Augie Meyers, whose Tilt-a-Whirl stylings on his trebly Vox organ shaped the sound of Tex-Mex music with the celebrated Sir Douglas Quintet and the Grammy-winning Texas Tornados, and lent flavor to recordings by Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and others, died on March 7 at his home in San Antonio. He was 85.
The cause was pneumonia, his son, Clay Meyer, a drummer for the Texas Tornados, said. (Like his father, he adopted Meyers as his stage surname.)
The Sir Douglas Quintet formed in San Antonio in 1964, drawing from an array of influences as wide as Texas itself: garage rock, blues, jazz and R&B, along with Texas-Mexican border genres like conjunto and norteño.
While never a commercial juggernaut, the group had three Top 40 hits on the Billboard chart: “She’s About a Mover” rose to No. 13 in 1965, “The Rains Came” made it to No. 31 the next year and “Mendocino” climbed to No. 27 in 1969.
Its impact was far greater in its home state, where it became “one of the great Texas bands of all time,” Joe Nick Patoski, an author and historian who directed the 2015 documentary “Sir Doug & the Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove,” said in an interview.
The band’s frontman, Doug Sahm, may have gotten the spotlight, but Mr. Meyers was hailed as a star in his own right. He filled in parts typically played on an accordion in traditional South Texas music with his bright, syncopated riffs, which functioned as the sonic engine of the band and set the model for countless groups to follow.
“Augie Meyers and his Vox organ are the Tex-Mex groove,” Mr. Patoski said. “That is the groove, the element in Tex-Mex music that gives it the bounce, the appeal, that made Tex-Mex more than a regional sound.”
Part of what made Mr. Meyers’ sound distinctive was his choice of instruments. Instead of the ubiquitous Hammond B-3 vacuum tube organ, with its rich, gospel-ready sound, he opted for a lightweight, transistor-based Vox Continental, manufactured in Britain and known for its reedy, chirpy tone. He often claimed he had the first one in America.
His tone was often described as “cheesy” or “cheap,” and he took that as a compliment. He often said that he preferred the more exuberant Vox sound, reminiscent of a merry-go-round or a circus calliope, in part because it could cut through the guitars onstage.
Mr. Meyers recalled members of the Beatles approaching him to ask how he got his sound. (His secret: Play the Vox through a Fender Super Reverb amplifier.) His distinctive approach set the template for countless garage rock and new wave bands to follow.
August Edmond George Meyer Jr. was born on May 31, 1940, in San Antonio, the only child of August and Emma (Kosub) Meyer, who together ran a grocery store.
He was born with a club foot and without his left ear. (He later wore a prosthetic, barely visible because of his long hair.) As a child, he spent more than three years in an iron lung after contracting polio.
He eventually went to live with his grandparents outside town. “The doctors said the country would be a better environment than the city for my health,” he said in a 1974 interview with The Austin American-Statesman, “but I didn’t walk until I was 7.”
Limited by his health issues, he started writing poems and songs to keep himself occupied. Inspired by acts like Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and blues artists like B.B. King, he taught himself guitar and piano. As a student at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio, from which he graduated in 1958, he began gigging with local bands.
He and Mr. Sahm, a prodigy on steel guitar, had been friends since childhood, but it took an ambitious scheme by the noted Texas record producer Huey P. Meaux to place them in the same band.
At the height of Beatlemania, Mr. Meaux decided to put together a British Invasion knockoff group of his own and recruited the two friends. He chose a laughably British-sounding name, outfitted the members in matching suits and adorned each with a Parliament-worthy nickname; Mr. Meyers was Lord August.
The Sir Douglas Quintet’s debut single, “Sugar Bee” (1964), went nowhere. The group made a name for itself the next year with the bluesy rocker “She’s About a Mover,” which became the centerpiece of its first album, curiously named “The Best of the Sir Douglas Quintet” (1966).
By the time of its release, Mr. Sahm had been arrested on drug charges at the Corpus Christi airport and decided to flee Texas for more freewheeling San Francisco, where he formed a new version of the group and eventually lured Mr. Meyers.
In 1969, the group released “Mendocino,” the title song of an album that many consider its masterpiece. Equal parts Tex-Mex and California psychedelic rock, the album, as the music site Pitchfork once put it, proved that “country could be just as groovy as the Grateful Dead.”
The group disbanded in 1972. Mr. Meyers went on to a prolific solo career, recording nearly two dozen minor-label albums over the years. Mr. Sahm eventually reformed the Sir Douglas Quintet, which scored a major hit in Scandinavia with the 1983 song “Meet Me in Stockholm.”
In 1989, Mr. Meyers and Mr. Sahm, along with the country and Tejano star Freddy Fender and the accordion virtuoso Flaco Jiménez, formed a Tex-Mex supergroup, the Texas Tornados.
The group’s 1990 hit “(Hey Baby) Que Paso” — a rendition of a 1980s song by Mr. Meyers — became a Texas party anthem. Another song off the Tornados’ self-titled debut album, “Soy de San Luis,” won a Grammy Award for Best Mexican-American Performance.
In addition to his son, Mr. Meyers is survived by his wife, Sara Ramirez-Meyer, and a grandson. His marriage to Carolyn (Brown) Meyer ended in divorce in 1989.
Mr. Meyers was also a sought-after sideman, appearing on albums by Tom Waits, Willie Nelson and Tom Jones, as well as on multiple Bob Dylan albums, including the Grammy-winning “Time Out of Mind” (1997).
“Augie’s my man,” Mr. Dylan once said, praising him in the most cryptic, Dylan-esque fashion possible. “He’s like an intellectual who goes fishing using bookworms. Seriously, though, he’s the shining example of a musician, Vox player or otherwise, who can break the code.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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