I’ve covered some outré stories at The Third Ear—about human sacrifice. Pagan orgies. Emperor Nero. Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone. And Congress.
This has to be the most disturbing yet.
Driving through San Antonio recently, conversation in my rental car turned to music. A cultural crossroads, San Antonio is home to a complex musical history. Czech and German music schools. Mariachi. Mexican Vaudeville. Tejano and conjunto. Country and swing, jazz and blues.
While the “Cradle of Texas Liberty” isn’t necessarily associated with rock and roll, perhaps it should be. “The Butthole Surfers, they’re from San Antonio,” I took an opening stab, as we shuttled through town on the PanAmerican Highway. “And the Sex Pistols…” played one of the wildest shows in their brief history here in 1978, a few days before they disbanded permanently, one of only seven U.S. tour dates.
Robert Johnson’s first recording session, one of a mere two (the second being in Dallas), including “Cross Road Blues” and “Sweet Home Chicago,”—about half of his 29-song recorded catalogue, which had a profound effect on Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and many others when Columbia rereleased this material as King of the Delta Blues Singers in 1961—was recorded at the Gunter Hotel in November of 1936.
About four blocks from the Gunter Hotel hunkers the former Spanish mission known as the Alamo, which supposedly housed an artifact belonging to one of its trinity of folk heroes, Jim Bowie. The blade that inspired one David Jones to change his last name, so he wouldn’t be confused with Davy Jones of The Monkees, in 1966:
“The ultimate American knife. It is the medium for a conglomerate of statements and illusions … a truism about cutting through the lies and all that,”
as David Jones, aka David Bowie, told Rolling Stone.
If only he knew.
“How about Phil Collins?” my passenger added, as we passed an exit for the Spanish mission. “His weird Alamo obsession—the museum?”
The drummer for Genesis? The Grammy-winning frontman who composed such soft mediocrities as “Another Day in Paradise” and “Do You Remember?” And now: The Alamo and Beyond: A Collector’s Journey…
“Not since Ozzie Osbourne donned an evening gown and relieved himself on the Spanish walls has an Englishman so befouled the legacy of the Alamo… which is messy to begin with.”
Phil Collins has amassed the single largest collection of Alamo ‘artifacts’—over two hundred items, some of them quite questionable. He agreed to donate the entire collection to the state of Texas in 2014, after a few margaritas.
Not since Ozzie Osbourne donned an evening gown and relieved himself on the Spanish walls has an Englishman so befouled the legacy of the Alamo… which is somewhat messy to begin with.
A complicated legacy is the point of a new-ish revisionist history by three journalist-historians, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (2021). The book emphasizes the role of Tejanos (Texans of Spanish-Mexican descent) in the 1836 battle for Texas independence, and the Alamo as part of a larger fight to preserve slavery in the Republic of Texas. The authors adapted parts of the book into a Texas Monthly article, centered around Phil Collins.
Activist histories like Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project (fruitful, if contested by historians in places, like its assertion that the American Revolution was fought chiefly to preserve slavery), and ideological drink-coasters like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist (2019) or Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) sold like hotcakes in the Trump years, for understandable reasons. But Forget the Alamo, according to its primary author, seems to have become embroiled in the culture wars somewhat in spite of itself (though the same author suggested after the book’s release in 2021, “If there’s ever been a moment for a spirited discussion about what the Alamo really symbolizes, we’d suggest it’s now.”). When militia-types showed up carrying long-arms to protest the Alamo’s newly-reexamined history, the authors were surprised to learn that Latino counter-protesters showed up carrying copies of Forget the Alamo.
Revisionist histories undermining the legend of the Alamo have been around for nearly half a century, from academia to animation.
They received renewed attention in the teens and twenties, as the debate over monuments heated up after the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017. So did attention to the Alamo historical site, thanks to an MOR soft-rocker named Phil Collins.
Strange man.
“Basically, now I’ve stopped being Phil Collins the singer. This has become what I do.”
Digging for relics in 2008. Not beneath the Alamo—beneath the History Shop, a curio house that appeals to tourists. Like other establishments adjacent to Alamo Plaza: T-shirt vendors, Tussaud’s Waxworks, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
An avid collector of Alamo memorabilia, Collins became the History Shop’s most lucrative customer (in fact, he even bought the building itself, so he and the owner could dig up the floor in search of historical treasure). By 2012, he’d gathered enough dubious pieces of Texas history—purchasing every item he could get his hands on, and excavating a few himself—to warrant an illustrated book cataloguing his discoveries. The chief historical consultant on Phil Collins’ Beyond the Alamo: A Collector’s Journey, however, has to admit there’s little documentation supporting the authenticity of Collins’ most coveted treasures, the ones supposedly owned by Col. William B. Travis, Davy Crockett, and Jim Bowie.
The most outrageous piece, for which Collins is rumored to have paid $1.5 million, is a Bowie knife (not the one pictured above, another one, below). Inscribed with the initials “J.B.,” the knife was purchased at a Los Angeles-area gun show in the early 1970s—incidentally, around the time David Bowie was a resident of Los Angeles. The dealer who originally purchased the knife verified its authenticity—through a psychic, who once worked on the Boston Strangler case and Manson murders.
According to one sane skeptic, the knife above was actually manufactured in London, by “the most notorious Bowie knife counterfeiter of all,” a man named Dickie Washer. That exact knife, the skeptic says, appears in the hands of one of Washer’s associates, in a photograph taken in London in 1972—incidentally, when David Bowie was still living in South London. It’s possible, then, that Phil Collins’ (probably-counterfeit) Bowie knife migrated from London to L.A. around the same time as the man who took his stage name from this mythical weapon, David Bowie.
Now it’s in San Antonio, next to the Alamo.
Even more unlikely than the dubious origins of Phil Collins’ most expensive artifact is the role that this, and other items—horseshoes, scraps of metal, uniform buttons—played in rejuvenating a new Alamo restoration project known as the “Alamo Master Plan.”
In 2011, the Alamo wasn’t much in the way of a historical heritage site. Its museum took all of ten minutes to breeze through, and the surrounding tourist district resembled Cancun or Bourbon Street. In 2014, stewardship passed from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas—a contentious group of backbiting blue-haired ladies infighting for control of the site—to the state’s General Land Office. The Land Office was tasked with renovating the site and expanding it to incorporate the mission’s original footprint—the parts now occupied by T-shirt stores, a wax museum, and the History Shop—but the GLO didn’t have anything close to the necessary funds.
Enter Phil Collins.
“It’s not a stretch to say that Collins’ conception of the Alamo comes from Disney’s 1955 version of Texas history, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier.”
The owner of the History Shop, whom Collins had befriended in 2004 when he brought his wife and son to see the Alamo, introduced the multiplatinum singer to a midlevel official at the General Land Office, who sensed an opportunity—both as a fan of 1980s Top 40, and a state bureaucrat: Would Collins be willing to donate his collection to the Alamo, she wondered, thereby creating a publicity splash, and a chance to drum-up the millions of dollars necessary to update the Alamo into a world-class tourist destination? The fund-raising from this publicity stunt, the GLO official suggested, could also be used to construct a new museum. One vast enough to house Phil Collins’ collection, which was too large for the current museum.
“I feel like a dog with two tails,” Collins responded, according to the authors of Forget the Alamo. Meaning, presumably in English colloquialism, that he was happy enough to wag both. The only caveat: the GLO was obligated to accept Collins’ entire collection, items authentic and unverified (except by psychic medium), alike.
It’s not a stretch to say that Collins’ conception of the Alamo comes from Disney’s 1955 version of Texas history, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. “The memories I have [of that film] were that this group of people were going—and they knew that they were going—to die,” he told a panel at the Texas Tribune Festival in 2016. “That just moved me as a five-or-six-year-old. From that moment, I was obsessed.”
Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett is up there with John Wayne’s The Alamo in terms of mythical Hollywood history. The latter is sometimes regarded as Wayne’s 1960 endorsement of Richard Nixon’s traditionalist vision of America over J.F.K.’s progressivism. These two films (though Disney’s had a profounder effect on midcentury six-year-olds, while Wayne’s performance was described by the New York Times, even in 1960, as “long and dull”) supercharged the myth of the Alamo. Before that, the earliest film depiction was D.W. Griffith’s Martyrs of the Alamo (1915), which gives Birth of a Nation (also 1915) a run for its money in terms of race-baiting and miscegenation anxiety, this time directed at Mexicans.
Ironically, part of Forget the Alamo’s objective of widening the historical perspective of the Alamo, from the thirteen-day siege in 1836 to include 300 years of Spanish, Mexican, Native and U.S. history, originally fell to this man, George P. Bush.
Son of Jeb, nephew of “W.,” grandson of George H.W. Bush, “P.” became commissioner of the Texas Land Office, and thus head of the Alamo restoration project, in 2014. He removed the Daughters of the Republic of Texas as the Alamo’s chief caretakers.
After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, the GOP famously conducted its own “autopsy,” and determined the party had died from a lack of diversity. Jeb Bush’s son, whose mother was born in Mexico, seemed like the perfect embodiment of a kinder, gentler, more inclusive Republican party. The third-generation Bush won his first bid for public office easily, then set about refurbishing the Alamo’s image to showcase more than its brief history as a sacrificial holdout against the Mexican forces of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. It was a plan he embraced, at first, but one he was contractually bound to by the city, and would soon try to distance himself from for political reasons.
By 2016, to put it mildly, diversity was no longer a key tenant of the new Republican party. In the national fight over Confederate landmarks and legacy since 2017, the new Texas land commissioner found it difficult to assuage “Alamo-head” traditionalists, who were suspicious of Bush’s minimal efforts to expand the Alamo’s history, and revisionists wishing to showcase more than the rose-tinted legends of Davy Crockett or Jim Bowie.
Republicans like Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick (“who keeps a scale model of the Alamo and memorabilia from the John Wayne movie in his office”), anxious that an aspiring presidential candidate like George P. Bush might be coming for his job next, pounced. The man who ran against Bush in the 2018 GOP primary claimed Bush intended to erect a statue of Santa Anna in Alamo Plaza. Given his partial-Mexican heritage, Bush accused the opposition of racism, while at the same time denouncing “the murderous dictator Santa Anna” and leaning hard into the traditionalist narrative focused only on the events of March 1836, when a rag-tag band of beleaguered hold-outs supposedly embraced certain death as the necessary price of freedom. Bush’s public appearances soon included comments like, “We must restore the battlefield to honor the Alamo’s gallant defenders,” and “We must respect this sacred space. We must and will ensure that 1836 lives here every single day.”
With Bush embattled, the GLO momentarily lost sight of the “Phil Collins Texana Collection.” The singer was miffed. Bush had put the state on the hook for a $450- million, four-story, 130,000-sq.-foot museum to house the collection, lined up deep-pocketed fund-raisers, then lost them in the political controversy. Now it looked like taxpayers were on the hook. For the first time since 1989, Phil Collins had to “think twice”—“I have to admit I’m getting more than a little discouraged with the speed and urgency that is being displayed regarding my collection and related museum,” he emailed a Bush aide.
Apparently deriving his knowledge of Spanish architecture from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Collins seemed to think his collection was languishing in a mythical cellar next to Mr. Herman’s missing bicycle:
“I don’t want my collection sitting in boxes in a basement,” Collins complained.
“I realize there are more pressing things on [George] P’s list, but on my list, my hard-earned collection is important to me. Please let me know the situation . . . the REAL situation.”
Concerned with the real situation—cutting through the “statements and illusions… the lies and all that” like David Bowie’s ultimate American knife—Collins became defensive when the authors of Forget the Alamo inquired about the authenticity of certain artifacts from his collection. A few days later he contacted the Bush team again.
“I would like you to consider the real probability of me withdrawing my collection and giving it back to me . . . I’ll be happy to donate it when the museum is ready, but right now, I’d like to bring it back. I don’t want to bring lawyers in, but I will if need be. Plus I’m getting flack on what’s ‘real’ and what’s not.”
Bush staff, afraid of losing the centerpiece of their Alamo restoration plan, rushed to reassure Phil Collins, revealing the bizarre reality behind this entire endeavor:
“Please know that your collection is extremely important to the entire State of Texas and we would not be where we are in this process if not for you and your generosity,” an aide responded. “You sparked this entire Alamo Plan and we owe you so much.”
Since then, Bush has managed to neutralize his political enemies, in part by kowtowing to traditionalists, while moving the Alamo Plan ahead far enough for a successor to deal with. It may even manage to satisfy activists, if the new museum is curated with an eye for historical accuracy and revision - which might mean shelving some of Phil Collins’ collectibles out of sight.
Perhaps in the basement.
Collins, meanwhile, is temporarily placated with a provisional exhibit showcasing five items from his collection, "graciously gifted to the state of Texas by musician and historian Phil Collins,” according to a press release—none of the questionable, big-name items relating to Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, or William Travis.
(Yes, they called Phil Collins a historian.)
“The battle for the Alamo,” the authors of Forget the Alamo contend, “continues.”
What traditionalists and revisionists alike seem to dismiss is the idea that, as Constance Rourke noted in American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931), the backwoodsmen—folk figures like Crockett and Bowie—have always been a self-conscious “myth, a fantasy.” Crockett “became a myth even in his own lifetime,” per Rourke. In almanacs and spurious autobiographies, “his magnified exploits of marksmanship and strength were pictured—by himself,” while still greater feats were attached to him by others. His exploits were slippery—in legend, he went from being Andrew Jackson’s running mate, to opposing him, just as Jim Crow jumped to join the abolition. “After his death in 1836, he was boldly appropriated by the popular fancy. His heroic stand at the Alamo was richly described; and laments arose in the western wilderness.”
Ridiculous, patently-unbelievable laments:
“That’s a great rejoicin’ among the bears of Kaintuck, and the alligators of the Mississippi rolls up thar shinin’ ribs to the sun, and has grown so fat and lazy that they will hardly move out of the way for a steamboat. The rattlesnakes come up out of the clearings, and the foxes goes to sleep in the goose-pens. It is bekos the rifle of Crockett is silent forever, and the print of his moccasins is found no more in our woods…”
…one pop document from the nineteenth century mourned.
These aren’t the type of historical documents you’ll find in the Alamo museum or History Shop, or for that matter in the pages of Forget the Alamo, but they go a lot further towards explaining why Phil Collins is indulging a boyhood Alamo obsession, or David Bowie mispronounced Jim Bowie’s last name and took it as his own, or psychedelic folk singer Donovan wrote this song in 1965:
Myths die harder than histories; they’re more colorful.
As one critic of American culture from the nineteenth century protested, reacting to such tales of boisterous hokum: “Sir, this is really too much even for us Englishmen to swallow, whose gullets are known to be the largest, the widest, and the most elastic in the world.”
Apparently not.
As the authors of Forget the Alamo ask us to remember, Jim Bowie was a slave trader killed as he lay sick in bed from “a peculiar ailment” (tuberculosis, opium addiction, hangover, syphilis—you decide). Half the defenders of the Alamo may have fled into an open field, where they were unceremoniously shot. David Crockett may have surrendered and begged for mercy, according to some accounts—he probably didn’t perish surrounded by a ring of Mexican soldiers he was prepared to take with him.
He also probably didn’t wake up one January morning to find the earth froze in its tracks, its wheels clogged with an icy sun, then go about squeezing hot oil from a grizzly bear strapped to his back, in order to melt everything loose and get the music of the spheres humming again, as he does in one “autobiography.”
Nor did he travel to Japan and the South Seas, where he dove into a cave, “crawled until he reached dry land in the deepest depths of the ocean, made a lampwick out of his hair, soaked it in elbow-grease, and struck a light with his knuckles on a rock.”
“In the end,” Rourke notes, Crockett “became a demigod, or at least a Prometheus.”
As Greil Marcus argued in his 2004 introduction to American Humor, for Constance Rourke—whose intellectual lineage includes Pauline Kael, Leslie Fiedler, Ralph Ellison, Bob Dylan, Ishmael Reed, and Lester Bangs—“American history began not with events or documents, but with Americans,” both biographical and fictionalized—and that includes Native, African, and Mexican-Americans. And one might add, those regarding Americans from across the pond. Like the famous English dramatist Junius Brutus Booth, father of John Wilkes Booth, who arrived in the U.S. in 1821, touring the country like Phil Collins. It was Tennessee that Booth loved best, Rourke recounts.
As Marcus explains: “In Tennessee Booth met Davy Crockett; he hooked up with Sam Houston, later governor of the Volunteer State and the first president of the Republic of Texas,” who would defeat General Santa Anna in San Jacinto following the rout at the Alamo. A man of “strange entanglements,” Rourke said in The Roots of American Culture, who had once been sighted “on a river island among the Cherokees, reciting Pope’s translation of the Iliad.”
Houston did in fact have a primitivist fascination with Native Americans, and lived among them for a time. A cosplay act he shared with the thespian father of John Wilkes Booth. In the end, biography is stranger than tall tale, or Phil Collins, and in the old weird America, the two are often related.
Booth and Sam Houston, “two fast friends,”
….traveled up and down the country together, wearing Indian warpaint and feathers, and enjoyed the perennial American masquerade. At wayside taverns—in this costume—they would match each other in another field of display, that of eloquence, reciting declamatory speeches of poetry through whole evenings to any audience that would listen . . . Booth managed to visit Washington whenever Houston was there as a member of Congress, and on one occasion, when Houston had spoken from the floor, rushed down from the gallery to join him, exclaiming with ardor, “Take my laurels!” Nor was the gesture an empty one: in the middle eighteen-twenties, theatrical managers in Washington were complaining that plays failed in the nation’s capital because gifts belonging to the stage were so freely employed by the nation’s representatives and senators.
In other words, all America’s a stage, and all the men and women players. Even (especially) land commissioners and Lt. Governors, activists, or Englishmen playing toy soldiers in the Alamo dust.
To forget to laugh at Phil Collins, or take George P. Bush’s Texas patriotism at face value is a fool’s game. American Humor for Rourke, according to Greil Marcus, was “America declaring over and over, to closed ears, even its own, that it did exist: a shout, a whisper, a con game, a practical joke, nothing more and nothing less.”
Today that includes traditionalists clinging to old historical fallacies, and a new generation of Americans declaring they exist. Much of the political fight over the myth of the Alamo, Forget the Alamo declares, has to do with the fact that Texas is set to once again become a majority Latino territory, or state.
“The story of Rip Van Winkle has never been finished,” Rourke wrote. “Day after day, year after year, we wake up to a new country that seems to have completely changed,” Marcus explains, “as if we have never seen it before.”
But we have, in one form or another. The newness, the ever-shifting demographics, our constant lack of definition, and desire to assert one, is the thing.
“So,” Rourke said, in Marcus’ words, “attend to those Americans who were here before you were, and who will be here when you’re gone.”
Remember your history, or forget it. But dismiss the myths at your own peril.
Wild.