The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime by Gregg Olsen, Kathryn Casey, Rebecca Morris Read Free Book Online

country blues and the lighter strains of country rock. A congregation of the faithful filled the tables and the bar.
    At center stage, John Vandiver dug deeply into the thick, low tones of the early blues he loved. His strong hands, callused from years of work on his ranch, picked authoritatively at the strings of an old Gibson F-hole guitar, which, singer B.W. Stevenson says, “Johnny could make sound real funky.” With his old friends Shake Russell, the whiskey-voiced Texas country rocker, and the bass player Michael Mashkes, a.k.a. Marcello Marconi, Vandiver joined in on songs he used to perform nightly in the Seventies.
    John Vandiver spent twenty of his thirty-nine years playing on the Texas music circuit. He was one of those musicians who were always poised on the brink of success but who never quite made it. “There were people of much greater success who considered Johnny their peer,” says folk star David Bromberg, who’s recorded with the likes of Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan. Bromberg would occasionally play with Vandiver when he was in Texas. “I myself was very happy to be known as Johnny Vandiver’s guitar player.”
    Over the years, Vandiver had played beside the hierarchy of Texas good-time music, including Jerry Jeff Walker and Michael Martin Murphey. He made local television appearances and recorded with Shake Russell and his country-rock band. Vandiver’s music hadn’t made him rich, but he seemed content. Besides, there were other ways to make money.
    At the end of the performance, Vandiver swept his gray flannel racing cap off his head and bowed to the crowd. Out of the cap’s crown flew two tightly twisted joints, which he scrambled to recover. Standing upright again, Vandiver looked around the room, smiled sheepishly and said, “Hell, you people probably already knew that about me.”
    The crowd roared with friendly recognition.
    Vandiver’s musical career began in the Sixties, when music was intertwined with love, peace, and drugs. His career continued through the Seventies – the heyday of Texas music – and into the leaner, cocaine-fueled Eighties. While friends and fellow musicians like Bromberg and Walker had gone on to national prominence, Vandiver remained a local star. But he found a way to supplement his modest musical income. In his final days, Vandiver was playing two circuits: the Texas bars and music halls and the drug route from Florida to Colorado.
    JOHN VANDIVER GREW UP IN DALLAS, IN A DEVOUT Church of Christ family. After high school he attended Fort Worth Christian College for two years and then transferred to Oklahoma Christian College, in Oklahoma City, on a choir scholarship. He flunked out after only one semester because he spent most of his nights and weekends playing folk and blues in the local Okie bars.
    He returned to Texas and joined his first group, a jug band called the Dallas County Outpatients, which also featured Michael Murphey and Steve Fromholz. By 1966, when Vandiver was twenty-one, he was playing solo in a small Dallas coffeehouse called the Rubaiyat. It was a breeding ground for musicians who would later become the vanguard of the "Austin sound' or the progressive country-rock movement of the Seventies. “We were all about the same age and had a lot in common,” says Fromholz. “We loved good-time music and would play it anywhere, any time.”
    In May 1967, Vandiver and his wife, Diana, packed their belongings into a camper and left Texas for Coral Gables, Florida, where he had a gig at a coffeehouse called the Flick. Vandiver was the opening act, comedian Gabe Kaplan who later starred in Welcome Back, Kotter with John Travolta, was next on the bill, and the Ewing Street Times, with Michael Mashkes, a wiry, longhaired bass player from Chicago, closed the show. Vandiver would soon become the lead singer of the Times.
    Living was easy in Coral Gables during those years. David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, Dion and John Sebastian congregated there, along with