Records & Roads

Scent is supposed to be the most evocative sense.  Certainly, some smells call to mind a certain place or time, but never anything very specific. Rain on the desert takes me back to just that, the scent of creosote and sage wafting on a wet wind. When I smell that heady aroma, I am taken back to any number of good soakers I have ridden out, never a definitive storm.

                For a Proustian bout of recall, nothing works for me like sound. A song will always take me a surprising number of places. Music never fails to remind me of a specific moment and the feelings I felt then. A half dozen pop hits from the 90’s can have me smelling my high-school’s gym or hearing the rumble of a friend’s car.

                The only other thing that can recall so many emotions is a drive. Certain roads can bring a flood of sense memories rushing through me. Growing up in rural West Texas, you had to drive a long way to do almost anything, so I have a large bank of road-related memories. So much of our daily lives were spent speeding down one highway or another.

                I probably inherited most of this tendency from my father, who would famously take the long way around almost any day, if time permitted. To this day, heedless of the thirty year gap between us, he’ll still ask me if I want to go for a drive, and my answer is still and always yes. My own days, especially those not consumed with school or work, are usually spent blowing up and down the highways of Southern New Mexico and West Texas. Driving is a meditative process, a curative exercise, and a way for me to explore the place I live.

                It would follow, then, that I would find a way to combine these two triggers. I spend a lot of my time (especially beautiful fall afternoons) going from record store to record store, usually starting in El Paso and working my way back to Las Cruces. It’s something that satisfies so many urges for me, the urge to travel, and the compulsion to find music I haven’t heard before. I get the quiet solitude of driving and the comfort of song, and sometimes, the two combine into an experience that etches itself so deeply, I lose the words to explain it.

                A few weekends ago, I was on one of my jaunts. My hands were blackened from digging through stacks of vinyl, but I found nothing that I just had to have. Winding up in Las Cruces empty handed, I stopped to take a cursory glance at the local entertainment superstore. They were having one of their periodic CD blowout sales, and I grabbed  a fair number. One in particular struck me. It was a Rodney Crowell best-of.

                 I was a kid in the 80’s, when you could hear Rodney Crowell,  Emmylou Harris, or Dwight Yoakum on the radio. The Neo-Traditionalist heyday was short, but I could never forget those songs, even if the radio did soon enough. I probably hadn’t heard “Many A Long & Lonesome Highway” since I was 9 years old. Hearing the first line took me right back to sitting in my Dad’s truck, hearing this sad, wise sounding voice come out of the speakers. All the places we went back then were down long and lonesome highways.  (If you don’t believe me, take Hwy 62/180 from El Paso up to the New Mexico line, and you’ll start to understand the sort of vistas that informed my childhood.) I remember feeling strange, the words and melody of the song were evoking all these emotions that I, as a child in a happy family, would have no way of knowing. It was powerful magic to my 9 year old self.

                21 years later, I pop the CD in my truck’s player and head out of Las Cruces, out of sweltering heat into the storm that is threading itself on the teeth of the Organ Mountains. The smell of desert rain was so thick, it filled my truck’s cab. Big, ice cold rain drops were exploding all over windshield. A blue mist shrouded the mountains and the sands turned red with moisture.  A few songs into the disc “Many A Long & Lonesome Highway” twangs out of the speakers. I’m listening to the words now as a man, and not all of them, but one verse in particular hits me. I knew exactly what the song was saying.  I understand the song now as an adult I completely understand the feelings of freedom, hard-won knowledge, and the slight sadness that the song made me feel as a kid. I’m on a long and lonesome highway, in a beautiful rain storm, listening to a song that suddenly means a lot to me for two different reasons, decades apart.

                When I smell rain on the desert now, all the oils from the plants turning to vapor in the moist air, I might not remember that particular drive, but when I hear Rodney Crowell sing knowingly about the road and lessons he’s learned running down it, I will always remember that drive, they way the song could and still does make me feel. I’ll think about the power of words and music to make a child feel things beyond his ken, and they power they have to sing a man’s life back to him.  I’ll think of records and roads, two of my favorite things in life.

Heat, Honky Tonks, etc.

It’s been brutally hot here lately. Monsoon season just started, but it’s been a pretty nasty drought, and the rain has just made the day after muggy beyond belief. Since Cruces is a college town, it sort of shuts down during the summer. Needless to say, this stifling heat and lack of things to do will kinda wear on a soul.

                When I got an invite to a house show over at Steve MacIntyre’s house, I jumped, because the heat and the lack of people around, frankly, had me a little down in the mouth. The band playing was Aquarena Springs, based around a brother-and-sister pair of Texas ex-pats. Country music and a party? Just what I was needing!

                I get a little defensive about country, especially when people use words like “honky-tonk” to describe their sound. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, even if it describes a specific kind of place and music. Honky-tonk is a music you can’t fake, it arose, at least partially, out of Western Swing. You can either swing the beat and make the rhythm snap, or you can’t. I was just a little bit worried that I was going to see another hipster band that made a joke out of playing Honky-Tonk, without understanding where it came from, or what it was. Honky-Tonks were places where displaced rural people could meet in the city, be amongst their own, and listen to music that spoke to their experiences. (As well as drink, dance, and fight) Most importantly, you could dance to it. It’s how people my grandparent’s age met their spouses.

                As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. The folks in Aquarena Springs could make the beat swing like pros.  There were strong family/friend connections throughout the band, and the bond was evident in the way they played. There were was a guitar, drum, bass, and keyboard. Normally, when I see a keyboard, I think “Keyboard” i.e. something off a Weezer record. An Oakland guy with a cool sideways haircut that can play twinkly honky-tonk piano is a good thing. Their merch people even knew how to two-step to the music! Two-stepping is what the whole thing is about, music as a social activity.

                 I think the big show stopper was a cover of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”, which is itself, probably more famous for being covered by the Byrds on “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo”. If you’re keeping score at home, that was probably the first time California rock bands took notice of country music. There was an easy, unforced harmony, with each member of the band singing a verse solo and chiming in together on the chorus. The song is one of those songs that binds together country fans of different generations and backgrounds, and in the hands of Aquarena Springs, sounds like a torch being carried strongly forward. Their originals speak to heartache, loss, and displacement in a way that sounds completely contemporary and unique to their situation, but also fit right into the honky-tonk tradition.  They also sang a train song that their Dad wrote, which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Ray Price record in the 50’s, or a Merle Haggard album in the 60’s, or a Waylon record in the 70’s, etc. etc. These aren’t hard-core traditionalists like Dale Watson (who I think is awesome), nor are they “alt-country” fakers who jumped on the band wagon when punk rock got too hard to sing. They’re taking the tradition, adding their own spin to it, and carrying it forward.

                Are Aquarena Springs hipsters? I have no idea. They have hip haircuts and are so skinny, I wanted to feed them all. (As it was, I just bought them beer.) I do know that they know their stuff, and made what would have been another boring, sweltering night into something special. I hope they keep making music, because they have something between them that can light up a room. I hope they come back through, and I hope I can have them on my radio show in the future. But mostly, I hope they keep swinging that beat, and making people dance. As long as they are playing their music together, honky-tonk is in another set of good hands.

Aquarena Springs 

Steve MacIntyre/Alister M

Ending The Night On A Win

It was a Friday night, and I had been hauling hay with my Dad in 100 degree weather. Thirsty work and I couldn’t scare up a pal in El Paso for a beer. Driving around, I didn’t see any bars that didn’t look too crowded, or too loud. (I don’t like bars with more than one TV or a TV that is on too loud) Cutting my losses, and feeling kinda hungry, I headed back to the farm. On a whim, I decided to drive through Fabens, the town closest to home. The McDonalds there is perpetually swamped, and not anything I would eat. Everything else was closed, but I did see a taco truck in the vacant lot next to the old bank.

Have you ever eaten a meal you wished would never end? The tacos al pastor weren’t full of chunks of pineapple and onion like they usually are, but still delicious. The green onion was roasted to order, and the ends wrapped in foil before they were put on the fire. The result was less like an onion, and more like a tube full of sweetish, tangy syrup. The baked potato was baked to perfection, and topped with just a smidge of butter. There was a lime, to squeeze on the meat, and a few slices of radish to clean the pallet. (A taco isn’t a taco without a squeeze of lime, friends) The two salsas were a thin, red, hot sauce and a chunky, smoky, grilled jalapeno salsa.  Both were good, but I preferred the jalapeno salsa. It made a better contrast to the latent sweetness of the pork. I sat, finishing my beer, thinking that I had previously marked the night down as a dud. Any night that ends with some delicious tacos is a win, in my books.

Red Headed Strangeness

I’ve been on a bit of a Willie Nelson kick here of late. Which is sorta like saying that animals had a bullet problem when Teddy Roosevelt was around. I just finished reading the massive Joe Nick Patowski (part of becoming a naturalized Texan is adopting three names, it’s on the checklist) biography of him. I’ve also read the autobiography he wrote with Bud Shrake. As well as the two humor/philosophy/memoir books he co-wrote and the western novel he wrote with Mike Blakely. Not all at once, mind you, but over a period of say, four years. All of them were entertaining, and when they weren’t full of good ideas, they were full of dirty jokes. Good advice and dirty jokes will always find a welcome ear. I’ve got a slew of his albums on various formats. I’ve seen him a few times, and if I could, I would follow him around all summer (but not all year, even I’m not that obsessive) at least once.

I was rearranging my vinyl collection the other night and noticed something, looking at all the brightly colored covers. I’m pretty sure the one thing Willie Nelson has never said is “No, I won’t wear that.” Country music now is full of over groomed southern guys dressed like western guys. And they all sound like Bon Jovi. In a climate like that, appearing on an album cover looking like you just fell out of a laundry chute qualifies as more than a fashion statement, it’s a statement of artistic integrity.

The first time I saw Willie, he had carpal tunnel syndrome. The guy that played his kid in Honeysuckle Rose played guitar for him. It was at the Roswell UFO Festival. Merle Haggard opened. I took my Dad for Father’s Day. A crowd of teenagers who were volunteering at the door walked past us, the leader exclaiming “Let’s go sniff Willie’s bus”. Dad still chuckles at that. Willie wore a brace on his arm. I told my Dad “If Willie can feel pain, it MUST be bad.” He put on a good show, even if he didn’t play guitar. Merle had previously threatened to jump on the first UFO that offered him a ride with a startling earnestness. After a statement like that, On The Road Again doesn’t have quite the same excitement.

The last time I saw Willie, he was playing guitar. Opening for Dylan, in Albuquerque. It was a really great show, he played a bunch of his hits and some old honky-tonk chestnuts. I specifically remember that he played a lot of sacred songs. No one batted an eye or seemed aggrieved by this. I found them particularly moving. Out of the context of sitting in church, they seemed to be serving their intended purpose, uplifting people’s spirits. “He must have thought Albuquerque needed some Jesus” I told my Dad, after the fact. Albuquerque is pretty liberal for the rural west. My Dad, not one to miss a beat, said, “He was probably right.”

This is what I have figured out about Willie. Willie plays music because it makes him happy. Willie’s music makes people happy. Willie gets happy that people are happy with his music. Willie makes happier music. People get happier. It just keeps cycling upwards. When you think it can’t get any better, that the level of happiness can’t possibly get higher, he calls it a night. There was no peak, and you’re left wanting more. No one gets let down. I’m sure there’s a life lesson in that. The lesson I’m taking away from this, dear reader, is that I should wrap this thing up right here. It’s Willie’s world kids, and we’re just living in it.