Wheatfield

Lyle Lovett - January 1999 from the foreword to the book "Austin City Limits-25 Years of American Music" by John T. Davis 'Turning the knob, changing the channels the old-fashioned way one evening in 1976, I landed on KUHT, Houston's PBS station-the country's first PBS station- and saw a band on a stage in front of an enthusiastic audience. Two tall, skinny men with long, blond hair, one on each end of the stage, stood playing acoustic guitars as a beautiful dark-haired girl sat on a stool between them in the center of the stage, singing, "The lady has no heart.

from the foreword to the book
"Austin City Limits-25 Years of American Music"
by John T. Davis

'Turning the knob, changing the channels the old-fashioned way one evening in 1976, I landed on KUHT, Houston's PBS station-the country's first PBS station- and saw a band on a stage in front of an enthusiastic audience. Two tall, skinny men with long, blond hair, one on each end of the stage, stood playing acoustic guitars as a beautiful dark-haired girl sat on a stool between them in the center of the stage, singing, "The lady has no heart....". "What is this?" I thought. I sat down, mesmerized, arm's length from the television, and didn't touch the knob again until after Gary P. Nunn's "London Homesick Blues" played and the credits for the show ran.

The band was Wheatfield. The tall, skinny men were Craig Calvert and Chris (Ezra) Idlet, the dark-haired girl was Connie Mims and what it was, was Austin City Limits in its first season.

About Wheatfield...

Wheatfield began in 1972 in Houston, Texas, with Connie Mims, Ezra Idlet, and Craig Calvert. The three original members met during a talent show at Lamar High School in Houston Texas. When they began performing together professionally in 1973, luck was on their side as they almost immediately began to land really cool gigs. One evening, while playing a private party, Wheatfield was invited to play in The Virgin Islands. After 6 weeks in St. Croix, they came back tighter and determined to conquer the Texas music scene. The trio quickly established themselves at the forefront of the then emerging Texas music scene and continued to stretch their musical influences from country, bluegrass and folk into jazz and rock genres as they added bassist Bob Russell in 1974. Wheatfield worked the clubs, festivals and concert venues that year between Houston, Austin and the surrounding areas, learning their craft and honing their skills. They played well known local venues such as Liberty Hall, Armadillo World Headquarters, Steamboat Springs, Castle Creek, The Too Bitter, Guaranteed Wholesome and countless others. In 1975 Wheatfield decided that they needed to improve their groove and added drummer Damian Hevia. Not long after that, before MTV, the band was approached about playing a new live music television show on Austin's public supported KLRU called 'Austin City Limits'. Who knew? Then, Wheatfield got a call from the artistic director of the Houston Ballet (James Clouser) who wanted the band to write the music for a three act ballet called Caliban, based on 'The Tempest' by William Shakespeare. While the band was completing the score for 'Caliban' they were contacted by another band called Wheatfield who claimed to own the rights to the 'Wheatfield' name and insisted that the 'Texas Wheatfield ' cease and desist using the name. Caught up in the creative process of 'Caliban' and without the resources of the internet to see if the other band's claims were true, the members of Wheatfield decided to change the name of the band in order to avoid a law suit. The band that once was Wheatfield became known as St. Elmo's Fire and St. Elmo's Fire played on until it in 1979.

About the Wheatfield CD...

While looking through a closet at his boyhood home, Craig found three, dusty, unmarked boxes containing eight-track master tapes of Wheatfield. Not the kind of eight-track tape that you might have had in your car if you were alive in the 70's but eight-track, professional multi?track recording tapes that were state of the art at the time. Craig thought that if the material on the tape was good and intact it should be mixed and released. Craig contacted Connie and told her about finding the forgotten tapes and asked her if she wanted to partner with him in the Wheatfield project. Connie said, ?Count me in.? After months of looking for a now, antiquated eight-track recorder, it became apparent that locating a tape machine that was capable of playing and transferring the tapes was proving to be a daunting task. Then, as fate would have it, Connie was doing some recording work at Sugar Hill Studios in Houston and discovered that the studio not only had an eight-track tape machine but it was also the one on which Wheatfield had originally recorded the old, newfound tracks. With the tracks sounding good and the tapes in good shape, the tracks were transferred to a Pro Tools digital format which is widely used in recording studios today. After the transfers were complete, Craig took them to Moonhouse Studio in Austin and produced the tracks. At that point, Connie signed on as the Executive Producer, which means she was willing to pay for the mixing, mastering and CD manufacturing. When the mixing of the transferred eight-track tapes was complete there were only eight cuts suitable for release. There were some key songs missing from the project, so the decision was made to try to add songs from Wheatfield's 1976 Austin City Limits performance to fill out the project. Austin City Limits staff kindly obliged and seven more tracks were added to the Wheatfield CD from their ACL performance. The final product is an accurate representation of that 70's band from Texas, Wheatfield.

Due to the band member's individual performance schedules, Wheatfield is unable to play gigs on a regular basis. They squeeze the shows in whenever the stars align properly or when Trout Fishing In America, Calvert & Mims and Murphy's InLaws all have the same date free.