Before You Leave

Alright Zoo Freaks, settle in for a minute, because the Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on something that barely made it out of East Texas alive. This is "Before You Leave" by First State Bank, off that little collection somebody put together years later and called First State Bank 1970-1976. The song itself was the flip side of a 1975 single on Banke Records, paired with "A Long Long Time," published by Mockingbird Music and billed as a Steve Wright production. It sat on a private-press seven-inch for decades, the kind of thing you only found if you knew a guy who knew a guy, until the folks at RidingEasy Records dug it up for Brown Acid: The Third Trip in 2016. That series is all about the hard rock and heavy psych that never got a fair shake, and this one belongs right in the middle of it.

The band started out in Gladewater, over by Tyler and Longview, and the Gladewater Mirror wrote them up in April of 1969 when they were still kids winning battle of the bands contests in Tyler and Longview. They were headed to Shreveport hoping to win a paid trip out to California to appear with Paul Revere and the Raiders on the Happening '69 show. Whether they ever got that trip is one of those stories that just kind of drifted off. What we do know is they packed up and moved to Dallas, worked the club circuit, and kept regular gigs going in Arlington and Houston. Randy Nunnally wrote every song on the records they cut, and he was the only guy who stayed in the lineup the whole way through. Early on it was Terry Clayton on keyboards, Harvey Hanson on drums, and Don Wilson on bass, with Glen Sheridan managing and Raymond Murray running the stage. Later you had names like Donny Hyles, Shannon Day, John Windle, Kirk Brewster, and a fellow they called Rabbitt Scruggs coming through the door.

Here's the part that still stings. Around the time the band was peaking in 1976, word got around that Ted Nugent had heard Randy play and asked him to come out as a guitarist on a tour. Right about then Randy was diagnosed with ALS. He went downhill fast and passed in 1986. He was born in 1952, so he never got old enough to see any of this get a second life. The original master tapes were lost in a fire, which is why the Shroom Angel CDR that carries the 1970-1976 title had to be built from the singles and a live radio broadcast somebody still had. That disc is dedicated to Randy. A few years after Brown Acid put "Before You Leave" back in circulation, they did the same for the earlier single "Mr. Sun" on The Tenth Trip. Lance Barresi from Permanent Records has said he goes through hell and high water tracking these records down and then hunting the people who made them, because licensing them beats bootlegging them, and a lot of these bands had been gone for thirty or forty years.

They never had a big official website, and there isn't an Instagram or an X account floating around for the band. What you can still find is the Facebook page the old crowd keeps at facebook.com/firststatebankband, where photos of Randy and the guys still turn up. The best written history sits over at Garage Hangover, garagehangover.com/the-first-state-bank, which is where the Gladewater lineup and the discography got sorted out. Discogs keeps the releases lined up at discogs.com/artist/2917858-First-State-Bank. No big fan club page beyond that Facebook spot, just the record collectors and the Brown Acid people who refused to let a Gladewater guitar player disappear. That's the story on this one, Zoo Freaks. Randy wrote it, the bank never cashed it, and we're still playing it.