Texas Music Hall of Famer Augie Meyers

The keyboard player from a long-defunct San Antonio band digs deep into his memories to come up with the last time he played San Diego. “I think it was back in the ’90s,” says Augie Meyers. “A place called, what, 4th&B?” Meyers calls on the day after Merle Haggard’s passing. He gets quiet, and then he says, “I loved that man for 40 years.” Talk is friendly and turns easily, his slight drawl shortening some words and lengthening others. Names like Bob Dylan float to the surface: Meyers played on both Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. “You know, when we’re in the studio, Bob’ll try his songs out in all keys?” Meyers keeps busy; he recently finished a project with Tom Waits. “There’s a guy who is very articulate. Knows what he wants before we play it.”

With a European tour in his headlights for later this year, the Texas Music Hall of Famer says a local outfit called Action Andy & the Hi-Tones will muscle him through an evening of Tex-Mex style here in town, including his own hits and “some Tornados stuff.”

Meyers says he lived in Stockholm for a year. “Doug Sahm, he and I, we had a hit record over there.” With Sahm, Meyers cofounded the Sir Douglas Quintet. (Meyers is the Vox organ sound on all those ’60s hit singles like “Mendocino,” “She’s About a Mover,” and more.) In 1990, following a jam in San Francisco — as the story goes — Meyers, Sahm, Freddie Fender, and Flaco Jimenez launched the Texas Tornados. Even though their road to fame was decorated with Grammy gold, Meyers remembers a chilly first date with the recording industry. “It ain’t gonna work, they told us, because we were trying to play conjunto music. You know? That gave me the energy to do it. Since then, we’ve been recorded in over 15 languages.”

The Sleepwalkers also perform.