Many of his songs have been covered by other artists.ī.J. Stevenson, who performed frequently at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, opened for Waylon Jennings at Memorial Auditorium in Dallas in 1976. He felt more comfortable and was at his best playing guitar and singing in a coffee house rather than playing a big room, Hubbard says. Stevenson fit into the country/folk/pop genre popular at the time, but the obligations of being a pop star frustrated him. He signed with RCA in ‘72, launching a prolific career. That’s where Stevenson wrote “Highway 1” and “On My Own.”Īfter a terrifying earthquake in 1971, Stevenson left California as fast as possible. and stayed in the Hollywood Hills home of their friend, actor Royce Applegate. When Fowler and Kidd drove up a few minutes later, they rolled out of the Mustang, laughing hysterically.īut they made it to L.A. Goofy on fumes, Stevenson drove off the road and into a snow bank. “Buck said, ‘You better read the instructions on that thing.’ It said, ‘Do not use in an enclosed area,’ and we laughed so hard at that,” Hubbard says. They filled it up, lit it and went on down the road. The heater was broken in the Mustang, so they stopped at a hardware store in Taos and bought a kerosene heater. The other two guys in Hubbard’s band, Rick Fowler and Wayne Kidd, went in the van, and Hubbard rode with Stevenson. It was so cold we had to leave the cars running the night before,” Hubbard says.

“It was incredibly cold, and we were leaving the next day.

Hubbard recalls taking a perilous trip in 1970 from New Mexico to Los Angeles in Stevenson’s Ford Mustang. When Hubbard and his band Three Faces West had a club in Red River, N.M., Stevenson, still an airman, would make the drive and perform solo, just him and the guitar.

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