The Blues Be Good News

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“Some men get new wives when they turn 40,” said Lamar.  “All I want is an electric guitar.”

He is a practical man.  Probably had weighed out the economics of the situation pretty carefully.  Happy I made the cut.  Probably was a close call.

Even I could see the equation clearly.  Amazing I made the cut.

Fine.

Even though I thought I had married an acoustic man who had wooed me sitting on the front porch in the mountains of Virginia listening to records (did I mention we were old?) of the exotic (hey, I’m not from Texas) Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker and Willis Alan Ramsey.

My husband kept his electric roots repressed for two decades.

But this is a man who had played the Bonham – not today’s gay Bonham – when it was the USO.  Captain Midnight headlined a St. Mary’s Hall dance; that was when the band found out Jeff Richmond only had one harmonica in one key that he played discordantly throughout the evening.

The high point must have been opening for ZZ Top at the Teen Canteen.  Neglecting to mention Captain Midnight, Margaret Moser wrote in The Austin Chronicle:

Forget the cute, silly name – the Teen Canteen was the staging ground for San Antonio’s vibrant rock & roll scene, from before the Beatles until the dawn of punk. Owner Sam Kinsey opened the first Teen Canteen in 1960. It moved around to several locations, including a ballroom dance studio, settling at Wonderland (now Crossroads) Mall in 1963. In 1968, the Canteen moved to its last location on Bitters Road across from Northeast Stadium, the place it would occupy until it closed in 1977….

Local bands like the Pipelines, the Outcasts, the Spidels, the Stoics, the Swiss Movement, and the Virgil Foxx Group, plus touring bands of the day such as the Strawberry Alarm Clock (“Incense and Peppermints”) and the Syndicate of Sound (“Little Girl”) played there. More importantly, it was one of the places for Texas psychedelic bands such as Sweet Smoke, Zakary Thaks, Bubble Puppy, Shiva’s Headband, the Moving Sidewalks, and Lord August & the Visions of Lite. ZZ Top played their first gig at the Teen Canteen; others who got their start there include Mike Nesmith of the Monkees and Chris “Christopher Cross” Geppart.

Talent, and perhaps a smidgen of nepotism, continued to boost the band’s profile.  Band member Galvin Weston, whose royal lineage can be substantiated online, managed to get the band booked on the family’s cruise line.  Don’t know why Captain Midnight did not get an offer for a second summer cruise.  Surely people our parents’ age were into songs by Cream or Spirit’s “I Got a Line on You?”

Even nepotism must have its limits.  Alas, college dispersed the members of Captain Midnight to far corners of the map.

But fast forward past forty.

One electric guitar gets lonely.  The first black guitar led to a red guitar.  And then a woody-looking guitar.  And now a really cool Teye (Guitar men are rolling their eyes in their heads over my superficial descriptions.  If Captain, or After, Midnight’s band members want to get the details right, they have to get their own blogs.).

Plus, one does not play the electric guitar alone.  Lamar had to seduce our friend Richard Nitschke off the acoustic.  And Richard’s first electric guitar seemed to procreate as well (People, ducks, guitars.  Does just say no ever work?).

Strangely, it turned out our CPA is an amazing drummer, Karl Yelderman (whose drumsets reproduce like ducks as well), and he brought along bass player Daryl Chadick (with his multiplying bass guitars).  Now the band even has a keyboard player, Steve Chase (whose wife must have had his keyboard spayed).

Then there is Claytie.  Claytie Bonds has the type of voice capable of singing the national anthem a cappella at a chamber of commerce gathering when she was only nine.  She can belt out the blues.

After Midnight Blues Band: Daryl, Richard, Karl, Claytie, Lamar and Steve
After Midnight Blues Band at Sam’s
Lamar and Claytie

Which finally brings me around to the point of the blog (guess I’ll never learn to tweet).  After a bit of a lull, the After Midnight Blues Band is playing four times in April.

You can catch the band this Saturday, April 17, from 7 to 10 p.m. at Alamo City Pizza and the following Saturday, April 24, at from 4:45 to 5:45 p.m. at the King William Fair.

Someone asked me if the band stuff drives me crazy.  The answer is no.  I love the blues, and, even without nepotism to help, in my unbiased opinion, After Midnight is great.

The blues are great therapy, and, Lord knows, living with me, Lamar needs large doses of that.  So I’m standing by my man.

Update Added on September 5:  No reunion performance of the members of Captain Midnight is planned for today’s Canteen Fest at Floore’s Country Store in Helotes.  The band’s glory days are yet again overshadowed by ZZ Top.

According to Hector Saldana of the San Antonio Express-News:

ZZ Top made its first public appearance there.  “The scene was that of a drugless rave,” Kinsey said. “We had black lights; we had strobes and overhead projectors. It was fantastic.”

Admission was 25 cents in the ’60s.  Imagine “Where the Action Is” and “Hullabaloo” incarnate, albeit amateurish and fresh out of the garage.

Seeing the vintage photo of the Pipelines in the paper made me yearn to see a group photo of Captain Midnight, but, if he ever possessed one, my husband must have destroyed all evidence prior to our marriage.

‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’

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On Salon.com, Laura Miller is shining (note the foreshadowing) a spotlight on the most evil writers ever to appear on screen:

Every so often, though, filmmakers tell us what they really think about those perverse souls who cling to the fusty old medium of print — namely that they’re pretentious, manipulative, insecure and overly fond of the sauce.  And, you know what? They’ve got a point….

Hey, I resent that.

Easy to guess who tops the list in what has always been, for me, one of the scariest scenes on film – not any of the expected attack scenes, but the buildup starting with Jack (Nicholson) Torrance’s writer-interruptus tantrum:

…leading to the one where the vulnerable Wendy (Shelley Duvall) peeks at Jack’s writing.

I make it a habit to leave my midpoint-manuscript lying about so no family members worry I am merely tapping out “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” compulsively, over and over and over, so no key wears out faster than another.

Prodigious Poster in Pursuit of Parsimony

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Reflecting on her four years of blogging, author C.M. Mayo writes:    

Blogging is whatever you want it to be.  And that morphs.  I don’t worry about this so much as I once did.  I just blog.   

C.M. Mayo’s blog led my daughter and me to the San Miguel de Allende Writers’ Conference, which we now hope to make an annual pilgrimage.  But the conference also led me to wallow in the bog of blogging.      

A simple posting of very few words about a proposed product for preventing postmen from getting lost via Google map destination envelopes is highly appealing.

 

  I have been blogging eight weeks since San Miguel, and find myself inappropriately writing feature-length stories – a rant about John Edge’s claim that Austin had the best breakfast tacos in the U.S. turned into a more than a thousand-word restaurant review – obviously unsuitable for the attention span of anyone surfing the web.   I remain verbose, even though my favorite post of mine let the photo tell all and I am drawn to quick-read postings, such as Swiss Miss’ goggle map envelopes I discovered through a Mayo post.     

My blog also has a tendency to let politics slip in – Texas produces such rich fodder for ridicule – and I have even fired volleys at the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.  Unwise for a freelance writer trying to make a living in Texas.  Biting one’s tongue while blogging is as difficult as doing so at well-lubricated cocktail parties.  Author Margaret Atwood describes this problem on the New York Review of Books Blog:       

Oops! I shouldn’t have said that. Which is typical of “social media”: you’re always saying things you shouldn’t have said.  But it’s like the days of Hammurabi, and those of the patriarch Isaac in the book of Genesis, come to think of it: once decrees and blessings have made it out of the mouth—or, now, in the 21st century, out of the ends of the fingers and past the Send button—you can’t take them back.    

I fear blogging is a distraction diverting me from more serious writing projects.  Mayo dismisses this as not problematic (but she, of course, has several successful books under her belt):      

I’m finding it increasingly less interesting to even think about querying newspapers and magazines.  I’ve written for the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Mexico, Inside Mexico, and the like, and until I started my blog, I assumed I would continue to do so.  But I prefer to put my effort into writing books (long form) and blogging (short form).  Maybe I’ll rethink this.  Sometime.     

As Atwood began to build her website in 2009, her publishers were nervous:     

“That sounds wonderful, Margaret,” they said, with the queasy encouragement shown by those on the shore waving goodbye to someone who’s about to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel.   

Yet Atwood has embraced fully the technological advances affecting how writers communicate.   (I only wish while in San Antonio as part of Gemini Ink Autograph Series, she had convinced her friend, Colleen Grissom, to start a blog.  Reading things Colleen “shouldn’t have said” would be so entertaining.)   At the Texas Book Festival in the fall of 2009, Atwood spoke extensively of her progress from blogging to tweeting.  She regards her followers as though they are “33,000 precocious grandchildren.”     

On the subject of followers, Mayo shared one of her poetic tweets – “a tweet can be a form of poetry (twiku) or fiction (twiction)” – in “Twitter Is:”   

@c_m_mayo:  Following no one, having no followers, she was like the woman in the back closet, grumbling at the blankets, existing on mothballed air     

There’s no period at the end of that sentence because I’d used up my allotment of characters. Fster than a wlnut cn roll dwn t roof of a hen house, were gng 2 see t nd of cvlizatn   

 One of Mayo’s tweeters defined tweeting as:    

@lisaborders:    Twitter is a message in a bottle that sometimes gets answered  

If novelists such as Atwood and Mayo can confine their thoughts to 140 characters, surely there is hope for me to learn to curb my blogging output before my few followers dwindle to none.  Then again, here I am with a 700-word entry about the critical need for brevity in blogging.  

As one “grandchild” of Margaret Atwood tweeted:  “I love it when old ladies blog.” 

Note Added on April 28:  The Daily Beast‘s “Can the Author Survive the Internet?” 

James Wood….  said he finds looking through readers’ comments on blogs to be akin to a descent into Hades.  He added that his friend Andrew Sullivan is buckling under the strain of writing three hundred blog posts per week, which has interfered with his ability to concentrate on anything longer than a few paragraphs. 

I like readers’ comments (of course, mine are rather limited). 

Note added on May 3:  Margaret Atwood’s speech upon her acceptance of the American PEN Award. 

Note added on July 13:  C.M. Mayo now has a second blog for those seriously researching the “French Intervention” in Mexico and also provides podcasts online of some of her presentations on both her writing and writing in general. 

Note Added on September 5:  Here I am a few months later managing facebook fan pages, responding to yelpers and, yes, even tweeting for a restaurant client.