Full Moon On Main Street

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a cut that smells like hot pavement, wet alley gravel, and a sheriff’s car idling two blocks over. “Full Moon On Main Street” is Omar & The Howlers working the swampy side of the Texas blues, pulled off the 1996 album Southern Style. If you are riding with the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, this is the one that makes the room lean in. Hound dog in the junkyard, black cat in the garbage can, a wine-o down in the alley, and a bad moon coming up over the storefronts. The chorus does not whisper. It warns you. Sirens are wailing, and somebody is going to jail.

Here is the part a lot of folks miss when they hear that gravel voice and assume Omar wrote every line. The song belongs to Fred James and Hoy Lindsey. The Kinsey Report cut the original back in 1987 for Alligator, a hard Chicago-blues reading of the same street scene. Omar and the Howlers picked it up about a decade later and dragged it south and west, slowing the pulse and letting the guitar hang in the air like a porch light that never quite goes out. On the Southern Style sessions he shared the producer’s chair with Richard Mullen, the same engineer who had already spent years in Austin rooms getting that big, unfussy guitar sound onto tape. Watermelon Records put the record out in the States. Provogue handled Europe. The track sits in the middle of the album, right after “Bessie Mae” and before “Pot of Gold,” and it is the one that feels like a short story somebody told you in a roadhouse parking lot.

Omar has never been shy about where pictures like that come from. In a long sit-down with Early Blues, he talked about Austin the way a man talks about a town that nearly chewed him up before it fed him. He rolled in during 1976. Sixth Street was not a college parade yet. It was pawn shops, Mexican clubs, and Black blues rooms, and he called it a dangerous place. That is the Main Street this song is walking. Not a postcard. A street where the doors stay locked and the sirens are not decoration. He has also said, more than once, that he never set out to be a businessman in a music town. New York scared the band. Los Angeles scared the band. Nashville did not fit. Austin did, because you could still be a longhair with a guitar case and get a gig. He told a Pennsylvania paper years later that you could be a hippie there and just play. That is the whole Howlers religion in one line.

The man behind the howl started out as Kent Dykes in McComb, Mississippi, born in 1950, same little town that gave the world Bo Diddley. His daddy stacked the house with Albert Collins, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Memphis Slim. Kent did not sort the pile into genres. He just played what was spinning. By twelve he was slipping into edge-of-town juke joints. By thirteen he had a band, and the next youngest player in the room was old enough to be his father. He has laughed about a used-car-lot gig when he was fourteen, standing between Joe Willie Wilkins and Houston Stackhouse, both of them alumni of Sonny Boy Williamson’s circle, and asking those two legends to play “Walk, Don’t Run.” He thought they were terrible. He did not know enough yet to know they were great. They kept talking about Robert. He figured they meant Robert Johnson. They meant Robert Nighthawk.

A Grand Ole Opry sideman named Mr. Calcutt showed him licks and once hauled him to Bossier City for a strip-club job with strict orders not to tell his parents. Creedence, Lonnie Mack, Eddie Taylor, and a hopeless wish to be Roy Buchanan filled out the rest of the schooling. After high school he drifted through Hattiesburg and Jackson. Down in Hattiesburg a drummer named Bobby Field pulled together a wild party band called the Howlers, with players from Mississippi and Arkansas. They did Top 40 until the room hated them for it. Kent finally drew the line. No more “Angie.” No more “Daniel.” They learned Taj Mahal’s “Going Up to the Country” and “Paint My Mailbox Blue” and never looked back. Sax players wore Henry Kissinger masks and got billed as the Kissinger Brothers. Some nights the horns were Dolly. Some nights they were Cher. Cardboard cutouts came out for skits. Gallon cans of collards sat in the prop trunk next to a Mojo mask built by Blaze Foley.

They called the tall guitar player Omar Overtone because he liked to let a Gibson scream with feedback, then drop on his back and spin, usually with a little whiskey in the mix. His wife bought him a strap for Christmas with the name Omar stitched on it. The nickname stuck, and the government name got left in Mississippi. The Howlers pointed the van at Austin in 1976, a six-piece outfit working for about a hundred and fifty dollars a night, fans of the Silvertones and already hip to the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Soap Creek, the Broken Spoke, the Armadillo, and Antone’s took them in. A couple of years later most of the original bunch decided the road was not a life. They went home. Kent asked if he could keep the name. Nobody objected. Omar & The Howlers, proper, dates from about 1978.

From there the story is the one Austin still tells. Independent records first, Big Leg Beat and I Told You So. Columbia came calling after an Austin City Limits taping and a Tipitina’s show, and Hard Times in the Land of Plenty became the record that carried the Howlers past half a million copies, with “Mississippi Hoo Doo Man” getting the radio tip-sheet treatment. The major-label stay was short. Sony bought the company and the band was cut loose. Omar kept working the rooms and the European festivals, landing at Rounder and Bullseye, then at Watermelon for Muddy Springs Road, World Wide Open, and Southern Style. Fans on the old Omar & The Howlers Facebook group still trade roadhouse stories from that stretch, the kind where the siren line in “Full Moon On Main Street” gets answered by a guitar figure and the floor moves. A Watermelon documentary shot around the same season, also called Southern Style, caught Omar and Clifford Antone talking shop between live clips. That is the company this track kept.

The voice on the record is the same instrument he has always carried, a baritone that writers keep comparing to Howlin’ Wolf with a Texas drawl poured over it. He has said he still hears the McComb players who went acoustic to Chicago and came home electric. Southern Style is that round trip set to a shuffle. The junkyard dog, the garbage-can cat, the locked windows, the jail verse: it is street reporting from a man who learned songs in joints where the next youngest musician was fifty.

If you want the rest of the trail, the band keeps the porch light on at the official site, Omar and The Howlers. Omar posts straight from the source on Facebook and over on Instagram. Howler Nation also gathers in the long-running fan room, Omar & The Howlers on Facebook. No official X account turned up that we could stand behind, so we left that one off the rider. Spin it again, Zoo Freaks. Full moon on Main Street. Somebody’s going to jail, and the Howlers already pled guilty to the groove.