In all fairness, this one’s not bad.  It’s rough, but not fatally so.  The tempo’s too slow, the key could stand to be a half step lower (this is the third song in a row in the key of D, I think), and I would like to make the guitars a bit more assertive—I’d like to make the whole thing a bit punchier, in fact, and I’d really like to have an honest-to-God guitar solo in that break before the final verse—but this is okay.  It has a good beat and a strong melody, two areas in which I have not particularly distinguished myself.  It was very fun playing bass on this song.  The lyrics . . . .  Well, the best thing about songwriting is the lyrics don’t have to make sense; they just have to sound like they make sense.

Drums.  The reason it’s too slow and the key is wrong is because I finally got some drums involved.  George Carlin had a record I listened to a lot in high school, A Place for my Stuff, that had a promo for a fake TV show, which went something like “Watch Wagons West, the compelling saga of a pioneer family who braves fierce mountain lions, savage blizzards and hostile Indians to start a new life in California, only to find out they don’t like it there.”  That’s kind of how I feel about drums.  It’s just not worth the trouble.  The drums on this one are fake, of course, and it’s just the same two bars played throughout the song—I didn’t even try to vary them up (well, I did try, but it didn’t work)—and they tyrannize the whole song.  The beat, it’s just relentless.  I may just have to get myself a drummer.  They’re not very expensive and are pretty easy to take care of.  (Old drummer joke:  How do you get a drummer off your porch?  You just give him the money and take the pizza.)

The Flatlanders.   As I mentioned last week, we had Scottish friends, Heather and Karen, staying with us all week.  We were also visited by another Scottish couple—Norm and Carole Ann, friends of Janet’s cousin Rona in Glasgow.  Norm and Carole Ann live in San Francisco and are moving to Houston like the sensible Scots they are.  They were here to check things out and wanted to see some live music.  Cousin Rona must have failed to explain to them that I don’t leave the house.  I checked the paper and saw that the Flatlanders were kicking off their North American tour at Fitzgerald’s in the Heights.  Let’s go there, I suggested, and in so doing became a hero.

The Flatlanders, in case you don’t know and are too lazy to open a new tab and go to Wikipedia, are the three amigos from Lubbock, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock.  Each is a legend in his own right—Ely the rocker, Gilmore the pure-voiced country tenor and Hancock the folkie, all first-class songwriters—but they occasionally get together as the Flatlanders.

I’m a moderate fan of Joe Ely and a casual fan of Jimmie Dale Gilmore.  I have listened to very little Butch Hancock; Nick Hornby loves him.  I’d never really listened to any of their group efforts.  I was skeptical.  I figured it was a Travelling Wilburys or Highwayman sort of operation in which the whole was less than the sum of its parts.  Not at all.  They were magnificent. 

Fitzgerald’s is an old barnlike structure, a Heights institution and a firetrap.  We used to live within walking distance of it.  It caters mostly to the headbanger crowd these days, so I was surprised to see these guys booked there.  It was a perfect place to see them.  The band was smoking.  The wood floors never stopped shaking.  The Scots were mighty impressed and I was very proud of what we offered up.  It renewed my faith in something, though I’m not sure what.  Everything maybe.  Rock and roll still offers the promise of redemption even when you’re north of forty, it turns out.  Go see the Flatlanders if you get a chance.

Every Picture Tells a Story Part I.  Rod Stewart has been a blight on the face of humanity for so many decades now that people forget that he was once, briefly, great.  I love those messy, ragged, loose, spacious albums he did in the late sixties and early seventies, some solo and some with the Faces, up to and including Every Picture Tells a Story and Ooh La La.  The best-sounding albums all came out before 1975–Astral Weeks, Blood on the Tracks, The Red-Headed Stranger, Every Picture Tells a Story.  When I hear those albums I can picture the musicians in the studio, and you can hear the wood in those albums.  I wish I could figure out how they get that sound.

Every Picture Tells a Story Part II.  The picture in the video has nothing to do with the song.  It’s my mother, 22 years old, holding my cousin Dennis.  I like that photograph.  I’m about two years out of the picture when it was taken. 

Ooh La La.  Rod Stewart didn’t sing the lead on the original release of “Ooh La La.”  Ronnie Lane (or maybe Ron Wood) did.  But here he is singing it with The Corrs.