Musical Pilgrimages of the Occidental Tourist
So it doesn’t take some kind of musical rocket scientist to figure out that Austin is where it’s happening. But the [slightly] more subtle question is what’s happening. Is there more talent in Austin? Did western swing give rise to all this? And what exactly is the point of having a music festival in Austin anyway, isn’t it a 365 day a year music festival?
Maybe these seem like rhetorical questions that could only be answered in the affirmative. But I think there is useful counterpoint to the most obvious response.
There is more talent in Austin at any given moment, but it’s not all Austin talent. Austin isn’t just a black hole into which all Americana gets absorbed until it floats to the top of the musical cappuccino froth and goes on national tour. It’s more like a heavy planet attracting musical asteroids that spin in towards its critical mass and then get slung back out with the unpredictable results that are dictated by musical gravity animated by changeable cosmological constants – the multiverse of music. . .
The Dance Tax
the really interesting thing about Western Swing’s place in all this is the phenomenon of its own rise and fall [and rise]. Born as a dance genre around 1920, it fell victim to a bizarre 30% excise tax instituted during World War II that fell solely on establishments that allowed dancing. A brief foray into the underreported history of this musical sea change seems to show it less imbued with cultural animus and more with typical gratutitous government money grubbing from sin taxes that we have grown oh so familiar with.
Now, I’d grant that raising a little money to fight Hitler isn’t the worst motivation that has ever stuck its head over the tax increase parapet. But however fitting it was to siphon the wallets of folks back home who wanted to dance their cares away while the nation’s youth were foxtrotting in foxholes, you can’t escape the unintended consequences that economics decrees. If you want more of something, subsidize it, if you want less tax it. In a world where we continue to reward illegitimacy and tax music, Austin seems to have defied that gravity, but at least the sin tax on dancing is history (as of the mid 60s – any wonder that you could start to see a modest but determined resurgence of dance a decade or so afterwards!).
Ironically, maybe killing dance was the birth of something else important (the excise tax only applied to anything sold while there was an open dance floor, so musical entertainment was not taxed unless there was dancing). Musical innovation was already migrating to a freer form that eschewed itself as a servant to dancers, a trend that ultimately reversed the relationship completely leading to the moth dancing craze of the 60s which was in service of, indeed almost bodily worship of, the music.
But once we outgrew the 60s and realized that the whole point of dancing was touching the opposite sex, genres like Western Swing were set for a comeback, informed not only by early traditions but by the explosive musical change that had intervened. And towns that figured this out, like Austin, were destined for great things. Meanwhile, towns like Providence, where I grew up, saw roots music scenes that soared like Icarus only to crash as the politicians and urban elites tried once again to tax entertainment and melted its wings. . .
While Texas’s larger political scene remains confounded by the conflicts of interest the founders knew would plague republican government, the sentiments of the inheritors of the Republic of Texas inform a freer climate that was able to nurture a retro scene rather than nip it in the bud. And the more liberal climate that ironically attends the capital of a less liberal state was able to capture the musical imagination of the entire state with a rededication to musical tradition as well as innovation. Let’s face it, Austin is big for its parade of retro influences not for its gay parade.
They probably have a gay parade, it’s Austin, it’s weird. But it just doesn’t stick out ‘cause everything’s weird. And instead of demanding that weirdness be considered mainstream, Austin takes pride in being different. This is the kind of touch that demands a grudging respect even from those who imagine it a Times Square-like center of depravity in a state otherwise illuminated by Friday night lights. It means a self-respecting cowboy musician from Lubbock, Joe Ely, finds himself at home in Austin without abandoning his west Texas roots.
Ely, who opened for The Belleville Outfit (or, in Austin parlance, The Belleville Outfit closed for him), joked that the only difference following his childhood move from Abilene was that Lubbock was 17 feet lower. So his life has kind of had a downhill trajectory. And he was wont to add that coming to Austin was way down from there. The ability to see the Austin scene as capable of appreciating that kind of deprecation, and not as needing to have its ego stoked as superior to the parochial dance halls of the western desert that actually put it on the map, indicates a civic maturity that never attended say Boston’s jazz scene. That’s another little subculture of my nearby youth whose narrower focus and self indulgent pecking order robbed the more urbane capital of Massachusetts of the opportunity to govern the musical world the way Austin does.
The Soulful Accordian
Ely was who we really came to see, a legend of western swing in the legendary Saxon Pub for a night, 3 feet away from you. Ely deserves accolades but having already received his share from authors too numerous to mention, I have to reserve my own for Joel (joe•al) Guzman who accompanied Ely on the accordian.
Never have I seen such a patient left hand on a squeeze box. Guzman seemed to say afterwards that he was being gentle with his Baffettis because they had sustained some rough handling. But in a ‘sport’ where a flashy right hand is king, Guzman reigned with the most sensual left. The traditional but untethered trills with which he feathered Ely’s gruffer west Texas growl were born of the right hand, but always seemed doomed as the box squeezed closed. You didn’t think he had saved enough left hand to polish the phrase to its bittersweet conclusion before that button accordian started playing a different key on the way out, but you were always wrong.
This was no Zydeco king squeezing the hell out of the thing – not that there’s anything wrong with that -- this was a man wringing the very soul from an instrument that properly comes in for its share of derision as something short of a soulful. I’m thinking one of the best superbowl commercials ever where a young James Marshall Hendrix is walking a dusty street and chooses to buy a Coke from a machine in front of a guitar store. So you’d think the commercial is over with the rest being history, but the camera pans around to the Pepsi machine on the other side of the street and slowly lifts its perspective to show that Hendrix’s soft drink preference helped him narrowly avoid the curse of Bob’s Accordians.
And Ely and Guzman found vocal as well as instrumental accord in a studied trade of brief but haunting harmonies that could at once fulfill the needs of romance and loss that drives folks to a west Texas saloon and the more sophisticate (if no more legitimate) longings of an audience drawn to Lincoln Center. And not to be outdone in the cover department, Ely offered up in similar communion with Guzman in a tribute to Buddy Holly. Who hasn’t that guy touched even in his loss.
