Doug Supernaw

I went back to my room. A few minutes later, the phone rang and a tipster told me I might find Supernaw at a nearby sports bar/pool hall called Memory Lane. Supernaw's hit from the glory days “Not Enough Hours in the Night” was billowing from the juke when I walked in. The clientele was of all races, and young, very young. I ordered a beer and waited for my moment, which came not five minutes later. A kid in a camo baseball cap was talking to another young guy, this one wearing a cowboy hat on his head and a pretty blond in his lap. The camo hat kid was talking about some drunken shenanigans he had gotten into the night before. “Yeah, everybody down there was pretty shithoused,” he said. “Was Supernaw there?” the Cowboy asked. “Naw, I hadn't seen him in a few weeks,” Camo replied. “Me neither,” Cowboy replied.

And so I introduced myself. The Cowboy and his lady clammed up. Camo kid, whose real name was Jimmy Martin, was more forthcoming. He had been involved in the caper that had most recently gotten Supernaw locked up. “Yeah, we'd been partying with him that day, but he was getting pretty out of control, so we were trying to lose him,” he said.

Somehow, it seems unlikely that guys like Alan Jackson and Garth Brooks would get ditched by kids like that, but Martin didn't see it as a big deal. “He sang a karaoke duet with my dad one night,” Martin said. “He said he'd like to record with him some day. That would be pretty cool, I guess.”

After striking out at Memory Lane, I headed over to the Blue Moon on the other side of Bellville. At about ten o'clock, the place was almost empty. The proprietor, a jolly blond fiftysomething with an accent of her native Ohio, laughed bitterly when I mentioned that I was doing a story on Supernaw.

“Well, you won't find him here,” she said. “We barred him from this place last year.” Apparently, management at the Blue Moon didn't find his performances as entertaining as some of the people on his message boards. “He's up there cussing, stripping off all his clothes, screaming,” she said. “We don't tolerate that stuff here.”

The Blue Moon once was Supernaw's home. Literally. The singer lived for a time in a trailer out back. “He didn't even have any electricity,” said one of the patrons. “Naw, I think he did have a generator back there,” said the club's DJ.

Later in the evening, the bar got slam-packed. Nearby Sealy has a midnight closing time, while the bars in Bellville rage until two. I walked over to the owner and told her what a nice place she had.

“Well, it's only been nice since we kicked Doug out,” she says. “This place was pretty terrible when him and his friends were coming in here.”

---

“Like a kid on a carousel / I go around in circles / Not knowing whether to be scared / Of all the ups and downs”

— Doug Supernaw, “Carousel”

One of the only signs that Doug Supernaw ever had a country music career is his Web site. The postings on his message boards run toward the odd, to say the least. Some people seem genuinely concerned for him, others are disgusted, while a third contingent appears delighted to kick the man while he's down.

Though he has not spoken to Supernaw in about five years, Justin White had more than a front-row seat for the singer's glory days. White was still a student at Robert E. Lee High School when he met the honky-tonker at a golf tournament in 1988. By that time, the 27-year-old Supernaw already had served as a staff writer with a Nashville music publishing house. At the time, White was impressed, with good reason. “That was the way you became a star back then,” says White, citing the examples of staff writers-turned-hitmakers such as Garth Brooks, Clint Black and John Michael Montgomery.

Supernaw was being groomed for that same level of success when he met White, who had whiled away his high school years writing songs and dreaming of a country music career. At the golf tourney, White told Supernaw he was a musician, and Supernaw asked him to send him a tape of his stuff. “He called me back and said, ‘I think your stuff is great, and I wanna write with you,'” White recalls. “I thought, ‘Well, hell, this is great.'”

By 1990, Supernaw was spending more time in Texas, and he and White cowrote together whenever possible. Supernaw also started assembling Texas Steel, an early version of the road band that would back him through his glory days. Meanwhile, White enrolled at the University of Texas, and in early 1991, Supernaw would again intervene in fairy-tale fashion. Texas Steel had a spate of road gigs coming up, and Supernaw asked White to become his sound man and songwriting partner between gigs. “I said, ‘Man, you're gonna pay me money to do this?'” White remembers. “So I called my dad and told him I wasn't gonna waste my time or his money anymore, so I dropped out of school, moved back to Houston and went to work for Doug.”

Soon enough, Supernaw was opening for Willie Nelson, playing the parking lot stages at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo Chili Cook-Off, and headlining the Party on the Plaza concert series. He was drawing interest from several major Nashville labels, but Supernaw resisted when they insisted that he needed to move back to Music City. “He decided that the way for him to do it was to come back here, put together the best band he could, hit the road and play three-four-five nights a week at every roadhouse, outhouse and dance hall we could find, which is what we did,” White remembers. “We did it in my Blazer, two vans and a trailer.”

And it really paid off. Coors Light signed on as a sponsor, and Supernaw was able to retire the little caravan of trucks in favor of a proper tour bus purchased with the brewery's money. The band hit the road and hit it hard, and eventually became one of the top draws in places like Tyler's Oil Palace, and if they know good country music anywhere, they know it in Tyler.