On a frontage road to the I-5 freeway, in Anaheim, the stretch known locally as the Santa Ana Freeway, sat a real honest to God “honky tonk” known as Linda’s Doll Hut. The place was sandwiched between a kind of run-down industrial park and a road sign telling drivers speeding by that they were just one off-ramp away from Disneyland.

On Sunday afternoons in November and December 2002 through 2003 this dive would become the happiest place on earth. Something very special was happening at the Doll Hut. Adventurous musicians were exploring the frontier land of music that was eerily familiar, yet fresh and new at the same time.

Upon entering the tiny roadhouse, you were greeted by a combination of smells, all of them stale. These odors all had origins associated with the life cycles of beer and cigarettes. To the right was the area where the musicians would set up. To refer to that part of the room as a stage or a bandstand would be a stretch by anyone’s wildest imagination. It might be at this point that you noticed that the ceiling was so low that it gave the illusion a double upright bass might have trouble standing upright.

The tiny free-standing building was surrounded by a small gravel parking lot and an asymmetrical patio whose only ambiance was the fence, which was festooned with barbed wire.  

The place wasn’t much, but it didn’t need to be much.

It was here that magic happened in these modest, yet entirely appropriate surroundings for such an occasion. Southern California based musicians Chris Gaffney and Dave Gonzalez had been working on an idea for a new band for some time. Sunday afternoons at the Doll Hut would be the spot where tune up shows and a pot luck would take place in advance of the first album and tour of the now legendary Hacienda Brothers.

Over the next six years the band would record three exciting studio albums and a stunning live album. They maintained a busy live performance schedule, thrilling audiences all over the world with their blend of American music. The honest to goodness “buzz” that followed this band everywhere came to an immediate, sudden and unexpected end when Chris Gaffney passed away in the spring of 2008.  

Gaffney had been a fixture on the Southern California music scene for years. He was always hard to classify or pin down. His band, Chris Gaffney and the Cold Hard Facts played every dive on the wrong side of paradise for years. The wildly eclectic “Gaff”, as he was known amongst friends, could toggle between songs by Joe Ely, Duke Ellington, Hank Williams, T-Bone Walker, Johnny Paycheck and Ray Price all in the same set mind you. Nobody this side of Doug Sahm could pull this genre hopping off with the unapologetic grace of Chris Gaffney.

There wasn’t a single word in his vocal vocabulary that didn’t ring of truth. Gaffney sang like he had emotional baggage. You didn’t just hear his music, you felt it. He played guitar and a bluesy accordion. I’ll bet you didn’t know that such a thing even existed. It did and it didn’t sound like anybody else.

He teamed up with Dave Gonzalez to form this new band. Gonzalez was the co-founder of the Paladins.   He, along with a high school buddy out of San Diego, bassist Thomas Yearsly, put together a band that gave you everything one could ask for on a Saturday night. They combined blues, rockabilly, rhythm & blues and good old-fashioned rock & roll. They put a boot down hard on the gas pedal and left it there all night long.

Gonzalez was the principal vocalist, songwriter and band leader of the Paladins. However, it was his big hollow body Gretsch that was the real star of the show. He played it with such relentless ferocity one might miss the fact that he could take that big rig down any thoroughfare of his choosing. From a dusty dirt road near Bakersfield to Jackson Highway in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and beyond you can hear the guitar of Dave Gonzalez.

In discussing the Hacienda Brothers, Gonzalez said, “When second guitar player Teddy Morgan moved to Nashville from Tucson is when we came back out to California and were looking for some tune up shows every so often. Gaff suggested the Doll Hut. So, I called over there and said that we would like to do some gigs on a Sunday. They explained that they weren’t open on Sunday’s. When I told them, it was me and Gaff…well let’s just say they were now open on Sunday’s.” Gonzalez estimated that they played there about forty times in a two-year period.

Back in December of 2002, while sampling some posole, which Gonzalez brought up from his home in San Diego, I asked the guitarist and occasional vocalist what this new band was all about. He lit up like a Christmas tree. “Western Soul,” he almost shouted with uncharacteristic bravado. He let his words hang there for a moment. Having heard the band’s first set, I told this uber talented musician that they had created a genre which only they inhabited.

Looking back on it, I was wrong. The band, like the Cold Hard Facts and the Paladins in their own way, destroyed any notion of genres. Then you have that long history of soul singers doing country music.  Arthur Alexander and Solomon Burke are just two names that come immediately to mind. As folks milled around the Doll Hut on that unusually, warm, winter day, terms like “alt-country”…“countrypolitan” and “southwest honky tonk” were on the lips of the neo hipster, PBR guzzling crowd. Whatever you call it, nobody was making music quite like the Hacienda Brothers.

One of the things that made those gigs special was the fact that out of necessity it was a pot luck. The Doll Hut didn’t have a kitchen or full bar for that matter. They had beer. As Gonzalez reminded me, “Gaff made the best macaroni and cheese. He was a real good cook. He would tighten it up and could get it just right. People would bring fried chicken, different home-made salsas and chili. Chili goes really good with beer.”

I revisited those heady days from the very early part of this new century as a brand-new Hacienda Brothers compilation CD made its way into our library here at the JUNCTION. This 16-song collection entitled Western Soul includes original demo selections, rough mixes of the band’s debut album and unreleased studio tracks, along with two alternate takes. The album was compiled and produced by Tucson based Americana music empresario Jeb Schoonover.

In discussing the new album with Gonzalez recently he said, “There is a lot of cool magic going on with that thing. At first I had trouble listening to it because Gaff was such a great guy and I still miss him so much.” 

On that Indian summer day in Anaheim the band hadn’t quite settled on a name yet. They had been known briefly in their infancy as the Tucson Ramblers and that in many ways seems appropriate. They would soon settle on the Hacienda Brothers which would help to alleviate any regional confusion. While Gonzalez has relatives from Tucson, he, like all of the other members of the band, is a Californian.

No place in America is more southwest than Southern California, but that is only from a Rand McNally perspective. Tucson, sitting in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, surrounded by rugged mountains and saguaro cactus, is where the southwest lives, eats, breathes, and passes wind.  It is also the real birthplace of the Hacienda Brothers.

“We had been talking about doing it for about ten years before we actually did it. Jeb kept pushing us, he said, 'You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do this.' Then right out of the shoot we wrote ‘I’m So Proud.’” 

I caught up with Jeb Schoonover who had befriended Dave Gonzalez many years earlier. He described hanging out with the musician at his home in Tucson and listening to old records. Schoonover said, “All Dave wanted to do was a listen to country music for hours at a time.”

Schoonover described one evening when the two sat down and listened to old country music records at his digs known as the Honky Tonk Hacienda. On this evening, like all other listening sessions, barbeque and tequila went down nicely while listening to Ray Price, Johnny Paycheck, George Jones, Waylon Jennings and others for five hours. Then the pair shifted to vintage soul albums. These included records by Bobby Bland, O.V. Wright, Otis Redding and Solomon Burke.  

It is then they discussed putting a band together that could play a hybrid of these twin giants of American music. When the subject came up of who they could bring in to sing in such a band, Schoonover said, “We both looked at one another and I swear to God, we both said at the exact same time, Chris Gaffney.”

Schoonover had already worked with Gaffney going all the way back to 1987. Gonzalez and Gaff would play together in Tucson for the first time at Shoonover’s 40^th birthday party in October 2002 at a little dive bar in downtown Tucson on Congress Avenue.  The collective timing and circumstances seemed right for a formation of a new band and that is exactly what Gaffney and Gonzalez did. They put their other bands on hold for the time being. Although Gaff continued to tour with Dave Alvin and his Guilty Men.

In 2003, towards the end of their run at the Doll Hut they were again looking for a steel guitar player. As Gonzalez pointed out, “We had several real good steel players go through the band, but Dave Berzansky’s name came up as somebody we should check out.” He came highly recommended and they tried him out at a private party gig down in Escondido.

As soon as he started playing both he and Gaff looked at one another and as Gonzalez said, “We knew we had our man. He had the tone, the feel and most importantly, he loved to play the old stuff.”  Gonzalez told Dave Berzansky, “We need you to do one more gig at the Doll Hut next week and then go over to Tuscon with us to make a record.” Their rhythm section consisted of bassist Hank Maninger and drummer Dale Daniel. As Gonzalez put it, “All the pieces fell into place.”

I asked Gonzalez about the one piece that really caught a lot of people’s attention around the country, and that was the addition of Dan Penn as the band’s producer.

“I first met Dan backstage on a festival in Europe. I was with the Paladins and he was playing with Spooner (Oldham) at that festival. He and Spooner, as well as the Paladins, had the same European distribution company out of Holland. Dan and I hit it off immediately. We stayed in touch. Every time the Paladins would go through Nashville we got together, have lunch, maybe just visit at his house or studio.

I never thought of asking him to produce a record. I thought this guy doesn’t want to produce a rockabilly album. But when we started mixing country and soul music and made a few demos I thought we really need a producer. Jeb said to me, ‘Why don’t you just ask Dan Penn? You know the guy.’ I thought wait a minute, that’s a tall order, but I knew the songs were good. One Sunday morning I drove up to Gaff’s house. We were getting together to go over and do a show at the Doll Hut. We talked about mailing the four-song demo to Dan.

Here’s the thing; Dan told me if you ever want to do anything musically, you have to come see me. I’m into hanging out. Those were his exact words. He went on to say that he didn’t like getting songs in the mail and didn’t want anything to do with the computer.

Dan was into old cars and, of course, music. I had an old DeSoto and we spent as much time talking about old cars as we did music. One day I picked up the phone and started to give Dan an update on some work I was doing at the time with the DeSoto. I then slipped in the fact that we had made a four-song demo that I had just mailed to him.”

Wallace Daniel Pennington was born in 1941 near Muscle Shoals, Alabama. By the time he was barely twenty years old, he was the exclusive house song writer for Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals. He went on to work out of Chip Moman’s American Studios in Memphis before moving to Nashville.

Along the way he would write songs that were covered by artists as diverse as Ronnie Milsap and Bobby Bland, (I Hate You) and Out of Left Field which was recorded by Percy Sledge and Hank Williams Jr. He wrote Do Right Woman, Do Right Man that was famously recorded by Aretha Franklin as well as I’m Your Puppet by James and Bobby Purify, Dark End of the Street by James Carr and Cry Like a Baby by the Box Tops. You Left the Water Running was recorded by Barbara Lynn, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave as well as Otis Redding. There wasn’t anybody, or so it seemed, that didn’t want to record a Dan Penn song. He had already developed a reputation as a reliable producer and in the meantime became an icon of American music.

That icon was soon be in a Lincoln Town Car heading west from Nashville to Tucson while Gonzalez and Gaff were in that 57’ DeSoto heading east from Southern California to the same place…the Honky Tonk Hacienda.

“We were very lucky to have him. He is such a beloved figure in American music. Everybody loves Dan Penn, especially songwriters.,” said Gonzalez.

The Hacienda Bothers seemed to be a natural progression of what Dan Penn spent a lifetime doing in the record business. Yet, this band placed an emphasis on the western side of country-western music.  There is a decidedly western approach and feel to the music of the Hacienda Brothers.

Gonzalez told me, “Gaff always thought of himself as a western singer. There is just something about the southwest. There is a different feeling. The air is dryer, the desolation and the wide-open spaces, all of this is what makes the western sound.”

He went on to tell me about a special place called Gates Pass. It is where he wrote two instrumentals which close out the first two studio albums by the band. The songs entitled Saguaro and Son of Saguaro were written by Gonzalez there.

 “You go way up outside of Tucson and this road cuts through the mountain and at one point you can see all of Tucson down below and on the other side the Saguaro National Park. We used to go up there all the time just to chill out and watch the sunsets which are spectacular.

One time, Dan and I went up there and we wrote Looking for Loneliness. We raced back down the mountain and recorded it with the band. The way Gaff delivers that song is very special. He had a lot of loneliness, desolation and pain in his voice. It wasn’t made up it came from the life he lived and the man he was.”

The “new” Hacienda Brothers album, Western Soul, which was released this past summer, opens with a hard driving honky tonk number, Mental Revenge, from the original demo sessions recorded at the Honky Tonk Hacienda. It is a song that Mel Tillis wrote for Waylon Jennings. Other highlights for me include a Fred Neil tune sung by Gaff entitled I’ve Got a Secret. As Gonzalez told me about that song, “Gaff could sing that with just with his own acoustic guitar accompaniment.” I happen to enjoy the “rough mix” and the way the band gently backs up the lyrics. Gonzalez’ baritone guitar for instance is the perfect foil for Gaff’s vocals and acoustic guitar here. Berzansky coaxes some beautiful, subtle lines on the steel. The rough mix on Looking for Loneliness is extremely poignant and moving. These three numbers were taken from songs on the band’s debut, 2005 self-titled release.

From the band’s 2006 follow up album the title track, the Gonzalez/Penn song What’s Wrong with Right has an alternate take on Western Soul. There is an alternate take on the Brothers’ version of the Gamble and Huff classic Cowboys to Girls on the recording as well. The original coming from the same album. It is great, but had me thinking about the version on 2007’s live album Music for Ranch and Town. That version was recorded at a festival in Oslo, Norway, in 2006. This song is a big slice of Philly soul that the Brothers turn into a tour de-force. That limited-edition live album may be my personal favorite from the Hacienda Brothers canon.

Arizona Motel, the band’s 2008 release came out right after the death of Chris Gaffney.

The release of Western Soul rekindled my interest in the Hacienda Brothers. This sixteen-track recording beautifully compiled and produced by Schoonover is a welcome addition to my CD library and kind of wraps up the legacy of one of the finest bands of the new millennium. It gave me a fresh perspective on some great old tunes.

In visiting with Dave Gonzalez, he summarized the concept of the Hacienda Brothers and Western Soul. He said, “David, you and I have talked about this before and you get it. During interviews back in the day Gaff and I would be asked, ‘How can you play country and soul music at the same time?’ I would say, soul music comes from gospel and blues and country comes from the same place. We like blues music that sounds like country and we like the country that sounds like blues, so what’s the big deal.’”   

To me the big deal is the Hacienda Brothers did it so well. The band spoke to everything I love about American music.

-  David Mac

Editor’s Note:This piece is dedicated to the memory of Chris Gaffney.

The Hacienda Brothers will be performing more reunion shows…Friday ,November 15^th, at the Continental Club in Austin, Texas, and in New Braunfels, Texas, at Gruene Hall on Sunday, November 17^th.  For future dates and venues check the Hacienda Brothers' website www.haciendabrothers.com. The album Western Soul is available at Bluebeat Music in both vinyl and CD format.