“I CAN’T TALK ABOUT IT, BRUDDAH,” HUEY MEAUX said to me. The man who was once the single most important figure in popular music in Texas was sitting on an aluminum stool in the squalid fifth-floor visiting room of the Harris County jail. This was his first interview since he was arrested—charged with child pornography, having sex with minors, and cocaine possession—and then recaptured after jumping bail and spending a month on the lam.
The 67-year-old Meaux winked at me and gestured at the round metal
speakerphone as if it were bugged.
“I just can’t say anything right now,
bruddah,” he said. His voice was subdued, though still laced with a
thick Cajun accent. But the fear in his eyes, the tentative glances, the
snow-white hair and eyebrows (which he used to dye dark brown), the
scraggly beard—this was not the colorful, larger-than-life producer of
dozens of Top Ten hits I had known for 22 years.
This was the Huey
Purvis Meaux I’d been reading about in the newspapers and had seen on
television. The one with the sordid double life he had hidden from
almost everyone.
Crazy Cajun's Last Show
KPFT 1974
Huey P. Meaux's last Friday night oldies show on KPFT right before he went large with Freddy Fender's Before the Next Teardrop Falls.
KPFT was downtown in the old Atlanta Life Building back then, and legendary RAG publisher, Thorne Dreyer was the station manager.
Huey did a 3 hour show every Friday, 9-midnight, playing old records (some that he produced), telling personal experience stories about them, and sometimes talking over them in a kinda 50s bebop radio style that nobody did any more.
For almost an hour of every show, he also read letters from the boys in white, inmates in Texas prisons, where he once resided....
"you betta show blieve it!"
Huey Meaux was the top record producer in Texas. Nobody knew about his sordid, secret life—not even me.
JERRY LEE LEWIS Huey Meaux (Coonass Bastard)
Wow, brings back memories. I was a full-time News Dept intern at KPFT in the summer of 1974, and used to always hang around Friday night to watch Huey Meaux do his thing. What fun times. He truly played the Crazy Cajun role to the hilt. Like you can see/hear on this clip (e.g., while he's playing Chantilly Lace and Stoop Down Baby), he'd turn his microphone on during a song and interject his comments and squeals and shout-outs.
He'd always have at least one beautiful, buxom young lady with him.
I remember him reading fan mail from prisoners who loved his show (he himself had been in jail for some minor stuff ... and later went to jail for major stuff). I recall him spinning the hell out of what was then a brand new record he produced, Freddy Fender's version of "Before the Next Teardrop Falls."
Oh, and that's Drivin' Ivan Kuper at the controls... old school.
Update:
At age 82, Huey died April 23, 2011 at his home in Winnie, Texas.
No matter how it all ended up, no matter what you thought of him, you gotta admit he was a character, an original, a one of a kind.
grisly #hueymeaux article from Texas Monthly https://t.co/TWF82jZhrG— mrjyn (@mrjyn) July 11, 2018
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