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.
No comments:
Post a Comment