The Briks

In a hotbed of hot bands, The Briks certainly burned among the brightest of all the best groups Dallas had to offer in the 1960s. Their songs ‘Can You See Me’ and ‘Foolish Baby’ are classics, and Cicadelic Records helped enhance the band’s legacy by later releasing several previously unreleased but solid songs. Lead guitarist Richard Borgens was instrumental in the group’s formation and also wrote much of the their material.

An Interview With Richard Borgens

60sgaragebands.com (60s): How did you first get interested in music?

Richard Borgens (RB): My parents loved music, and gave my sister and I lessons. I started out on violin when I was about seven and switched to classical guitar. My sister, who is about four years younger than I, also started about that age and took classical piano lessons. I stayed with lessons for a long time into my teenage years. I thus knew the fretboard very well, knew how to transpose and read music by the time I got into playing popular music as a freshman and sophomore in high school. I am now 62 and still work to keep my hands in shape, and also play mandolin and five-string banjo. While I get busy with my career and go a long time between bouts of practice, I still am very serious about guitar.

60s: Was The Embers your first band?

RB: No. I played with several combos in high school These were usually two guitars, bass, drums, and a saxophone – and played largely instrumentals at the sock hops in the school gymnasiums (kids were not allowed to dance with shoes on the waxed basketball court!). My junior and senior year I played around with a lot of friends and do not remember a particular band.

60s: Was The Embers the same band as The Briks, but after a name change?

RB: Almost…The Embers had a bass player with a great voice named Bobby Daniels from Friona, Texas. When most of us Dallas boys busted out of Texas Tech at Lubbock, we went back home to Dallas. We got a new singer and bass guitar player.

I met Lee Hardesty on the floor of our dorm at Texas Tech University in 1964. We were 18-years-old. He and I found a good drummer in the same dorm from Dallas named Steve Martin. With Bobby Daniels (a West Texas boy), we formed The Embers and were basically a party band at Tech (mostly frat parties). We had a really good time—actually too good a time…too little study—and the three of us returned to Dallas on academic probation! So did two other buddies from Dallas, Reggie Lang (who later became the manager of The Briks) and Cecil Cotten. With a booking agent later, Reggie was less a “manager” as he was a ringleader for fun…and always had something cooked up for us to do. Party…party…party.

Cecil became our new lead singer once back home in Dallas. An old friend of Lee’s, named Mike Meroney, became the bass player and that was the nucleus of The Briks.

The Embers formed in 1964 and morphed into The Briks in 1965. So I guess one could say Lee Hardesty and I started the whole thing back at Tech, quickly adding Steve Martin.

I played lead guitar, harmonica, and vocals and wrote most of the songs along with Cecil. Lee Hardesty played rhythm guitar and backing vocals, but actually that was a misnomer because he did some lead work too. He also played some keyboards occasionally. Mike Meroney played bass and contributed vocals and Steve Martin was on drums.

About two years after forming, Cecil and Steve enlisted to keep out of the draft so Paul Ray was the lead singer for a while, and Chris Vanderkolk on drums. Cecil outed the airforce quickly and returned to Dallas to rejoin the band. Paul, who was simply a great singer, went on to do other things; basically we were all friends. I got the wanderlust by 1967-1968 and started making records with a variety of people, and played for a short while with some high school friends (called Truth) and was replaced by Jamie Herndon as The Briks continued to play as a group.

60s: How would you describe the band's sound? What bands influenced you?

RB: Straightforward 1960’s rock and roll was our forte. We were at our best doing Stones and The Kinks. But since all of us sang—we did some Byrds, Yardbirds, and of course The Beatles. We were an emotional group and when the volume went way up we seemed to carry the crowds. I hated playing clubs. It was all about volume, strong guitars, and a great heavy-handed drummer in Steve. As we matured we did more melodies—even Righteous Brothers songs when Paul sang with us.

Our own songs seemed to be heavily influenced by The Kinks and such so most were rock though the folk-rock style was there with ‘Can You See Me,’ and some ballads, too. Looking back, I think we were quite versatile.

60s: Where did the band typically play?

RB: We were known for big frat parties (like “Roundup” at The University of Texas) and we played some university parties, for example at Christmas and Spring Break, at SMU, University of North Texas, and even back to Texas Tech. While we lived in Denton, we became a regular fixture at a booze soaked—just a great club—outside of town, curiously called The Windjammer. We were loud, the crowd drunk, and I loved playing there; it seemed we always sounded good there. We played a lot of the big teen nightclubs of the time, in Dallas (The Studio Club and Lou Anns), and in Houston (The Catacombs). After a year in Dallas, we really got around.

60s: How far was the band's "touring" territory?

RB: Mainly Texas, with forays into Oklahoma occasionally.

60s: Did The Briks participate in any battle of the bands?

RB: Yes. We did when starting out as The Briks. I don’t remember those events very well now. Basically what I remember was meeting other musicians, like The Green Men there, but our music circles were largely defined by North Texas State University in Denton—which was our base of operations for years—with the late George Rickrich being our booking agent. We had a lot of band friends there; Denton was sort of the “Long Hair” musician campus. Many of these people are still friends to this day of my Brik buddies in Texas; some like Don Henley, Richard Bowden, Jimmy Vaughan and Doyle Bramhall went on to huge careers.

60s: How popular locally did The Briks become?

RB: We were very popular. I still meet professional people today that graduated from SMU or Texas University (not related to the Denton scene) and they still remember the excitement of The Briks. Though our time together was comparatively short—it was intense—and I believe looms larger in our memories for each of us. Perhaps it was the first thing any of us did in our lives to that point in which we prospered; in which we were really successful as teenagers and young men.

60s: What were the circumstances leading to the Briks' opportunity to first record?

RB: I really don’t remember. I do remember cutting a record at a Dallas studio, and the guys drove by KBOX in the suburbs of Dallas and handed the demo off to a deejay that played it on the spot. We were listening to ourselves on the radio the same night. Wow…those were the days. Lee was always a techno-junkie. He failed out of Tech by staying up nights building an analog computer and developing four-wheel drive slot cars! He built the first “fuzz box” after listening to The Stone’s ‘Satisfaction’ and had to case the electronics in a brown wood box that held English Leather aftershave lotion! The first time he used it at a recording studio the soundmen and engineers went ballistic trying to figure out where all of the distortion was coming from!

60s: Where did The Briks record?

RB: We recorded at several places around Dallas. In the ‘60s there were no tricks or effects. The band played as if in a club, laying down track after track, until you got it right. I remember playing the harmonica break on top of my lead in ‘Foolish Baby’ as an overdub! Now, wow – that was high tech for us.

60s: Did The Briks write many original songs? Who was the band's primary songwriter?

RB: I guess I was. I penned several by myself but the things we were best known for were joint efforts by Cecil and me. Of course, then…like now…it is the “hooks” that make a song popular. Lee was great at that. It was his “thirds” used as an intro to ‘Can You See Me’ while I played an electric12-string…basic accompaniment and a short break in the middle. It was Lee’s mellow cherry-red Gibson that played the single note melodies in ‘From A Small Room.’

60s: Do any (other) '60's Briks recordings exist that haven't been released yet by Cicadelic Records? Are there any vintage live recordings, or unreleased tracks?

RB: Yes. Last count we had about six or eight studio recordings and a lot of tapes and party material. Some are really pretty good.

60s: Did the band make any local TV appearances? Does any home movie film footage exist of the band?

RB: I know of no home movies but we did do some TV in Dallas: the Sumpin’ Else show with local personality Ron Chapman, and also (some shows) in Houston. A lot of that is lost in the haze of 40 years!

60s: What year and why did the band break up?

RB: I don’t know exactly. I left Texas in 1973 for graduate school at Purdue University and lost track of my buddies for along time. The band went on to perform together ocasionally even into the 1990s.

60s: Did you join or form any bands after The Briks?

RB: Yes. I had a short stint and a record with a studio band The Town Council and Truth…basically joining a great drummer and high school friend Jon David “The Bird” Blachley. The group was the core of a Bryan Adams High School group called Kenny and The Kasuals. Kenny was with us for a while and then a new lead singer joined and we changed the name. The fellows I knew from high school were Blachley (the drummer), Jerry Smith (rhythm guitar) and Lee Lightfoot (bass player). Actually we had a good strong live sound.

The most memorable time with Truth was part of a summer spent in New York City playing clubs in Manhattan like Scott Muni’s Rolling Stone Club. Being naïve, we decided we wanted to stay at a musician hotel in the village. So we all had a big room in this absolute dump, The Albert Hotel, where some of The Lovin’ Spoonful and Tim Buckley were to have lived. Right across the street was a gay bar called The Stirrup 77. So in I went thinking I had found a little piece of the southwest in The Village of all places…not knowing anything about cowboy “code” in those early days of the gay scene in New York City. My! Everyone was really nice to me, buying me cigarettes and beer, and me with my long red hair, cowboy boots, and fringe jacket. Being basically clueless, it took me a while to figure out there were no girls in the bar. Talk about a panicked, yet measured, departure.

Eventually I went into basic training in Ft. Polk, Louisiana and medical training as an Army Reserve Corpsman at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and went back to school after returning from active duty. That spelled the end of my rock and roll days though I played a lot of acoustic music in the Midwest at Purdue and at Yale Univeristy as I moved around the country. I never really gave up “live” entertainment.

60s: What keeps you busy today?

RB: Today I am at the polar opposite you would expect from a rock and roller from the ‘60s. I hold two Professorships at Purdue University and two in China. I work in research only, and have never really taught college at all. I am the Director of the Institute I formed in 1986 to develop treatments for disease and injury to the brain and spinal cord. I love my career; I’m still working with a lot of brilliant young people (mainly graduate students in Basic Medical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering and Postdoctoral Fellows). I still work hard at my guitar doing a lot of “flat picking” (typical of Doc Watson and Norman Blake) and my first love, Spanish Classical (Fernando Sor, Franscico Tarrega, etc.). I have a large collection of vintage electric and acoustic guitars (I’m embarrassed to say how many), banjos and mandolins. My wife is a singer and we still entertain friends actually doing some old Buckwheat Stevenson ballads a few nights ago for some graduate students.

As far as a truly professional gig, my wife Sandy and I did some acoustic duets in local clubs in the late 1980s and now that’s gone. It is just for us and friends.

60s: How do you best summarize your experiences with The Briks?

RB: It was a singular and very, very, special time in my life. I learned so much with my friends, all living away from home for the first time. The tangibles—learning to become professional and to work hard for a “good sound”—not just the time honored “jam” in front of an audience. We were serious. It was, as I said, our first experience with true success, forged by working together. We made some really good money occasionally and all of that together shaped me as a more confident adult. There were intangibles as well. I never had one moment of fear to go to a podium and address several hundered scientists at a professional symposium. That is nothing compared to standing in the stage lights with a big crowd watching your every move, and trying to work through a lead break.

I left Texas never to return…living in Indiana, Connecticut, Maine and California as a university faculty member and professional scientist. Yet my friends, The Briks, were never really out of my thought—even my mind’s eye—and I often daydreamed about them and those times. All of them made their adult lives in Texas and stayed in touch, as real friends should. My biggest regret is that I let the river of my career pull me along in the current and I did not see everyone, as I should have.

We had a big reunion some years back. I drove down to Denton to see Lee, and on to Omaha, Texas where Cecil lived to meet with everyone. What a joy. I am so glad I did. Actually, it was providence that I did. Cecil passed away in March 2008 and it is these events that remind you of how old you are, how quickly time passes, and how important those “guys” of the 1960s, my friends The Briks, are in my life.

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