Freddie Steady

Texas Music Hall-of-Famer Freddie Steady Krc comes by his name honestly. This renaissance Texan has pounded out a steady beat on the drums around the world and across miles and miles of Texas for the past several decades. Krc (rhymes with search) landed in Austin at the precise moment that a musical revolution was getting started at a styles-don’t-matter joint called the Armadillo World Headquarters. The kid and the town were a perfect match, because he loved as many styles of music as the ‘Dillo’s hippies and rednecks.His first love was rock and roll, which had first found its way into his native Southeast Texas by way of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. By the time he hit Austin, he was also passionate about the Tex-Mex mix of the Sir Douglas Quintet (his first concert), the psychedelic sounds of rock innovators like the 13th Floor Elevators, and the soulful folk of singer/songwriters like B. W. Stevenson and Jerry Jeff Walker.It all worked out pretty good for Freddie Steady, because his career would soon cross paths with each of these artists, all while fueling his own creative musical ideas as a songwriter, drummer, guitarist, and singer.Krc appeared on Austin City Limits during its first season as B. W. Stevenson’s drummer, and he would soon begin a long run as the rhythmic foundation for Jerry Jeff Walker, with whom he would work on more than a dozen albums and log thousands of miles. Session drumming along the way included studio work with everyone from Jimmie Dale Gilmore to Carole King, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters to The Faces’ Ronnie Lane.With his own power pop trio, The Explosives, Freddie Steady set his drums right up next to the guitar and bass of band mates, Cam King and Waller Collie (who says drummers can’t be out front and singing lead?) Only in Austin could you see someone like Krc drumming in a cowboy club with Jerry Jeff one night, then singing in a punk rock club with the Explosives the next night.Krc took front and center on the guitar with his country band, Freddie Steady’s Wild Country, and his Western folk rock outfit, The Shakin’ Apostles, but his earliest and purest rock and roll tendencies all come together in his latest and greatest incarnations: The Freddie Steady 5 and the revival of his Explosives.The Freddie Steady 5 has been his most personal project to date, a vehicle for the kind of British rock and Texas roll that had first captured his imagination as a kid. The 5 keep a go-go dancer on stage just to keep the sixties feel honest. And simultaneously, Krc and Cam King have re-energized The Explosives to serve as Roky Erickson’s band in the 13th Floor Elevator front man’s triumphant return the stage.In each of these incarnations, he brings influence from his heroes, but he creates a sound and a body of work that is uniquely his own. When he’s not singing, songwriting, drumming, or playing the guitar, Freddie Steady is producing, teaching, and mentoring kids in the rock and roll trade he knows so well, most notably a new group of teens for whom he’s releasing a CD on his own label: Jenny Wolfe and the Pack on Steady Boy Records, representing yet another spiritual link to his own youthful rock and roll passion. Forty years after the Beatles, Freddie’s still pounding out that same righteous beat. Still rocking, still steady. --Rush Evans