Les McGehee

I was a teenager at Canyon Lake and I did all that stuff.  Constantly swimming, keg parties in the middle of nowhere, stadium rock in San Antonio, Album rock in Austin.

I had hosted a high school talent show as a junior.  I wrote three jokes and either they sucked or I sucked.  But then a girl’s record player broke and I was asked to fill about 15 minutes.  I told stories and was funny.  A judge of the talent show offered me a comedy job ato take place a couple of days later and I took it and got paid.  I was scared because I knew I was funny but I knew I had a problem telling prepared jokes, especially if I’d told them before.  But I did it and it went well.  That show was in a banquet hall at the San Antonio Convention center.  That would have been 1978 I think.

But I was much more interested in acting.  I was invited into a program at UT where they let high school juniors take a college semester in the Department of Drama.  I’d done some plays already including original works and two high school productions that had won a bunch of awards.  We took dance, voice, literature classes, the whole nine yards.  We did shows in the Lab Theater at UT.  There at UT I met other funny actors.  One of them Kirkland, is a partner of mine in the TV/Film industry in LA.  I did well, I was still good-looking enough to play funny leads, which would only last a few more years…

Austin made a big impression on me.  First through radio.  YOu could hear album rock on Austin radio that you couldn’t hear elsewhere.  Then the lifestyle.  Oh my, the clubs, live music, just the sheer joy and danger of being on a campus that housed tens of thousands of young people all hyped about art, sex, and change.  The drinking age was 18, then later 19, which was close enough for us to fake it into a few campus-area clubs.  At some point, couple of us went across the street and a couple of blocks over to a scary loud place called The Rome Inn.  I walked in and was kind of on the stage walking to seats, stunned because the music was rockin so well.  onstage were some of the guys from Paul Ray’s bands, maybe pre-thunderbirds lineup too, and Billy Gibbons from ZZTop who was a BIG star to me.

I decided Austin rocked, i was no longer a High school aged teen, all that was over and the future looked great.

When I got back to the country I had lost interest in little theater stuff and didn’t even sign up for drama as a senior.  The drama teacher came and pulled me out of class, chewed me out, said I had a responsibility to the school and unceremoniously took me to the office and conscripted into what would be a fun year of theatrical adventure.

i graduated, got scholarshipped to UT Drama, and took off.  What I remember most about Drama at UT was auditioning.  It was such a mess, who would do what.  Sometimes there were several great parts for me, sometimes none.  I found it very frustrating that an actor couldn’t manage themselves more, that they had to be so beholden to directors and auditions.

One day I went to a big multi-show audition.  There werent any parts for me but because it was school I had to go.  That made me mad.  I wanted to decide when I would work.  So I wnet home and called some creepy guy in the Greenhouse Discoteque office because it was a Thursday and they had comedy nights on Thursdays.  That would have been 1981?

Greenhouse was at 35th and guadalupe.  They said come on over.  i got there and they were full of smirks.  There were 2-3 creepy club guys there.  The manager told me to do five minutes so I did, in the office.  They put me on the bill that night along with Johnny Torrez and Kerry Awn.  We performed on the dance floor surrounded by raised brass rails and ferns.  I did OK, was asked back.  I met a comic named Tiny Mac who was large and did lots of fat jokes.  He asked me to open some shows for him around Central Texas and I did.  He was extra-creepy and lecherous so I quit immediately afterwards.

Famous Austin radio guy Larry Monroe saw one of those Greenhouse shows.  Later I made him a sandwich by campus at the County Lunch and he said he’d been intrigued by my act and had I considered recording?  I didn’t follow up with Larry like I should have and that was one of my first tasty missed opportunities I’d say.  But his encouragement meant a lot and I was working on my terms.

I was developing my pattern of having an opener in mind, some amount of material in mind, and then winging it until my time was up.  Once I learned how to close it was going pretty well.  But I didn’t tell people I was making stuff up, they would have been uncomfortable back then.  I just kept my laugh-per-minute ratio up and kept a going and left them free to think whatever they wanted to think.

How good was I at stand-up?  not as good as the guys ahead of me that’s for sure.  What was it like to be the young gun at the same time as Bill Hicks and the great Austin comedy scene that was developing?  Tough, Bill and a lot of the other comics were getting VERY good and I was green and starting later.  I did better outside of Austin where I didn’t feel like I was playing catch up to the great comics here.

A smart thing happened to me though, where I was looking at these successful comics and detecting that they had problem lifestyles.  Not just sex drugs and rocknroll, but larger design probs like spending your life in a car, a hotel, and with flaky club people.  It didn’t have the type of family community thing that theater had.  I missed that.  I didn’t want to spend my life working alone and driving a car.  That was the mental shift that started me towards improvising with friends.  It was about 1983…

Next, I find group comedy in Austin…

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