Amarillo, Texas
1978 – 1986
CH 01 · Formation
Seventeen hours from Alpine to Amarillo, June 1978. Four musicians. No station they could agree on. They became one.
The Shoulder Lane formed in June 1978, at the end of a seventeen-hour drive across West Texas. Four musicians had been hired separately to play a wedding dance in Alpine. They rode home to Amarillo together in Lonnie Fife's van. The trip normally takes six hours. A tire went outside Fort Stockton, and the part took most of a day to arrive.
The van had an AM radio. Every station the dial found faded within forty miles, and the four of them did not agree on any of it. Somewhere north of Lubbock, Dee Ochoa switched the radio off. The CB stayed on. For the last three hours they listened to drivers on channel nineteen and sang whatever came to mind. Wade Tolliver, eleven years a long-haul driver, called it the best station in Texas. By the Amarillo city limits there was a band.
On the sleeve“The high plains had no radio. So we made our own.”
— Wade Tolliver, sleeve of No Radio Signal (1979)
CH 02 · The Road
The band's history, as entered in the order it happened. Mile markers are the archive's. The road is I-40.
Wade Tolliver drove long-haul out of Amarillo from 1967 to 1978. He sang at dances on his weekends home. Dolores Ochoa had played pedal steel in Hereford and Lubbock dance halls since she was sixteen. Buck Riordan played bass in Dumas. Lonnie Fife played drums wherever someone in Dalhart needed a drummer and owned a van that could carry a kit.
Each of them was hired, separately, for the same wedding dance in Alpine in June 1978. None of them had met. The drive home took seventeen hours, a day at a tire shop in Fort Stockton, and one long argument about the radio that nobody won. The band was agreed on before the argument was settled. The argument was never settled.
The Shoulder Lane did not play clubs if it could help it. It played truck stops along I-40, from Tucumcari to Elk City, off the back of a forty-eight-foot flatbed trailer parked at the edge of the lot. The amplifiers were strapped down. The pedal steel was bolted to a sheet of plywood.
Wade announced each show on channel nineteen an hour before it started. Drivers parked facing the trailer and listened from their cabs, windows down. They did not applaud. When a song ended, they flashed their marker lights. A good night on the east lot at Shamrock looked, from the highway, like a small town switching on.
Dee Ochoa was the best musician in the band, and the band said so in every interview it gave. She arranged all four records. She wrote the turnarounds, set the tempos and decided where the silences went. Wade wrote the words. Dee decided how long the road was between them.
She played a single-neck, ten-string pedal steel with three pedals and four knee levers, and she tuned it twice before every show, in the wind, by ear. Session players who came through Amarillo to hear her generally stayed for the second set. Several asked for her tuning chart. She gave it to all of them. None of them played it the way she did.
Wade Tolliver drove his last load in the spring of 1986, from Oklahoma City to Amarillo, and parked the truck outside the studio while the band recorded the final song for Exit Ramp. The engine is audible on the tape. Nobody asked him to switch it off.
The band played its last show that October on the flatbed at Vega, Texas, to forty-one trucks. There was no announcement that it was the last. Wade signed off on channel nineteen the way he always had. The marker lights went on and stayed on longer than usual. Then the lot emptied, one rig at a time, eastbound and westbound.
Customs, equipment and one location, as the band kept them.
custom
Drivers at a Shoulder Lane show did not clap. They flashed their marker lights at the end of each song, and held them on at the end of the night. The band counted the rigs that answered and wrote the number in the logbook beside the date. The highest count on file is sixty-three, at Elk City, Oklahoma, in 1981.
equipment
Dee Ochoa's pedal steel was bolted to a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood so it could not walk on the trailer bed. The plywood went on every date from 1978 to 1986. It was replaced once, in 1983, after the dust storm at Shamrock. The second sheet is the one in the photographs.
mythology
Eastbound I-40, near McLean, Texas. The band stopped there on the way home from every eastern date to change drivers. It is a song on Exit Ramp. It is not a landmark. The band asks that nobody treat it as one.
custom
Every show ended the same way. Wade Tolliver keyed the microphone and said, "This is Static, eastbound and westbound, we're gone. Keep the shiny side up." Then he unplugged the guitar. Drivers who heard it more than once say it was never said any other way.
CH 03 · The Unit
The band exchanged cards with listeners from 1978 to 1986, the way drivers did. The archive holds one card for each member. They are reproduced front side up.
Static
Holds the microphone the way he held a CB handset: close, low, thumb ready to let go of the key.
“I drove eleven years. You learn what a song has to do between towns.”
“Ten-four. That's the whole review.”
Now. Lives in Canyon, Texas. Keeps the radio from his last truck on a shelf in the garage. It is still on channel nineteen.
Thanks for the copy · 73s
Dee
Arranger, all four records
Arranged every record. Counted in every song. Never once looked up from the neck to do it.
“The steel is the radio. Everything else is the road noise.”
“I tune before the sound check and after it. Then I tune again.”
Now. Teaches pedal steel in Amarillo. Plays sessions in Fort Worth and Austin. Her students learn the tuning chart before they learn a song.
Thanks for the copy · 73s
Buck
“Root and fifth. Root and fifth. It's a long road.”
Now. Runs a tire shop in Dumas, Texas. Carries two spares in his own truck. He has never explained why two.
Thanks for the copy · 73s
Lonnie
“It was my van. I'd like that on the record.”
Now. Drives a school bus in Dalhart, Texas. Holds the speed limit to the mile.
Thanks for the copy · 73s
CH 04 · Logbook
One sheet per record. Each line on the grid is a song. The remarks are the record's own. Entries were kept in pencil and are reproduced as found.
Driver's Daily Log
One calendar day · 24 hours
Remarks
The debut. The high plains had no radio, so they made their own. Recorded in two nights in Amarillo, with the pedal steel tracked last and louder than the engineer advised.
Stops, in order
Driver's Daily Log
One calendar day · 24 hours
Remarks
One day's driving, as the drivers told it. The title is a distance. The archive makes no finding as to the hours.
Stops, in order
Driver's Daily Log
One calendar day · 24 hours
Remarks
Songs from the strip of pavement beside the road. Slower than the first two records. Dee Ochoa's arrangements leave room between the lines, and the band holds still in it.
Stops, in order
Driver's Daily Log
One calendar day · 24 hours
Remarks
The final album. They pulled over. Eight songs, the last one recorded with the engine of Wade Tolliver's final truck idling in the parking lot outside.
Stops, in order
CH 05 · Mile Markers
Nine dates on I-40, 1981, from Tucumcari, New Mexico to Elk City, Oklahoma, opening and closing at home. Every show was played from the flatbed.
Amarillo, TX
Flatbed, east lot. Opening night.
Groom, TX
Shamrock, TX
East lot.
Elk City, OK
Sixty-three rigs. Highest count on file.
Clinton, OK
Tucumcari, NM
Westernmost date.
Santa Rosa, NM
Vega, TX
Amarillo, TX
Home twenty. Closing night.
CH 09 · Reports
Three incidents, one newspaper clipping and the cards that came back. Entered without amendment.
Twenty: Amarillo, Texas
Copy: A letter arrived from the Federal Communications Commission concerning music on channel nineteen. The band stopped putting a microphone near the radio.
For two seasons the band set a CB handset on the flatbed beside the monitor, keyed open, so drivers parked at the back of the lot could hear the set through their own radios. In March 1982 a letter arrived at Wade Tolliver's address from the Federal Communications Commission. It noted that channel nineteen was not to be used to transmit music. Wade read it aloud on channel nineteen that evening, in full, without accompaniment. After that the handset stayed in the cab. Drivers at the back of the lot moved closer.
Twenty: East lot, Shamrock, Texas
Copy: A dust storm came over the lot in the second set. The drivers turned their headlights on the flatbed. The band finished.
On a night in April 1983, a dust storm came in from the southwest during the second set at Shamrock. Visibility on the lot dropped to a few yards. The stage lights were not strong enough to reach the band. One driver switched his headlights on and aimed his rig at the trailer. Within a minute, twenty more had done the same. The band played seven more songs in the beams. Dee Ochoa retuned twice. Nobody left.
Twenty: I-40, near Adrian, Texas
Copy: The flatbed, with the band's equipment strapped on, was weighed. It was under. The officer asked for a song anyway.
In 1985 the flatbed was pulled into a state weigh station west of Amarillo with the whole show strapped down on it. The load was weighed and found to be well under limit. The officer on duty walked out to the trailer, looked at the pedal steel for some time, and asked whether it was a working instrument. Dee Ochoa played him the first half of "Steel at Midnight" from the trailer bed. He waved them on before the second half. The band considers that a review.
The High Plains Hauler · November 1981
An Amarillo four-piece plays to drivers who never leave their cabs
By R. Pruett
You hear about The Shoulder Lane on channel nineteen before you see them. Wade Tolliver comes on an hour out and gives the exit and the lot. By the time you pull in there is a flatbed at the far end with a band on it and thirty rigs already parked facing it, nose in.
Tolliver drove eleven years before he quit to do this full time. He still talks like a driver. The songs are about the distance between towns and what you think about while you cover it. The bass and drums keep the speed. The pedal steel, played by Dolores Ochoa, does everything else. More than one driver in the lot told this paper she was the reason he came.
Nobody claps. When a song ends, the marker lights go on all across the lot. Tolliver says ten-four into the microphone and counts into the next one. Ochoa has usually started it already.
Listener cards, returned to the band. Signal reports as written.
Thanks for the copySignal 5 by 5
Drove thirty-one years. Heard them four times from the cab at Shamrock. Flashed my lights every song. The steel player is the best I ever heard, and I heard plenty.
D. Haskell, retired driver · Clinton, OK
Thanks for the copySignal 5 by 5
My father kept No Radio Signal in the truck. When the dial went quiet past Tucumcari, he put it on. I still do the same thing on the same road.
M. Esparza · Santa Rosa, NM
Thanks for the copySignal 5 by 5
I was at the dust storm show. We turned our headlights on them. I have never been more sure I did the right thing.
J. T. Burkhalter · Pampa, TX
Services
Shirts and printed matter are issued through the Sideband Label stores. Each one ships folded, flat and strapped down.
Fuel not available at this exit.
The Shoulder Lane
Breaker one-nine. Band in the lot.
Keep the shiny side up.
The Shoulder Lane · Amarillo, Texas · 1978–1986 · Played from the flatbed