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Amanda Cevallos and the High Hands:
The picture at left is the neon sign for the (in)famous Broken Spoke on South Lamar. It's an old time dance hall that was once on the edge of town — when we first started visiting Austin back in the '90s. These days it's getting crowded out by condos and other developments. Austin is a fast growing city.
We saw Amanda Cevallos and her band the "High Hands" one evening at dinner time at the Broken Spoke — they say they have the best chicken fried steak but then a lot of places claim that title. We had dropped in last year to see her and really enjoyed her music which I had discovered through Calvin Powers and his Americana Music Show (a podcast I'd highly recommend if your musical tastes are any where near mine). We enjoyed Amanda's music — authentic country — and had taken some nice photos but were heading out before the show was over. Amanda caught us at the door saying "I know you, you've been here before!".
The Broken Spoke is famous for the dance hall. Amanda was in the dining room where you enter first. She has a regular weekly gig there. We've been to several dances over the years (Gary P. Nunn a couple of times, Alvin Crow and others) and you really come to understand Texas music when you see it on a crowded dance floor with those who can move to the music — Kate can dance, I can't get past the Owen Sound 2-step which ought to be more than enough for country music.
Austin Lounge Lizards:
The photo album starts at the Cactus Café on the UTexas campus. We had tickets for the Austin Lounge Lizards at the Cactus Café that we had bought while still at home in Canada (Kate loves them and we've always wanted to see them). We ate at a Noodle chain on "the drag" before the show (all restaurants near the campus seemed to be fast food) – surprisingly good food and wine was surprisingly decent. There's a funny picture in the album of some street kids "fishing" for change on the drag.
The Lounge Lizards were wonderful and hilarious – I was in tears with laughter when they were doing a song in Spanish and pretending to do simultaneous translation. Their chatter in between songs was as funny as their songs. During the break, they walked around chatting with fans (who were mostly about the same age as the band – about our age). Kate asked one of the band members if they planned to do "Pflugerville" (I fled with my flogger to Pflugerville, Pflugerville, Pflugerville) and he said he thought they might be as it was their encore last night – it ended up being their encore that night! They also did another favorite of ours – "Cornhusker Refugee" (I’m going back to the flat lands, the good old welcome back lands) – where the audience were encouraged to sing along on the chorus holding their arms up and waving them as waving fields of wheat. The pictures of the band members with tin-foil hats was taken during the conspiracy theory parody "Black Helicopters". I was a little uneasy in the days to come when I then started noticing the "Black Helicopters" circling around our neighborhood!
They hung around chatting with fans after they were done and we chatted a bit, told them we were from Canada and had wanted to see them for years, etc. Kate has since struck up a correspondence by email and invited them to come play in our part of the world.
Terri Hendrix:
We got to see Terri Hendrix at the Cactus Café. I had dropped Kate in front at about 7:20 for the 8:00 show but the line was already quite long – extending into the cafeteria. Kate had her stool with her this time but was able to pull a chair into the line (also done by quite a few others). We chatted with the people in line – a couple (she from near Buffalo but had been here quite a while, he from Wisconsin wearing a Billy Joe Shaver T-shirt) and a guy wearing a beret (probably around our age or a little younger – looked a bit like George Clooney). Billy Joe Shaver was playing that night at an east end dive called the “White Horse” (very near the fancy restaurant called Qui where we had dinner earlier). The guy with the T-shirt said he had moved to Austin about 30 years ago to follow Jerry Jeff Walker. When Kate told the beret fellow about seeing the Lounge Lizards the previous week, he told her an anecdote about when he was travelling quite a bit on business all over the country and the Lounge Lizards seemed to be playing everywhere he went and he would gather up some local friends and go see them. He said they were friends of his. He had also worked in the Amazon about 15 years before as an engineer on a medical project. Seemed like a nice guy – easy to talk to. We chatted with him and the couple about the Olympics (the Canadians did very well at hockey, the Americans not so well) and the Great Lakes being 88% frozen, etc. We still managed to get seats in the second row even though we were way back in the line so had a very good view of the show.
Terri Hendrix had lots of great music (which Reg already knew about – why we were there) but also was very lively and told lots of funny stories. Lloyd Maines who plays with her and has produced every album and CD of note coming out of Austin in the past 30 years as well as being the father of Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks also told some funny stories, including how Terry was visiting his family for a few days at Christmas and was always practising the harmonica and they decided she needed a blues name – so they decided to call her Blind Lemon Pledge.
Lloyd told a story about a gig they were playing in a similar setting with the audience wrapped around the stage. During a song someone in the audience to the side kept calling out “Lloyd, Lloyd…” to get his attention. After the song had ended he asked her what she wanted and she replied “Could you scoot back a bit, you’re blocking our view of Terri”.
Sadly we missed seeing Iris Dement who played two shows at the Cactus Café while we were in town. Both shows were sold out by the time we discovered them!
James McMurtry:
One day Kate had taken me for a wine tasting tour in the hill country around Dripping Springs (motto: "Just West of Weird) — more about that later. That night we saw James McMurtry at the Gallery of the Continental Club – a fairly small space with couches and a few high tables and chairs. James plays a regular midnight gig at the Continental Club with his full band but that's at midnight and we're not willing to stay up that late. We had seen him and his band a few years ago at an outdoor concert at Threadgills garden which we really enjoyed.
This show in the gallery was just him with an acoustic guitar – sometimes a 6-string, often his 12-string. His songs were great (very much story-telling – usually depressing stories), his playing was amazing as always (although he did an awful lot of tuning – he would tell people to take a break and get a drink while he tuned – happened several times in the 90 minute set – he made some droll comments at other times as well like – “There’s lots of room here. All the non Baptists can get up and dance. I guess they’d be Methodists.” And then when nobody danced said that he guessed there were no Methodists there). The only downside was that we were sitting right in front of one of the speakers and it was way too loud.
One of his more well known tunes is Choctaw Bingo where he tells the story of going to a family reunion up in Oklahoma where his uncle Slayton "Cooks that crystal meth because the shine don't sell". It's a rousing spoken word tune in the style of Woody Guthrie ... but not political. For that you should listen to his version of "We Can't Make It Here Anymore".
I spoke to him before the show and then we spoke to him again after the show thanking him and telling him about seeing him at La Zona Rosa years ago as a solo gig when he was working on “Where’d You Hide theBody” (1995). He said he might see us in Canada – he has a friend in Peterborough. We were going to ask him if his friend was Washboard Hank but by then someone else was talking to him.
We bumped into him again one night at the Continental Club when we caught a bit of the Whiskey Sisters.
Chris Wall:
Chris Wall's song "I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight" is a classic of country music made famous by Jerry Jeff Walker. Like all good country music it tells a story. A sad evocative story of a marriage breakup. We have all his albums and have followed his music for years. But had never seen him. The previous year we missed him at Gruene Hall when he was doing a CD release of "El Western Hotel" (his first CD in many years) and this year we saw that he was playing a regular gig at Luckenbach — that would have been a treat.
When we couldn’t go to see Chris Wall in Luckenbach because of other plans we found on his web site that he was going to be in Leander (a far northern suburb of Austin — about 30 minutes drive). We had to do quite a bit of research to find out where it was — it wasn't listed in any of the usual papers or anything. His show was listed as 7pm at the "Twin Creeks Dance Hall". If you go to Google now you'll be hard pressed to find anything about the dance hall!
We thought we would go early (about 6:00) so we could find the place while it was still light out. There was no trouble finding it – lots of cars were parked on the road and motor bikes too. We entered this patio area where tons of people had clearly been there all afternoon — quite pretty surroundings on a creek that feeds into Lake Travis. There was free food of various kinds — hot dogs, potato salad, macaroni salad, carrot salad and various hot things that probably contained various meat. It wasn't really clear what you were supposed to do — it was like we had crashed a private party — which in a lot of ways, we probably had. It felt like the first time we went to Luckenbach — only seemed even more of a private event than that. There was an open-mike stage going on outside on the patio and Chris Wall was listed with several others in the line-up playing on the main stage (which we had to ask about) – open-mike outside, main stage inside the "dance hall" – which was the size of a small bar with about 8 tables, a few bar stools and the rest standing room. Fortunately, we got a table in front of stage while everyone was outside watching Dr. Danger set himself on fire – turned out it was a woman – a roller derby champ. Yes people set themselves on fire just for fun. Kate missed it because she was holding the seat inside but Reg captured it on digital.
We saw the guy who preceded Chris, Bob Cheever, a 70-year-old who kept forgetting the words and so going off onto other songs — great voice, sounded a lot like Willie. Then Chris Wall who was great, very friendly, but didn't seem very healthy — looked him up later and he’s a week younger than Reg (we would have guessed that he was at least 70). Then a guy called Bill Callery (also of an age – Bill mentioned Vietnam several times and seemed to be best known for writing Hands on the Wheel on Willie's Red Headed Stranger record. All 3 seemed to have connections to Willie and Jerry Jeff. The musicians were playing for free because it was a fund-raiser for a new sound system for the dance hall (which they needed — we didn't enjoy Bill Callery at all mostly because the sound was so bad — he was with a band; Chris was fine because he played on his own with one other guy sitting in). They announced they had raised $800 which didn't seem very much considering there was probably 100 to 200 people there.
Joe Ely:
On our last night in town we had been exploring Ginny's Little Longhorn Saloon in north Austin. On the way home, Kate got the yen to try out Home Slice Pizza on SoCo across the road from Gueros. I was not enthusiastic as our car was loaded down with bikes and everything. Especially cranky when we had trouble finding a parking spot, but we finally pulled into the Home Slice lot, got out of the car and who should be heard but Joe Ely!
He was playing across the street at Gueros under the live oaks for the KDRP radio show they do on Wednesday nights (which we had never figured out involved live music). We ran over to check it out – there was about ½ hour left of the show so Kate went in and got drinks while I moved the car to a more permanent parking spot.
It was a great show and a real treat for us. It was pretty much a standing room only show in spite of the very cool weather. Joe had a young fiddle player (Warren Hood) and another guitarist (Jeff Plankenhorn on slide guitar as well) with him. He commented that he had known Warren, the fiddle player, all his life — he was an accomplished younger fellow and the son of Champ Hood. I've written about Joe and the Flatlanders in other blog entries.
We got pizza slices to take home after at Home Slice Pizza – which were also great.
MapJam:
MapJam is a day long music event spread over several places in East Austin sponsored by the UTexas radio station KUTX. The idea is to walk or bike from one event to the next over the course of day.
We drove over to Mapjam with our bikes on the back of the car. The event seemed to have the same itinerary as last year – starting at the Hops & Grain brewery and then Tillery Park and ending at Scoot Inn. We only planned on going to the first three places so that we could come home to rest before going to see Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines at the Cactus.
We saw the Carper Family (an all female acoustic blue grass band) and the Brewery and Growl (a young punkish band) at Delta Millworks (a lumber yard of sorts). We enjoyed both acts and bought CD's.
The brewery once again was not able to handle the numbers. We were there early but they weren’t serving yet (it was 11:45 and they couldn’t serve until noon) so I went out to schmooze with the police and Kate sat at a picnic table outside the brewery door. Next to her was a guy set up for selling one kind of draft beer to refill glasses for those who had purchased tickets inside. He told Kate they couldn’t serve yet but that she could buy tickets so she went back in to do so. There were 2 or 3 people ahead of her for the bar and when she got there it was about 11:52 but they had decided to start serving. She got the refillable souvenir glass (about 16 oz) filled with their pale ale plus 2 tickets for refills for $10 – to share with Reg. By the time she turned from the bar, the line was about 30 people long; it never got better – by the time we left an hour later, the line snaked around the room and out into the inside corridor (probably over 100 people). We assume that some gave up but there was only one small beer seller at the next event (Tillery Park) with a long line when we arrived there so a lot of people remained thirsty. They were giving out free bottles of water though as we left the brewery.
Funniest thing that happened was Reg was talking to a guy in a bicycle helmet about the GPS device on top of his camera (Nikon) – turned out it was expensive. As the conversation went on and we told him where we were from, he said “Were you at the downtown market this morning?” [yes] “We saw the Ontario license plate with the Austin Lounge Lizards bumper sticker and commented about how these people had come a really long way. Sort of interesting because the market is pretty small (somewhere between St. Marys and Stratford size) and not that many people go there, plus there are other markets in the city.
We rode our bikes to Tillery Park but the crowds were more than last year and the space for music watching was very small plus there was no food and it was 1:30 and we were hungry as well as a little drunk from the 3 big glasses of beer we had shared. The band was R & B (Latasha Lee and the Blackties) – okay but not our favorite kind of music so we rode to the next location (a lumberyard) hoping to find a restaurant on 5th St on the way but no luck. At this point, we decided to ride back to the brewery because there was a restaurant (Mettle) in the same building along with a glass blowing place and a few other things. The restaurant was a bit overwhelmed with the numbers of people (apparently no one had told them about Mapjam and none of the staff or management had noticed all the write-up about it in the paper). It’s a little on the upscale side – Reg had fish (sea bass) and chips that were really good; Kate had Caesar salad with candied walnuts and Balsamic – good but not great – made with the white romaine hearts (Kate prefers the green outer leaves). Food was not overly priced ($11 and $8) but the glass of wine we each had was pretty expensive ($11 for my South African Chenin Blanc and $12 for Kate’s California Russian River Chardonnay – expensive but excellent).
We then rode back to the lumberyard where a kind of punk band called Growl was playing to the huge crowd there. Kate sat on some logs/lumber (along with other people doing the same) while Reg shot some pics and then we decided we had probably had enough and rode our bikes back to the car then home for an evening at the CactusCafe.
Cajun at the Evangaline Café:
The final band documented in the photo album is Charles Thibodeaux & the Austin Cajun Aces who we saw at the Evangaline Café. I like Cajun and Zydeco music. Austin is a great place for a diversity of music and these guys play authentic Cajun music — squeeze box and all! There's several bars/restaurants that make an event out of Mardi Gras.
We originally had intentions to make a side trip to New Orleans and Louisiana to see a friend and catch some Cajun/Zydeco music. As I had a bug for most of our visit we weren't able to do that.
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