I I blame it all on Lowdog. We were just hanging out, watching Seinfeld and having a beer, as one does on a Friday night in a small town in east Texas, where there isn’t anything more exciting to do. After the show, he would put on music. Mostly the classics, a little Neil Young, or Beatles, the stuff that we’d been listening to for years. And then one night he puts on something different and tells us to actually listen to this one song. It starts off like a sweet sad country song, but then it builds into something more intense, finally devolving into something like a Larry Brown story put to music, a story of paranoia and murder. That song was I Can Tell Your Love is Waning, by Slobberbone, and with that first listen, I was a fan.

As it turns out, that album, Crow Pot Pie, was full of great songs, songs with depth and meaning to them, songs about drinking, and death, and longing. Soon we went to see them live, at Dan’s Bar, in Denton, TX and discovered them as a juggernaut of rock and roll, all sweat and thunder. I left feeling exhilarated, like I’d just discovered something new. After that, we would go to see them whenever we got the chance, traveling to Denton or Dallas or Houston, the three of us, Wendy, Lowdog and myself, but we had a strict rule: No Talking to the Talent.

Then my Dad died, Wendy finished grad school, and we moved off to Austin. By the time we got to go see another show in Denton, Lowdog had clearly broken the rule, as he was talking to the members of the band. We chastised him duly, but in the process, I guess we met the band too. Ice (and rule) broken, I guess we talked some more the next time and the next. Then, one night after another sweaty show at Dan’s Bar, Brian Lane asked where we were staying, we told him we were going to Commerce with Lowdog, and he said we should come stay with them next time we were in town. I would like to think that he was drunk at the time, but if memory holds, I don’t think he was drinking.

So, the next time we were in Denton for a show, Brian once again asked us where we were staying and I told him “with you.” I’m not entirely certain that he remembered his offer, but with a shrug, he told us to come on over. So, one late fall night, we rolled up to the address that he’d given us, where he and Jess were living at the time, to find a party rollicking on. It seems that Grand Champeen, who had opened the show that night, were also staying there, and a bunch of Dentonites who were old friends of the band, (and the original fans) were there at least till the wee hours of the morning. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was the start of a bunch of friendships that have persisted for a couple of decades now. Our lives had been changed.

The next few years are a blur of rock shows, late-night parties, and an influx of friends from the world of music, friends who remain dear to me. Through Slobberbone, we were introduced to many other bands. Just as Grand Champeen had blown us away on the night we met, the Drive-By Truckers astounded us when first we saw them open for Slobberbone, once again at Dan’s Bar. They opened with Bulldozers and Dirt, and from that moment we loved them. The Damnations similarly staggered us with their brilliance, as did the Gourds, Centro-matic and many others. The list of bands that we discovered in those days could go on and on, but perhaps more important are the friendships that we made, sometimes with the musicians themselves, but also with the many music fans, who are often as brilliant as the bands that they adore.

A certain core group of those friends gradually coalesced into a rogue’s gallery of rabid music fans. Wendy and I started referring to them as the Lee Family, a takeoff from Lowdog’s (him again!) incessant joking about the fact that serial killers often have the middle name Lee, like myself. Though scattered geographically, we became inseparable in our love for music and for one another. So when, after years of going to shows together, Lance Davis, Wendy and I decided that we should make a documentary about our favorite band, it seemed natural to call our company “Lee Family Productions.”

The idea for a documentary came about in October of 2004. We were thinking of doing something fun, exhibiting some of the band’s natural humor and the ridiculous things that we came up with, nonsequiturs and all. But before we got as far as talking to the band about it, Brent announced that they were breaking up. We were all devastated. That day, we went to see Centro-Matic play. I stood in front of the band, a pitcher of beer in my hand, tears running down my face. For us, that night was a wake. I thought for a minute that I was done. Done with music, with the life that we’d been living for some years at that point. Certainly done with the idea of documenting a band that was no more.

But with the announcement came a plan to play a few more shows, to see the era out in proper fashion. So our plan shifted to documenting the final days of the band. We talked to Brent about it and he was amenable. Three weeks later, we found ourselves at the Barley House in Dallas, a beer in one hand and a camera in the other, with plans for more of the same come the final tour in late February. I wrote a treatment covering the history of the band, Lance procured the necessary equipment (by now, our plans extended to making more music docs in the future,) and Wendy , with the help of Slobberbone manager Amy Pojman, handled the logistics of getting us on the road with the band.

Come February, we headed north in the car that Lowdog (yet again) loaned us, following the exhaust fumes of the Slobbervan as it made its way to St. Louis and throughout the Midwest for the next week or so. Those days are a blur of driving, setting up, shooting a show, breaking down, sleeping a little, then getting up and doing it again. Your basic rock tour, the kind that Slobberbone had been perfecting for years. It was a joy, but also bittersweet. By the time the tour culminated with a two night stand at Dan’s Silverleaf (yep, same Dan, different bar,) we were exhausted, physically and emotionally. On the final night, many tears were shed, and the aftermath was a very subdued affair.

During the tour, I had managed to get a handful of interviews, and over the course of the next few months, I got more, enough to tell the story that I had envisioned. Next came the task of actually telling it. All in all, I had something north of a hundred hours of footage to cull through. The process took longer than I had expected. After a couple of thousand hours of work, I finally had a cut of the movie. It was an opus, at over three hours long. If you wanted to hear about people puking on the lawn of the house that the band lived in when they were starting out, that’s the movie for you. It quickly became clear that few people want to hear about that, so I shortened it. Then I shortened it some more. And some more.

Cut to the fall of 2019. It’s 15 years since we first talked about making a documentary about Slobberbone, but there’s still no movie. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them nobody’s fault, but I needn’t go into all of that. Suffice it to say that I had lost momentum somewhere along the way. Years before, I had finally condensed the movie into something manageable, yet it languished on a dusty hard drive for a long time. In the interim, Slobberbone got back together and Lee Family Productions vanished like the dream it was (though the Lee family persists- you can’t get rid of love.) Then, after years away from the creative life, Wendy and I decided to go back to that long ago aspiration, so we formed a new company, Long Cut Productions.

With a new vision comes new projects. But still pestering me at the back of my brain was the movie I’d made those years ago. So I dusted off the old hard drive and pieced it back together. Fortunately, we still have all of the many notes that were taken back when, so it wasn’t too difficult to put it back together. Watching it brought a flood of memory. Of course it reminded me of why I’d loved the band in the first place; it is a document of a searing rock band at the height of their powers. But beyond that, it reminded me of my love for the members of the band, my love of the small group of friends that we’d reveled in those days with, and my love for the entire music community that we have been fortunate to be a part of.

Watching it after all this time, I realized that Slobberbone is more than a band to me. It is the nexus of a community of people who became and remain a family to me. It’s for these kindred spirits that I’ve returned to this movie after all of these years. The story of Slobberbone is the creation story for this family. I hope that it will remind us of why we love this band and why we love one another. I hope too that it will serve as an initiation, an opening for others to come into the fold, to join our clan. At the very least, I hope that it will be an entertaining hour and forty minutes in your life.

As I write this, I see that though I love the story told by this documentary, it really needs a little cosmetic work before it goes out into the world. Not much, really, but enough that it will take a few more weeks of work, a few more hours of my eyeballs glued to the screen. In the meantime, though, I’m hoping that we can generate a little excitement for its upcoming release, so please Stay Tuned, tell your friends, and pre-purchase the movie!

To quote the end credits-
This film is dedicated to all the fans, to Lowdog, and to the entire Lee Family:

“Look around, what kind of life is this?
It’s the life that others somehow missed.
Drive around, remember people you’ve met
And when you’re old,
I bet you don’t forget.
“You won’t forget.”
-Brent Best

Buy it Now. Stay Tuned. Trailer.