The Comeback Kid

The expression “keep on keepin’ on” has a beads-and-incense, hippie-era tinge to it, but it’s hard to think of a phrase that better sums up the life of Ronnie Dawson, a bristle-cut, twangy-voiced Texan who is a throwback to and a remnant of the early days of rock ‘n’ roll.

As a teenager in the 1950s, Dawson scratched out a small footnote for himself in rock’s early history by playing stripped-down rockabilly music. At 17, he was a local hero in Dallas, sharing hometown stages with--and usurping some of the applause from--such touring stars as Elvis Presley, Johnny Horton, Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb. But in 1960, bad business luck, reverberating from that year’s congressional payola inquiry into the music industry, cut Dawson off when he was on the verge of a shot at the national limelight.

He was left in obscurity, but not exiled from music. For nearly 30 years, Dawson played a mixture of rock ‘n’ roll and country music, sang on commercials for local TV and remained what he had wanted to be since earliest childhood: a career musician.

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Over the past 10 years, ‘50s-style music has made a comeback, and so has Dawson. Now, at 57, he is riding the retro-rock wave in style with “Just Rockin’ & Rollin’,” a delightful new album that pumps out ‘50s rockabilly with both the authenticity of the true throwback, and the vitality and enthusiasm of a performer whose moment is very much in the here-and-now. (Dawson plays Saturday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, opening for Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys, and headlines Monday at Linda’s Doll Hut.)

“Just Rockin”’ is the fourth release of Dawson material since 1987, when he began his comeback as a touring rocker. The spark came from an English collector/label owner’s regard for the handful of obscure singles issued during Dawson’s short stretch in the late ‘50s as a rock ‘n’ roll contender. Now, with his national touring, Dawson in his late 50s is starting to get some of the attention that escaped him in his late teens.

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When he was a small boy in Waxahachie, Texas, 28 miles south of Dallas, his father, Pinky Dawson, played upright bass and led a band that played western swing on the radio.

“As soon as I saw him playing and heard the music, there was no doubt in my mind,” Dawson said of his decision to take after his dad. “I don’t know of a day in my life that I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

Dawson’s training was well-rounded. He was influenced by the country music of Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell. He also recalls standing in the parking lot of a Dallas blues club, excluded by age (he was about 14) and race (the clubs were segregated) but eagerly taking in the sounds of players like Lightning Hopkins and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown from outside.

Sometimes, on Sundays, the Dawson family would go to two church services: One at their own Assembly of God church, where his mother led the singing, and a second at a black congregation, where the attraction was the gospel music.

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Dawson was still a small boy when his father gave up playing professionally, thinking he needed a steadier job to support his wife and their only son. As a teenager, Ronnie reestablished a Dawson presence on the Texas airwaves by winning a talent show and becoming a fixture on the Big D Jamboree, a live, weekly radio broadcast akin to the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride.

“We usually upstaged everyone,” Dawson said. “I was 17, looked like I was about 14, and had this young band with me, and we were really high-powered. We were favorites of the audience and got a lot of applause. We also got some jealousy. Webb Pierce didn’t like rock ‘n’ roll at all; we brought the house down and he didn’t want to follow us, so he left.”

In 1958, a Dallas label, Backbeat Records, put out a Dawson single. His regional buzz promised to become national when he was signed to Swan Records, co-owned by Dick Clark, the “American Bandstand” impresario.

The plan called for Swan to put out Dawson’s record and plug it by giving him a national forum on “Bandstand.” But Clark became entangled with the payola allegations, precluding the “Bandstand” exposure and derailing the promotional campaign for Dawson’s single. A few weeks before those setbacks, Dawson’s father had died of a heart attack.

“It was a very traumatic time,”Dawson recalled. “When [Clark] got investigated for payola [money offered disc jockeys to play records], he couldn’t touch the records as far as pushing them. I just figured, ‘It’s not my time.’ I had other things going. I got into a good-paying situation in a club in Dallas.”

Dawson spent the next 25 years as a Texas club entertainer, mixing folk, country and rock ‘n’ roll. He got a couple more record deals, releasing a blues single for Columbia Records in 1961 under the name Commonwealth Jones, and a country single for the same label in 1969.

Dawson grew his hair long and spent the ‘70s fronting a country-rock band called Steel Rail. He says overtures to Nashville and Los Angeles were rejected as too hard-rocking to be sold as country, and too country to be sold as rock.

When rockabilly first returned to the charts in the early ‘80s with the Stray Cats, Dawson wasn’t even paying attention. “I never even knew about it. I didn’t know who they were.”

It wasn’t until Barry Koumis, a British record collector, called him in 1986 that Dawson learned that anybody in the world beyond Dallas remembered or cared about his contributions to rockabilly music. Even Dawson didn’t play his own stuff; the rock ‘n’ roll songs he played at his club gigs in the ‘70s and ‘80s were usually covers of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and the like.

“[Koumis] said, ‘Has anybody approached you about putting out any of your old stuff? A couple of your songs are, like, legendary over here.”’

Those songs “weren’t hits at all,” Dawson said. “That’s a misconception. People write, ‘He had a couple of hits in the ‘50s,’ but they’d only press 1,000 of them at a time. They’re very rare. A lot of them got overseas as bootlegs [in unauthorized copies made from vinyl singles, not the original tapes].

“I have no animosity toward the bootleggers at all. They did me a huge favor. If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have gotten heard over there.”

In 1987, Koumis put out “Rockin’ Bones,” a compilation of Dawson’s oldies, on his No Hit label. Dawson began to tour in England and Europe. A release of new material, “Rockinitis,” appeared in 1989, followed in ’92 by “Monkey Beat!”

For “Just Rockin’ & Rollin,”’ Dawson signed with Upstart Records, a well-regarded, Massachusetts-based independent label that has given him some promotional push. Meanwhile, he said, a Dallas label, Crystal Clear Records, is readying a two-disc album documenting his early years.

Dawson’s current album, recorded in London, features an unlikely assemblage of players that shows how far the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu have spread in the latest roots-rock revival.

The two lead guitarists are Eddie Angel, a veteran player from Nashville, and Tjarko Jeen, a young phenom from Holland. Studio bassist Naokazu Tone is a Japanese teenager; the drummer, Bruce Brand, is English. (Jeen is in Dawson’s touring band, along with Lisa Pankratz and Kevin Smith, a drummer and bassist from Austin. All three are new-generation roots rockers who are in their 20s.)

Tone, a member of a Japanese rockabilly band called Death Dealer, “worked out pretty good,” Dawson said. “He didn’t speak a word of English, but the leader of his band was there, and he was able to communicate for us.”

Using almost all contemporary material that he either wrote with other musicians or drew from a network of writers who feed him songs, Dawson went for a varied approach that works in country strains and honking saxes along with straight-ahead rockabilly. He sings with a go-for-it spirit that can recall Jerry Lee Lewis.

But Dawson says any parallel between himself and the wilder, hell-raising contingent of ‘50s rockers is strictly a matter of mutual styles and shared influences.

“I went on one tour with Gene Vincent & the Blue Caps [in 1958] and didn’t want to go on any more,” Dawson recalled, adding that he liked the ill-fated rockabilly star nonetheless. “They were too crazy.

“They tore up motels and stages, and I’ve never been that kind of person,” he said. “I was raised to respect other people’s property. I don’t think rock ‘n’ roll should be destructive. With Jerry Lee, there’s a little bit of arrogance or cynicism in his music that you won’t find in mine.”

For years, Dawson has lived simply in a Dallas apartment, a bachelor by choice. He says he decided early on that marriage would not mesh with a career in music, having seen how unhappy his father became after giving up his band because he felt he needed a steady job to take care of his family.

“It was not a happy situation. He’d bounce from one thing to another, [doing] whatever he could, things he didn’t want to do,” Dawson recalled. “I decided when I was very young that that wouldn’t work. If I had a family, I was going to have to worry about them first. So it was a sacrifice.”

Persistence became his ethic; his aim now is to build his audience step by step with steady touring.

“I don’t think a musician can quit,” Dawson said. “I laugh when someone who I know is a serious musician tells me they’re going to quit, ‘cause I don’t think you can. Part of ‘em is going to die. You’re not being true to your own birthright. I know what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t care if I get rich or not. I’d just like to be able to go and play and always have a nice crowd waiting.”

Ronnie Dawson, Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys, the Round Ups and Inbred Jed play Saturday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $10-$12. (714) 957-0600. Dawson also plays Monday with Jimmy Camp and Scout Finch at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. 9 p.m. $5. (714) 533-1286.