Friday 16/03/07
"Friday never hesitates…" jangled the morning radio.
I don't know if Robert Smith, when he wrote that, was referring to spending 2 hours of a Thursday night drifting between drunken states of semi-consciousness trying to avoid Johnny Wolfe's wriggling torso before his manager burst in to the room and pulled him out of bed to go to some stupid bloody gig or other. If he was I think the upbeat jangle-pop feel of the tune is entirely misplaced. I would have gone for more of a shivery, sweaty terror-jazz vibe. I'll maybe have a go at it someday.
I hope my "Boy Scouts Of America" shirt I chose for the occasion wasn't taken as an insult to a great American institution, its just that on the other side of the Atlanic any kind of everyday US bric-a-brac takes on a magical and exotic quality. I hadn't really factored in when I did my packing that it would just be something people here had to wear at Scouts. Yanks should come over to Scotland in Boys Brigade hats just to freak me out. I got a few conversations and a photograph with a bemused tourist out of it anyway so it was £4 well spent.
At the Scottish Arts showcase we gleefully drank the taxpayers' beer, saw our old pal Jo Mango do her lovely music box thing, and found the only true rockers on the Caledonian airwaves, namely Jim Gellatly and Vic Galloway. They wooed us with wild fables of getting to go and see The Stooges, "media passes", "it'll be cool" and suchforth. After the Stax fiasco of the previous evening I was highly sceptical we'd get in but then again I'd willingly sit through 6 days of solid Elton John ballads in blizzard conditions covered in fire ants for a 500/1 chance of seeing Ron Ashton tying his shoelaces. So trying to blag a queue for a bit didn't seem like too bad an idea.
5 minutes later and we were in! Somehow the dream team of Galloway and Gellatly had swung it. Us Scottish chancers were actually going to see The fucking Stooges! And there was more free beer! Yas min! Except we weren't, there'd been a mix up and we were going to see The Buzzcocks.
I was a bit underwhelmed by this notion as most 70's punk bands that still play and don't have Iggy Pop in them tend to be pretty shit nowadays. Still, at least The Buzzcocks had the decency to be excellent. All the cast-iron classics played like they'd just thought them up and some priceless unintentional hate-theatre between Shelley and Diggle. Magnificent stuff!
I know things like South By South West are supposed to be about checking out new bands and that business, and we'd done a pretty bad job of that so far today, but when Public Enemy playing next in a big park you're hardly going to risk watching some jokers from Toronto mucking about with loops in the hope you've found the next Beatles. Are you? Maybe you have a purer indie soul than I.
Our posse had undergone a few substitutions. Johnny, Richey and Scott were flagging {and wanted to do something shite} so on came three Americans we found on the street who provided some superb banter and one world-class moustache. Moustache mannie {I will try to find out his real name}was, like Richey, a compulsive photographer, so that was that role covered. With Johnny gone we could have faced some real problems in the "being the dude" areas but Vic and Jim split the role and played the position to magnificent effect.
There's probably nothing I can say on the subject of the righteous and mighteous word-warriors that trade as Public Enemy which hasn't already been said, repeated, misquoted and corrected a zillion times already. What I didn't realise, though, on top of everything else was how funny they would be. Flava Flav is probably the world's first and only stoner comedian. Where most stoners {myself included} have themselves laughing and that's about it Flav had an entire park absolutely pissing their pants, and you got the impression he could have kept on going as long as they let him. Erin got to drive him home that night, how cool is that.
In the queue for Amy Winehouse a very, very angry man indeed started shouting at me for being in a line that was moving faster than his. I thought about explaining how I was with Vic and Jim and how they were the dude so it was all cool, but being a dick he wouldn't have understood. So I timidly pulled out the old confused foreigner routine and scarpered inside. He must've really wanted to see Amy Winehouse.
A.W. seems to be being pushed to the American public as a bona-fide soul diva with full soul-review backing band, dancers, a big booming "Ladies and gentlemen direct from London, England…" intro and just about every other glizy, glam showbiz scam you can think of. I'm all in favour of this kind of thing but it got me and Paul talking about the idea of the "star". It was definitely something missing from most of the new music we'd seen at SXSW. Amy has a great voice, some good songs, looks like some sort of Spanish princess, and I probably still have dreams about her { I haven't been able to recall any of my dreams for the past 3 months. I think its something to do with where they happen during your sleep cycle}, but is she a star? What is a star?
I used to think the guy who sold us sweets in the newsagent when I was wee was a star. He had a big red alcoholics' nose, wore golf jumpers and his conversation was mainly limited to the weather and his strong racist beliefs. I didn't really. Even when I was seven I thought he was a twat. No, stars. Yes. Maybe they have to be millions of light years away from our own ordinary world and we can only really appreciate them when they're gone, and it's dark. Still, Iggy Pop, Chuck D, Booker T, Pete Townsend and Issac Hayes were and still are all stars, and they weren't too far from here. Good luck to Ms. Winehouse, we'll see how history treats her.
I then embarked on, I think, the third most terrifying experience of my 27 years. This invovled a trip across downtown Austin, where people drive huge trucks "with attitude" and drunk, in a small bicycle/rickshaw type arrangement ridden by a rather alarmingly "thrill-seeking" 14 year-old with myself and {lets be blunt, big) Jim in the back. I think that sentence gets the necessary info across.
After this we watched Apples in Stereo who are an awesome powerpop band featuring people almost as ugly as the people in my awesome powerpop band. This helped me to relax a bit. Only then to have my senses bamboozled by the rapid fire, time-bending, sense-blending loon lymerics of Bus Driver. Now there's a star. And he's called Bus Driver, now that's confidence.
On the way home a Latino girl tells me that Latino girls find ginger men attractive. Weirdos.
Saturday 17/03/07
"Sometimes it's like someone took a knife all edgy and dull and dug a 6-inch valley through the middle of my skull" cooed the lead pixie as a 40+ heat, 4 days on Oliver Reed's rider, and a highly questionable{as in it could have probably answered questions if you'd asked it) Mexican meal did their best to put Bruce's words into action on my tender cranium and for that matter, most of my being. "With a freight train runnin' through the middle of my head" -cue actual, real-life, non-metaphorical freight train to shudder past. I was indeed thoroughly on fire. I don't know if Bat For Lashes intended these new visceral interpretations of meaning in their cover of the Springsteen classic but certainly was a very moving rendition. But that's between me and the guy who cleans the portaloos. If they'd got the chords right I don't think it would have made too much difference.
What had really broken me though was The Polyphonic Spree's percussionist ending their near-untoppable set by jumping off stage into a bin. Showmanship. I'd have to be doing some of that kind of thing in a few hours and I was far from full match-fitness. Aberdeen F.C. had also lost 3-0 to Rangers that day and although I didn't know this yet I could sense that some kind of dreadful cosmological imbalance had taken place.
As we got to Lamberts to set up for the gig the baddest-assed blues band in America was terrifying the well-to-do downtown Austin diners outside. "We gon' play some songs 'bout killin' our girlfriends, then maybe somethin' 'bout our girlfriends killin' us!" barked Mr.T as he laid down the foundations of hell on a floor tom and snare. Tony Soprano piped in on the Neapolitan Delta harp while a nervous looking guy, I'll call him "Brains" cause he had glasses, played Robert Johnson slide guitar licks like his life depended on it. It probably did, he was in a band with Mr. T and Tony Soprano. "Seen's y'all ain't dancin' I'm comin out there to show y'all how!" Mr T was now shaking a tambourine doing the Rufus Thomas shoogle in every available square inch of the patron's personal space. Not a drop more soup was eaten.
Showtime for The Needles and there were balances to redress. I couldn't be outdone by a couple of showboating drummers and Aberdeen badly needed a victory. Somehow people had turned up. Not entirely sure how this happened but perhaps the mayor of Austin had taken a last minute decision banning all unnecessary accordions and this was simply the only show left. Or maybe people actually like us. The crunch point seemed to come when the Fender amp I was using during our alternate-Universe chart-busting smash "Girl I Used To Know" packed in and Johnny, Paul and Richey had to pull some creative manoeuvres while I found a Marshall to plug into. It was a sign, a changing of the guards, a US-UK conversion. Things got a whole lot fuzzier from then on, in a good way. In many good ways.
"No way! You guys totally didn't suck!" In London and maybe even in Glasgow, there's often a sense that certain people's permission is needed before a band can be enjoyed. Maybe I was drunk on a sense of my own importance but it seemed that America is far too big a country and Texans are a little better sure of their own minds to listen to any self-appointed experts. They seem to like it when you have the tunes and you rock. I could of course be very wrong and their arbiters of taste are even bigger and worse informed than ours. But, let me have my moment, we had the tunes, we rocked, we beat Glasgow Rangers 100-0, we thrashed Texas AM 1000-0. We were the Longhorns, we are the famous Aberdeen. And so to bed.
Sunday 18/03/07
Sunday afternoon and Erin along with her friends Gail and Amy decided to treat us Needles to the traditional Texan custom of "Chicken Shit Bingo" at Ginny's. The game itself is fairly straightforward. A cage goes over the pool table, a chequered numbered board goes over the cage, punters put bets on and the chicken is released in to battle with its bowels. Eventually it defecates on a numbered square and someone wins $100.
It was more the place that really got me. I'd seen it a hundred times before in the twisted Americana of David Lynch or the Coen brothers, on the great Lost Highways of the 60's "Road". When I listen to Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson et al the emotion, the lyric or the exhuberance of the music connects with me on a real human level but I close my eyes and their stories happen in this place. A place I thought I'd never actually see. It was always part of the appeal, the myth.
This was the truth. Empires had been won and lost, Independent movie-makers declared hip then passé then hip again, Country music had lost its soul, found bigger hats, then thrown them away and gone back to the start, and this place had stayed pretty much the same. It was right all along. They were probably glad to get on with the bingo for a change without some damn New York college boy trying to get their authenticity down on film.
Telling the truth from the very pit of his soul accompanied by some white-knuckle 6-string chicken' pickin' and heart-melting pedal steel was Mr. Dale Watson. Dale's apparently a big star in Texas, but still plays at Chicken Shit Bingo every Sunday. He's got some new big fans in Scotland now.
While the rest of the band undertook the Texas steak challenge at Sherrif Tex's Cowmeat Warehouse{or somewhere like that) I rather foolishly ordered a chicken salad in an attempt to keep things light. I was then of course suitably punished by being presented with at least 5 birds worth of battered meat sprinkled round a medium sized tree. I was defeated. It was rather delicious though. Johnny and Scott tried to bridge the ocean of cultural understanding by explaining to our American hosts what a ned is. I got on my social conscience hat and accused them of being racists or something. Sorry guys, that was maybe going a bit far. Keep it light. Paul was just pleased he'd finished his steak. He hadn't thought about Pepto-Bismol in nearly 2 days, just goes to show the wonder a bit of sun can do. Richey didn't have any stickers left to stick but that didn't worry him, there was always plenty to photograph in Texas.
I'll leave you at the campfire in the woods that night. Cause of the steaks and everything we'd missed PopUp playing and the organiser had turned off the PA. He let us do a few acoustic numbers round the fire though. "Fire" by Arthur Brown seemed good for starters, then a few Needles tunes -"Dianne", "Poison Ivy", Dead Or Alive". As our lungs filled with campfire smoke and American Spirit, Texas twinkled through the trees and "Not Fade Away" faded away I wanted to stay there forever, in that moment. Still, as the unstoppable honky-tonk banter machine Dale Watson himself says: "Chicken Shit Losers ain't Chicken Shit Choosers!"
Goodnight Austin, We've been The Needles.
What we got up to in San Antonio and Houston< ST1:PLACE> is another matter entirely. Many thanks to Chris, Donny, Keith and Claire for putting up with us our silliness and showing us a great time there.... And of course Erin (we love you), Beth, Gayle, Sinclaire, Amy and anyone I've forgot I'm sorry Im rubbish but we love you none the less.
-Dave Dixon March 2007
