March 5-7, 1999
DALLAS - The North Texas (that would be Dallas) Irish Festival is a particularly good gig, in terms of morale, because it reminds us that there are (hopefully) more festivals to come in just a couple months (Canada, Canada, Canada, please) and that the snow is probably going to be melting soon so that we can head to the East Coast and Midwest without sliding and freezing. (The Mollys love festivals and I, former Minnesotan, love not being cold.) Beyond that, of course, there’s nothing like playing for a few thousand people.
We drove in from Houston yesterday afternoon, where we’d done a show at McGonigle’s Mucky Duck. We saw a bunch of friends in Houston and played some new material for them. The Chieftains were in town the same night, but we still pulled an 80 percent full house - not bad for a Thursday.
Before that we were in Austin, where we were competing for a crowd with the usual amazing lineup of performers giving Austin a shot - I half expected to see that The Beatles were getting back together and playing for free down the street from The Cactus Cafe. Damn. Austin is a stop for every act on the road; seriously, with the exception of some of the stadium circus acts, every act on the road seems to make it through Austin. In the average week there are probably as many or more name or up and coming acts playing Austin than even New York and Los Angeles. When you’re in Austin, you’re in one of the toughest music towns in the country. We’ve got a loyal audience there. The second night in town we played an unpublicized set at Threadgill’s, an old country-style restaurant and bar on North Lamar known for serving up music along with the best homestyle cooking I’ve eaten. Suffice it to say that chicken fried steak cultists turn towards Threadgill’s when they say grace. (It’s worth the trip to Austin for a dining tour of Threadgill’s and Ruby’s BBQ - it gives Memphis barbecue joints a run for the heartburn).
Had a great time at Threadgill’s. We played second in a lineup of local acts (remember, this is Austin and “local” usually means “scarily good”) for people chowing down. It’s tough to compete with Threadgill’s food. They liked us, we met some local musicians, and heard some good music - and got a good start on our monthly calorie intake.
The only disappointment in Austin was missing two of my favorite roups, the Amazing Rhythm Aces and The Gourds.
The Aces are out doing a few shows, and here I had a chance to hear them and ... ARRRGGHH.
And the Gourds, every bit as musically strange (though in a different way) as we are, have a brand new CD out, "Ghosts of Hallelujah," on Munich Records and were doing a CD release show. Didn't get to hear them, either. Rats.
Meanwhile...
We’re now (March 5) at the North Texas Irish Festival. We’ll play three times over the weekend at the state fair grounds outside the Cotton Bowl, as well as closing a show at the Tipperary Inn.
The Tipperary (a very large pub) show turned out to be a wilder time than usual - it could have passed for New Year’s Eve. The shows at the festival weren’t as wild, but we got a uniformly hot response on all the stages we played - nobody seemed the least bit concerned that we weren’t traditional Irish, in fact the groups that got the wildest response were Celtic-rock and other Celtic-derivative bands. I’ve probably written about this before, but from what I’ve heard about the music scene in Ireland there isn’t much hair pulling over what is traditional and what is “not authentic.” (If you take that traditional mania too far you wind up with the only authentic music being a guy named Thog beating on a mastodon skull with a rock.) There, I've been told, Irish music is a living form, not a museum piece fretted over by academics. And Canada, I can tell you from personal experience, is quite the same; many of their festivals are just called festivals, with no label as to the genre. You hear everything imaginable; it's not unheard of to have a hard rock band follow a bunch of clogging accordion players or something like that. The US music scene seems particularly obsessed with genre purity. (Odd that that would be the case in the ethnic melting pot, or maybe not.) Even many of our music night clubs seem to be fanatical. Much of it has to do with the recording industry, which sees anything that doesn’t quite fit into an established slot as a marketing problem. It’s resulted in the best country songwriters and performers being made “outlaws” (Waylon, Willie & the like) in the 1970s and Nashville outsiders in the 1990s (so-called “alt country,” or “y’alternative” and Americana). It’s even weirder over in our strange little nook of the music business. There’s a considerable amount of fighting over where we don’t belong (“Uh, they sure aren’t Celtic with that Mexican stuff and they ain’t folk with those damned drums and that electric bass, and they don’t do enough country to be Americana, and...”) Who knows where the hell you’ll find our CD - if you can find it at all. Only the fans don’t seem to care what the hell we’re called.
Well, now that I’ve got that off my chest again, I have to say we had a damned good time at the festival, raised hell on stage, got enough applause to annoy some folks, and got to hook up with some good friends we only get to see when we’re in that part of Texas.
And one night, after playing at the festival, we headed down to the hip neighborhood known as Deep Ellum and I got my chance to hear The Gourds at The Tea Room. Great band. Their sound man almost blew us out of the room, but the new songs are gems. It's an unlikely mix of bluegrass(for want of a better description) harmonies (two great singers with unique voices) employing a mix of country and punk rock feel using acoustic instruments (guitar, accordion, mandolin, and fiddle or even banjo) with electric bass and drums) to tell Kevin's Russell's stream of consciousness stories. They've added a new multi- instrumentalist who fills out the sound, switching between mandolin, fiddle and a bit of banjo. Got to make some Gourds music. I'm happy. Time to pack up The Beast and hit the road.
And so, we’re off to Tucson for a couple days off before the big St. Patrick’s raid on Reno and the Bay Area.
P.S. By the way, on the way home our record of getting harrassed by the cops in Texas was kept intact by Catherine. She got nailed on I-20 somewhere between Dallas and Midland-Odessa. Suddenly, we’re all sitting up in the van, looking around and waking up to see Catherine gone and flashing lights in the mirrors. We hear nothing for a long time and then there’s that familiar radio dispatcher’s voice droning from the cop car: “Zavala, Catherine, Arizona, negative 10-28, 10-29.” That’s cop talk for “No outstanding warrants, there’s nothing on the law enforcement computer network showing any agency wants you to arrest her.” So much for my theory that they were going to charge her with smuggling pasty white folks out of Texas. When she gets back in the van, we ask the question, “So, what did we do this time?” She tells us they wrote her a warning ticket for weaving. Hmmm. Right, imagine that, a 60-mph hour side wind and she was nudging the line once in a while in a seven-foot tall vehicle with a side profile like a barn. That’s not quite as lame as the time the cop stopped Gary outside of Dallas at 3 am in a rainstorm on the narrow shoulder of a curve to write him a "safety" warning for having a burned out license plate light. Don’t get me started. Suffice it to say I don’t find this BS any more satisfying than the truth, which is, “We keep pulling you over for nothing because you’re driving an old van with Arizona tags and look like a bunch of poor, long-haired hippie bastards, and one of you is even a Mexican.” And that’s my plug to join the ACLU.
At this point, I’ll also note that I worked around police for years when I was a reporter. I’ve seen enough dead and wounded and wronged people to have an intense dislike for wrong doers. I even had guns pointed at me by the guys without the badges while standing with the guys with the badges. It makes one appreciate the job a bit more than your average TV show. I worked as a police reporter for a few years, including having an office in the main police station in Tucson for quite a while. I’ve got a few friends who are cops. I’ve known a bunch who were great, honest people and I’ve known a few real dirt bags that don’t deserve the power they abuse. But even some of the ones I put in the former category, and that’s most that I’ve known, sometimes forget how liberties taken with departmental rules stomp on rights and can make those people feel like, and eventually become, enemies and outsiders. Getting jacked up for no good reason will do strange things to your attitude about a lot of things. I don’t recommend it. But I can assure you that this traveling around in a low-paying, transient profession is a way to try on some other shoes.
End of lecture.