Hunter Ward, R.I.P.

About five years ago, after the death of legendary Houston partyer Bruce Henry Davis, a letter writer penned some words to the Press that I have always remembered: "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to serve as a horrible reminder."

Like most musicians, Ward had something of a double life. By night, he was known as a hard-charging guy, the life of every party, sometimes taking it to extremes. Rudyard's bartender Brad Moore allowed that Ward could be "a handful" when he came in the club, but never was the kind of guy you wanted to bar from the premises permanently. "You hoped he was just going through a phase. It's really sad because he died so young. You always thought a new girlfriend or logic or maturity would prevail and he would pull out of it."

Byron Dean, Ward's bandmate in the Poor Dumb Bastards, agrees. "He was in his mid-twenties, and was doing the same kind of things we were doing in our mid-twenties," says the musician, who is in his late thirties. "You know we've had our ups and downs with coke, although this is the first tragedy we've had. And we told him about that. We all grew out of it, but one of the guys had to go to prison for two years before he did, so we told him, 'You'll either end up dead or with prison tats. You can choose all of the above or none.'"

Dean says that Ward first started hanging around the band ten years ago, when the guitarist was all of 16 years old. "He found out where we practiced and he would start hanging out down there," Dean remembers. "He didn't drink or anything back then, he just showed up one day with a Pepsi and a bag of pork rinds." Dean remembers seeing him regularly around town between 1997 and 2000, but never being able to remember his name. "He was kind of a pest back then, but the good kind, like a happy fly you don't want to go away."

Ward's knowledge of many types of music won Dean over. "He didn't just know current punk or early punk, but he knew stuff like classic rock too," he says. "That was uncommon for a younger guy."

Ward worked for several years as a clerk at Chuck Roast's Vinal Edge Records on the north side, where he worked alongside Chris Unclebach, who says that the store's punk section is still operating on Ward's blueprint. Unclebach says he was the type of clerk who didn't suffer fools gladly. "Sure, he could be a know-it-all," he remembers. "Some kid would come to the register with a crappy punk record, and he'd say, 'You don't want that, you want this.' But the thing was, he would be right."

Unclebach says that there was never a dull moment when you worked with Ward. On slow nights they would burn stuff in the parking lot. "Or he'd put some cheesy song on like Europe's 'The Final Countdown' and just bounce off the walls, playing air guitar," he adds.

According to Dean, Ward had uncommon ideas about his rock and roll heroes. Dean says he wasn't the kind to worship people like Keith Richards or Robert Plant, rock gods up on inaccessible mountaintops. "His heroes were people like Ruben, who used to play with us, and Andy Wright from Sugar Shack," Dean says. "He loved the regional and local guys he could talk to and hang out with."

Poor Dumb Bastards were his heroes too, and in 2000, he was invited to join the band. "He got to be one of his heroes," Dean remembers. The singer says he was a "hell of a guitarist." "You could just throw an idea out there and he would pick it up right away," he says. "Maybe not exact, but close enough. And there were times where he would come up with ideas and we'd take it from him and he was okay with that. He also brought a lot of enthusiasm to the band. We've been around forever, and there are times when we feel like we are just going through the motions. He never did that."

Ward's other family — his biological one, parents and siblings and nieces and nephews — is grieving. These are the people who took pride in him as a member of MENSA, the youngest person ever to be appointed a financial officer with Saturn automotive company, the cool uncle with the tattoos in the rock band, the little boy in shorts playing in the rain.