Although he never threatened to harm her, LaPoint says Meaux manipulated and controlled her, and ensured her silence, by constantly making it clear who was paying the bills. And while he provided them with the basic necessities, LaPoint says she, her mother and her sister lived like paupers while Meaux lived like a king, especially after the money from the record deals started rolling in.
"I don't know what went through my mother's mind [when she married Meaux]," says LaPoint. "He was vulgar, he wasn't faithful and he had a filthy mouth. Maybe she felt trapped, too."
Georgia LaPoint, who still lives in Winnie, wasn't saddened to learn of her stepfather's arrest.
"He's always been a very warped, perverted man," says LaPoint, "and he still is."
If he was a tightwad at home, Meaux was a charitable presence in the larger world. He loved to give gifts, and he worked at cultivating his image as a generous man. If someone were sick, Meaux could always be counted on to come up with a few hundred bucks to help them through the bad days.
In one fondly recalled episode, Meaux showed up just before Christmas Day of 1976 at KPFT, the listener-supported radio station in Houston where he had hosted a weekly music program a few years earlier. In those days, KPFT didn't always meet its payroll, and the handful of employees and most of the legions of volunteers were usually broke. But Meaux was flush that Christmas from Freddy Fender's comeback, and as he strolled through the KPFT studios and offices, he produced a roll of bills from his coat pocket and handed $50 bills to everyone he met.
Meaux would often boast of the times he had signed a musician to a contract, advanced him some money and gotten him a gig if he were out of work. No doubt many of the artists entered into their deals with Meaux with their eyes wide open, and, at the time, were grateful for the opportunity. No doubt many profited from their dealings with the producer.
But Meaux was far from the one-man musicians' benevolent society he portrayed himself to be. Many of the folks who had financial dealings with Meaux considered him to be one of the biggest cutthroats in the music business. A promoter who worked with Meaux in the early to mid-'60s says the Crazy Cajun was notorious for contracts that would suck musicians dry. In the late 1950s, for instance, Meaux reportedly bought the rights to Big Sambo's song "The Rains Came" for $25. A few years later, Meaux's investment paid off handsomely for himself -- not Big Sambo -- when he pulled the song out of the vault and had the Sir Douglas Quintet record it as the follow-up to "She's About a Mover."
"Huey had control over when you got to pee," says Steve Gladson of Bread and Butter Productions. Gladson recalls once overhearing Meaux negotiate the closing of a contract with a blues artist over the telephone. As he sat in his office at Gold Star Studios, Meaux was momentarily silent as he listened to the questions from the other end of the line. Soon, says Gladson, Meaux resumed talking, telling the musician that the purpose of paragraph 19 was so that there would be no blank space between paragraphs 18 and 20.
"That's just the kind of guy he was," Gladson says.
But in the early 1960s, Huey was the one guy in Houston in a position to cut deals, as bad as they may have been, because Meaux was the only producer in town making any money. Part of the reason for Meaux's financial success was his undeniable, instinctive knack for picking a hit.
And while Meaux never admitted to paying anyone to play his records, he did make contingency plans just in case anyone suspected him of doing so. In a 1991 interview with local music historian Andrew Brown, Meaux said he intentionally made his trail of production hard to follow. Federal authorities had been busting disc jockeys and record producers around the county in the payola scandal of the late '50s and early '60s. Meaux bragged to Brown that he was able to avoid the feds' attention by spreading his artists over several different labels, all of which he owned.
"If there had been a chart that had, say, seven Crazy Cajun songs on it," Meaux told Brown, "the government would have said, 'We need to go after this motherfucker.' So I just changed the labels around, so that if the government got a record chart, they would only see one or two songs on Crazy Cajun. They didn't know that eight others were mine, too."
But Meaux would eventually attract the attention of the federal government, though not for his music productions.
Like most American rock and roll producers, Meaux was caught flatfooted by the stateside arrival of the Beatles in early 1964 and the rest of the British invasion that followed, which sent their own homegrown acts plummeting off the charts. But Meaux was determined to discover the secret of that English beat. Although it sounds like a bit of self-mythologizing apocrypha, Meaux claims to have stuffed his car with Beatles records and Thunderbird wine and driven to the Wayfare Motel in San Antonio. There, he rented three rooms, opened all the connecting doors and sat in the middle one, listening to the music and drinking wine until he got "skunk drunk."
