The state health agency in Texas
has proposed new rules for hemp
products.
Those rules could mean higher fees
for businesses, more testing for
products, and it could effectively
outlaw access to hemp flower.
What's being proposed and how Texas
business owners are feeling about
it. Plus, after Oak
Wilt claimed a tree in his yard, a
local artist turned its wood into
a sonic experience.
His solo exhibit features wooden
records and wind instruments.
We're gonna experience some of those
sounds for ourselves.
That's coming up on today's show.
The Austin Signal is a production
of KUT News, hosted by
Jerry Quijano.
And what do you get when you mix
Austin's Best Music Station with
one of the world's most famous
stages?
We've got the whole story for ya.
That is coming up next.
It's right here on Austin
Signal.
Howdy, and thank you for tuning in.
This is Austin Signal.
It's Thursday, the eighth day of
January. Thank you for including us
in your day.
I'm your host, Jerry Keconnell.
Let's get into today's
show.
The Texas Department of State Health
Services is proposing new rules on
hemp products.
The rules include more testing and
formal recall procedures, as well
as increasing fees on businesses.
A public hearing on the proposals is
set for tomorrow morning at nine.
Heather Fazio is director of the
Texas Cannabis Policy Center.
She's joining us now to talk more
about the hearing.
Howdy, Heather.
Hi there, thanks for having me.
We're glad to have you here.
So cannabis and hemp were big topics
in Texas all of 2025,
it felt like.
So why are state regulators meeting
this early in the new year to
discuss these new proposed rules?
Well, last year certainly was a
rollercoaster for those advocating
for cannabis policy, whether
it's medical cannabis through the
Compassionate Use Program or
Hemp Policy, which is
hemp products increasingly popular
among Texans.
And last year there was an effort
to prohibit hemp products
that included THC.
Thankfully, that legislation was
vetoed by Governor Abbott and
subsequently he issued an executive
order. Calling for regulatory
agencies to beef up regulations
and enforcement.
These are the rules that we see
being developed now with the
hearing happening tomorrow for
public input from stakeholders.
So can you tell us what exactly
is DSHS proposing with
these rules?
Since 2019, DSHS
has been responsible for regulating
consumable hemp products,
that's manufacturing and retail
sales.
We now see increased regulations
coming on board, which is a good
thing. We've been missing things
like age restrictions,
recall protocols, and
tracking adverse effects.
The regulations that have been put
forward do just that in
addition to some changes that may
have some negative effects on the
industry.
Can you speak more on those negative
effects?
Well, the biggest, most glaring
issue that we see are the
outrageous fees that have been
proposed.
We, of course, support fees to cover
the cost of regulation,
but $20,000 for
a retailer per location per
year is going to price out
the vast majority of entrepreneurs
who are operating legitimately and
with integrity.
This goes far beyond the
cost of regulation and seems to be
punitive in nature.
This is something that we hope the
department will reconsider.
You said that was a $20,000 fee
for just for operating the business?
That's correct, that is the
registration fee for simply
having a location that
sells consumable hemp products.
And I'll add that it's $25,000
per year for manufacturers.
These fees are gonna make it cost
prohibitive for many Texans
to participate in the hemp market.
Currently it's 250 dollars
to become licensed as
a manufacturer and 150
dollars to be licensed as a
retailer.
Now we understand that those prices
could come up to help cover the cost
of increased enforcement of
regulations. We support that, but
the costs that they proposed here
are just too far.
What would you say to
opponents, to people who are trying
to limit this exposure, what would
you to people that argue these
numbers aren't arbitrary and that
there's a reason for them?
In early 2025, I did an
open records request for DSHS
budget when it comes to
the enforcement of regulations
for consumable hemp products.
What I found is the department is
spending only about a third of what
they bring in with 70%
of revenue going right into the
general fund rather than being
used explicitly for enforcing
regulations with hemp products
I'm concerned that these new numbers
are punitive in nature,
trying to deliberately shut down the
industry rather than simply covering
the cost of regulation.
Okay, now I wanted to ask
specifically about hemp flour.
Austinites and Texans have access to
many more gummies and drinks in the
hemp market these days.
How would flour be affected by these
proposed rules?
I'm so glad that you brought this
up. This is the second biggest issue
for us.
Hemp flour is the most natural form
of this product that people can use,
straight from the ground,
unprocessed, and we know that this
encompasses 50% of the
marketplace.
Texans enjoy these flour products,
and this is the bud from the flour
that most people use for
smoking, or they'll use it for
cooking and infusing some baked
goods at home, maybe.
This again is something that is
widely enjoyed and consumed by
Texans legally right now in the
state. And while the rules
that are put forward don't
explicitly ban flour, they
effectively ban this product
because what it does is
calls for a total THC
testing limit, meaning that
all of the THC molecules would be
regulated and restricted in the way
that Delta-9 THC has been
restricted since 2019.
It gets complicated, but the bottom
line is that there's not going to be
a market demand for hemp flour
with such low levels of
THC.
It means that consumers are gonna be
turning to the illicit market to
find products that they enjoy.
And of course, we know there are no
age restrictions there, no product
safety standards, and certainly no
consumer protections in place.
Well last question for you, what are
you hearing from people in the
industry here in Texas about how
the up and down nature of hemp's
future has been affecting them?
It's been so difficult to watch
business owners operating with
integrity and legitimately in
an illegal industry going
this up and down yo-yo of
emotions all year last year
and here we are again where
they're facing the fact that
they may have to shut their doors.
They may have close their businesses
and find a new livelihood
simply because of arbitrary
policy changes that are happening.
Texas entrepreneurs deserve better.
We're proud to be a pro-business
state and we should be taking those
principles into the room here
when we're talking about hemp to
ensure public health and safety, of
course, but also allowing the
free market to work.
All right, once again, a public
hearing on the proposals is set for
tomorrow morning at nine.
We're going to have more for you
following that hearing right here on
Austin Signal.
We have been speaking with Heather
Fazio, Director of the Texas
Cannabis Policy Center.
Heather, thank you for your time
today.
Thank you.
And thank you out there for tuning
in. This is Austin Signal.
A live oak in Steve Parker's yard
died last year from oak
wilt. The tree had been with his
family for years and Parker was
surprised by how saddened he was
when it came down.
And he was also confronted with a
question a lot of Austinites have
faced. What to do with
all the wood?
An artist and musician, he arrived
at a unique answer.
As KUT's Mose Bouchel reports,
that answer can be heard and seen in
his solo exhibit, Funeral for
a Tree.
Walk into the show, and one of the
first things you might hear is this
scratchy, woody sound.
It sounds kind of like a branch
spookily grinding against
the side of an old farmhouse.
It's something else.
There are slices of
live oak that are now functioning
both kind of like conceptual
and literal records.
This is Steve Parker, the artist
behind Funeral for a Tree,
and when he says records, he means
it.
Parker has taken cross-sections of
his old tree, sometimes called wood
cookies, and found ways to
play them, like vinyl albums.
Here by the entrance, smaller sliced
tree branches, 45s if
you will, spin on the wall.
The sounds you hear are twigs and
metal stylus needles making
contact.
And that's getting sent to an
amplifier and then
resonates through a
trumpet bell that's kind of poking
out of the wall.
What does this make you think about?
The passage of time, I think.
Like when we look at a tree and want
to look at its life, we look
the stump because
it's like this visual
record.
Now turned to an actual record
playing its own.
All right, what do we have next?
Well, maybe I should show you this
one.
He takes me to another piece,
an altar of live oak, made
of branches and an oak desk
that support the pipes of
a shung.
It's a Chinese wind instrument,
historically made of bamboo, that
Parker learned about on a recent
trip to Taiwan.
And here it's gonna start playing
right now, actually.
He plugs it in, and tubes
bring breath to the instruments
and fill the space with sound.
For Parker, it brings to mind the
shutting down at the end of
life.
And also the lungs of the human
body.
The Schung and the Live Oak records
come together in another piece in
the exhibit, where thick wooden
disks hang above a wooden
turntable.
These albums are far more polished
and refined than the wood cookies
near the entrance They're made from
bigger sections of the dead
live oak.
They're encoded just like
a vinyl record with a
bird song of different bird species
that are roosted in the tree's
branches over its lifetime.
And those have been interpreted by
my friend Ji Bo-Yong,
a shung player from Taiwan.
There's the Eastern Wood Pee-wee.
The Purple Martin?
Again interpreted by Gippo.
Swainson's Thrush.
The wood thrush.
And the yellow-billed cuckoo.
Now I should say, what you're
hearing now are not the
wooden records on the
wall, but the original recordings
of Jibo Young.
The wooden versions are far
scratchier.
But I also have another wooden
record here that's made on, that's
played on this wooden record player.
It functions like a old Victrola.
So it even has like a
wooden needle for a stylus.
It's a toothpick.
And this wooden records plays
a melody that sort of
captures in my mind, the essence
of the exhibition.
He plays an old folk ballad.
From the 1920s.
It's called Bury Me Beneath the
Willow, performed by Ernest
Thompson.
They sound fuzzy because they
are capturing both the
imperfections, so to speak, of the
wood and the different fissures
and lesions
that the wood has experienced as it
died.
And the life of the
wood is captured.
And over time it will actually fade
a little bit more, just like a
memory.
Here's the original vinyl
version.
As our tree got sick,
one thing that was
noticeable for me and a parent was
the way that
emotionally I was tied to the tree
and how it echoed a
lot of what I experienced six years
ago when my dad was really sick with
cancer.
And I often think about
my dad when I'm working in the
studio, I listen to music that he
would have listened to, and
this is just something for me to
kind of maintain a connection with
him.
Funeral for a Tree runs
through this Saturday at the iVestor
Contemporary Gallery in East
Austin.
In Austin, I'm Mose Bouchelle.
You can head on over to kut.org
to take a look at some of these
records.
We'll have a link in our show notes
and you can find more at kut
dot org slash signal
and you could find more arts
coverage, including a list of
weekend recommendations at
k ut dot org slash
art beats.
This is Austin signal.
We'll be back in just a moment.
This is Austin Signal, welcome back.
Let's take a look back at an Austin
legend that you might not have heard
of, LaVeta Durst,
once known as Dr. Hep
Cat, who in 1948 became
one of the first black DJs
in Texas.
That was just one of many hats he
wore in the Austin community.
Here's Jason Mellard from the Center
for Texas Music History at Texas
State University.
This week in Texas Music History we
meet a hip Austin DJ whose
career spans baseball,
barrel house, and gospel.
On January 9th, 1913,
radio personality and musician
LaVeta Durst, also known as Dr.
Hepcat, was born in Austin.
Durst played many roles in the
community over the years, but it was
gospel piano that he settled into
first. By the 1930s he'd
mastered the secular style of barrel
house piano, too, and would long be
associated with local artists of the
genre like Robert Shaw and the it
goes.
In the 1940s, he became the
announcer for Austin's black
baseball team, the Senators, calling
games with a distinctive hip banter.
Future Governor John Connolly, then
an up-and-comer in LBJ's circles,
attended one of those games and told
his friend and co-owner of KVET
Radio, J.J.
Pickle, about the talented
announcer.
They gave him an on-air job in 1948,
one of the very first black DJs in
Texas.
A KVet program director also owned
the record label Uptown, and Durst
recorded his singles Hattie Green
and Hep Cat's Boogie in 1949.
Talented at cross-promotion, Durst
published a vocabulary of his hip,
on-air lingo, the jives of Dr.
Hepcat, to sell to his fans.
In the 1950s, Durrst also turned
his attention to gospel songwriting
and management, mentoring the group
The Chariots, and writing the
influential song, Let's Talk About
Jesus, for the Austin Singers at
Bells of Joy.
So Levada Durst was a baseball
announcer, radio DJ, recording
artist, songwriter, and gospel
manager, but that's not all.
At the same time, he worked at the
City of Austin as program director
for the Doris Miller Auditorium.
Putting on concerts by Duke
Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sam
Cooke. By the late 60s and into
the 70s though, Durst turned his
attention increasingly to the
Baptist Church, giving gospel center
stage, while occasionally coming out
of Barrow House retirement to
perform with the Texas Music Museum
in Austin, where his piano and book
of jives reside today.
And you can hear music from the Lone
Star State 24-7 on the
Texas music experience at TMX.fm.
Support for This Week in Texas Music
History comes from Brain Audio,
maker of a compact portable speaker,
featuring an internal subwoofer that
produces deep bass sound.
Engineered in the live music capital
of the world.
More at BraneAudio.com.
That's B-R-A-N-E audio
dot com.
When the topic of iconic Austin
music venues comes up in
conversation, there are a handful of
names that make the list where you
can still hear live music
this very day.
One of those was established in 1974
as a reputation of being on the
bucket list for musicians from all
over the world, and it happens to be
right across the street from us here
at KUTNKUTX.
We're talking about hole in the
wall. And some news here on Austin
Signal.
KUTX has partnered up with Hole to
bring you a new series that merges
the energies of two Austin music
institutions.
And for more about that, we are
talking with Deidre Gott, assistant
program director and live music
booker for KUTx.
Deidra, thanks for joining the show.
Hey, thanks for having me!
Well, we're really excited to hear
about this new series.
Tell us a little bit about it.
Does it have a name?
It is the whole story.
Mmm, nice, I love it.
And the idea is behind like
kind of think like VH1 Storytellers
meets MTV Unplugged.
Oh wow, like VH1 behind the music,
that kind of thing?
Yeah. Well, so I mean,
like it's, it's more of a
storyteller series, you know, like
they'll play, they play four songs
and then they also talk
either about like what influenced
them or,
you know.
Shiny Ribs did a whole like, here's
my, here is my life story.
Just off, off the cuff.
He's amazing.
So there's a lot of great stories, a
lot insight to songwriting and
and songs that you've heard a lot on
KUTX. We get to hear like what
they're about.
And yeah, I
think it's gonna be cool, I hope.
It seems like a natural
synergy between the two.
I mean, they are literally there.
They are feet from us here at the
hole in the wall.
What brought this partnership about?
Um, well, you know, you sit in
the, uh, studio, the control room
and right across the street, we get
to see Hole in the Wall every single
day, right?
Um, and you know we just
wanted to partner with them because
that front stage is
iconic, you, know, over 50
years. I mean, there's so many
amazing stories from the Hole in the
Wall back in the crazy days.
Um, you now, Lucinda
Williams has played there or, or
was told she can't play there
because they already had a woman,
that's a good story.
Um, you know, Blaze fully played
there a lot.
Spoon, uh, when they were going to
UT, that was the, the place that
they played the most, getting all
their practice and show time in.
Uh, Fastball, Gary Clark Jr.
Shiny Ribs, um, or the Gord's,
uh.
Uh, a bit about Shakey Graves.
I mean, just the list goes on.
Yeah, the real murderers row, yeah.
Yeah. It's an awesome stage.
So we wanted to do something
and kind of like honor that
front stage, which has
not been changed since it was built.
Uh, the owners, there's been several
owners of Hole in the Wall, but they
always say they are not allowed to
change that front room or people
would get mad. It will be cursed.
It has to stay exactly the
same, including the bathrooms.
So it has to stay.
It's like that for a reason.
One of the reasons why I mentioned
the Hole in the Wall stage being on
the bucket list for many musicians,
local and international, is because
at one of the tapings an artist,
Jade Bird, she's from the
UK, they said just that.
I gotta guess that wasn't the first
time that you heard that from one of
the artists performing on stage,
right? Like I've been dying to get
up here.
I mean, most of the people that we
invited this time have played
before, but Jade Bird
Haddon, Grace Sorensen,
who's an R&B singer, she had
never played there and she was
honored to be there.
So yeah, I mean it is a pretty
iconic special stage
with all of these like amazing
artists that have stood on that
stage and played.
Yeah, you mentioned Shiny Ribs,
that Shiny Rib's episode is coming
out shortly.
We want to play a snippet of a voice
memo that he sent you that kind of
lets listeners know just what
they're in for with this series.
Okay, we are
thinking back on
memories from the Hole in the Wall.
As best as I can
remember after
discussing this with my old
bandmates from the Picket Line
Coyotes,
we first
played Hole in The Wall,
I think it was South by Southwest,
1990.
I love the energy
That crack of the can, you know,
nothing beats that. Oh, nothing beats that.
Kevin Russell is awesome.
But I have to say, late breaking
news, after he sent that memory,
he was like, the first time was 1988
at South By.
So I had to correct that.
He made sure I got that
text message.
Yeah, it was an
awesome story that he sent
me a rambling on voicemail.
So I'm gonna include that in the
broadcast version.
And then when he was in a hole
in the wall taping back in
May. Uh, just took us on an
incredible journey of storytelling.
Yeah, okay, so we mentioned Shiny
Ribs, Grace Sorensen, who else
is going to be featured in this
first season?
Yeah, we've got Alex Maas from the
Black Angels, Hayes Carl,
Cary Fessel who is in Bruce
and Kaliope musicals,
and Paige Renee Berry of Half Dream,
oh and Jonathan Terrell as well.
Nice.
Nice nice.
Well, I think the whole series I'm
sorry The whole story has
achieved something that's something
we struggle to do in journalism
Which is actually putting something
out once it's actually finished
You've done a bunch of these already
and you're ahead of the game.
So now that you've completed this
first run of shows What do you
what do you think about them?
Do you feel like you kind of
achieved the the what Kevin Russell
was talking about the crack of the
can going back to the days of 1988
Yeah, I think it was
such a cool taping to do and
people we had like a really
small audience of concert club
members was only like 50 people when
we taped each of these and I
mean, they keep asking me when I'm
going to do more taping.
It takes a lot the back end
takes a lot.
The taping is real fun and it takes
a lot of work, but hopefully we'll
do another season, but it kicks
off January 16,
we'll put them up.
We put an episode up on YouTube
every Friday and starting the 20th,
it will air every Tuesday at
10 PM on KUTX.
Excellent. We are definitely looking
forward to it. You mentioned being
across from the hole in the wall We
get to see lots of people going into
shows late at night But it was
always cool when these productions
were going on it'd be like two or
three in the afternoon Tons of
people packing into the hole on the
wall. So we're really excited to
check out the entire series again
It's gonna be over at kutx.org.
We've been speaking with Deidre
Gott from kut x We'll have
a link to the series in the show
notes and over at KUT.org
slash signal Deidra Thanks for
talking with us
Aw, thanks for having me, Jerry.
And thank you out there for tuning
in. That is it for today's show.
You can find more from us at kut.org
slash signal.
Kristen Cabrera is our managing
producer and Rayna Sevilla is our
technical director.
I'm your host, Jerry Quijano.
We will talk to you manana.