was really where it was happening in the Texas counterculture. There were several factors that played into this transformation (including an “us-versus-them” attitude that made for a strong and cohesive community).

First, lots of important music talent grew out of or was nurtured in Houston and East Texas, and Houston had a vital, organic club scene that provided outlets for that talent. Mike Condray, George Banks, and the Jubilee Hall-Family Hand-Liberty Hall continuum of clubs played an especially critical role in showcasing cutting edge roots-music talent from the region and around the country, and Anderson Fair -- which from its inception served as an organizing site for progressive politics -- would become one of the nation’s most important acoustic venues.

Billy Gibbons with Vicki
Ayo's Boys From Houston.

Although I first saw Janis Joplin in Austin -- at the UT student union’s weekly folksinging circle -- it was Houston’s Jubilee Hall that initiated me into the transformative experience that was the Thirteenth Floor Elevators; Liberty Hall where I first saw Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bruce Springsteen; and Anderson Fair where I discovered Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and a raft of progressive folkies.

The Old Quarter was a pioneering acoustic venue, and David Adickes’ Love Street Light Circus held court to the psychedelic crowd and the likes of Bubble Puppy, Fever Tree, and Billy Gibbons’ Moving Sidewalks. Of Our Own brought in Phil Ochs and the MC5.

These weren’t just places to go hear music. They were an integral part of the scene; there was little separation between them and the community they served.

Second, Houston may not have had a center, but it certainly had a heart. Montrose, still one of the great neighborhoods of the world, and long a haven for artists, homosexuals, and iconoclasts, became a bohemian mecca in the Sixties, with a sense of community and a tolerance for diversity that were unique in the city.

It was an eclectic mix of elegant old houses and ramshackle apartment complexes, head shops and boutiques, strip clubs and burger joints, lively music venues and gay bars. There were galleries, museums, and folk art sites, hippie communes and esoteric enterprises like the Pagan Church, plus a Greenwich Village-type strip of bars and bistros with European fare. There were always block parties and outdoor concerts and guerrilla theater actions and anti-war demonstrations -- and longhairs, dude, abode!

And, if you really looked, you could find a place to live for well under $100 a month. With indoor plumbing!

Logo from Houston Scene.

Finally, and perhaps most important, was the role of underground newspaper Space City! -- with a significant assist from Pacifica radio station KPFT -- in spreading the word and creating an environment where the counterculture could thrive. Space City! (originally Space City News) helped to pull together “pockets of resistance” throughout the massive metropolitan area, provided otherwise-isolated hipsters with a sense of belonging, and was a primary source of information about community activities.

In the community-at-large, Space City! became the face of Houston’s thriving counterculture, as hundreds of young kids peddled the newspaper throughout the city -- at the corner of Montrose and Westheimer, on the University of Houston campus, at Hippie Hill in Hermann Park, and downtown at Market Square and Allen’s Landing.

Not only did the offices of Space City! serve as a de facto community center, but the paper also spun off a number of auxiliary counterculture institutions, including a drug crisis center, a food coop, several high school underground newspapers, and a community-run nonprofit rock ‘n roll hall, Of Our Own.

Also playing a key role in making Houston a happening place were noted painter Margaret Webb Dreyer, a peace activist and a prime mover in the Houston art scene, and her journalist husband, Martin. (Full disclosure: they also doubled as my parents.) Their Dreyer Galleries had, since the 50’s, been a gathering spot for Houston’s arts, literary, and academic types -- and liberal politicos like Houston’s young progressive mayor, Fred Hofheinz -- and now it became a center for the burgeoning peace movement.

Thorne Dreyer in the mid-Sixties. Photo by Robert Simmons. Image from Vicki Welch Ayo's Boys From Houston.

(Avant garde rockers the Red Krayola played [blasted!] at one Dreyer Galleries art opening, and legendary Houston folkie Don Sanders sang at the 1976 memorial homage to Maggie Dreyer, held at Houston’s Rothko Chapel.)

Houston was also home to an active -- and actively violent -- chapter of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. (It would later be revealed that the KKK had built a strong and abiding presence inside the Houston police department.) The Klan targeted the Houston counterculture, with most of the city’s peace organizations feeling its wrath. Klansmen shot bullets through the front door of Dreyer Galleries after throwing yellow paint on the front wall of the converted old house on San Jacinto. The offices of Space City! were bombed and some of the paper’s advertisers were threatened and their shops riddled with bullets. Pacifica radio was twice bombed off the air by right wing nightriders.

Ironically, the work of the KKK scared nobody off, and if anything, the violent acts just seemed to strengthen the commitment of the peace activists and counterculture denizens -- and made the radical community even more cohesive and purposed.

To say nothing of providing a lot of free publicity!

[Thorne Dreyer is the editor of The Rag Blog and host of Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. A Houston native, Dreyer was a founding editor of underground newspapers The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston and was general manager of KPFT-FM, Houston's Pacifica radio station.]

• Also see "Vicki Welch Ayo's 'Boys From Houston' Documents a Thriving '60s Music Scene," by Ivan Koop Kuper in The Rag Blog.

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Ivan Koop Kuper : Stacy and Bunni: A Montrose Love Story

Stacy Sutherland tombstone, Center Point, Texas. Image from Mindspring.com.
Stacy and Bunni:
A Montrose love story

If Stacy Sutherland of the 13th Floor Elevators were alive he'd be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / March 31, 2011

HOUSTON -- On the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in the east Montrose section of Houston is a vacant lot with an untended vegetable garden. The lot was the previous site of a Craftsman-era bungalow that was recently demolished due to neglect. In this house lived Stacy Sutherland, lead guitarist of Texas’ legendary psychedelic music pioneers, the 13th Floor Elevators, and if Sutherland were alive, he would be celebrating his 65th birthday this May.

Known as the soft-spoken member of the band, when the introspective Sutherland did choose to express himself, he did so not only with his thick central Texas drawl, but also with his reverb-drenched leads that cut through the band’s wall of sound, and whose sustained notes seemed like they would never end.

His signature guitar style appeared on four 13th Floor Elevator albums and countless live performances from Austin to San Francisco. But Sutherland had another side of his personality he kept hidden deep inside and that was known only to those close to him.

Stacy Sutherland. Image from Emerald Wood Archives / Flickr.

Montrose is a neighborhood still in transition whose early 20th century architecture has all but vanished. Once considered a “hippie neighborhood,” by the late 1970s this inner city community was approaching the eve of gentrification, with each neglected bungalow soon to be torn down and replaced with several modern townhouses per city lot with no particular continuity regarding their style or design.

Long time Montrose resident and small business owner Robert Novotney recalls a Montrose in the 1970s when rents were “cheap” and a party atmosphere prevailed in the neighborhood seven days a week. He also recalls a “repressive” police force that was always on the lookout for “longhairs” to harass and search, as well as a neighborhood where home invasion by the criminal element was a common occurrence.

“I was broken into once and I had friends that were always getting broken into because they had these nice stereos that you could hear from the street because nobody had air-conditioning back then and they always kept their windows open and it invited burglaries,” Novotney said.


Stacy Sutherland’s all too short life journey can be traced back to his early days in central Texas, when he used to skip high school and practice guitar all day on the banks of the Guadalupe River that flowed through his family’s ranch in Kerr County. Sutherland also spent a brief period in Port Aransas one summer performing with the Lingsmen, a band that included future Elevator drummer John Ike Walton, as well as future bassist, Benny Lynn Thurman.

When Sutherland joined the 13th Floor Elevators, his personal journey took him from the live music clubs of Austin in the 1960s, to the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium of San Francisco and eventually to Houston, where he found himself out of money, out of luck, and on the skids.

The 13th Floor Elevators performed together from 1965 to 1969. The band’s core membership and songwriting collaboration always included Sutherland on lead guitar; Roky Erickson, vocalist and rhythm guitar; and Tommy Hall, electric jug, lyricist, and spiritual advisor.

They were just your average Texas rock band that openly proselytized the use of the psychotropic drug LSD as a vehicle to higher consciousness, and who spread their message through their music and lifestyle. They were also one of the first bands of their era to use the term “psychedelic,” and when the 13th Floor Elevators were guests on “American Bandstand” in 1966 promoting their breakout single, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” a naive Dick Clark asked Tommy Hall, “Who is the head man here?” Hall then smugly replied, “We’re all heads.”


Sutherland was a survivor. He survived the turmoil of being in a band signed to a record label whose owners engaged in questionable business practices, numerous arrests for drug possession, an addiction to heroin, and seven months of incarceration in the Eastham Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections near Huntsville. In exile from his central Texas home of Kerrville, in 1975 Sutherland decided to find refuge and a change of scenery in Houston.

Houston was very familiar turf to Sutherland. The 13th Floor Elevators recorded in Houston studios, as well as performed countless concerts in Houston nightclubs. The band also lived communally for a time in an old mansion located on Old Galveston Road owned by their record label and known as “Funky Mansions.” However, what really drew Sutherland to Houston after the demise of the Elevators was the fact that it was home to Ann Elizabeth “Bunni” Bunnell.

Ann Elizabeth "Bunni" Bunnell. Photo courtesy of Jim Hord.
“She was brilliant and a member of MENSA,” said longtime friend and former Montrose neighbor, Jim Hord, “but she couldn’t handle the everyday little things in life. Bunni displayed bad judgment in men and had a lot of slimeball friends.”

Bunnell was a New Jersey transplant to Texas whom Sutherland initially met in the late 1960s during the time he lived in Funky Mansions. She was an “exotic dancer” who took the name “Bunni” when she danced at the “Boobie Rock” on Houston’s lower Westheimer Road. Bunnell was now working as a typist supporting herself and her two children from a previous marriage, and studying to be a court reporter at night.

Sutherland and Bunnell rekindled their relationship in the summer of 1976, and settled into east Montrose where rents were affordable, drugs were plentiful, and crime was rampant. The next year, on Sutherland’s 31st birthday, May 28, the couple married, traveled to central Texas to visit family and friends, and then returned to Houston to resume their domestic routine of volatility and substance abuse.

“Stacy had a very bad temper and the alcohol brought out the worst in him,” said Hord who now resides in Waco, “but Stacy and Bunni brought out the worst in each other. The house was always dirty, and it was infested with roaches. Bunni wasn’t the best housekeeper. Every time I went over to visit, the condition of the house used to really bug me. Bunni had some really bad times in her life, but the time spent with Stacy was the worst.”

516 Pacific Street, The Montrose, Houston. Photo courtesy of Paul Drummond.
Hord remembers Sutherland as someone always toying with the idea of putting another band together, but who went to extreme measures to forgo actually playing music during this unproductive time period. As a frustrated Sutherland sat on his front porch, neighbors were known to come up to him and ask for an autograph, which served as a reminder of by-gone days in the spotlight.

“I don’t remember ever hearing Stacy play guitar when I went over to visit. He used to talk about drugs a lot. He had a fascination with drugs, and he would do anything that came his way. Bunni once told me that when she and Stacy used to go out bar hopping in the neighborhood, Stacy would bandage his hand before leaving the house, and when people would buy him drinks and ask him to play guitar with the band, he would have an excuse not to play and sit in with them, choosing to drink all night instead,” Hord said.

By 1978, the Sutherlands were at an all-time low in their on again, off again relationship, and in the early morning hours of August 24, after a full day of drinking and arguing, Bunnell shot Sutherland in the kitchen of their east Montrose bungalow. The bullet severed a major artery causing massive internal bleeding. Later that day, the Houston Chronicle included the following story:

A Montrose resident was shot to death today in his residence at 516 Pacific Street. Police identified the victim as Stacy Keith Sutherland, 33. Shot once in the stomach with a .22 caliber rifle, at 3:30 a.m., Sutherland died at 5:07 a.m. in Ben Taub Hospital.

Officers arrested a 34-year-old woman at the scene. No charges have been filed.

Hord believes that Bunnell’s actions were taken as a measure of defense to protect her teenaged son who was staying with them at the time from an irrational acting and inebriated Sutherland.

“Stacy was making threatening remarks and acting belligerent towards Bunni’s 15-year-old son,” recounts Hord, “and when Stacy lunged at Bunni in an attempt to enter her son’s bedroom, she pulled the trigger to the .22 rife that the couple kept in the house for protection against burglars.”

On April 10, 1981, after seeing evidence and hearing arguments from council, the Honorable Judge Frank Price of the 209th District Court of Harris County issued a motion for dismissal to Ann Elizabeth Sutherland for the murder of Stacy Sutherland.

More than two years had passed from the time Bunnell was indicted for the felony offense by a Houston grand jury, and according to Bunnell’s attorney, Audley H. Heath, “because more than 120 days had passed since the commencement of the action, the defendant was entitled to a dismissal of the indictment filed in the cause in accordance with the ‘Speedy Trial Act of 1974’ of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.” This statute was later repealed by the Supreme Court of Texas in 2005.


Sutherland died before experiencing the worldwide recognition and the accolades now paid to him and the 13th Floor Elevators from adoring fans, musicians, and the music press. Their music has found a new audience from an entirely new generation, that discovered the band and the body of work they recorded, from that brief moment in time they performed together.

Sutherland is buried at Center Point Cemetery near his family’s ranch in Kerr County, not far from where he used to practice his guitar on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Bunnell eventually became a court reporter, remarried and continued to live in the house at the corner of Pacific and Hopkins streets in east Montrose where she died of cancer in 1987 at age 43.

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu. Find more articles by Ivan Koop Kuper on The Rag Blog]

Also see:

• Mesmo's Reflections on the Sixties by Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008
• Roky Erickson to Houston: Return of 'Two-Headed Dog' by Andrew Dansby / Houston Chronicle / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2009
• Long Strange Trip: Austin's 13th Floor Elevators and Still Trippin' Tommy Hall by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2009
• Austin Rock Musician Benny Thurman Dead at 65 by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2008

The 13th Floor Elevators -- Tommy, Bennie, Rocky and Stacy -- at the New Orleans Club in Austin, 1965. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.
Roky Erickson, Stacy Sutherland, and John Ike Walton perform at La Maison in Houston in May or June, 1966. Image from last.fm.
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Houston Pride : 2010 Parade is Horse of Different Color

Houston gay and lesbian community -- and friends -- stage a massive and joyous Pride Parade in the Montrose neighborhood, for the 31st straight year. Photos by Bill Maxey / The Rag Blog.
(And the cops manage to hold their horses)
Massive pride parade in the Montrose

By Bill Maxey / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2010

HOUSTON -- Every June for the past three decades Houston has put on a boisterous street party that starts with a daytime festival of performers and artists and ends in a nighttime parade of floats and marchers, celebrities and politicians.

The all-day event sponsored by the city’s well organized gay and lesbian community draws tens of thousands of Houstonians to the historic Montrose district, where my wife Kirste and I live, and testifies to the city’s reputation as a cosmopolitan oasis in a state better known for its red-necked cowboys, Lone Star beer, and Saturday-night lounge shootings.

Last weekend’s Pride Parade, like the 30 before it, was a noisy, high-spirited but peaceful procession that wound its way past the Mexican restaurants, small antique shops, and neon tattoo parlors on Westheimer, the major east-west artery that slices through Montrose. Some crowd estimates were well over 150,000. But unlike last year’s parade, clumps of two, four, five police officers stood watch on the crowd at nearly every intersection, the red lights atop their squad cars pulsating.

More barricades than last year’s number were set up by the city, the better to gently control the crowd of onlookers. And members of the Houston Police Department’s Mounted Patrol -- whose 1,200-pound gelding Kato trampled Kirste at last year’s parade, were barely seen this year.

Kirste and I own a 1920s bungalow in Montrose, recently honored as one of the country's 10 great neighborhoods. We count Annise Parker, Houston’s mayor, as a neighbor, and in previous times the late Walter Cronkite and Howard Hughes lived nearby.

So last year, we hopped on our bikes and pedaled over to Stanford street where we met our neighbors, a group of single and married couples, some with children and others without. It was to be a night of fun.

The 2009 parade began, heading east on Westheimer, and we cheered as it passed us, the crowd numbering an estimated 80,000 people. Few officers on foot were present. There were no barricades on that section of Westheimer. Kirste was busy snapping photos with her iPhone, but she soon discovered that headlights on the floats caused glare and her pictures looked better if she faced towards the east, away from the marchers. And then it happened.

A trio of Houston police officers on horseback approached from the west. Led by Officer P. Hernandez riding his mount Kato, they turned into the onlookers assembled along Westheimer and used their animals to force back the surprised spectators, many of whom were cheering as loud music blared from the floats. The police officers did not use any whistles or other sound-making devices for crowd control. So, the people were immediately confronted with two choices: either step back or be trampled. And my dear wife, facing the opposite direction, never saw what hit her.

The next day, June 28, 2009, a Houston Chronicle article reported: "Police say the officers, and the horses, were just doing their jobs. ‘The woman wasn’t kicked, stepped on or trampled,’ HPD spokeswoman Jodi Silva said.” Despite what Silva told the reporter, however, several dozen witnesses watched in horror as Kirste was repeatedly kicked and stomped by the skittish, out-of-control Kato. During the subsequent police internal affairs probe, an investigator told me that an officer on foot said she saw the horse strike Kirste in the back of her head and knock her to the ground.

An ambulance took Kirste to the emergency room that night. She suffered deep bruising on her arms, legs, and torso. Her forehead was swollen with knots the size of tennis balls as was the back of her head. And she had a hole from a deep cut to her chin that went through into her mouth.

But she survived the assault -- and for that I am thankful. And so here we are, nearly a year later, her bruises have healed and dozens of dentist visits are behind her. She still has temporary teeth, and faces multiple years of orthodontic work ahead of her, as well as reconstructive surgery to her chin.

Bill Maxey (in blue shirt) comforts wife Kirste (in purple) after she was trampled by Kato -- the brown and white paint in foreground -- ridden by officer P. Hernandez, during the 2009 Houston Pride Parade. Photo by Tony Morris.

See more pictures of the incident, Below.

It’s odd sometimes that a person in shock will focus on issues that seem inconsequential. Kirste recalls asking herself in the ambulance, “Where are my shoes? I’m supposed to usher tomorrow at Trinity Episcopal, I have to be there. I want to tell the police officer that I forgive him. I can’t leave without telling him.”

After the shock wore off, important questions remained unanswered. HPD has never explained, for instance, why the Mounted Patrol decided it was necessary to turn their horses into the peaceful crowd. Or why at first, until multiple witnesses came forward, did the police department’s public affairs office release statements to the media that the trampling never even occurred. Other questions remain unanswered by Houston officials, among them:

• Why did no police officer offer to render first-aid to my wife, despite the fact that all HPD officers are given first-aid training? A Good Samaritan helped me pick Kirste up and carry her safely away from the agitated Mounted Patrol’s horses. Eventually the ranking officer on the scene, Lt. Randall Wallace, dismounted and watched as civilians attempted to stop the bleeding.
• Did HPD last year use different procedures for the Pride parade than it used for other parades?
• Why has the HPD refused to inform Kirste and me of the results of its internal affairs investigation?

Houston surely is no stranger to parades, but perhaps our city could look to the manner in which nighttime parades are managed in New Orleans, where they have been a way of life since the 1830s. Crowd control there is managed by a large police presence, primarily on foot. Yet Lt. Wallace was quoted in the Chronicle as saying that about 20 officers were scheduled to patrol last year’s Pride Parade on foot that night but they “didn’t make it.” Why not? Did the shortage of officers cause the mounted patrol to become overly aggressive?

So, in the aftermath of this year’s Pride Parade, another question arises: Did the HPD and Houston city government make any changes in parade planning or security procedures?

A couple days before the parade, Mayor Parker, who rode in the city’s first Pride Parade in 1979, made it clear to me that she had turned down my request to replace the Mounted Patrol with the department’s Bicycle Patrol at the parade. Then she said:

Mr. Maxey, I personally observed the actions of the Mounted Patrol at last year’s Pride parade, (and) don't think they were in the best interests of public safety and crowd control purposes at all times. They will be at this parade, but I hope that they will return to the professional behavior that has made them a benefit to the parade in previous years.

I must ask, would this behavior be acceptable if a small child had been trampled by a police mount at the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade?

My wife and I are both native Houstonians, and we love our city. We are fortunate to have health insurance which paid for the initial emergency room charges, and the means to pay out of pocket for the dental work. The financial costs have been considerable, and the bills will continue to amass in the months ahead. But it’s not always about the money; sometimes it’s about making sure that our public servants are doing the right thing.

Kirste feels strongly that she needs to speak out and that the HPD still needs to implement better parade policies and procedures. I agree. She and I have appeared before the Houston City Council to tell her story and ask for changes in police procedure.

As the recently concluded Pride Parade rolled past me last Saturday night, I recalled her request that the City of Houston erect more crowd barricades. It did add another block of barricades. But the line of barriers stopped 10 feet from where Kirste was attacked by Kato last year.

And the horses of the Mounted Patrol were quartered on the side street behind me; their role this year reduced to that of spectators.

[Bill Maxey and his wife, Kirste Reimers, are native Houstonians who own a 1920-era bungalow in the near-downtown Montrose district, where the annual Pride Parade takes place. Maxey owns an electronic systems integration firm, and can be reached at bmaxey2005@yahoo.com.]

Cop horses trampled Kirste Maxey, sending her to the emergency room, during 2009 Pride Parade. Photos by Tony Morris.
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