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The Judy's Come Back

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"I remember going to school all week excited because it had been in the newspaper we were playing on Thursday night," says Bean, who with Cessac was a senior at the time. (Walton was a grade behind them.) "That was a big deal."

Word about the Judy's spread quickly. "You're at the club and somebody mentions, 'Hey, there's this really fun group — you'll never believe them, they're playing pots and pans,'" remembers E.A. Srere, who managed the Judy's for about a year and a half. "So we went down to see it and fell in love immediately, of course. They were so adorable I wanted to eat 'em up."

Srere, an attorney with the Dallas County public defender's office for the past decade, likens her managerial duties with the Judy's to being a "den mother." Besides calling clubs to arrange gigs and fanzines for interviews, when the band decided to do a show in honor of the recent Mount St. Helens eruption, she was tasked with driving around Houston looking for a suitable volcano they could use onstage. She tried to ease Bean's pre-show anxiety — "holding his hand while he threw up, that kind of thing" — and was in charge of their guest list, which led to an interesting encounter with ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons one night at the Island.

"He said, 'I think I'm on the guest list,'" Srere remembers. "I said, 'And your name?'

"'Well, my name's Billy Gibbons.'

"'Really? Oh yes, yes, you're on here.'

"I asked him, 'What brings you to the Judy's?' He told me his pigs liked the Judy's."

As befitting boys not yet out of their teens, the Judy's were fond of practical jokes. As Srere would be driving them to a show, they enjoyed tying socks around their heads as mock blindfolds and attracting the attention of passing motorists with signs that said things like "Help. Call police."

"These rednecks came by one time and showed us their rifle, and I said, 'That's enough,'" she laughs. "The Judy's were a lot of fun."

The Judy's broke up around 1982, but reconvened around 1984 to record Moo. Bean chose the title because he liked the idea of people calling record stores and saying "moo!" to the voice on the other end. (Modomusic, the solo EP he recorded in the interim, is included on the Moo reissue.) They picked up right where they left off, soon packing Numbers on successive weekends and playing for more than 1,000 people in Dallas. Bruce Godwin, owner of the much-missed Record Rack and a former partner in Numbers, where he also DJed from 1980-1990 — and who once appeared as the "Ghost of Liberace" during a Judy's show at the Arena Theater — says the band was every bit as popular as the era's biggest college-rock artists.

"They were hugely popular in Texas, right up there with the Ramones, R.E.M. [and] Siouxsie & the Banshees," he says. "The high-school kids loved them, but so did punks, nerds, gays and parents. They always sold out no matter what."

Margaret Moser, who booked the Judy's for this year's Austin Music Awards, brought New Wave producer Liam Sternberg, who discovered the Waitresses ("I Know What Boys Like") and would go on to write the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian" and the 21 Jump Street theme, to a Judy's show. He loved it, telling her Bean had a "platinum voice" and including Bean's "My Imagination" on his 1984 Elektra compilation Ten from Texas: Herd It Through the Grapevine.

Rumors swirled the Judy's were about to be signed to Warner Bros., and the band seemed poised to take the next step beyond regional success. But for reasons neither the band nor their friends still can't quite explain, that next step never came.

"Everybody back then thought they were going to hit it big, they were going to be the next Talking Heads, the next B-52's," says E.A. Srere. "You think you can just be enthusiastic enough and a group will sell themselves, and you soon learn that the music business is brutal and you've really gotta know what you're doing, and you gotta know people."

"I think their local and regional success was a big surprise to them," Moser offers. "But I also think they were more ambitious than they knew. I just don't think they knew how to channel it, and there wasn't much industry back then [in Texas] to support them with anything."

The Judy's did reach out to the big-time labels, Bean remembers, and were shot down every time. Blondie, the B-52's, Talking Heads and even Devo all eventually broke out of the New Wave disco to enjoy mainstream chart success; so it would seem that a band with distinct similarities — not to mention a sizable and enthusiastic regional following — would be a sure thing. But whatever it was about the Judy's that worked so well in Texas just didn't fly in New York and L.A.

"Most of the time, [labels] would request to hear something because they saw our name, or they were getting references or whatever," sighs Bean. "They'd hear it and go, 'We don't get it.'"
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According to the Pearland Economic Development Corporation, the population of the suburb on Houston's southern border is projected to surpass 70,000 by 2011. In 1990, ten years after Bean and Cessac graduated from high school, it was just shy of 24,000.

"At the time, it was almost more of a rural place than it was suburban," says Bean. "Back then, there were three groups: the jocks, the kickers and the heads."

The Judy's didn't belong to any of those — the closest high-school subcategory would probably be "band geeks" — but nonetheless, their Pearland roots were fairly obvious to people who hung out with them. Their idea of an afterparty, Srere remembers, was hitting up either a bowling alley or House of Pies.

"They were really clean, innocent boys," agrees Moser. "They didn't do drugs, and they mostly had girlfriends and they read. Even their parties were these cute little parties, not like the big orgiastic parties I was used to. It was very refreshing."

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