Swimming away
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Toni Price has always loved the ocean, felt the pull of the sea. She is a Pisces, and proud of it. Her favorite color is the aqua blue of Champ Hood's acoustic guitar. On the inside jacket of her first album, "Swim Away," Price is dressed like Neptune's princess, lifting a conch shell to her ear, as if listening for the roll of distant waves.
So it's only fitting that Price soon will be moving to San Diego where we might easily imagine her walking along some bluff above the Pacific in the salty chill of a June twilight. Let's pretend it's a Tuesday, at sunset, with shafts of light making silver patterns on the water. The singer in solitude, at peace with herself.
Toni Price deserves such good wishes, for all the music and love and loyalty she has shared with us in Austin since the early 1990s particularly for her 15 years of early-evening Tuesday Hippie Hour gigs at the Continental Club. Toni was Tuesday for the longest time in this town, the hottest live act around. The dance-happy music she shared with us in that cheesy room on South Congress was boozy, bluesy and blazing with acoustic guitar. And best of all: It was drenched in feeling.
"I think people are starved for emotion right now," Price said in 1996, four years into the Hippie Hour gig. "The world we live in is so stripped of emotion, so harsh, it's like we're made to be numb. I think people want something acoustic, something real. They want wood. They're sick of plastic and metal and fake and violent. Real people need a release from all the harshness and that's where emotion comes in."
Drawing from the wells of country, rock, blues and soul, Price sang plaintive as deeply and intensely as Hank Williams sang lonesome and she did it at the Continental almost every week. Sadly, that's history now. On the second Tuesday in April, she told her fans that she'd be moving to California. At first, she planned to do Hippie Hours through May. But after one more show April 17 Price felt the emotional strain of an extended farewell would be too much.
Her goodbye is shrouded in a bit of mystery. No one seems able to say, for certain, why she's chosen to leave Austin. Will she come back in a year? Or never at all? The timing of it all is sudden, precarious, especially since she'll have a new album coming out in just two months.
Some of her peers suggest Price may not know the answers herself. But it is clear that she is a little restless "I'm 46 years old, you know" and that she feels a need for change, even as she makes it clear she has no desire to talk to friends or the media about the particulars. But why, exactly, San Diego?
"Because it's got an ocean," she told a curious fan at her final Continental show, a twinkle in her eye. "When y'all get one, I'll come back."
Chain of love
It's no surprise that Austin fell for Toni Price, for she embodied the spirit of independence that the city long has celebrated in itself. From the beginning, Price proclaimed she could not be managed, produced or directed by image makers in the music business. She doesn't use a publicist or an agent. If you need to reach her, you leave a message on her answering machine.
"I have to keep my freedom, no matter what the cost," she once said. "My single-mindedness is my saving grace, and it's also my curse."
Price moved here from Nashville after playing a South by Southwest set at Antone's in 1989 and fell in love with the local blues scene. She came to Austin a wispy, honey-haired single mom with a young daughter at her side and a tattoo of a coiled snake on her left forearm. If you lived here then, Price might have filled your tea glass as a waitress at the Night Hawk or La Zona Rosa.
Her first Austin shows were rowdy, dance-all-night affairs at Antone's, where she fronted guitarist Derek O'Brien and the house band with a sassy energy that suggested Bonnie Raitt. Within a couple of years, however, Price took her blues to the Continental Club and put together the grooviest, sit-down, unplugged sing-it-and-pick-it music show in Austin history.
Flanked by Rich Brotherton and "Scrappy" Jud Newcomb on acoustic guitars, along with Champ Hood on violin and guitar, Price created a Hippie Hour vibe that was front-porch friendly and kick-ass fun. The show was an almost instant hit, the first after-work gig to catch fire in a midnight music town. Austin music fans stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the little shoebox-shaped nightclub to experience it. And if you didn't show up early for the first set at 6:30, you'd have to wait in a line that ran halfway down South Congress Avenue for the chance to get in.
A generation of Austin music fans including Mayor Will Winn championed Hippie Hour as must-see Austin for out-of-towners. Its appeal was wonderfully democratic. Pushing your way to the front of the room, you'd pass a couple of guys in starched shirts and power clothes, a blond princess in a white tiara, a couple of white-haired hippies and a guy with a nose ring.
Price's stage persona was a little smoky, a little torchy, a little hippy. She'd sit center stage, eyes closed, wrapping her heart around songs about longing and loss and good times that can't be reclaimed. Price had a liquid aura about her, especially in the way she twisted and twined her left arm during a song, as if floating in water. There was a profound Ray Charles influence in her vocal style, obvious in the phrasing, but also in her affinity for bringing country inflections to soul and blues. She was the rare Austin singer who doesn't write her own material.
"You can tell that Toni has lived everything she's singing about, even though the songs are from other writers. Her interpretations are completely her own," says blues guitarist Sue Foley, who was recording her debut album on the Antone's label just as Price moved to town. "Also, she gets maximum depth and emotion out of every word. She really wrings it dry."
Toni Price was no conformist, which only made Austin love her more. Irked that record distributors airbrushed the cover photo of her "Hey" CD in 1995 to conceal her armpit hair, she responded by drawing in the lost hair with a felt tip when autographing the album for fans.
When Antone's parent label, Discovery, suggested she tour more in support of her records, Price politely declined. She explained that she preferred the comfort and convenience of the Continental, and besides, she had two daughters at home to raise. Price played that Tuesday show for free for years which only made us dig that much deeper into our wallets when her giant tip jar floated by, knowing the singer felt so strongly about her adopted hometown.
"Nashville is different. It's catty and competitive. It hurts people. It grinds them up and spits them out," she said in '96. "But it's not like that here. Austin is very welcoming as long as you come to give and not to take. I sensed the magic when we drove into the city the very first time."
For years, Price rode the bus to her gigs. She liked the feel and the stories of the streets, hated the sterile isolation of a car. She poked fun at her own eccentricities, on stage and off. She once laughed at a critic's comment that her singing style was self-indulgent. "So what?" she said. "I am self-indulgent." Toni Price has always had the sense that you had to go really deep into self exposing all those vulnerabilities, those insecurities for the music to work. And she would never apologize for that.
Price played other clubs in Austin and Central Texas, and she frequently did weekend shows at the Continental that were less rambunctious than her Tuesday gig. But she made Hippie Hour an Austin institution: "The Continental was her home, her family," seven-year regular Jack Frick observed the other day. "What Toni did there was wrap her voice around people and give them a big hug. And the people loved her back."
'Tennessee Waltz'
Toni Price played her final Hippie Hour to a full house, wearing a '60s vintage sundress of pastel blues and reds and creams, singing old favorites to longtime fans, not yet sure in her own heart that this show would be her last. On impulse, she opened with "The Tennessee Waltz" a new addition to the set list.
During the first several tunes, Price played it like it was just another night, even though everyone in the house was carrying a sudden, heightened awareness of precious days almost lost. The singer offered a toast to the crowd, accepted a glass of Tennessee whiskey from a fan. She got torchy, then played a little silly, introducing herself to the audience as "famed character actor Charles Durning." Darcie Deaville played the fiddle parts; Willie Pipkin (of the South Austin Jug Band) was on guitar.
As the stack of whiskey glasses beneath her chair grew taller during the second set, Price paused once and made a gentle allusion to leaving Austin, leaving the Continental. "I've been thinking back over these years, how we've saved each other's lives a few times," she said softly, almost shyly, glancing down at the floor. "I know you've saved my life. And I hope I've been kind of helpful to you."
The night was filled with joyful moments, including the pleasure of singing along with "Can't Judge a Book By Its Cover" one more time. But there were jagged times, too. Price hides nothing in her performance, and sometimes those lines about parting and separation had an almost desperate subtext to them: "If I reach out, and nobody's there, will I tumble to the ground?/And if I cry out, and nobody hears, will it even make a sound?"
Price has lost a lot of friends and mentors over the last several years Clifford Antone, Mambo John Trainer, Larry Trader. But the death of Champ Hood in 2001 (at age 49) was a devastating experience, for the two were musical brother and sister. And in its aftermath, Price led many of us in expressing that communal grief, through music, carrying with it the load of her personal grief. We expected that of Toni Price, the artist who always connected with us by wearing her feelings on her sleeve.
Hippie Hour lived on without Hood, but his death imbued it with darker textures. Over the course of 15 years, Price has learned a lot about how things must change. Brotherton had left the band long before Hood's death. Newcomb and Caspar Rawls have moved on, as well. And now, Price herself was coming face to face with transition in her own life.
Before taking the stage for the second set, Price talked with me for a moment about the sensation of saying goodbye. The passion of the crowd, the immediacy of the departure, the pressure of those who seemed betrayed by the announcement: It weighed heavily on her. She worried she might leave town underappreciated, that all those years might be forgotten.
For all the strain in her, I wasn't sure that she recognized "thank you" in the eyes of so many of her fans. Her mood made me think of "Swim Away," a song so quiet that she rarely sang it live, almost never at the Continental: "Something's gotta change; I can't go on this way. I'll give this body to the waves. And then I'll swim away."
Before she left, I told her that I've quoted her a hundred times to friends and strangers over the years. It's that old comment she made about Austin: that if you come to our city with a giving heart, Austin embraces you. But if you come to take, you never quite get what this place is all about.
"I said that?" Toni Price said with a little smile. "Really? I said that?"
Then, for one last set, I drifted back into the audience. Together, we shouted and danced and felt the sting of that farewell tear in our hearts. The last song she played was the first one, quiet and sad, "The Tennessee Waltz." There was no stomping, no clamor for an encore. She let us go gently, in melancholy, with a song fit for the leaving.
bbuchholz@statesman.com; 912-2967
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