Well, here I am in Austin again, this civilized city in the
middle of Texas, a city that --- what
with its many universities, art galleries, sophisticated shops, and devotion to
music, a city about the size of Ottawa that has 150 clubs offering live music
most nights of the week --- seems oddly not to match the image of Texas that
Texans like to propagate. I come here,
as readers may already know, because my son, Ben, who lives and works here,
does a lot of flying, and whenever he has a surplus of points gained from his
peregrinations, he buys me a ticket to come down and observe the scene.
Being a travellin’ kind of man all my life, I accept these
gifts with alacrity, and the most enjoyable thing about these jaunts is that
Ben takes me around as he goes about his work here, and introduces me to all
his friends, most of whom are musicians, hundreds of whom live and perform in Austin
the year round.
As readers may know, I have seen and heard some wonderful
bands in Austin, and names that might be familiar to readers of this blog would
be the Canadian guitar virtuoso Redd Volkert, who played with Merle Haggard for
years; the almost crippled but magnificent keyboardist and rock and roll singer
Earl Poole-Ball, whose song Livin’ in a
Cheap Hotel is one of my favorites, (and whose line from that song, Trying not to compare myself with the
company I keep tops my list of rock and roll philosophies); the
superbly-named slide guitarist Cindy Cashdollar; the sparkling young violinist Warren Hood who has picked up where his
father, a local legend, left off; a great band of international renown called the Hot Club of Cowtown headed
by a magnificent violinist-singer Elana James; another local institution, the
Blues Specialists, who have played a gig at the Continental club every Friday
night for the last 25 years or more; the world-class trumpeter Ephraim Owens,
who plays upstairs most Tuesday nights; and, it hardly needs to be mentioned,
the remarkable entertainer, Dale Watson, a veritable repository of every
country song ever written, so far as one can tell.
Well, last night was my first on this brief visit, and we
went down to the Continental (a club I have many times described as the world’s
greatest night-club, a grungy, dim, not too spotless club whose walls attest to
its many decades of activity in delighting its customers) where at 10 pm Dale
Watson took the stage as always. The last
time I saw this man he played his regular Christmas Day gig , singing non-stop
for four hours, hardly pausing for breath, but always talking to his audience
as he related to them in a way that last night I began to think is probably
unique. He played until the early hours
of the morning at that time, and the next day was back at work at 2 pm, hosting
the fabulous musical spoof, chickenshit bingo, at Ginny’s Little Longhorn
Saloon.
I realized last night that quite certainly I have never
before seen or heard an entertainer who so much revels in just entertaining the
people who flock to hear him, week after week.
He will talk with the customers dancing just in front of him
about their boots, ask where they bought them, compare the various cowboy-boot
shops of Austin, and when he finds one customer who can’t remember where she
bought her boots, he thunders the question, “What, you can’t remember where you
bought your boots?” as if she had confessed she knew where the closest hydrogen
bomb was stored, but had forgotten it for the moment. And then, picking up on
the fact some girls crowding the stage are from Nebraska, he falls into a sort
of jingle that he sounds as if he is making up, about dancing, and its rhythms.
Within minutes, and a couple of swigs of the local beer later, he launches into
a story about a character called Shoeshine
Charlie who used to have a shoe-cleaning stall outside, but is no longer there,
although he waited long enough for Dale to make up a song about him, which he
now performs. When that is over he launches into a mock-denunciation of his band, threatening one of them to terminate him if he doesn't get rid of that moustache. Then he looks up and says, "Sorry, folks, just trying an imitation of Buddy Rich...always liked Buddy and his rants..." Or words to that effect.
In fact, the guy seemed so much at home on the stage working
his audience that I began to wonder what kind of private life he could possibly
have, since all his energy must be absorbed by his concentration on being an
entertainer.
That thought reminded me of an occasion when I met the
divorced ex-wife of a famous radical preacher who had made an international
name for himself as the defender of the poor and downtrodden: she said he had been so much in love with
humanity that for his family he had little, if any love left over.
Okay, folks, that’s if for the moment. You may not have heard of Dale Watson --- I
never heard of him until I came here --- but Ben tells me he goes over big in
Europe, where he plays to audiences of 2,000 and up, and is regarded, with his endless fund of colorful, mischievous, funny and sometimes passionate songs, as a real representative of the cowboy-inspired, country music for
which the United States is famous, and has been ever since the formative days
of the motion picture industry. Of course, in Austin, they will argue that
James Hand (a real cowboy, living on a real ranch) is the real thing.
But they will still flock to Ginny’s on Sunday afternoon, as
Dale and his band play at one end of the long skinny house, while chickenshit
bingo is played to the wild encouragement of the patrons who have invested $2
each for the 44 (or is it 48?) tickets on the bingo square over which a chicken
is released, and urged to drop its load on their particular ticket. Another
great Austin institution. That, unfortunately, this time around I am going to
miss out on.
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