Live at Raul's 40th anniversary bash w/ the Skunks, the Next, the Explosives, Larry Seaman

“It all runs together for me,” says master singer-songwriter Jon Dee Graham of being the teenage guitarist who replaced Eddie Muñoz in early Austin punk unit the Skunks. “The Raul’s period was so wild and vital to me.”

Graham revisits it Saturday, reuniting with fellow Skunks Jesse Sublett and Billy Blackmon onstage at Sam’s Town Point, marking the 40th anniversary of vintage local punk survey Live at Raul’s, reissued earlier this year. To celebrate, the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture has reassembled much of the LP’s cast besides the Skunks: the Next, Explosives, Standing Waves. After a cardiac incident in Chicago earlier this summer, Graham will be hitting his power chords from a chair.

“I’ve already been through it with Jesse,” affirms Graham. “He said, ‘If we have to roll you in on a gurney, we’ll do it that way!’”

After a 90-minute set at Fitzgerald’s Music Festival, which ended a seven-show run, the guitarist walked offstage to find his car.

“And next thing I knew, I was having my clothes cut off me inside an ambulance,” he says. “Let’s just say I was not well-hydrated. They think possibly my electrolytes might have been out of balance.”

Being out almost five minutes, Graham escaped brain damage but not nerve damage to his legs, hence being chairbound at recent shows.

“I walk with difficulty and with a cane,” he notes, “but every day is incrementally better. I can see a time in one month or six weeks where I’ll be standing up.”

This won’t stop him celebrating the personal watershed that was Live at Raul’s:

“I was 18, and it was the first time I’d ever been on a record. I remember finishing the show and thinking, ‘Well, that was pretty goddamn good!’”