OCTOBER 8, 2008 URBAN TULSA Copyright 2008 American Cathartic Success been cruel to Larry Shaeffer. But then he grabbed it by the throat BY MIKE EASTERLING Glory Days. Shaeffer says there was no genius behind what he was doing; it was simply an exceptionally fertile period in popular music, and he was there to benefit from it. Jeremy Charles "The record labels were over-investing in everything because there was so much wealth. So from 1976 to 1983 or '84, all I had to keep saying was, 'I'll take 'em, I'll take 'em.' " By the time he was finishing up high school, life on the farm held no further appeal for Larry Shaeffer. Growing up in the 1960s on a 105-acre spread west of Keystone Lake that his grandparents first settled and his parents inherited, Shaeffer surveyed the idyllic "Green Acres" lifestyle and concluded it was not for him. Not coincidentally, this revelation came to him shortly after he put together his first band, the Undertakers, with a group of Mannford High School classmates and began to experience the pleasures of life as a rock 'n' roll guitarist. Even at that modest level, Shaeffer was a sucker for the easy cash, the pretty girls and the attention that seemed to go hand-in-hand with that world. "I knew I was on to something when we had money in our pockets and I had fun doing it," he said, recalling how he was seduced by a business that would soon become his lifestyle for most of his adulthood. "There was that proverbial golden moment in time when I first heard the Beatles doing 'She Loves You' . and that was my lucky--or, unlucky break." So Shaeffer understands that some people might find it ironic that the family farm he fled in the mid-'60s in search of a more exciting life now has become his refuge a little more than four decades later. The same guy who went on to put the Sex Pistols on a Tulsa stage in 1978, sell a Buick Riviera to Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, collect vintage guitars by the dozens and regularly rub shoulders with some of the biggest names in the music business has spent the past several years living in a mobile home on a patch of prairie within shouting distance of his mother, 77-year-old Wilma, and father, 81-year-old Cecil--on that same farm he once couldn't wait to leave. And he has no plans to leave. "As much as I wanted to get off that farm, it's exactly where I will spend my last days," he said from his Sand Springs office one afternoon in mid-September. Despite all the finality that statement carries, it's a little premature for anyone to be shoveling dirt on Larry Shaeffer's grave--even Larry Shaeffer himself. Almost 10 years past a debilitating series of personal, legal and financial setbacks that left him disgraced, divorced, drunk, broke and homeless, the former owner of the legendary Cain's Ballroom has settled comfortably into elder statesman status on the same Tulsa music scene he did so much to shape over the past three and a half decades. Best known now as a promoter for outlaw country icon Willie Nelson, Shaeffer at age 60 has rediscovered his passion for a business that he was convinced he wanted no more of by the year 2000. "I've been trying to get out of this business for 36 years," he said. But, "... It's very gratifying for me to show up at one of (Willie's) shows and be treated with immense respect and admiration for the job I've done. Maybe that's the payoff." You Can Check Out Anytime You Like If this is the payoff, the end of the 1990s is very much when the proverbial bill had come due for Shaeffer. His high-flying, high-octane lifestyle as the owner of Cain's (which he purchased and rescued from irrelevance in 1976), concert promoter (his Little Wing Productions regularly booked some of the biggest acts in the business throughout Oklahoma), rare automobile restoration specialist and vintage musical instrument collector carried with it a hefty price tag, both literally and otherwise. The chaos his life was devolving into is by now well known to anyone who followed local music in those days- -Shaeffer went through money at an alarming rate, and he was going through drugs and booze even faster. It was a hedonistic lifestyle that was impossible to sustain, as Shaeffer was about to discover in harsh terms. It was all quite a comedown for a guy who had spent most of the preceding 28 years building a bigger and bigger name for himself. Since entering the music business in 1972, Shaeffer had enjoyed practically boundless success. Not only was his Little Wing Productions a cash cow, he also served as the national promoter for Hank Williams Jr., then one of the hottest acts in all of popular music. But it was Shaeffer's purchase of Cain's in 1976 and his reopening of the ballroom as a rock venue that made him practically a household name in these parts. Under his watch, the all-but-forgotten Cain's reclaimed the glory and stature it had once enjoyed during the heyday of Bob Wills, a development that ranks as one of the more significant in Tulsa's musical institutions. Shaeffer said he paid $10,000 down on the building and financed the other $50,000. Despite the vast sums of money that came his way over the next two and a half decades, he said he still hadn't paid off the note when he sold the ballroom at the end of 1999. Financial missteps aside, Shaeffer recognized immediately he had a treasure on his hands. "I knew right away how important it was," he said. "I sat hundreds of hours with old people who were there as teenagers and saw the original Texas Playboys in the '30s and '40s. I realized how important Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys were to people who worked and toiled in the oil fields and cotton fields and used Cain's Ballroom on Saturday night as their only outlet. The best stories (about Cain's) aren't told by Bob Wills' Texas Playboys; it's from the people who came there every Saturday night." Shaeffer's deep affection for that music and history is what separates him from so many other people who work on the business side of the music industry, his friends say, and that's a trait he never lost. Former Tulsa World music writer John Wooley, who met Shaeffer in 1983 and has been friends with him since, acknowledged there aren't many promoters you can say that about. "It's getting rarer all the time," he said, including Shaeffer as part of a group of local music impresarios such as Jim Halsey and Ray Bingham "who are in it because they love it. Now, Larry's certainly not averse to making a buck, but that's never why he got into it." Shaeffer's longtime friend Steve Ripley, frontman for the multi-platinum-selling country-rock group the Tractors and onetime owner of the now-defunct Church Studio in Tulsa, believes the former Cain's owner brought a unique gift to the local market. "He could have been P.T. Barnum or Col. Tom Parker," Ripley said. "That's what he is--a combination of snake oil salesman and lover of the arts, at least the art that I'm involved with." In those days it was virtually impossible to meet Shaeffer and not wind up being charmed by him. Matt Alcott, now Shaeffer's assistant, was a blues and rock writer for the Tulsa World in the mid-'90s when he strolled down to Cain's one Friday afternoon to visit with Shaeffer about an upcoming show. Fourteen beers later, Alcott staggered home, having watched Shaeffer conclude the "interview" by relieving himself in the office trash can rather than make the long walk to the men's room. "... I left with the concert info, a buzz and a friend for life," Alcott wrote in an e-mail. Shaeffer's reputation as a master showman and his ability to recognize the next big thing may have been cemented on that frigid winter night in 1978 when the notorious Sex Pistols--then virtually unknown in America--took the Cain's stage under the watchful eye of the ballroom's famous Wills portrait. That event is still talked about by local music fans, but it was hardly the only groundbreaking show Shaeffer would deliver to Cain's patrons over the next quarter-century. Among the other then-little-known acts he broke in Tulsa over that period were the Police, Pat Benatar, the Talking Heads and the Blasters, most of whom went on to achieve major stardom. Shaeffer booked Van Halen and U2 for $500 each shortly before both those bands skyrocketed to the top of the charts. Stories like that make it seem like Shaeffer could do no wrong, but he admitted to having passed on a few shows he shouldn't have. For instance, there was the time he had the chance to book some guy from New Jersey named Springsteen and didn't. But those mistakes were few and far between. Shaeffer now insists there was no genius behind what he was doing; it was simply an exceptionally fertile period in popular music, and he was there to benefit from it.