Everyone who deals with the music business is familiar with the following scenario: Label opens its doors, tries to be everything to everyone, and, with only the highest intentions in mind, swears to treat its artists right by paying royalties on time, offering tour support, booking, distribution, the whole shootin’ match. Credit cards at the ready, it offers advances to bands, buys instruments, makes van payments, and buys ad space in magazines.
Buoyed by high spirits and sheer business chutzpah, the label starts putting out records by everyone and his younger brother, on the order of one or two releases a month. In a couple of years, the label’s resources are spread far too thin to do right by anyone, and the good intentions collapse into an overheated, fermenting pile of bad debt and sour feelings.
Eddie Stout has seen it happen before. Stout paid his dues playing bass with local outfits like the Dynaflos, the Thrills, and Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets, but simply putting in time with bands wasn’t quite what he was after. He had ideas for a label since high school, but wanted it to be something that would be done right. In the early Eighties, Stout put Dallas’ Pee Wee Records together and began putting out records and licensing them in Europe. The fledgling label’s first release was by the Texas Lovers, and, before long, the wheels were in motion.
“I was the first guy to release anything by Reverend Horton Heat,” notes Stout. “He was on the Texas Lovers’ release. I also did the Paladins, Ted Roddy, Anson Funderburgh’s band, of course. [There was] Mark Pollock, Kathy Murray and the Kilowatts, a bunch of local people, and I immediately licensed all of them for Europe. Then I found U.P. Wilson and essentially did the same thing with him. It was all very low-budget — I mean, I had no money, no backing, and no idea how to do it. I just knew I wanted to have a record company.”
Stout’s seat-of-the-pants approach began to pay off, and Pee Wee Records eventually saw 15 or so releases, all with European licensing and distribution. Pee Wee was eventually shelved, though, when he got a job working marketing and distribution plans for Amazing Records, later to become Antone’s Records. Over the years, Stout logged many a tour mile with various Antone’s artists such as James Cotton, Sue Foley, Pinetop Perkins, Doug Sahm, and Kim Wilson.
It’s easy to set one’s imagination ablaze with the thought of some 20-odd folks melting the frozen steppes of Russia with a blast of Texas-style blues, and Stout was the man responsible for this bit of musical glasnost.
“Probably the wildest time was bringing 22 people to Russia,” he recalls. “It was Lou Ann Barton, the Texas Harmonica Rumble, Reverend Horton Heat, a huge amount of people. We went into northern Russia and played at Murmansk, of all places. The next year, we didn’t go. We kind of blew it off just because it was so damn difficult to get it together. It was so frustrating and crazy.”
After a considerable stint at Antone’s, Stout once again began itching for a label of his own. He teamed up with friend Dennis Wall with the idea of putting together a marquee where business would be conducted a little differently.
“We’d seen so many things wrong, day-to-day, about what a record company does, and we wanted to do what a record company should do,” Stout says. “We wanted to be totally artist-friendly, as far as total communication, royalty statements when you’re supposed to get ’em, and just face up to what you have to do as a record company and be responsible. We got frustrated seeing bad things happen on a day-to-day basis, and we both had the passion for music and the same ideas, and we put this label together.”
In 1998, Stout dropped by a Bells of Joy rehearsal and loved the sound put forth by the veteran gospel powerhouse. He visited with the band and the late A.C. Littlefield, and soon the first Dialtone release was in the works.
“[Stout] was wanting to start his own business with Dialtone,” recalls drummer Willis Littlefield, “and we did the recording for him, the Second Time Around album.”
The result was a terrific 11-song release by the group, belting out gospel tunes with a fire and fervor that puts most rock bands to shame. Then 1999 brought the release of the Texas Trumpets CD, a quartet of journeyman horn players backed by the rock-solid Eastside Band and longtime bluesman Matthew Robinson.
Tapping musical pedigrees including time served with James Brown, Etta James, Otis Redding, Duke Ellington, Joe Tex, and the Motown and Apollo house bands, Stout was able to pull together a group of horn men with talent and chops beyond compare. The resulting disc was a compellingly greasy slab of Sixties-flavored R&B.
Sadly, the Trumpets now only number three. The group lost one of its leading lights when “Pat” Patterson passed away recently at age 70, and his passing hit the group hard.
“Pat and I played a lot of gigs together, with Blues Boy Hubbard, W.C. Clark, the Eastside Band,” recalls bandmate “Duck” Jennings with a distinct note of sadness in his voice. “They’d call and ask for both of us, the two trumpets created such a big sound. It was such a blow to me, we played so much together. A lot of times, if I didn’t make it, he wouldn’t go either. Same here; it would be hard to be effective with just one trumpet when we did so many things together.”
“His sons came and took him back to Pittsburgh, where he was from, and after that, everyone locally hated it because they never even had a chance to say goodbye,” Stout says of Patterson’s death. “We never even found out what it was, but everyone just figured that it was a heart attack. It’s sad. He was 70 years old, but he was still hard at it. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, lived a clean life.”
In Patterson’s entire storied career, the Texas Trumpets disc is one of the very few recordings of his trumpet work. Indeed, his bawdy renditions of “Rebecca, Rebecca” and “Shake, Rattle, and Roll/Big Fat Mama” are the only recorded instances of the trumpeter’s vocal stylings.
This year saw Dialtone issue Greyhound Blues by the late Ervin Charles and Richard Earl, a CD of stinging Gulf Coast blues that splits the difference between Albert Collins and B.B. King. Beaumont native Charles put in a lengthy stint with Sam Young and the Soul Lovers, who formerly went by the problematic moniker Big Sambo and the Housewreckers.
After a 1972 studio session with producer Huey P. Meaux (for the song “Funky Booty”), Earl joined the Soul Lovers and became close friends with Charles. Sadly, Charles didn’t live to see Greyhound Blues come out; he died April 1. Nevertheless, Dialtone was again able to capture an extremely rare recording; after 50 years of road work, the CD is the only thing that Charles ever committed to tape.
Now, in keeping with its modest two-release-a-year schedule, Dialtone has a Christmas CD in the works featuring local Eastside favorites Clarence Pierce, James Kuykendall, Robinson, the Bells of Joy (of course), Richard Earl, and terrific newcomer Ernestine Fuller. Together, they bring home a down-and-dirty alternative to the smarmy holiday fare that engulfs Yuletide record stores in an avalanche of cheese. Pop it in your parents’ CD player when the presents are all opened and the drinkin’ starts.
Accordingly, Stout currently has no plans for 23-story headquarters, limousine service, million-dollar expense accounts, or world hegemony in Dialtone’s future.
“I’d just like to see it be a record label where I could quit my day job and concentrate on this every day,” he muses. “I’d like to see it accomplish that everyone is happy on the label and all the artists are into it and to be artist-friendly. I’d like to leave something to my daughter, a legacy of something I’ve done right.
“A friend told me one time that, before you die, the only thing you’ve got is your word,” Stout concludes. “I’d like to leave that and do the best I can for all the musicians on the label.” 
This article appears in Rick Perry.