Left-to-right: Dave Mitchell, Jerry Ontiberoz (hidden), Ray Turner, Pete Bailey R
ay Turner and Dave Mitchell first played together in a band called Rip West, before joining United Gas where they first encountered future Josefus drummer Doug Tull
(some of this often excellent material is released on the Dead Man aLive CD). Doug had moved to California with a band called Christopher who went on to release a memorable album on Metromedia, but returned to Houston after drug troubles and a rumoured suicide attempt. Throughout their brief career, the band was tuned in to the underground music scene in Houston, playing at Love Street and The Vulcan Gas Company and hanging out with The 13th Floor Elevators,
Bubble Puppy, American Blues and The Moving Sidewalks (members of the last two bands would go on to form ZZ Top).
“When Doug got back to Houston in ’69 he wanted us to form a rock ’n’ roll band. Original music was really happening in H- town back in the day,” recalls Ray today. Dave continues, “It was probably two to three years after Rip West and I’d played in several other bands before he asked me to audition for Doug to play lead in United Gas. That night we jammed for a while and then Doug took us straight to a club where we played live on stage. We were being booked at some of Texas’s best rock clubs within the first couple ofmonths.” A couple of line-up changes and the band was complete. “Doug and I started shopping around for another singer and found Pete Bailey, a great lyricist and performer. We hired Pete because he had such a bizarre stage act.” Finally came the name change: “Doug Tull sprung the name Josefus on us one night on stage,” remembers Dave. Doug claimed that the local gas company had threatened to sue, thoughmore than likely the ever-persuasive drummer wanted to change the name and was lying to get his own way.
At a live show the band caught the attention of a promoter who managed to get them a deal for JimMusil to produce an album in Phoenix (in December ’69). Never released at the time, this material eventually surfaced as Get Off My Case in the ’90s and features many of the same
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songs that make up Dead Man. Explains Ray, “Musil tried to get us on Frank Zappa’s Straight label, but they didn’t want us.” However, Dave and Doug wouldn’t leave Musil alone. “We called Jimin Phoenix constantly asking for news and when things weren’t happening fast enough for us, he released a 45 on his Dandelion label, which we immediately got on the radio in Houston.” Musil had also renamed the band Come, which may or may not have been to their detriment. “I still wonder if a band named Come wasn’t part of what turned the major labels off,” muses Dave. “The album we recorded for him wasn’t all that much different from our Hookah album (Dead Man), but we finally got tired of waiting for him to get us a deal and went back to the same studio on our own dime to record the newer Hookah version.”
Indeed, frustrated by the lack of action from Musil and wanting to capitalise on the favourable reaction to the single, the band pushed on and re-recorded the album themselves and put it out on their own Hookah label, thus creating one of the most desirable private press albums of the era. “We were probably one of the first bands ever to do an indie album,” states Dave. “Our families put up the money for us to go back to the same studio in Phoenix and record the album again.” The result was the Dead Man album released in a press of 3,000, which contained re- recorded versions of four of the Get Off My Case tracks. Jam-packed with dirty
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