Shock as friends and I realize we knew suspect

I was reading the pilot's rant-suicide note-manifesto and trying to see if the name Joseph Stack was familiar to me when my phone rang. It was my friend Jim Hemphill, sounding grave and shaken up, calling from a few blocks away.

"Dude, it's Joe Stack," he said.

It still took me a few seconds to put it together: Stack — accused of setting fire to his own house and then flying a plane into a Northwest Austin office building — had played bass for two or three years in a band in which Hemphill played guitar, the Billy Eli Band. When Hemphill was putting together a band to play a backyard party for his mother-in-law's birthday three years ago, he got Stack to play bass, Stack's wife, Sheryl, to play keyboards and Michael Cerza, who played with Eli, to play drums. Jim and I played guitar.

We practiced at the Stack house for the one-off gig, the same home he is accused of setting ablaze Thursday morning. I took my sons over there for pizza one night before practice. My boys played with their daughter while we woodshedded tunes by Chuck Berry and Johnny Cash. Stack and Sheryl hadn't been married all that long, and he seemed to adore his wife and stepdaughter. I remember Sheryl, who was classically trained, being a bit more fussy about the rough edges of our sound than the rest of us, who were more interested in making racket and having a couple of beers.

I did not know Joe Stack well by any means — I don't recall running into him after the party gig — but the hoary cliché is true: He seemed incredibly decent and mild-mannered, the absolute last person you'd expect to perpetrate Thursday's madness, violence and horror.

I spent a portion of my day talking to friends on the phone and blurring the line between friend and journalist. When you have to ask someone you've been close to since you were 15 to go on the record, that's a weird and dislocating experience.

After Hemphill called, I called Eli. Stack was in Eli's band for a few years before drifting away. Eli said: "He was the most sort of even-keeled and sane person I ever played with. I know everybody says that, but it's true. He was just a normal-seeming guy. I never heard him raise his voice."

Eli doesn't recall Stack saying a word about a decades-long beef with the government.

Same with Michael Cerza, who was also in Eli's band with Stack.

"My impression of Joe was a kind, quiet, not at all brooding or taciturn person," Cerza said. "I didn't sense anything boiling under the surface. He was very pleased to get married again, I know that. There was no indication in his actions or his words that he would harm anyone. And then he crashes into a building full of strangers, innocent people. I can't make those ends meet in my mind. The madness of the times, maybe."

Then there was Ric Furley. Furley was the drummer when Eli's band made its "Amped Out" record, on which Stack played.

"He never let on that this was going on in his head," Furley said.

Hemphill still sounded weirded-out hours after he first called. After all, he'd actually ridden in that plane with Stack for a wedding gig in Conroe.

"I'm still too shocked to say very much," said Hemphill, a lawyer who sometimes does work for the American-Statesman. "I never saw anything like this in Joe, but... we weren't the kind of close friends who would talk about personal or political things. "

There was one irony above all else staring us in the face Thursday. Stack was in other bands. One of them was the Last Straw.

They made a record called "Over the Edge."

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603