It was 2011, near the end of a long drought and shortly after the Lost Pines Fire in Bastrop destroyed my favorite forest.
Fun Fun Fun Fest had just moved to Auditorium Shores in Austin and the lineup looked pretty good. My concert buddy and I turned up with a list of bands we wanted to see.
I was still excited about Occupy Wall Street around that time, even though the movement seemed to be fading. I didn’t participate beyond checking out the “Occupation” at Austin City Hall, but still I wondered, was this about to be “the revolution”?
So we show up at the festival and everyone is wearing bandanas over their faces like a bunch of insurgents. I was like, oh shit. OWS is getting its second wind. Maybe I underestimated them.
Just then a gust of wind caught me in the face and I got a mouthful of dirt. Summer had killed all the grass along Auditorium Shores. Every time the wind blew it was like getting sandblasted in the face.
The dust was so bad my friend’s allergies flared up and he had to bail partway through.
I saw some good shows despite the dust. I was impressed with how far Budos Band had come since I saw them the first time. Love that Ethiopian world funk. Saw Grimes before she dated Elon.
Not bad. Witch house, I guess you’d call it. Public Enemy put on a hell of a show. I waited for them to mention OWS, but they never did. Kool Keith cracked me up. For some reason I got more out of the rappers.
I still kinda wish I’d gone to the Danzig show. My buddy got to see Glenn Danzig throw his jealous fit because Slayer had a bigger stage, the one where he drove off and left his band. That would’ve been entertaining.
No complaints. Instead I saw Public Enemy who were as badass as I hoped they would be. I wondered if they might mention OWS, but it seemed like a pretty white movement… They didn’t mention it.
I kept waiting for a sign that police truncheons and infighting hadn’t killed OWS yet.
Eventually I figured Henry Rollins was a radical guy as well as a great storyteller. If he didn’t bring up OWS, then that was it. No revolution. At least not yet…
Foxy – Get Off. I got such a kick out of this video. I remember thinking this song was cool, back when I only heard music on Top 40 AM radio. Not sure what I would’ve thought if I had seen this as a teenager.
Seeing this over the top video of Get Off, by Foxy really took me back. I thought the song was cool when I heard it on the radio. What teenager wouldn’t? It’s about sex. But I definitely imagined them looking so much cooler.
I liked disco as a kid – until I didn’t. It was just one kind of pop music, like R&B or rock. Not that I thought of music in terms of genre back then. You just listened to the Top 40 station (KTSA) and you either liked it or you didn’t.
This is a little playlist I threw together of disco hits I remember liking. There were a lot more.The songs actually sound pretty good to me now.
I was a freshman in high school when I saw a long-haired rock ‘n’ roll dude in a “Disco Sucks” T-shirt. I remember thinking “Somebody had to say it.” I didn’t hate disco exactly. I just realized I was really really tired of it. The fact that I’d just discovered album rock played a big part also.
I didn’t yet know about the “Disco Demolition” incident in Chicago where they blew a bunch of disco records at a Chicago White Sox game and caused a riot. But I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I understand a lot of people put the anti-disco backlash down to racism and homophobia. That was probably part of it. My friend’s dad had some choice nicknames for disco. I’m sure there was a lot of heartburn over the Village People getting as popular as they were.
I liked Disco Duck by DJ Rick Dees – when I was 12.I don’t really want to hear it again.
But mainly I think it was over-saturation. The market did what the market does: took something popular, tried to squeeze out every penny, and ran it into the ground. It was in movies, TV, advertisement jingles. There had to be a disco version of everything, from classical music to jazz.
And you couldn’t escape the Bee Gees, who frankly were too good for their own good. If they weren’t on the radio or TV, they were producing somebody else’s song and singing backup. After a while enough was enough.
It’s been long enough now that I can listen to disco again and enjoy it. Even the Bee Gees. I also like that younger generations don’t have those prejudices against different types of music. Disco is as legit as anything else.
I’ve been following these guys for a while. It’s fascinating to see how much they’ve changed. Just listening to a lot of different types of music can open your mind that much.
It’s been an interesting phenomenon, seeing the way reaction videos have proliferated on YouTube.
You have rap fans listening to rock, rock fans listening to rap. People from tribal cultures listening to techno. People reacting to stand up comics. Classical musicians listening to self-taught punk artists, young people checking out classics, old people checking out new bands way outside their comfort zones. So many possibilities.
At first I thought it was a bit much, but eventually I couldn’t help it. I got addicted. What will people who are different from me think of my favorite music, comedian or movie? Seeing someone discover them makes them feel new all over again.
It occurs to me that these videos are doing something very positive, opening people up to different cultures, points of view. There are some channels I’ve watched on and off for a few years and I can tell they’ve grown as people, simply by listening to a variety of music over time.
Ren, reacting to the reactors posting about his “Hi Ren” video. Ren is all about opening people’s minds and bringing people together, has encouraged reaction videos as a way to advance his career. They don’t have to worry about copyright strikes and it’s paying off.
I’m so overwhelmed, I don’t even know where to begin. I was going through YouTube, looking for interesting traditional music from around the world and discovered the arts and music of Karnataka, a state in the southwestern India.
Om Shakthi Jai Shakthi – Ravi Raj Karadi and team Beemsandra Tumkur. The video that first grabbed my attention. The costumed dancers are depicting the goddess Durga in her angered form, about to vanquish the evil lord Mahishāsura. This is part of the story of how the evil asuras Chunda and Munda were slain by the goddess Kali. (Thanks to a friend on Mastodon who filled me in.)
Some of it I loved right away. Some is so different from what I’m familiar with, I can’t tell yet. All of it fills me with awe. The variety of rituals, the complexity, the way everyone there seems to be involved.
I’ve never experienced anything like that kind of depth of culture. One thing in particular that blows me away is the theatrical art of Yakshagana. Through acting, singing, dancing and elaborate makeup, participants tell stories from history and religion.
Yakshagana – Bheeshma Vijaya 2
Vocal percussion tradition Konnakol is an art form I’m still trying to tune my ears to. One thing is for sure, this takes a TON of skill and training to pull off. Beyond impressed.
Ken Roberts, author of The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing, talks about his encounter with a pair of Cedar Chopper kids on Bull Creek, when he realized there were people in Austin with a totally different culture.
I grew up in the Texas Hill Country in the ’70s and I want to talk about the Cedar Choppers. I’ve been reading a really interesting book about their history, The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing, by Ken Roberts.
I’ve already learned some interesting things. Like for instance, you’d think with that drawl and being in the South, that the Cedar Choppers would’ve been all in for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
In fact, they were just as divided as everyone else. Roberts writes about an outfit headed by Dick Preece (1833-1906) that refused to fight for the Confederacy. “For two years they used the hollows and caves of Bull Creek to wage guerilla warfare against the Confederate home guard, calling themselves the Mountain Eagles.”
Not something I expected.
Hallie Mae Preece singing ballads for John and Alan Lomax in 1937. She was part of an old Cedar Chopper family from the Bull Creek area outside of Austin.
I recognize most of the last names in the book. I wasn’t a Cedar Chopper, but in a way they were my people. They were part of the mix, always around. I had some as friends. Grandpa, who was a medic in WWII, used to go into the hills when they had emergencies.
They’re the people who cut the cedar posts that fenced the West. Same people as in Appalachia, but at the end of the migration. They got to the limestone hills of the Edwards Plateau and never wanted to leave.
Until the economy made them.
Alexa Dee Crooks sings Little Blossom, a song that made it to Central Texas through Appalachia, all the way from the British Isles.Read her description under the video. Interesting stuff.
They provided wood and charcoal that powered Austin, Texas as it modernized. They made some of the best whiskey during Prohibition. They got to hunt and fish and live next to clear running streams. The Ashe Juniper kept them afloat during the Great Depression when so many others were going broke.
Gene Landrum – No Beer In Here, Cedar Chopper blues recorded in Boerne, Texas, in 1978.
Now their former territory has been nearly wiped out by urbanization. I get sad every time I drive in the outskirts of Austin and see the exclusive neighborhoods on Lake Travis, pretending to be “Tuscan.”
The people who live there think they have everything, but the Cedar Choppers were richer if you ask me. Eventually that rocky, almost worthless farmland, became “scenic” and worth a fortune and the Cedar Choppers had to move to town. Everyone lost.
An unnamed storyteller relates the tale of a loudmouth who made the unwise decision to pull a knife on a cedar chopper.
A lot of the reason I miss the Cedar Choppers is the very thing some people hated about ’em: how they could and would beat the ever lovin’ shit out of you if you disrespected them. I respect their cussedness.
Because people in town did disrespect them, a lot. And it wasn’t right.
They had the fiercest honor culture you ever heard of. If you were in the know, you didn’t fuck with them. Great friends, terrible enemies.
We had legends about them.
There was the one about the Cedar Chopper driving in the outskirts of Austin with a load of posts who decided to stop and let his kids buy Cokes. When the kids came out and said the man refused to serve them, he went in with a chainsaw and sawed the counter in half and said, “Now sell my kids a Coke.”
How do you not respect that?
They’ve owned the term at this point, but when I was a kid, calling someone a Cedar Chopper would get you in a fight. A lot of townies looked down on them, but if you were smart, you minded your manners.
Granny used to equate forgetting to comb your hair with “going out looking like a Cedar Chopper.” I think that was projection. She grew up a whole lot like a Cedar Chopper on the headwaters of the Guadalupe, and didn’t get treated very well when her family moved to town.
I actually owe my life to one Cedar Chopper neighbor who my mom said looked like she could whip a bear with a stick.
She caught me and my friends trying to crawl into a “cave” in front of her house where the ground had collapsed over the new sewer line. She saw what we were doing and said, “Oh no you ain’t!” and closed up the hole with a pickaxe.
We were so pissed. “Why doesn’t she mind her own business?” But that would have been the end of me. She also annoyed me and my siblings by making us share our candy with her kids. Different ideas about property it seems like. In the hills, squabbles over candy were probably a matter of cousin vs. cousin.
I also remember her park ranger husband shared a watermelon with me once on their front doorstep. I was just some kid on the street. They were different than us, but good people.
I have to talk about this guy: Farya Faraji. I really like his attitude.
He’s a singer, musician and a composer, but more than that, he’s an evangelist for culture. Persian music, Greek, Turkish, Balkan, Byzantine, lots more. They all get handled with skill and respect…
“My goal is to showcase musical traditions from all over the globe, regardless of culture, ethnicity and religion,” he says on his About page. “I want this channel to be like a musical world museum, a library of musical traditions from all over the world and all over time.”
I think he’s right. The world is hungry for this sort of thing. Real culture. Real roots. Everybody’s. Something that connects us to the parts of our culture the modern world threw away.
I like that he’s trying to give us a taste of the real thing, real culture and not the Hollywood corporatized version of culture. I approve. He’s already taught me a few things. I didn’t really understand just how Hollywood our concept of Greek music is.
I’ve always thought of Greece as Eastern, but not THAT Eastern. It has also caught me off guard, hearing Greek music that sounded Middle Eastern, but what he says makes sense. Cultures in close proximity to one another are going to have things in common. Greece is a lot closer to Persia than it is to England. What else would it sound like?
I hope his channel really takes off. I hope to see similar projects from other musicians. I’d say Peter Pringle is a good example, taking us WAY back, to the Mesopotamian cultures.
So many of us have forgotten how precious culture is. We’ve lost touch with the earth. We need to appreciate music that comes from the roots – our roots and everybody’s roots. Stop getting riled up over other generations’ wars and just enjoy the music.
I say this as an American Southerner who wishes he’d listened to his great uncle play the fiddle when he had the chance.
Foxy – Get Off. I got such a kick out of this video. I remember thinking this song was cool, back when I only heard music on Top 40 AM radio. Not sure what I would’ve thought if I had seen this as a teenager.
Seeing this over the top video of Get Off, by Foxy really took me back. I thought the song was cool when I heard it on the radio. What teenager wouldn’t? It’s about sex. But I definitely imagined them looking so much cooler.
I liked disco as a kid – until I didn’t. It was just one kind of pop music, like R&B or rock. Not that I thought of music in terms of genre back then. You just listened to the Top 40 station (KTSA) and you either liked it or you didn’t.
This is a little playlist I threw together of disco hits I remember liking. There were a lot more.The songs actually sound pretty good to me now.
I was a freshman in high school when I saw a long-haired rock ‘n’ roll dude in a “Disco Sucks” T-shirt. I remember thinking “Somebody had to say it.” I didn’t hate disco exactly. I just realized I was really really tired of it. The fact that I’d just discovered album rock played a big part also.
I didn’t yet know about the “Disco Demolition” incident in Chicago where they blew a bunch of disco records at a Chicago White Sox game and caused a riot. But I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I understand a lot of people put the anti-disco backlash down to racism and homophobia. That was probably part of it. My friend’s dad had some choice nicknames for disco. I’m sure there was a lot of heartburn over the Village People getting as popular as they were.
I liked Disco Duck by DJ Rick Dees – when I was 12.I don’t really want to hear it again.
But mainly I think it was over-saturation. The market did what the market does: took something popular, tried to squeeze out every penny, and ran it into the ground. It was in movies, TV, advertisement jingles. There had to be a disco version of everything, from classical music to jazz.
And you couldn’t escape the Bee Gees, who frankly were too good for their own good. If they weren’t on the radio or TV, they were producing somebody else’s song and singing backup. After a while enough was enough.
It’s been long enough now that I can listen to disco again and enjoy it. Even the Bee Gees. I also like that younger generations don’t have those prejudices against different types of music. Disco is as legit as anything else.
The year I got married, 2014. Dang I looked young back then.
My wife and I got married the day before my birthday, so we wouldn’t forget our anniversary, but as it turns out, we don’t much care about that. We celebrate Gotcha Day. The day we met.
We don’t do anything too extravagant. We reminisce about our date, which started out as a Craigslist hookup and ended up changing both our lives.
We listened to Violator from Depeche Mode (my pick) and Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, by Neko Case (her pick), music we listened to at her old apartment.
Depeche Mode – Policy of Truth. Favorite song from my favorite Depeche Mode album. For a while, I thought Violator was a Greatest Hits album.
Our date started as a Craigslist hookup, back when they still had personals. My previous dates were so awkward and frustrating, I decided I just wanted to have sex with someone I liked.
She had good grammar and spelling. Her ad gave me an idea of her personality and she shared a lot of my interests. She was into sci fi. That was rare.
At the very least I thought she’d be fun to talk to. She was.
Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. I was already a big Neko Case fan, but my wife got me to give this a good listen on our first date.Gorgeous, like most of her music.
We met at a Greek restaurant, near my old neighborhood. I decided to get it out of the way early: “I’m an atheist. I hope you’re OK with that.” I didn’t want to get trapped in that world again.
She surprised me. “Me too.” She was from Austin, but this was still Texas.
The chemistry was pretty obvious even to me, who tended to have a bad read on those situations. We took it to the sports bar next door.
She blushed. I thought it was so cute, I got her to do it again. Finally, she got me to go with her and I followed her home in my car.
The rest is history. At age 47, she became my first girlfriend. I robbed the cradle. She was 36. And yes, she took my virginity. I think I did quite well, thank you very much.
We were both ready for each other. I was ready to stop being alone. She was ready to value herself and quit settling for men who neglected her and took advantage.
I wasn’t in the strictly “hookup” part of the personals – those ads grossed me out – but Craigslist had a reputation.
We’ve been through a lot since then. Our mothers dying, hers while sharing an apartment with us. Covid and the lockdown. Jan. 6. But going through those things together made them bearable.
As long as we have each other we can deal with whatever comes next.
March Slave by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
To say I don’t like the direction much of Southern culture has taken would be an understatement. Though not all of us are so resistant to change. I know I changed a lot over my lifetime.
But there’s another reason I can’t give up on us: My dad.
My wife and I were chilling out, listening to music yesterday.
Out of nowhere, I suggested we listen to some classical music. I especially wanted to hear Tchaikovsky’s March Slav and Capricio Italien.
But it wasn’t out of nowhere. Sunday was Father’s Day.
If I ever wanted proof that the unconscious mind is always busy…
Dad has been gone for almost 30 years now, but I still miss the guy. Dad had failings. He was a man. But he gave me the parts of myself I’m most proud of.
When I discover a new band or a new type of music I always have this impulse: I have to see what Dad thinks of this. Then I remember I can’t. Dad was all about music. He played clarinet, directed high school band for many years.
He taught me to love music. Music was always playing in the house. He especially loved classical. I learned to love it myself. Also turned him onto the Alan Parsons Project late in life – he finally gave rock a chance.
When I read a book that makes my head spin, I wish I could talk to him about it. I can still see him lying on the couch with his nose in a book, or sitting at the kitchen table with a book and a bowl of popcorn.
He turned me onto science fiction by handing me a copy of The Star Beast by Robert Heinlein when I was 9 or 10. He turned the walls of our house into a library, full of history, literature and science. I could read anything I wanted.
Capriccio Italien byPyotr Tchaikovsky, Berlin Philharmonic Conducted by Herbert von Karajan
He’s the reason it almost seems like I’m still in college. He talked to me like an adult, and could converse about nearly anything. I can’t stop reading the hard books and searching for Truth. That’s how he was.
He was a deacon in the Baptist Church. He directed the choir. He had four or five versions of the Bible, all highlighted and marked. He regularly consulted Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, even knowing that Asimov was an atheist.
If you couldn’t tell already he was not a typical Texan, Southerner or Baptist. But he had a curious mind and he grew, and changed. He came from poor and working class Southerners transplanted to West Texas. He served in the military, went to college and found a way earn a living from music in rural Texas.
Many of his best qualities came via education and the military, but some of them came from Southern culture. If Southern Culture managed to produce someone like my dad, there has to be something in it worth saving.
Phoebe Killdear and the Short Straws – Fade Out Line. This is my favorite version so far…
I’ve been obsessed by Phoebe Killdear for days. I didn’t know they made rock ‘n’ roll chicks like her any more. Powerful, badass. She puts me in mind of singers like Patti Smith, Danielle Dax, even Diamanda Galas, though she’s way more accessible than any of those.
Phoebe Killdear and the Short Straws – Highway Birds (live in Paris). Very psychedelic version. They would have fit in very well at Psych Fest in Austin.
Innerquake from Phoebe Killdear and the Short Straws has been in constant rotation. That album has totally hooked me. It seems “Fade Out Line” was an international hit 12 years ago and I somehow missed it. Anyway it was new to me. When you get to be my age, 12 years is still recent history. The whole album is a banger.
I don’t know if she’s still working with the Short Straws, but I really enjoy watching their mesmerizing live performances. “Fade Out Line” really resonates. It describes a feeling I think most of us have these days.
Phoebe Killdear and the Shift – Dream B
The Piano’s Playing the Devil’s Tune fromfeatures Maria Medeiros (Bruce Willis’ wife in Pulp Fiction, is what I would call esoteric music. Right up my alley. Spoken word poetry, unsettling and hallucinatory.
More recently she’s been working with Melanie Pain a project called Kill the Pain. So far I’m digging the self-titled album, which is very catchy and a lot more upbeat than the other Killdear works I mentioned.
Kill the Pain – Zig Zag. This one reminds me a lot of Talking Heads. Styles on the rest of the album are pretty all over the place.
Late Boomer's Den 
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