Today's Featured Biography

 
Al Henson

I am now married for 34 years to a wonderful Yankee lady. She has now lived in Texas longer than she lived in Connecticut. After PHS, I worked in the refineries about 6 months then started at San Jac Jr College. I went a semester to San Jac then left the next Fall for college at South West Texas State in San Marcos. I did two semesters at SWTSU but toward the end of Ocotober of that first semester, I got suspended for an Illegal War Protest On Campus. It was the National Fall War Moratorium and a number of students decided that we could protest in Texas too. Wrong. We disrupted classes by sitting silently on the grass (how does that disrupt?) and were told to leave immediatley or suffer the consequences. I thought Disciplinary Probation or something. Wrong twice in one day. We were expelled. About three weeks later were allowed back in school by court injuncton pending a court case. A case we later lost resulting in the loss of all the credits for the full year. Thus endeth the college career of Al Henson. Back to Pasadena and back to refinery work. Started a band with guys from around East Houston and one guy from Lubbock. We rented a rehersal hall in Old Town Pasadena across for the Old Post Office on Munger. In October (I better watch out for October) of 1970 we had some very nice (not) Pasadena Officers stroll our Rehersal facility with in guns in hand and it was a bust. Actually it was a bust gone awry. The search warrant was made out for another band on the street that had had prior troubles but the night night that the police decided to raid them, they were out playing a job. Well after getting all those boys in blue together they decided to go get those other hippe musicians down the street, which included me. Anyway, even after drugs being planted in our rehearsal hall, we and 7 strangers (kids) that has just wandered in off the street to hear us play, we were all found not guilty with the bad search warrant being the end all/be all. But, this convinced me that I (and my band mates) was no longer welcome in Pasadena or probably Texas for that matter. We had used the down time between arrest and trial (about six weeks) to get all of our business together and move to New York City and take a shot a making it up there.
We headed north but the closest that we could get to New York for affordable housing was a couple of hundred miles away in Vermont. We rented a big house on a mountain and started back to working on our original music. We quickly realized that the money was running out fast and we needed income so we started working on cover material to augment our origianls and after a few weeks we had a four hour long set list so that we could find work in clubs. We landed a good job playing the whole winter ski season at a big club in Stowe, VT. The same club owner had a big nightclub in The Hamptins on Long Island in New york and we got to play the whole summer season there. Anyway one job led to another and for 3 and a half years the same 5 guys from Texas lived, slept, ate and played music together all over New England and into Eastern Canada. It was a great time. When one of the band members finally decided that he was going to quit the band and get married it was too hard to even think of someone else in the group so we split up. I moved in with my girl(now wife) Sue in Connecticut. We did some travelling with me trying to get another music project together (too many stories to tell there) and after a few months decided that we would get married. When I proposed, we were living in a tent in a guitar player's backyard. Talk about for better or worse, she got the worst right off the bat. We moved to Upstate NY and became Winter Caretakers at a sort of hotel out in the country near the Saratoga Springs Racetrack. That lasted until the cold weather set in and the Fuel shortage hit and they threatened to shut off our supply of fuel since we were brand new customers. We decided to come back to Texas. We lived in Pasadena for almost 10 years, reestablished ties with some great old friends and then finally moved into our present home in The Heights area of Houston. We have no children but we have raised Wire Fox Terriers since 1977. I played in a few bands after coming back to Texas but in 1977 I took a job as an entertainment booking agent and quit playing music for a long while. In 1979, I started my Private Party DJ Business called Al Henson's Party Machine. Those two jobs have gone hand in hand and I've been very lucky to stay pretty busy with both. I started playing live music again 5 or 6 years ago when my wife bought me a guitar. That started what has become a weekly gathering of musicians that includes mostly PHS alumni and a few other mostly long time friends. All in all, life is very sweet. A good woman, many good, longtime friends, my health holding out are all signs that God has smiled upon me and for that, I am truly thankful.

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