We went camping this weekend, so this week you get one from the vault.  At least it’s a break from the Olde-Timey stuff that’s been going up recently.  The song is technically pre-Nutcracker, but not by much.  The Nutcracker was officially born on November 27, 2008, when I wrote a song called “Secret Lives of Your Neighbors” and wondered if I could write a song every day.  There’s more to it than that, but that’s enough for now.  “No Proof,” written November 9, 2008, is at least part of the Apocrypha to the Nutcracker’s Bible.  It was supposed to be a wedding song.  I know it doesn’t sound like one, but that’s irrelevant anyway, because I didn’t even write the song until two and a half years after the wedding.

The vocal is awful, which is why I buried it back in the mix-you can see the lyrics on the sidebar link.  It’s actually me singing, not the Nutcracker, but he gets credit because we have that Lennon-McCartney type of deal:  straight down the middle on everything. 

Camping Trip.  The song is old, but the video is from our camping trip to the hill country to celebrate my birthday this weekend.  The video has no relationship to the song at all, and this whole thing was done Monday night and Tuesday afternoon (except the song was already recorded), so it makes about that much sense.  Through the magic of the movies, the video has been edited to make it look like the experience was endurable.  I deserve an Academy Award.  (My friend John Lowe questions the entire concept of an editing award.  “How do you know what got left out?  It might have been some really good stuff.”)  I do most of my editing on the set just by turning off the camera before the crying starts.

If you’re ever feeling nostalgic for the dorm, go tent-camping in a state park.  You get the thin walls, too-close quarters, people walking by your door at all  hours yelling, frat boys smoking dope for the first time and claiming not to feel it, loud radios playing Pat Green, stuff on fire.

First we stopped in Pedernales State Park, named after the Pederast Indians, who were forced from their tribal grounds when a school got built within 500 feet of the river, then on to Fredericksburg for the first round in the Worst Waiter in Texas competition (congrats to Fredericksburg Coffee House for their $1.50 a pop warm-tap-water-in-styrofoam-cup and the waitress who responded to my complaint by saying, “I know!  They just ripped off my parents too!”)  Then on to Enchanted Rock, 17 miles north of Fredericksburg and, by my reckoning, about 25 miles from where the red light of the gas gauge must have first come on.

Then seventeen miles alone back to Fredericksburg to buy gas because I knew I’d never hear the end of it that night otherwise.

Then . . .  frat boys!  And large Mexican families with large Mexican radios!  A two-night engagement! 

And we climbed that big rock.

Fredericksburg.  I could write a book about Fredericksburg, but it wouldn’t be about Fredericksburg.  It would be about the metaphor Fredericksburg has been for me since I was about thirteen—a seemingly perfect little town in a sleepy, pretty part of Texas where nothing ever changes and nobody ever grows up.  When I was 12 or 13 I read a book called Hondo, My Father, by Becky Crouch Patterson, and that stoked my fascination with the Texas hill country and the peculiarity of that culture—the tidy little German towns, the Spanish goats, the limestone, the big live-oak shade trees, the crazy wildflowers, fresh peaches, the steep tin roofs on the houses, the beer and music—a fascination that began when I started listening to Jerry Jeff Walker.  Hondo Crouch, a guy born to be local color, was the owner of Luckenbach, Texas, in the seventies (along with Guich Koock, an actor whose most notable role was as a deputy on the seventies sitcom Carter Country and who also owned a restaurant in Austin where I waited tables in college), which was (and is) just an old general-store-slash-beer-joint-slash-post-office off a dirt road that attracted (and attracts) hippies, musicians, beer-drinkers, etc.  Jerry Jeff Walker recorded his best known album, Viva Terlingua!, there in 1973.  Willie and Waylon had a huge hit in the late seventies with a song called “Luckenbach, Texas” (though neither the song’s writers nor Waylon, reputedly, ever visited Luckenbach.)  I first went there on a pilgrimage with my dad when I was maybe 14, then went back on my own a couple of years later, a 250-mile drive from Young County.

I started at UT a few years later and made the drive out to Luckenbach and Fredericksburg pretty often, even into grad school and law school—if you hung around me long enough, sooner or later I’d take you out there.  I never could explain to anybody my fascination with the place.  It seemed like a place where time had stopped and was in no particular hurry to resume; past, present and future were all one and the same, indistinguishable from each other, and nobody knew anybody’s last name or cared where anybody came from.   All anybody did there was hang around the picnic tables under the live oaks and drink beer, smoke dope, play guitar and throw washers.  I liked going down to the creek behind the old gin and sitting in the roots of the huge cypress tree there and looking at the water.  There’s a novel by William Brammer—the greatest novel by a Texan ever published, in fact (and before you sneer at that as faint praise please remember that Katherine Anne Porter and O. Henry were Texans, not to mention John Graves, Larry McMurtry, Dorothy Scarborough, William Hauptman, Larry L. King and Roy Bedichek)—called The Gay Place, which was published in the late fifties and is the best rendering I’ve ever read of the Texas hill country ennui, the beer- and sun-blanched languor of the place.  The novel begins with the main character returning to Austin from a drunken antique-buying trip out in the hill country.  The sleepy, provincial Austin of the fifties is long gone (Austin was still in Texas then apparently), but the feel of leaving Austin for the hill country seemingly hasn’t changed in at least fifty years.

The best rendering of it in music, by the way, is probably Jerry Jeff Walker’s self-titled album from 1972 (especially the song “Hill Country Rain”) and his 1977 double album, A Man Must Carry On, which also features Hondo Crouch reading his poem “Luckenbach Moon.”  I outgrew my Jerry Jeff fixation many years ago (did you know he’s not even from Texas?  He’s from Oneonta, New York.  And his name’s not even Jerry Jeff Walker), but I’ll still crank up “Hill Country Rain” now and then.  Some of Jerry Jeff’s early stuff sounds like it was recorded under similar conditions as my stuff and with similarly limited knowledge of what the hell he was doing.  I don’t think he knew you need to run a wire from your guitar to a moist part of your body if you want to get rid of that hum (which I learned subsequent to recording “No Proof.”) 

That particular Texas hill country vibe has now been commodified, if only on a regional scale, in a style of Frat-Rock (I don’t know if I made that term up) practiced by Jack Ingram, Cory Morrow, the aforementioend Pat Green, and several others influenced by Jerry Jeff’s, and Robert Earl Keen’s, backroad beer joint style.  I haven’t listened to much of their stuff, but the main formula seems to consist of making sure “Texas” and “Shiner Bock” are referenced in every song.  But I shouldn’t spout off like that—those guys may be great.  I’m just getting old and don’t have time to give everybody a fair hearing anymore.  And I’m kind of grumpy.

Anyway, every time I go there I remember the other trips, which have all run together in my mind.  Nothing particularly memorable ever happened to me out there.  Mostly I liked driving around on those little roads that seemed to have no real reason for being there and didn’t have much idea where they were going.  Maybe the reason I’m fascinated by it and the reason that others are drawn to it is that nothing particuarly memorable does happen.  You just kind of are, out there.

And every time I go to Fredericksburg I think about what it would be like to live there—the restaurants and bars and book stores and festivals, the creeks and the hills, the other pretty little towns nearby like Sisterdale (my favorite town name) and Luckenbach, Boerne and Blanco and Kerrville.  Fredericksburg, population 8,900, led the way of the small town that goes all antiquey and touristy and B&B-y; almost every other dying little town in Texas has followed that model, few with the degree of success of Fredericksburg (Marfa and Salado are the only others that come to mind.) 

I don’t know what the town is really like.  Probably it’s a victim of its own prosperity in that the only people who can afford to live there are people who don’t live there.  And it’s probably too late for me to get into whatever groove is necessary to fit in there.  My fascination with the place, going back thirty years, probably all comes out the fact that I know, and have always known, that I could never lead that kind of existence.  I’m too nosy.  I need to know people’s last names.

Pioneer Museum.  You ought to visit the Pioneer Museum.  They make the most elaborate corn husk dolls we’ve seen yet, and we’ve seen a bunch.  We also learned about a local guy named John O. Hays who became an expert on barbed wire after he retired.  All he did was collect, read about and learn about barbed wire.  He even collected Norwegian barbed wire.  I used to not understand that kind of compulsion.  Now I do, and I applaud it.  We enjoyed looking at his barbed wire collection.