Confessions of a Maddog

Book excerpt: Once upon a time there was an innocent lad from West Texas who wrote a novel and fell in with a rabble of Texas writers as they were bridging the literary gap between J. Frank Dobie and his paisanos and the current bumper crop of Texas writers who seem to be everywhere writing about everything. This rowdy rabble of gap bridgers bonded in a sort of literary and social club they called Maddog Inc. (Motto: Doing indefinable services to mankind.) But our hero managed to live through it all anyway. This is his story. Jay Milner was part of a generation of Texas writers whose heyday lasted from the late 1950s through the 1970s. The group comprised Billie Lee Brammer, Edwin "Bud" Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, Larry L. King, Pete Gent, and (peripherally) Larry McMurtry and Willie Morris, among others. From the musical scene there were the "picker poets" such as Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, and Waylon Jennings. Some of the primary works coming from this generation of writers include Brammer's The Gay Place, Shrake's Strange Peaches, Cartwright's Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, King's The Whorehouse Papers and None But a Blockhead, Jan Reid's The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, and Willie Nelson's album Phases and Stages.