This past weekend was a phenomenal grouping of days that contained two gigs, both of which were uniquely marvelous in their own special ways. Let's start with Friday and work our way kicking and screaming through the weekend. Sound good? Ok then, now we're making some freaking progress.
Friday night was a free show at Gruene Hall. You know, Gruene Hall. It's arguably the most famous venue in the entire nation-state of Texas. Shit man, John Damn Travolta filmed part of Michael there. If you're one of the few people reading this that actually find themselves baffled about the existence of Gruene Hall and don't appreciate my sarcasm on the point, just click the words "Gruene Hall" and ye shall be mystically transported along the waves and wires of the information superhighway you call the internets and I call a cluster-fuck of "information" to the homepage of the hall itself. If you've never been, I recommend taking an afternoon or evening out of your busy schedule, driving to New Braunfels, and ordering the coldest beer you'll ever have from the pretty girl behind the bar. Even if there's no show going on, the place has a distinct air of history about it. Sit down, take a breath, drink a beer, and revel in the history smoked into the walls around you.
At this point in our side bar about Gruene Hall, I'm going to take the approach of the old "pick your own adventure" books from my youth and allow you to calmly and carefully choose your own path at this point, giving this story a bit of a personal touch. So, if you're NOT a smoker, continue your adventure by reading passage A located below. If you ARE a smoker, climb on down to passage B (located just south of passage A) and see how your story ends up. If you're really REALLY adventurous, traverse on down all the way to passage C...but I don't recommend that way, brave explorer.
Passage A
Sit down, take a breath, drink a beer, and revel in the history smoked into the walls around you.
Now take a few calm, collected moments and breathe the fresh air of a truly historical structure in a truly historic area of south Texas. Everything turned out okay here, and there's no second hand smoke to contend with the oxygen so desperately trying to make its way into your lungs. Tip your beerslinger, check out some pictures nailed up on the 137 year old wooden walls, and go home safe in the knowledge that you experienced a true piece of Texas history without even having to get your hands dirty. Your adventure is over, and it was just fine.
Passage B
Sit down, take a breath, drink a beer, and revel in the history smoked into the walls around you.
Now, take a moment to quietly curse the fact that modern day bureaucracy and laws have finally completely and totally encroached upon your God given right as a man (or woman) in America to light up a cigarette and smoke it in a bar. And this is not just any bar, mind you. This is Gruene Fucking Hall, the original Texas dance hall, a structure in which literally millions upon millions of cigarettes have been lit up and smoked down over the past CENTURY with the fervor and fury of an addict hot on the heels of a sweet, sweet fix. There is absolutely no denying how authentically incredible the entire place feels, and all you want is to be able to light up a smoke like the cowboys of old and smoke it to the filter while you sip your own beer at your own table next to the actual woodburning stove that keeps the bar area the perfect temperature when it's uncharacteristically frigid outside. Rise from your table, brave adventurer, and head on around through the wooden door that takes you out of the bar and on to the ancient planks that make up the Gruene Hall dance floor. Walk around a bit, maybe cough up a few quarters for a game of 8 ball and put down a rack in a place that has most assuredly seen its fair share of skull trauma from pool cue fights. Actually, screw it. Head out the back door and smoke a damn cigarette in the open air of the Texas night. Relish each and every single slow puff and drag, deposit your butt in the nearest ash can or card board box full of empty beer bottles, tip your incredible beerslinger, and head on home. Your adventure ends here, fairly similar to the non smokers, only we had more fun together AND we got to smoke. Plus there was almost a pool cue fight...remember that? Man that was awesome.
Passage C
Sit down, take a breath, drink a beer, and revel in the history smoked into the walls around you.
You just had to risk it, didn't you. Even after the warming, you decided to skip on down to old passage C and see if maybe, just maybe, fortune and glory awaited you at the end of your quest. You rise from your table, blatantly disregarding the well deserved tip that you neglected to give your incredible beerslinger, and make a beeline towards the stage, hoping to take a selfie of your face in front of the mysterious and fabled "Willie Door" rumored to exist somewhere in the vicinity of the men's room. You notice a loose board behind some old sound equipment, so why not just reach on up there and give it a pull? As you do, a wayward road case shifts and crushes your puny adventurers body against the 137 year old wooden planks of the floor. As your vision goes dark, you can't help but recall the words of your helpful yet foreboding narrator and the unheeded warning that would have saved your life had you simply listened. You die penniless and glory-less outside of the Gruene Hall men's room, mostly because you were a dick and forgot to tip your beerslinger.
So Gruene Hall provided us with yet another tremendous sized crowd of intensely focused and courteous show goers. Every time we play the hall, several distinct groups of radically righteous fans turn out in droves, sit quietly at their seats, and hang on every word we say and every note we play. It's the kind of crowd that laughs at all of your jokes (even the lame-ass ones) and pays such close attention that you could swear the world outside had completely ceased to exist and you, the artist, have finally become the thing that all artists secretly and subconsciously want to become...the absolute center of someones universe for three and a half minutes. It's a world in which you can do no wrong, where all of the petty problems and conflicts that muddy up your daily life get sent to the backburner and you become somebody else entirely. A person both capable of performing miraculous feats of rock and roll and worthy of the abilities and so called talents used to perform them. As a group of guys that choose to make a career out of playing the songs that they write in front of people that actually pay to watch them do it, we count ourselves lucky that we're even allowed inside a place like Gruene Hall with an instrument in our hands, let alone paid to make music with it.
After the Gruene Hall show, we loaded up and headed over to a private and rather cozy establishment known as the Farr Barr to pursue further musical enlightenment from libations and fellowship. In other words, we drank more and played more songs. Blake's buddy has transformed a functional but rather boring old garage into his very own private speakeasy, complete with a fancy antique wooden bar with glass cabinet, Golden Tee machine, and a Gadsden flag hanging proudly on the wall. On the wall opposite the Golden Tee machine sits an 80's model soda vending machine, stocked full of Lonestar beer that only costs a quarter. If you're broke as hell and don't have your own quarter, there's a Crown Royal bag full of them hanging from the side of the machine next to the quarter slot that you can borrow from. The Farr Barr is a traveling musician's paradise, a place where you can drink all night and play songs as loudly and drunkenly as you want without fear of reproach or reprisal from anyone. Plus they have a huge freakin' dog.
Saturday morning, we avoided a rather substantial pile of someone's vomit on the way to the vehicles and hit the road caravan style with the Sprinter leading the charge while Blake and I followed in his truck. After the three hour long and intensely nauseating drive from New Braunfels, we decided to stop off for some important supplies at the local tobacco shop, which we were told was "right by the Hastings" by a different friend of Blake's familiar with the area. We retrieved our sundries from the shop and asked the clerk there if he knew where the La Quinta Inn was located. "Sure" he said. "It's just over on the other side of the Hastings." Fan...tastic. I finally started to understand that the little swatch of downtown Brownwood that we were hanging out in was basically the only bastion of civilized society for dozens of miles in all directions around us, and that the Hastings (being the biggest store around) was apparently the most easily recognizable monument in town. We all took a few hours to enjoy the reasonable La Quinta accommodations as they were a head and shoulders above the kinds of places we're normally used to staying at, then headed to load in at Waylon and Ray's.
From the outside, Waylon and Ray's looks a lot like most any of the older buildings that make up the eerily quiet downtown area in Brownwood, Texas. We loaded our gear in through an unassuming door that led right onto the massive stage positioned on the second level of what turned out to be a three tiered space. The dance floor area was an entire level below the stage, creating an effect like playing in a balcony for all the tiny people dancing and twirling around down below. We had a great turnout for our first time playing in town, so we celebrated with a few more libations and a relatively comfortable bed to pass out in at the La Quinta.
The next day, the Sprinter containing Warren (bass) and Kevin "Haystack" Foster (fiddlin' wunderkind) headed north for Oklahoma while Gabe, Tom and myself went on back to Austin for a pre-pre-production meeting and Bloody Mary's at Casino El Camino on Sixth Street. After consuming the bulk of a bloody mary adorned with accoutrement the likes of a fried taquito, a Swedish meatball, a mammoth sized stick of celery, assorted Mediterranean olives, a martini onion, and a few pieces of pickled okra, I split off from the fellas and took an unforgettable stroll down Sixth Street in the company of a highly enlightened and well traveled friend I became acquainted with over the weekend via a gloriously random series of completely unrelated events, which began with my sneaking in to the Shovels and Rope show in OKC the previous week and ended in the yellow sunlight on Sixth Street a few hundred miles to the south. We drank draft beer at the Jackelope in between spats of laughter and a half dozen or so trips out to the sidewalk, where we could smoke our filthy cigarettes a safe distance away from the clean-living trendies and civilized social networkers of the younger generation of Austinites. We ended our parlay on a high note and I spent the rest of the evening frequenting various Super Bowl parties around town and at Blake's apartment complex, eating party food and drinking Pina Colada flavored frozen wine pouches before passing out early.
Monday morning, the three of us headed to south Austin and met Dave Abeyta at a rehearsal space called...well...Space, actually. For those of you non-musical types that don't know much or even anything at all about the process of recording an album, I shall proceed to explain the process of pre-production using terms and phrases that even the layman can easily understand. This is going to be part one in my series of short but informative articles entitled...
The Layman's Guide to Making a Damn Record
Lesson 1: Pre-Production
Pre-production is getting together a few dudes (or chicks) that think they're ready to record a new album, putting them in a small room together with the record producer, and playing a selection of new songs they think they will eventually want to completely track out and put on an album. Then you feed all of them some fajita tacos, crack open a few tall boys, and go on about your day. It's really a way to make sure your songs are put together properly before you start spending cash on an expensive studio that you can afford for any longer than humanly possible. Lesson 1 complete. Moving on...
For those of you that don't know, Dave Abeyta is the mad tone scientist that plays lead guitar for none other than that older generation of Braun boys collectively known as Reckless Kelly. He's also our producer for the second record and one helluva dude to boot. Gabe and I sat down with Tom playing brushes and snare and went through all the new material that could potentially end up on the album. It was a real load off to actually be sitting in a room and physically working on a record again. Being in the studio is something I have always really enjoyed and even though it was pre-production, I still felt like we had accomplished quite a bit in a small amount of time, most of which didn't even pertain to the job. Dave has a lot of fantastic ideas for the direction and overall vibe of the songs, which are right in line with the way we've been performing and evolving them over the past year and change. It's going to be good. Really good.
With preproduction over in the mid afternoon, it was time for Tom to get some much earned and needed sleep for his early flight in the am back to his wife and kiddo and Gabe and I to signal our old pal and former merch guy Peaches for a ride down to New Braunfels. We hit up some of that good old North Carolina Moonshine we picked up a few East Coast tours back and rode down to the hill country to catch up with several of our old New Braunfels pals at Tavern on the Gruene, including quite a few of them Midnight River Choir boys and a whole slew of others, most of which are pictured below. Helluva night that continued on into the morning with a good old after hours jam on the river.
I'll pick up on the Deli weekend and Kansas City in the next installation of this newly reignited blog you're a readin'. A final note...
Some of you know about the difficulties we've had as a band over the past few years, and for those of you that don't, I can't really talk about much of it. Suffice it to say that circumstances beyond our control were the reason our new record has taken so long to come to full and final fruition, but those circumstances are behind us. If you're a follower of we Quails on any of our various social media outlets, then you're probably already aware of our Kickstarter campaign to raise money to record, release, and promote the second record. If you don't know what I'm talking about, head over to www.thedamnquailsband.com and check out the short video of us explaining how badly we want to make this record for our fans. If you're able to help, there are a ton of really great incentive packages, including stuff like a luncheon with the band, a copy of the album on vinyl with autographs, a custom song written by yours truly about whatever you like, private shows, house concerts, and lots of other stuff. You will get your moneys worth, whatever you decide to contribute. The way the work has gone so far and the songs that we're choosing to record are solid as a rock and it's going to be a record you'll want to have been a part of. Even if you've got 10 bucks to pre-order the digital download, every little bit helps. If you know someone that digs live music and hasn't heard of us, burn them a copy of Down the Hatch and inform them of our plight. Our fans are the greatest on the planet and we can't survive as a band without each and every one of you, and your fantastical word of mouth capabilities are staggeringly awesome. We're down to 8 days and we could really use your help. Thanks so much for all you do, catch you on down the road.
Bryon White/TDQ
No comments:
Post a Comment