Out Here on the Edge of the Desert--
¿Who booked this tour?
Me and the girl started out in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Georgia. Left a day early to walk the border collie and the button eyed dog up Fort Mountain to an old stockade and an overlook in the Chattahoochie National Forest. Got our exercise for the entire month of travel that day. The trip lasted for most of November with the last stop a thousand miles west in Tejas at the Texas Theatre in Waxahatchie, south of Ft. Worth. Dusk Weaver runs the Golden Hill Concert Series. When we drove the winding 100 final miles on a Georgia state road south of the park to Alto, we found him dusting up an arching airplane hangar of a building for my show that night.
Dusk's home, a short walk from the self made concert hall, is a passive solar construction. Everything is arranged to collect the southern exposure to the sun. The slab it sits on is massive, the building materials are excellent, and the weatherproofing has been tastefully, but rigorously applied for the maximum in energy savings. If it flooded this airtight house would float like an ark. It and the houses around it comprise a kind of dream commune from the 60's. Except all these hippies have jobs. If you ever wanted to do it, this is the way it should be done.
So anyway, I tuned up the Pawless a whole step low and played it down for a scattering of interesting folks from the rough equivalent of a gravel road neighborhood around the airplane hangar. Those woods are full of veteran writers, longtime musicians, and a compliment of successful business people.
My opening act's guitar player watched curiously as I confounded the bright, young kid with that totally mesquite guitar, "the claw" pick style I invented across the Bay bridge from San Francisco, and a passle of creative chord forms and tunings for a couple of enthusiastically calm, but fierce sets. It must have looked like I was playing music from Mars. He was very accepting of my eccentric approach to theme and interlude. I used to be just like him, twenty or so years and several musical lifetimes ago. It was a stitch to chase encores from the same stage with him and his female singing, accordion playing partner.
The next morning, after breakfast at Dusk's well thought out, cozy home walking distance from the downstairs half of a friends house they put us up in, we routed back south and west across the northern edge of Atlanta to pick up the interstate to Chattanooga.
We spent the rest of the first week at home in the cabin out on the hundred highway. But we kept the Jeep idling for our next foray into the sun. It got quiet as it would be for this swing. So I started working on another book about the thirty years I spent traveling with my first dreadnought guitar. Its essays and letters about the life and times of a Texas writer and a flat top box guitar. I call it "'SIXTYEIGHT 'TWENTYEIGHT". My pal, Vince Pawless, did the photography.
It was warm for that late in the fall, so I cantered about with a cold cup of java in shorts, sandals, and my freebie T shirt from the Ryman performance of the "Down From The Mountain" tour T Bone Burnett and Bob Neuwirth invited Sarah and me to earlier in the fall. Very interesting from behind the soundboard in the center of the balcony to see bluegrass, of all things, in that storied old cathedral of country music.
Let me break for a moment before we start the trip west and illustrate. When I first came to Nashville in the early '70's to gig, I was young, playing songs by John Lennon and Lowell George, and BLUEGRASS was a dirty word that no God fearing, guitar packing mother's son would be caught dead uttering, much less playing. These days, thanx to Ralph Stanley, T Bone, and Bob the hit hungry now stand in line like they had been there the whole time behind the now lucrative artform. An artform like a bastard relative they kept locked in the upstairs closet for a few decades. I confidently await the first cowboy rap cut from this cowboytown.
So much for predictions. I had bigger problems. The v2, my Pawless guitar, needed some attention. The string height was just too high. And it seemed to be climbing higher when I wasn't looking at it.
I'd play it and get used to the action, telling myself, "I can live with that".
Then I would come back a couple of days later and it would appear a moment higher. Impossible! When I received the instrument the year before it was the best action on a dreadnaught I had ever played. And though the sound was as perfect as ever I now needed a gorilla grip to play it. I eyed it up and down and could not figure out why the difference, why the gradual, yet obviously imperceptible change.
Tack on another few hundred miles to the upcoming Tejas portion of the road for a stop by Vince Pawless' new guitar shop outside of Gainesville north of Dallas near the Oklahoma border. We gussied up, packed for the ride the day before, and bolted out of this cowboytown for all points west at six a.m. sharp.
As I grabbed my hat for the door I called out to the kitties, "everybody's got a job, yours is to be good. So be good! We'll be back in a minute, you guys".
Bandit, the Berkeley cat, rolled over and yawned to the younger Texas cat, Petey, and the even younger Tennessee cat, Mollie, "yeah, yeah, yeah" and went back to sleep.
When we leave to gig a sitter comes in twice a day to feed, coddle, and kibbitz with them like they were the Pharoah's kittens. Sometimes we return from blowing it out on the road and I can't honestly tell who had a better time, the doted on felines, or the feted folk singers. The pooches are a good indicator, though. They'll hang dog around and sleep for three days after each trip from exhaustion.
Nonetheless we pulled up after about 650 miles straight west into the sun at Vince's new Guitar Ranch. It's a large metallic building down a dirt road from his parents horse and cattle ranch on Pawless Lane. After a day's worth of bumping up and down on the interstate, the border collie and the button eyed dog lept from the Jeep like convicts on parole. I had to laugh when the button eyed little dog from the green hills of Mt. Juliet cranked on a parched looking prickly pear cactus and yelped a feeble little yelp upon his unfortunately sensitive introduction to the nettles.
Ha! But also, Ouch!
The Guitar Ranch has every kind of equipment to construct, touch up, or troubleshoot any instrument Vince decides to make. Ongoingly there are numbers of instruments in varying states of construction filling the workbenches. Some are still in the collection of cases they got shipped in awaiting his attention. In addition to the sawdusted shop areas for woodworking, varnishing, and painting his newest models are living quarters for him complete with a kitchen, den, a bath, and a couple of bedrooms.
That night we kicked back, popped the top off a long neck, laughed about my weeks of string action consternation, and enjoyed a steak dinner from his double griddle like a Waffle House in the middle of a cattle pasture. In the field out the back door was a herd of cows the border collie couldn't ignore.
Bright and early the next day we breakfasted over that griddle. And before it could cool down, he took one look at my guitar, pulled out a straight edged metal ruler, and diagnosed the problem. He turned on a couple of power tools in the workshop, and it was all over in a few minutes. Man, that dude works fast. We left him waving good-bye from out front of the Guitar Ranch, and made for the deep pine woods around Huntsville, Texas to my people's home next to the Davy Crockett National Forest up FM 1375 seven miles from New Waverly.
Just up the road from that little town is Cold Spring where William Burroughs lived to get away from civilization just far enough to keep his wife in prescription drugs and cough medicine in the middle of the last century. He was heir to the Burroughs adding machine fortune. You know him better as the fellow who wrote "Naked Lunch".
A day later Sarah put the hammer down on I 45 south and we made for my next gig at University of Houston. It was a lecture and music for the University of Houston's Honors Program professored by an old, old buddy, Bill Monroe. He and I were quarterbacking young fools on a west Houston high school football team back in the 60's. His students were bright as newly minted pennies, and a great bunch of young adults.
You remember, you wear jeans like a badge of courage, the way your hair looks when you wake up in the morning is one of the more important things on the planet and you're not gonna die. They had a raft of intelligent questions for me I really enjoyed answering in between songs concerning my music, and my more dramatic moments of rehabilitation from head injury. They were refreshingly curious to know how the discipline of music and the requirements of recovery accented, and contributed to one another. I had a rapid, rewarding time with them for the hour, or so that I played and spoke my book.
A representative of the Texas Rehab Association sat in on the show and commented, "I've been with the group here in Houston for five years. I learned more in one hour than I have in all my years with them." My feet never touched the ground after that.
In the wake of the low key performance, Bill took a handful of us to a Vietnamese restaurant in the shadow of downtown Houston. The place served up some great traditional entrees. And surprisingly, offered excellent cheese cakes, pies, and layer cakes that were anything, but southeast asian. You know you're in Tejas when...
I looked out the window and realized I was just down the block from the Chenevert location of the old 500 seat Liberty Hall, where Bruce Springsteen played his first Texas gig in the 70's. I had probably played the local hamburger joint gigs for a year, or so, as I sat behind the keyboard player in the stage wings for that one as Springsteen came out, sat down in a folding chair, and started "Wild Billy's Circus Story" with an acoustic guitar. The bassist played a tuba. He finished the set with his trademark blonde Tele and the full band raised the audience, and the roof of the building, a few feet off the ground with a monster version of "Rosalita".
Anyway, two nights later I teed it up at Anderson Fair with Guy Schwartz playing excellent bass and singing backup vocals. He's another pal I've known since we were short people at Spring Branch Junior High School. These days he fronts a group called the New Jack Hippies in that bayouest of Gulf Coast towns.
After 80 post gig miles at around 2 o'clock in the morning the girl and I bedded down back up in the woods outside of New Waverly. Together with the dogs again, we drove for at least 300 miles and six hours the next day to my Late Night Lazy Boy Supper Club gig at the Royal Theatre in Archer City, Texas just south of Wichita Falls.
That part of the state is all grassless and scrub brush covered rolling hills with dipping "washer women" oil pumps steadily cycling up and down, up and down for as far as the eye can see. The place around is a forbidding wasteland of a landscape that constantly moves because of the old pumps. It looks like mile upon mile of towering metal crickets in what appears to be a huge hatchery of some sort that stretches to the horizon in all directions. They intently, relentlessly dip their hammer heads toward the ground as their flatter, counter weighted haunches raise up. I spent my share of time in oilfields with my father as a kid, so I can hear the windy whine of their rotating hip bone machinery's in my sleep.
Archer City is Larry McMurtry's hometown and the subject of the movie, "The Last Picture Show" that had all us suburban kids enthralled back in the 70's. The concert put me, Sarah, and the dogs up in the Lonesome Dove Bed and Breakfast in town a couple of blocks from the show, far from the whistling hillsides of petroleum bugs. The beasts loved it cause they got their own yard to hang out in for a change. It beat the bottom floor of a Best Western with exterior corridors on the deserted looking curbside of a dusty highway like a Baghdad Cafe. It beat the hell out of being on the second floor.
The show was great. The folks that run the performance have it down pat. In that little town in the middle of nowhere they pack 'em in for a catered dinner. Then they have three musician/writers take a well decorated stage like a sitting room and play a songwriter in the round for a couple of sets. They open the doors, and the concert hall fills up. They wine, dine, and entertain and no one leaves with a frown. So in a rough out of a little community of maybe a thousand people with three bookstores McMurtry owns they regularly put upwards of 200 paying customers from Dallas, or Ft. Worth, or Wichita Falls in good seats for a show featuring good food followed by a casual concert of pure music. That's how you keep Œem in Texas.
They ask the performers to bring a memento to decorate the homey stage. I brought Œem the gold plated bowling pin trophy I rescued from a Goldfield, Nevada junk shop back in the 70's. When I curiously walked into the shop at a gas stop almost thirty years ago now on my way to living in Lake Tahoe, California, I was humming a song that was trying to write me. And the bowling pin sitting abandoned on a dusty shelf among an assortment of collectibles above my head hummed back at me! So I snapped it up in an impulse buying fit for fifty cents.
I couldn't part with the upright, and bronzing fellow won by the Firestone Tire Company in Las Vegas back in 1951 for over a quarter of a century. But I figured it had more show biz to play, so I gave it off to those good fellows south of Wichita Falls to contribute the best I could have given to the best little show that close to the Oklahoma border. It now gleams in a righteous place on top of an old Conoco gas pump behind the players. In an aside I told Œem, "that bowling pin buddy of mine hasn't hummed at me for some time now, but if you guys do something foolish like go out of business, you know where to mail it".
To top it all off I got a Texas shaped brick with my name on it in the floor of the original theatre depicted in the "LPS" movie. Beau/Geoff Bridges, Cloris Leachman, and Sissy Spacek have bricks in the same floor.
Next night I played the Texas Nights North house concert with Wayne Lawrence. He did a super set. He's one good finger picking player from just out of Boston south of Glouster, "Perfect Storm" town, on the Atlantic Ocean. David Byboth, who hosts the event in the former Frito Lay mansion in Coppell, knows just how to pick Œem for his show that, arguably, is one of the best showcases for acoustic talent in the Dallas area among a very few others.
If anyone should know it's probably me. Hell I was born in that cowtown. When I grew up, somewhat, I played guitar there every year with Fromholz in all the joints. After a decade hiatus in the eighties I returned with my first CD to the yearly schedule when I moved back to Texas from Berkeley only to find most of the good places to play were gone, gone, gone. Rather sadly for the music me and others like me campaign, the rest have sorely degraded to marquis debris on Greenville Ave.
Enough of that shit. The road home to the cabin out on the hundred highway in Tennessee was long and hard knowing we had to come back to the Lone Star State the next week to finish up in Wimberley, and Waxahatchie. That's show biz.
On the town square in little Wimberley, Texas was my next billing. The classic Cypress Creek Cafe is owner by a high school mate, Bruce Calkins. I had always wanted to play that tourist town, but never had the opportunity for the three years I lived in Fredericksburg, 40 miles down the highway 290. When we arrived that afternoon, another old school buddy, David Lewis, had me, Sarah, and large table of friends on the River Road at his Juan Enrique's restaurant the late afternoon before we went to the gig. When we left the table we were well into the merriment of the approaching evening and David showed up at the gig in an orange wig. He's my opening act.
Again Guy Schwartz was my excellent accompanist and we city boys showed em how to do it despite the dance floor between us and the enthusiastic audience. A basketball game with the volume turned off was up in the corner over the otherwise classic old bar.
But when you're hot , you're hot. As far as I could tell everyone dug the tunes, the sound man was "on" and no one minded the shit kicking setting as we rifled through three hours of music. Anyway my now hands down favorite gig in Austin these days, notwithstanding the swizzle stick layout, is in Wimberley at the Cypress Creek Cafe.
The only odd caveat to the whole affair was when a pretty, but intoxicatedly earnest woman approached me on stage in the middle of a couple of rock and western tunes during the second of three sets and insisted we play some dance music.
"Aw c'mon, you can do it".
As I continued to tune my guitar, and carry on with the rest of the attentive audience, I reached into my pocket and whispered off mic, "Now, I love ya. Here's a quarter, there's the juke box. My break is in fifteen minutes...now disappear." I'm not sure she knew what the quarter was for, but I never saw her again. Money changes everything.
The last evening of this swing through Tejas was in Waxahatchie at the Texas Theater with Brian Burns, the workingest musician in the Dallas/Ft.Worth area. And easily one of the best. We held court at the playhouse for a couple of hours and even found time to yuk it up during one his tunes.
He was doing a song that listed a hundred Texas towns he had been to. They came rapid fire, and end to end of one another. All cleverly arranged and rhyming to boot. He motioned to me to take a vamp on a verse myself. So I obliged reminiscent of the Hemmeridge Mountain Boys.
"I been everywhere boys, I been everywhere. Houston, Houston, Houston, Houston, Houston , Houston, Houston, Houston, I been everywhere." I promised Sarah to give up comedy, but that got a guffaw, or two from a crowd that upbraided me earlier for pronouncing it Wax-ahatchie, instead of Wox-ahatchie.
Me and the pretty girl spent the night in Midlothian, Texas with excellent writers and players, Chip and Jonna Woodburn. The button eyed dog again distinguished himself as only a miniature sheep dog looking pooch can by rolling in excrement in their large yard because he thought it made him more glamorous.
1800 deadhead miles in a 5000 mile overall trip Georgia to Texas with Arkansas in the middle four times. West Memphis to Texarkana, Texarkana to West Memphis, West Memphis to Texarkana...and back. I was maybe a little crusty, and not in the best humor when the smoke ran out. The long distance routine, back and forth, smooth goggle eyed me.
Finally homeward on the bridge over the Tennessee river, Sarah shook her head without taking her eyes off the interstate. She sounded worn out herself,
"it's like traveling with a three year old".
Vince
