News

Doug Supernaw

Former country superstar. Now starring in a courtroom near you.

By John Nova Lomax 

Even by his own standards, which have grown increasingly bizarre over the past ten years, the show Doug Supernaw was putting on in an April pretrial hearing in Brazos County Court at Law No. 2 was pretty strange.

The one-time country star, whose early 1990s run of hits included the No. 1 smash “I Don't Call Him Daddy” and the Top 5 songs “Reno” and “Not Enough Hours in the Night,” saw his career slip off the rails in dramatic fashion in the late '90s. Beginning in 1998 and intensifying after 2002, his arrests and trials have grown more numerous while his concerts, save for drunken karaoke performances, have dwindled and his albums have ceased.

His rap sheet since 1998 includes arrests for nonpayment of child support, driving while intoxicated, public intoxication, assault of a police officer and several incidences of possession of marijuana. He has been acquitted of some of those charges and juries have hung on some of the others, but he has compounded more than a few of those remaining by allegedly jumping bail and skipping hearings.

According to a report in The (Bryan-College Station) Eagle, Supernaw was on the docket before Judge Jim Locke for allegedly evading arrest after a wee-hours incident in Bryan in 2004 that also resulted in a public intoxication charge of which Supernaw was acquitted.

Supernaw's version of that night's events is as follows: He was walking down the street singing the Gourds' country-fried cover version of the Snoop Dogg hit “Gin and Juice,” a song that contains several profanities, whereupon he was apprehended by a man in pajamas who claimed to be a policeman but could have been anyone. That was why he ran from the man, you see.

Arresting officer Brent Boswell, who was in fact off-duty at the time of the incident, had a different take. According to The Eagle, he says he showed his badge to Supernaw, who was “obviously intoxicated” and loudly screaming curse words and gesticulating obscenely. Supernaw then ran from him and wheeled around in what Boswell characterized as a fighting posture. Boswell had no choice then but to level his pistol at the singer.

Of course Boswell would say that, Supernaw contends. He is one of them. According to The Eagle's report, Supernaw believes that Boswell is a cog in an immense international plot to silence him, “a political economic conspiracy” the existence of which Supernaw claims to have proved “time and time and time again.” According to Supernaw, the details of this scheme were many and various, and, after telling the court that he had ridden to this hearing from The Woodlands on a bicycle, he went on to detail these shadowy dealings.

In The Eagle's telling, Supernaw hinted that it began with his birth as the secret love child of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, and that things started to intensify in 2002, when he was, as he put it, “held hostage in Paris” for two weeks in a top secret “mentally retarded home for terrorists.” Since then, he served as a “test monkey” in an experiment studying the effects of marijuana on baseball players, and was later attacked by two police officers from the town of Montgomery, who wanted to break his arm and thus bring about an end to the 46-year-old's professional pitching career.

Judge Locke heard all this testimony and sent the jury pool home. Supernaw, he ruled, was not fit to be tried. He ordered that Supernaw undergo psychiatric evaluations. This was dropped after Supernaw pled no contest to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct.

A few days later, a similar hearing was slated for Supernaw in Houston. For weeks, Supernaw has more or less politely dodged meeting with the Houston Press for this article, but he has been sending us the occasional e-mail, some of which are lucid, others less so. The one tipping us off about the hearing was in the latter camp. It was his response to Steve Jackson, his attorney in the Harris County case, which Supernaw copied to us. Jackson sent along a reminder that Supernaw would have to be at court at nine in the morning on April 13 — Friday the 13th — to discuss his competency. As his e-mail made clear, Supernaw had other ideas.

“I need more advanced notice as that my only transportation at present is a bicycle,” he wrote. “I was planning on leaving Magnolia on Sunday to make it there for my trial on Tuesday morning. As I do not like to pedal in long britches, hopefully it will be OK if I were shorts in court. Also, at present I have a flat on my bicycle and about 14 cents in my pocket, and of course I am not competent to stand trial, as I have read in the papers that I am an alchaholik, bi polar, not fit to be a father, MF.”

And true to his word, he didn't show up in court the next day, long britches or no. As a matter of fact, that very day found him up in Montgomery County getting arrested for public intoxication. Again.

“As I travel down that blue bonnet highway /I'm thankful I was born a lucky man /And I know that I will live and die my own way / Somewhere between the Red and Rio Grande”

— Doug Supernaw, “Red and Rio Grande”

I'm sitting in the Harris County downtown jail, shouting at Supernaw through a hole in plexiglass. After my aforementioned weeks of e-mails and traipsing around Central Texas trying to find him, I wrote my story. Two days later, I got a tip that Supernaw had just been arrested — in Houston of all places — and was only a few blocks from my office.

Having nothing else to do, Supernaw agreed to see me. The last time I saw anything other than a photograph of him, he was filling my TV screen, singing “Long Tall Texan” with the Beach Boys. It was an apt choice, for he is well over six feet, and back then, in his cowboy duds, he looked as Texas as smoked brisket on grease paper. He was clean shaven and had the features of a guy Hollywood would cast as the white-hatted sheriff who finally ran the bad guys out of Llano.

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