Powell St. John retired not terribly long ago and picked up a music career he left behind four decades earlier. St. John was a prominent figure in Austin’s mid-1960s folk and psychedelic rock scene, having written or co-written six songs covered by the 13th Floor Elevators.

By the time that band was making its mark, though, St. John was gone, having relocated to the San Francisco Bay area. He dabbled in music for a few more years and had songs covered by Janis Joplin, Boz Scaggs and others. But by 1970, he was out for the most part.

photo courtesy of Tompkins Square Records

St. John lived in Berkeley, Calif., and worked for a wholesale jewelry manufacturer, picking up the guitar or harmonica from time to time. He started a family in the early 1980s and put the guitar away until recently.

Now he’s on his way to Houston, where it all started. St. John will perform twice this weekend in the town where he was born in 1940.

St. John believes he was only three or four when his father’s work took the family to Laredo. He says the musical culture there was more prominent than the football culture at the time. The high school would send people to the area grade schools with instruments hoping to nurture talent early. St. John received a flute, which he took too immediately. “But,” he says, “as a kid I had horrendous ear infections. The doctors were concerned that playing the flute was pushing impurities into my ears.”

Out with the flute, in with the drum, which he said “was murder for somebody who likes melody.”

He found a harmonica in a dime store and it stuck.

St. John graduated from the University of Texas “despite being very distracted by Austin.” He earned an art history degree “which I’ve never actually used to make money. But it has enriched my life immeasurably.”

Like many other arty student types, he fell under the spell of Bob Dylan, and at the urging of a songwriter named John Clay, St. John began writing songs.

It wasn’t long before St. John felt the need to move, though. He says there were murmurs of a big police bust that would sweep up all the members of the city’s freak culture. “I knew what the Elevators were doing to get in trouble,” St. John says. “I was associated with them, and guilt by association back then seemed fine by the authorities, so I left.”

He went west. His friend and former bandmate Janis Joplin (they worked in a group called the Waller Creek Boys) was doing well for herself in California. “I knew she was either going to burn out and explode or do some great things,” he says. “She did both, I suppose. I was disappointed she didn’t last longer than she did. It was obvious she was a special person.”

In late 1966, Joplin recorded St. John’s Bye Bye Baby with Big Brother and the Holding Company on their debut album. “It gave me the idea that I maybe had some kind of talent, that there was some value to my songwriting,” he says.

But a career in music didn’t happen for him in the Bay Area. He took a job and ceased to be a professional musician. He says he pulled his guitar out from time to time in the ’90s to play for his kids when they were a little older. His jewelry job was shipped overseas, so St. John went back to school and came out of it with a job as a computer tech, which he retired from in 2005. That was the same year he received a call from two admirers. One wanted to bankroll PowellSt. John’s first album. The other wanted to play guitar on it.

The result was Right Track Now, which put a re-emergence into motion. He was inducted into the Texas Music Hall of Fame that year.

He later joined the Elevators’ Roky Erickson on stage at a subsequent South by Southwest, singing and playing harmonica. That caught the attention of Josh Rosenthal, who runs the New York-based Tompkins Square label.

Soon after St. John was presented with a contract to make a record for the label, which resulted in this year’s On My Way to Houston, a great garage folk recording that has enjoyed greater distribution than its predecessor. So, 40 years after leaving Texas, St. John has an album that can be found in record stores. The songs are mostly his own, though the two covers — like the album’s title — bring everything back home. The album opens with Erickson’s Hardest Working Man (the author has never recorded the song). It also includes a song titled Jerry Lightfoot, about St. John’s friend, a blues institution in these parts, who died in 2006. St. John will perform at an annual Lightfoot tribute concert Sunday.

And two songs serve as bookends of sort for the album. John Clay is about the songwriter who encouraged St. John to write his own tunes. He also covers Clay’s Ballad of Travis Rivers.

It’s an unofficial history of a time and place St. John was lucid enough to remember and document, which is a rare thing given the troubled fates of his contemporaries at the time. He almost seemed to be referencing it in Bye Bye Baby: “It seems you just got lost somewhere out in the world/And you left me here to face it all alone.”

Having already returned to Texas at large, he’s finally making his way back to Houston.

POWELL ST. JOHN
When: 1 p.m. Saturday
Where: Cactus Music, 2110 Portsmouth
Tickets: Free

St. John will also perform at the annual Jerry Lightfoot Tribute Concert with Mary Cutrufello, the Zydeco Dots, Steve Krase, George Kinney, Rock Romano and others
When: 2 p.m. Sunday
Where: the Continental Club, 3700 Main
Tickets: $10 donation at the door goes to Musicans’ Benevolent Society of Houston. More information: www.continentalclub.com.