Happy 29th!

Ond of my closest is getting music for her birthday, music that I like, music that she will like and some stuff we should both be amused by. I’m listening to some of it now. She is that certain type of friend who understands that although you may purchase- for them, brand new cds – protectively shrink-wrapped and sealed- it makes no sense whatsoever to send off the music without 1. previewing it and 2. burning it.

As I listen, I’m getting musically induced goose bumps for all sorts of reasons. Flashbacks to honkey-tonks in college. A flashback to Terri Hendrix show, happily lesbian friendly and so we packed them in and a very specific image of a friend of mine sitting on a low wide step. The bar was out off Woman Hollering Creek Road. I was so fucking lost. I couldn’t find that road or bar again in later years, although I know it’s there. The world I’d stumbled into was beautiful and confusing and I had no idea how I’d got there. I knew I was a million miles from home and that Shiner made it all okay. Another friend, S, was there, a strange sort of anchor those first few years. Equally lost. Equally displaced. A kindred soul who talked and laughed me through those years. My first roommate also, who taught me what charisma was, personified in a five foot frame. I can see each of them moving around that bar.

Some of what I now hear brings me to Ragweed concert probably two years later, At Floore’s, impossibly crowded- it had poured- a Texas sized storm all day and the show was moved indoors. The music was too big for the ceiling and we spent the whole time avoiding the cowboy hats and trying not to be stepped on. It was early still, probably 2001 or 2002 so the shows had not yet come to be dominated by obnoxious UT frat boys as later shows (and yes, I saw a few) two or three years later, would become. I remember the crowd being mixed, but that may be a mistake of memory, I don’t really know.

The show was loud and much of it sounded awful. Sound was bouncing off the widows and ceiling, much of which was covered by tin tiles, and it was humid- sticky and crowded and there didn’t even seem to be enough room on stage for the band. But, they played for hours. No mistake of memory there. At 1:00, after we’d heard them cover Ring of Fire, before the death of Johnny Cash (later, they stopped playing that particular cover), it was ruccous and intoxicated, we called it in.

It had stopped raining by the time we made our way back to the car. The music and sweat still filtered out, slower now, the night was showing. What I’m listening to right now belongs to a night like that. And, thinking about a night like that, I am, uncharacteristically, stabbed through the heart- missing Texas and maybe that messy 21-year-old uncertainty that made nights like it so beautiful and real.