September 2004 Archives

Well, I don't really have a lot to say about the third day of ACL, now that a little time has passed. We listened to a lot of bands from the shade, only braving the sun for Elvis Costello (who doesn't belong in a venue that big), and the North Mississippi All-stars, who were not nearly close enough to R.L. Burnside for my taste, and who had absolutely no shade near their stage.

Wilco played right before sundown, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band tore the roof off the gospel tent as night fell.

Since I've got nothing to say, here are a few photos instead. Our old digital camera is on its last legs, so I threw away a bunch of shots, but these turned out OK.

The last three blurry ones are the part where the Dirty Dozen asked "all the sexy ladies to shake it up on stage", and at one point had probably 50 girls dancing up on stage with them, all very shiny. It was a lovely sight in person, wish you could have seen it. Fortunately I was standing right next to the stage when it was time for them to leave, and a lot of them needed a hand down.

Note to self: stand next to the stage again during the DD show next year.

The saga of day 3 at ACL will have to wait. My feet feel like bloody stumps, so I'm gonna drink some water (I have already drunk 195 ounces today, and I'm still thirsty), take a shower, fix me a big bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and try to catch the season opener of "The Wire" when it runs on HBO West.

Work tomorrow seems like a whole other universe.

Gina just related this story to me. Our son Liam (age 7) skipped the festival today, and instead hung out with his friend Aarik all afternoon. They were at Aarik's baseball practice and Aarik's dad Michael asked Liam if he wanted a hat to keep the sun off. Liam said sure, and Michael, who is a huge Yankees fan, offered him the only hat he had lying around...which of course was a Yankees hat.

Liam looked at the hat, looked at Michael, looked at the hat, and said "Never mind, I don't really need one."

They eventually managed to find him an Astros hat, which he wore gladly, the Astros being his other favorite team besides the Red Sox.

I love my boy so much.

The devil is six
The devil is six
And if the devil is six
Then God is seven...

My daughter Cassidy and I took the shuttle bus to ACL today, got to our gang's tree grove by noon and got a good spot staked out with the chairs, and Gina took the Triumph down and caught up with us a couple of hours later.  We then proceeded to transform Cass into an uber rock chick.  New sunglasses, new Old 97's girly tee, then the face painter at the kids tent painted an Old 97's logo on her face. 

I cannot express how cool it is the first time that your daughter can hang out with you at an all-day rock show and relate to you the way a grown-up would.  There was not "finding kid stuff to entertain Cass" or "the kids need to eat 'cause they're getting cranky" today.  She wanted to buy a t-shirt, she wanted to shop at the hippy arts & crafts booths, she wanted to see band after band after band.

We saw the first few songs of Cat Power, which I bet would have sounded great lying in bed in the dark late at night on headphones.  As it was, we were standing on what felt like the face of the sun and I was pondering how my shirt could be so soaked with sweat just standing still, and how interesting it was that I had drunk three quarts of water and didn't even remotely feel like I wanted to pee any time soon.

We took many shade breaks today.

The Old 97's were next, and I think the days of being able to be right next to the stage in front of Rhett at a cozy club like Antone's are a thing of the past.  There must have been 20,000 people watching them, and they all knew the words to all the songs.  Cass got her shirt autographed by everyone in the band later at the Waterloo tent...we've got pictures, but that'll have to wait til I have the energy to upload them.

Fun diversion of the day was counting Red Sox hats.  58 in one day.  Not bad.  (Results in the Bronx were not so good, Yankees winning 14-4.  Steinbrenner's gonna die someday.  He's old.  You just watch.)

The crowds for Modest Mouse were probably twice as bad as that for Old 97's, so we listened to them from the shade.  Some species of indie rock, I guess.  They changed the schedule for the Wailers, so we missed them completely.  Heard about half of My Morning Jacket, which is some kind of Uncle-Tupelo-as-jam-band thing with a singer who does an OK Neil Young impression, even if I don't think he means to.  Gina headed back home around this time, and even though Cassidy begged and begged and pleaded to be allowed to stay to see the Pixies ("have you ever even heard the Pixies?", I asked.  "No, but the name sounds like they're punk and I wanna see them!!!!"), I could tell that she was gonna crash and burn real soon, and since I was taking the Triumph home afterwards, I didn't want to be on the road dodging drunks after dark with a sleepy child on the back, so off she went with mom.

I hooked up with Kristi again and her ex Todd for the rest of the night.  Saw a little bit of Dashboard Confessional (emo?), Marcia Ball (great New Orleans-style R&B piano) and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, then we crashed out on the grass after sundown and heard the entire set of the Neville Brothers.

I love the Neville Brothers.  I'm from New Orleans, I have to love the Neville's.  But y'know, they plant themselves so firmly in-between styles that sometimes they are hard to love.  They are a quintessential New Orleans party band...but I like Dr. John and Rebirth more.  They are a classic New Orleans R&B outfit...but I'd rather listen to Professor Longhair or James Booker.  They are way way into The Funk...but don't do it as good as P-Funk.  They do so much so well, but they are the absolute best at almost none of it.

But I could lay there in the grass, the sweat in my clothes finally starting to dry, my belly full, my feet sore, and I could almost pretend that I was at the Jazz Fest in New Orleans.  The Neville's may not be the Ultimate to me any more, but they definitely conjure the New Orleans festival vibe better than anybody.

Did I mention I spent lots of time at Prejean's today?  They know me now.  I'm their best customer.  Fuck, that's good gumbo.  And I didn't have to make it myself.

Oh, and why I like girl-watching with Kristi (who is pretty much heterosexual, but apparently flexible on those kind of details)...I'm watching some 20-year-old thing walk by in dark blue shorts that say "Port Aransas" on the back...she's at least 20 yards away, and you can barely see her through the crowd.  And Kristi says "you need the right kind of ass to be able to pull off wearing shorts like that".  And I say "which shorts?"  and she says "Port Aransas.  What did you think I was talking about?"  It's like Kristi and I were separated at birth or something, like that brother and sister in The Dreamers.  (Oh, and yes, little Miss Port Aransas definitely had that kind of ass.)

After the Neville's, we went to see what most people think is the highlight of the whole festival, the Pixies.  Us and 50,000 other people.  At one point Kristi was saying "Is it all the original members?  I don't see any women."   I said I saw one.  "But aren't there supposed to be two?"  I said, "I don't know, I was never a big Pixies fan," and she laughed and said "Yeah, right!"

But, y'know, it's true.  And I cannot really figure out the complicated series of thought processes that made me fail to ever get into the Pixies.

Part of it was timing.  When the Pixies arrived, my taste in music was starting to split and diverge a little.  Indie rock was just starting to bore me the teeniest bit, and the music I was listening to was either harder and more obscure, or it was old funk.  I was starting to step off the train of standard college radio fare, finally.  Just a little bit.

And part of it was how far and fast the Pixies went.  I had an aversion to really popular music, even of the indie variety, and there was no time to like the Pixies as some sort of underground cult thing before the whole world knew about them.  And so I blew them off.  Yeah, I'm a judgemental dickhead.  Yeah, I judge a book by its cover.  But working so much in the music side of college radio, I had such vast amounts of music crossing my path every week that I had to do some kind of triage just to be able to process it.  So the Pixies?  Yeah, they were too popular by, like, 1987.  (This same kind of thinking led me to call REM "sellouts" by the time their first album came out.  I was a "Chronic Town" die-hard.  OK, so I'm an idiot.)

So I haven't really started listening to the Pixies much until the past couple of years, and you know what?  I would have loved them in 1987.  But that era has passed.  I can't love this now.  I can't get passionate about this now.  The Pixies' time has come and gone, and if you were a fanatic about them then, then yeah, you are going to think they're fucking fantastic now just because you're reliving it.  It's the same way I feel about Wire and Mission of Burma.  But to become a brand new Pixies fan now, in 2004, with all that has transpired since their time?  I can't do it.  I like them.  But I can't love them.

However, I can get my daughter hooked on them.  Maybe I can kind of get a flavor of being a Pixies fanatic by watching a very cool 10-year-old discover them for the first time.

And once she's hooked on that...I might have some Wire albums to play for her.

She is SO doomed.

P.S.  Gina told me "tell everybody on your blog hi from me!"  So, all six of you:  Karl, Gregg, Melly, Heather, Quinn, and whoever else:  Gina says hi.

Somebody tell me where the party at!
Someone tell me where the party at!
Right here!
Somebody tell me where the party at!
Someone tell me where the party at!
Right here!
Now, jump, jump, come on, jump jump jump jump...

First day of the ACL fest was today.  I rode the Triumph down so that I could skip the whole shuttle bus routine (riding in shorts...I am SO bad).  Caught up with Mike and Dale and John from Vignette, and watched Neko Case during the hottest part of the afternoon.  I love Neko Case.  Not her music...well, I love her music too, but I mean I love her.  I want to bear her children.

After Neko, I found my old buddy Kristi at the Austin Kiddie Limits tent and we watched Trout Fishing In America do the absolute funniest kids music show I've ever seen.  We hung out with some other Rice alums, watched a little of Broken Social Scene, then hit the food booths.

If there is one thing that the festival has made drastic improvements on every year, it's the food.  The first year there were horrendous lines for basically the same old festival crap you'd get at Eeyore's or the Old Pecan Street festival.  Sausage wraps, some average BBQ, roasted corn, turkey legs.

Last year was an improvment with lots of quality local food.

But now...the surprise of the day was that the mighty Prejean's of Lafayette was there.  And there was no line for them, because people in Austin aren't hip enough to have heard of them.  Only Louisiana natives and Jazz Fest die hards were sucking up their food.  We'd walk right by the long line for Waterloo Ice House and not have any wait at all for Prejean's quail & andouille gumbo, crawfish enchiladas, and crab & crawfish stuffed mushrooms.  Damn, it was good.

After dinner and a quick pee, we were going to walk back and watch Toots & the Maytals and then Franz Ferdinand.  But I noticed that the Rebirth Brass Band was about to start in the gospel tent, and I tried to explain to Kristi how cool they were, but I could tell she wasn't buying it.  "You mean they're like jazz?"  She agreed to go check out a few songs and then we'd leave.

Ha!

Now she's in the Cult of the Rebirth.

If you've never seen a New Orleans brass band, you cannot comprehend the true meaning of The Funk.  Seven horn players, two drummers.  Maceo's horns, hardcore P-Funk beats, New Orleans street musician soul, hip-hop muthafuckin' attitude.  This is the funkiest music on the planet and YES I have seen Maceo a half-dozen times and YES I have been to the Mothership both with AND without Bootsy and YES I have seen James Brown in a small blues club in Houston and YES I am saying that none of those compare to a hot summer night in a gospel tent crammed in tight in a horde of sweaty dancing mayhem listening to Rebirth.

Earlier in the day, Kristi and I had been debating whether shiny was good.  Shiny as in hot tattooed chick at the gym who's been on the Stairmaster for an hour.  Shiny as in shirtless skater dude in the park.  Yeah, OK, we're talking about sweaty.  But not just sweaty.  A certain kind of sexy sweaty that we couldn't describe as anything other than shiny.  And we had decided that, yes, shiny was good.

Well, there were a lot of shiny people dancing to Rebirth tonight.  Shiny, smiling, happy people bumping butts with total strangers.  Not many people know about the New Orleans brass band thing, but those who know and GET it are like people in a cult.  The church of the organic brass butt funk.  There is nothing like it.

Kristi is in the church now.  I couldn't drag her out til Rebirth was done.  She's been reborn.  She's hooked.

After that, we checked out Franz Ferdinand.  I had to see them, first, because the program mentioned them in the same breath as Jesus & Mary Chain, and second, because they were from Glasgow, and I knew my Orkut buddy Kat (who lives there) would kill me if I had a chance to see one of her local bands and decided to pass.  They were very cool in a jerky tense early 80's post-post-punk kind of way...choppy like Echo & the Bunnymen or Teardrop Explodes or Joy Division, but without the doom and gloom.  And they closed out with a couple of songs that would have sat well with Eno's Roxy Music.  Fucking rocked.

It was also packed, considering it was only the first day.  Tomorrow will be unbelievable.  The Franz Ferdinand show was more crowded than even Wilco was last year, and they weren't even on one of the main stages.  We bugged out early after that; I gave Kristi a lift to her car on the Triumph (not even a helmet for me!  I am SO going to biker safety fascist hell for this.)

And get this:  completely and utterly sober.  I discovered, to my delight, that I can dance without being drunk off my ass.  Who knew?  Who fucking knew?  And why didn't they tell me years ago?

I'm gonna go soak my feet and turn in.

More tomorrow.

Got my wristband for the Austin City Limits festival today. Just waiting in line at the box office the day before the festival was grueling enough. No shade, 95 degrees. It's gonna be a hot one.

On the other hand, it's shaping up to be a great annual event. On my must-see list this year are Wilco, Old 97's, Elvis Costello, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, North Mississippi All-Stars, Cat Power, Los Lonely Boys, and Neko Case. Hopefully we'll get at least a little cloud cover, but it doesn't look too likely.

It will also be the first time I do a big music event like this completely sober. Last year I was pretty much plastered both Friday and Saturday. Drinking Miller Lite, no less. Do you have any idea how much Miller Lite it takes to get an experienced alcoholic even a little buzzed? Never mind a drunk whose tastes ran to Islay single malts and strong Belgian beers.

But last year's festival was what planted the final seed in my brain about finally doing something about my drinking. I had finally caught up with my friends Ellen and Andrew at the Martin Sexton show. Never heard of the guy, but Ellie raved about him, so I figured I'd check him out. Honestly, I thought it was just kind of OK singer-songwriter stuff...until he did this song called "Wasted":

Any time of the year
I'd walk a country mile
A pint and a bag in my pocket
Characterized my style

We were so wasted not strong as we are now
Oh we were so wasted so wasted so wasted

And I remember standing there in the late afternoon sun, can of beer in my hand, another one getting warm in my backpack, thinking that I can't do this much longer, and that what he has in that song sounds real good, and sounds like something I might be able to do.

But not just yet. Because I had some serious drinking events I still had to get through first. I kept at it for another month, in fact. And when I finally quit, and I finally went to my first AA meeting...well, I wasn't dealing well, but I knew if I didn't do it this time, I would never do it, I would just be a drunk until I died. And I bought a copy of the Martin Sexton CD, skipped out of work one day and drove around all afternoon, listening to the song over and over on the radio, reading my AA book in the park, and basically having one long non-stop anxiety attack.

That particular hell didn't stop until about two weeks into my "sobriety", when I finally got me a sponsor at Spider House, got some anti-depressents from my GP, and managed to escape to a more level plane where I could deal with this new life I was trying to figure out.

I never listened to that Sexton song again, until last week when I was making a mix CD for an Orkut friend of mine. I listened once. Can't do it again. It brings back the anxiety. It makes my brain spin. That song is beautiful, but it's tainted for me, because I don't have the meds any more to bring me back from spiralling down into the pit. I'll have to make a copy of that CD for myself, minus one song, I guess.

So I'm going to ACL Fest again this weekend. Same deal, I'll be with family one day, roaming alone looking for friends the other two days. But no beer. I've got a new thing for energy drinks now. Maybe they'll have a Sobe booth or something, and I can get all likkered up on guava nectar and choline. And dance around like a complete idiot, as only a sober guy can.

The last of the three Ramones is gone.  Only a long series of drummers remains.

Johnny Ramone dead at 55.

My heart is broken.

I've got another half-finished but longish entry from late Saturday night which I will have to finish and post out of order tomorrow.  All about being sober at drunken dinner parties and late night motorcycle riding as therapy and south Austin blues clubs and playing the saw and Vincent Black Shadows.  But this current bit is giving me the giggles too much to wait.

Gina and I went out for Dining For Life tonight, which is a night when all participating restaurants donate a chunk of their proceeds to local AIDS charities.  We do this almost every year, and this year had reservations at a new place on S. Congress called 7, which does almost nothing but seafood, and does it fabulously.

We get seated at a great window table, next to a table of 5 or 6 people, one of whom I vaguely remember as this 40-something woman with black black hair, black sweater.  I had my back to them all through the meal, but somebody at the table (black sweater lady?) had a British accent. 

I didn't think too much of it.  But when we were just getting our dessert, the hostesss (the fabulous Darcie, who used to work in the wine department at Central Market) walked them out the door, past our table, and I overheard them talking about Liberty Lunch, the now defunct Austin club which was the greatest music venue that ever lived.

When Darcie walks back in, she's all a-flutter and says "I can't believe Siouxsie Sioux just kissed me on the cheek."

I'm making gumbo today, which of course meant a big shopping run this morning to Central Market.  I found some great organic tomatoes which were perfectly ripe, to put in with the okra.  It's so hard finding big tomatoes that are already ripe.  I was psyched.

At one point I noticed a guy shove past me with some of the obviously tasteless hard-as-a-rock factory beefsteak tomatoes in his hand.  Eh, to each his own.  I'll pay extra for something edible.

I parked my cart and went to get some bell peppers and celery and okra.  When I got back, my cart wasn't where I left it.  I looked around and spotted it, still with the tomatoes in it, about 15 feet away from where I parked it, in the middle of the fucking aisle.  I hate people who leave their carts parked in the way, so I'm always careful to put mine off to the side when I leave it.  Now why would somebody move my cart like that?  Idjits.

Anyway, I do all my shopping.  Two pounds of crawfish tails, a quart of gulf oysters with some pacific ones shoved in as a bonus, a pound of crab claw meat, and a pound of catfish.  Frozen stock 'cause I'm lazy today.  Rice, blah blah blah. 

As I'm checking out, I notice the cashier has the bag of tomatoes thoughtfully set aside so that she can put them on the top of a full bag where they won't get smushed.  And what's weird is, there are only two tomatoes in the bag, but I could swear I got three.  Oh well, must be losing my mind.

I get home, put everything away, slice the okra, get that cooking, and open up the tomatoes.  And it hits me.

These tomatoes are big unripe beefsteaks.  They're aren't gonna be ready to eat until sometime in 2010 from the way they feel.  That fucker!  That asshole who shoved past me took my cart!  He's got my beautiful ripe ready-to-eat organic tomatoes in his kitchen and I've got  these two red flavorless pieces of granite. And you just KNOW tonight his dinner guests are going to say "wow, what great tomatoes, where on earth did you find them?" and that smug fucker doesn't have the FIRST CLUE what makes a good tomato.

Which turns out to have been just the beginning.  While I was sitting here typing this, I burnt the okra.

Maybe we'll just go get some Popeye's tonight.

Today at lunch I was playing around with my phone. I decided to clear out my call logs, and reset my text messages so that the stuck message light would go out again. And I did all this with my brain disengaged, so with a few absent-minded clicks, I managed to delete my entire phone book.

Fuck!

Annoying as hell. All my doctors' numbers, my mechanic, Delaware Subs, cell phone numbers for all my Orkut friends, all my AA contacts...all gone.

And then it occurred to me what I had *really* done.

I've written about my grandmother dying in some blog entries back in the spring. Back when I was in 2nd grade, I lived with my grandmother for a few months, in her old house in Hyde Park, MA, on Dietz Road. The phone number there was the first phone of mine that I ever memorized. 361-8250. I never forgot it.

She kept that phone number for her whole life, so of course I entered it into my cell phone, listed under "Nana and Tony". Tony was her husband, and he was like a grandfather to me.

Nana died back in January, and Tony moved out into a smaller place a few months later. The house is on the market, and the phone was disconnected last spring. But I could never bring myself to remove it from my phone book. It was like this last physical thread to the past, connecting my phone back to Nana & Tony's house as it used to be, like a long string connecting two tin cans. As long as the number was still in my phone, I could almost pretend that they still both lived in the house, and that I could still call them there. (Not that it would have done much good even when she was alive, since she was pretty much deaf.)

And today, while I was waiting for my number to be called at the deli, just poking buttons on my phone for lack of anything better to do, I cut the thread. It's just gone. Just like that.

I'm such a dork.