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The Judy's Come Back

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Not only did their relative isolation in Pearland keep the Judy's out of trouble, it freed them from the peer pressure that comes with belonging to a big-city scene. "I think it insulated us quite a bit," says Bean. "I think being sequestered out in a garage in Pearland gave us this sense that we were independent and could do whatever we wanted to do.

"We wanted to define for ourselves what we were going to be and how we were going to do it," he adds. "I think having that sense of being alienated from the big city also meant we could alienate ourselves from what the trends were."

That said, the Judy's never had much luck winning over their Brazoria County neighbors. Walton and Bean's group Mondo Babies played the Brazoria County Fair talent show in Angleton, where they lost to a twirler. (A Barbra Streisand impersonator beat them the year before that.) Another early group of Bean's played a chili-supper fundraiser for a friend of a friend's dad who was running for office; people kept yelling "Freebird!" at that one. As the Judy's, they made an auspicious debut opening one Pearland High dance where Bean, as "Johnny Typhoid," flung beef liver at the audience.

"We were trying to freak out the school," he says. "We considered ourselves very punk at the time, although the music wasn't punk."

The Judy's agreed to play one Pearland Founder's Day celebration, but Walton says standing up there in the city park playing for their hometown was "just awkward." Nonetheless, under "Notable People from Pearland" on the city's Wikipedia page, the Judy's are one of only three entries, alongside the baseball pitchers Clay Hensley and Adam Cowart.

"I remember growing up I never thought there were any cool bands from Pearland, and certainly none of them that actually opened for Devo or anything like that," says Press contributor and music blogger Craig Hlavaty, a 24-year-old Pearland native whose mother was a high-school classmate of the Judy's.

"For the longest time, the kids in Pearland always thought their band was the first band from Pearland to ever do anything, because Pearland's kind of a boring place," he says. "You don't really think of Pearland when you think of weird New Wave guys banging on refrigerators and stuff like that."

There may be a few more big-box stores and master-planned communities in Pearland today (okay, more than a few) but Hlavaty says it's as small-town strait-laced as ever, with church and football at the top of the social pyramid – "if you've seen Dazed and Confused, it's kinda like that" – and little to no precedent for creative types looking to do something different. Except for the Judy's.

"It's cool to see there's been older people who've come before you and actually succeeded in it," he says. "And you don't have to stay in town and go to one of the six Sonics every Friday and Saturday night."
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Especially now, with their albums finally available on CD and their third live appearance in 15 years in the very recent past — their Austin Music Awards set will, in all likelihood, be on YouTube before this issue reaches newsstands in Pearland — plus the momentum that comes from finding out kids half your age still dig music you recorded more than a quarter-century ago, why don't the Judy's keep this going for a while? Among their fans anyway, the mere possibility of the Judy's playing live again isn't that far removed from, say, the Pixies, Police or Van Halen reunion tours. So what's stopping them?

"Life," Walton and Bean offer simultaneously.

If life didn't make the Judy's into the kind of rock stars their Texas fans always thought they deserved to be, it didn't exactly deal them a bum hand, either. Overall, they're pretty satisfied with where they wound up.

Walton made the cover of the Sunday Houston Chronicle business section in October 2004 for his work as a TV and film composer; his well-appointed studio is decorated with memorabilia like a Planet of the Apes trashcan (his all-time favorite film score) and a French poster for Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl. Cessac, who now lives in the Hill Country community of Driftwood, followed his culinary muse through opening and closing a Clear Lake-area restaurant to earning a position as the number one chef at the main Whole Foods Market in Austin. Two hundred people work for him. Bean lives in Houston, but commutes to teach upper-elementary math and science in — where else? — Pearland. He still writes music, but won't say much else except that it's very "personal."

Since they played that cancer benefit for their friend a few years ago — which also inspired them to finally take the necessary steps to get their albums remastered and re-released — the Judy's have continued to collaborate off and on; they recently recorded the theme for a Japanese cartoon called Sergeant Frog.

"It never feels weird," says Walton. "It always just feels like we're doing what we know how to do. It's never really gone away."

The main thing preventing them from playing out again (besides Cessac living in Austin) is simply the amount of legwork and preparation required to stage one of their shows, which were always closer to theatrical productions — a milk-bottle conveyor belt and someone dancing onstage in a cow costume, for example — than three guys walking onstage and playing music for an hour. Short a production manager or any other sort of help, all those duties would fall to the band members. As they have before, including in a pair of previous Press articles, they say they'd be open to the idea given the proper circumstances. But what those circumstances might entail is anyone's guess — this is a band, after all, that even bristles a little at the very notion they're "back together."

"Things happened over the years and people left, but we still see each other through the years so much I don't think of it that we're not together," says Bean. "I mean, I don't think we're together, but I don't think we're not together either."

chris.gray@houstonpress.com

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