George Gimarc called the other day, said he'd just been rustling through stacks of paperwork left behind by Brent Stein -- better known as Stoney Burns, father of Dallas's underground press. Stein died in April, and in recent days those trusted to dispose of his estate have been offloading what remained. George -- once a new-music guru, now an old-history collector as part of his duties as Texas Musicians Museum's Advisory Board member -- was tickled by the find: "a little gem," he called it, "the conception of Buddy."
It's not much, not really -- just two pages taken from one of Stoney's journals. There's the drawing you see here, accompanied by a rough sketch of the logo, followed by a typewritten page in which he outlines the music magazine that would make its bow in the fall of 1972, following Stoney's days as editor and founder of Dallas Notes and The Iconoclast. In the piece that follows, he manages to say a lot in a short span as he explains the mag, its intentions, its look: "I don't know why I dig desingning [sic] or laying out a fucking publication but I sure do," he writes.
George writes: Sure, it's probably "not worth much of anything on the open market, but it's invaluable to the likes of us at the Texas Musicians Museum," where it will become part of a larger Stoney Burns display documenting his work and Dallas in the late '60s and early '70s. George, as always, was awful kind to share.