Ghost Stories

As a kid growing up in Las Cruces, NM, my grandparents lived about an hour north of us, a mile off the old two lane highway, in a little farm town called Garfield. Tipped off to the agricultural opportunities in the valley, in lieu of going all the way to California, my grandmother’s family had settled there in the 1930’s fleeing the Oklahoma dustbowl. Almost a decade older, my grandfather had left the same conditions, traveling around the west before coming to the Hatch Valley to build roads and bartend. The pink adobe house my grandparent’s eventually owned was a hundred yards east of the family’s original homestead where my grandmother’s sister lived. In the summers when school was out with both my parents working, Continue reading “Ghost Stories”

Running Kind

In my youth I romanticized the underdogs, the forgotten, the under appreciated. I gravitated towards those who’s misfortunes and bad decisions kept them on the fringes of the music business. The job of wanting to be an Elvis was already taken. I wanted to be a Billy Lee Riley or Jimmy Donley. Whiskey drinking half breed Indian guitar pickers born to working class dysfunction in the cotton fields and industrial towns. Rebellious punks who left home young, gave their best opportunities to someone else’s fortune and died broke. Their songs and licks were found only on scratched up 45’s until scholarly British record men made them marketable in the CD reissue boom of the early 2000’s. These were the musicians I idolized, my role models, and still are, for better or worse. Continue reading “Running Kind”

Standing in the Storm

My wife and I ran in to Jon Dee Graham at the grocery store. Every time I see Jon I bug him about how much I like this Calvin Russell record he played on from 1994. It was probably a tiny snapshot in his musical life but I have a big old framed poster size appreciation for that record. It’s bare bones Texas Rock’n’Roll that is easy to fantasize about but has rarely surfaced. It’s Townes meets ZZ Top meets Waylon at the Opry House in 74. There is a cult of believers behind those wandering Austin gypsy cowboys who surfed the couches and played their songs for tips on battered acoustic guitars at the Austex and the Outhouse in the late 70’s and 80’s. I like to fit in a few of my licks with that crowd every so often even if I missed the glory days by a few years. Continue reading “Standing in the Storm”