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pretended that they needed some of the brighter kids in there or certainly ones that were more qualified than I was, which didn’t make sense because I played in the beginner band, the middle band, and the superior band, and was All City and All State in music, and that would continue until I was in tenth grade in high school. The “somewhere else” they referred to would soon be clear.
    What they didn’t have were any tuba players. So they thought, “Shit, this kid weighs ninety pounds, let’s go ahead and strap this fuckin’ sixty-pound tuba on him and make him ride the bus with it and walk all the way up a hill with this thing to practice.” Naturally, I thought this was the dumbest thing ever—but it turned out to be the right choice because it was excellent musical training and I got good at it in a hurry.
CHERYL PONDER

Rex getting into the little school band as a tuba player was the most significant moment musically for him, other than the fact that we had all always enjoyed listening to music. But him actually learning to play an instrument was a big step forward.
     
    Like most kids my age, I played baseball, excelling at pitcher and shortstop. I played soccer until I got tired of running after a ball, and I played football, despite being too small to initially get on the football team. What I did have in my favor was my dad’s legs. He held the record for the hundred-meter dash in the state of Texas for seventeen years, and I could certainly cover the ground and catch the ball. Eventually somebody pulled some strings somewhere and got me on the team, but the coach—who was a total dick—just made me be a towel boy or a water boy. That was a shitty role, and all the bigger kids would tease me by sticking my head down the toilet and flushing it, known as a “swirlie.” Who needs a head/mouthful of shit?
    Thankfully I had this one good friend then who I’ll call Jack and at times I needed him so God bless him. He was this huge black dude—biggest guy on the team by far—and for reasons I never really understood, he took me under his wing like a guardian angel. I think he had missed about five grades of school, but whenever I had any troubles during my junior high and high school days, Jack seemed to appear out of nowhere. I lost touch with him in high school when he got into some heavy-duty drug dealings and ended up in jail, so who knows where he is now. Actually, he may be one of those characters who’ll be in jail his whole life, but I’ll never forget him for how he always took my side.
CHERYL PONDER

Rex pitched for a little league team which my husband Buddy helped coach, and he also played football for the Lancers football team that might have won a championship of some kind at one point.
     
    While sports were still holding my interest somewhat, I had started to listen to a lot of music. Pop culture was about to undergo radical change, and I could now pick up FM rock radio ’cause we lived in the Dallas Metroplex area where there was a bigger tower. I couldn’t have chosen a better moment to start exploring the radio dial.
    Better still, because FM was stereo, the whole dynamics of songs just got bigger and more in your face. Bread were a big band at this time and got a lot of airplay, and then because of them I got into bands like America and James Taylor. After immersing myself into this acoustic style of music, I quickly worked out how to play most of the chords. Another turning point for me was when my cousins in Midland, Texas, played me Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, not the kind of stuff you’d imagine I would like, but it really left its mark from a songwriting and arranging point of view. I actually thought that record, in a weird way, was better than a lot of the Beatles stuff that my sister had introduced me to.
    While my mom was supportive of me learning music—she bought me all the books and scribes to help me read music—she was also insistent that I made