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| A shock of green neon shooting through a window, Austin, Texas |
There are few things I like better than being downtown in the big city at night. I love stone surfaces bedazzled with purple light, a shock of green neon shooting through a window, layers of images mirrored and multiplied. The Juarez night was my world when I lived in El Paso. While other college students crowded inside the clubs dancing below mirrored disco balls and laser lights, I'd be on the street, where the inside and outside worlds bleed together--light and sound bouncing all around; a young woman on the corner, black eyes flashing back the lights, her body gently swaying to the rhythm of an unknown music in the arms of her lover, counter to the heavy beat shaking the walls of Club Reno; an entire chicken spinning on a rotisserie over an open flame in the window of a carniceria. Heat. Light. Motion. Layers of humanity. A photographer's heaven, and a pretty potent place for a young writer also.
There are few things Marci likes less than being downtown in the big city at night. She fears the pan-handlers and dope dealers buying and selling the last of all they've got left in this life just to get by. She sees humanity huddled in dark corners, dangers lurking everywhere, a world so unlike the open, red-earth and pinion dominions she experienced growing up in the southwest. She fears an urban downtown at night as much as I fear standing on a sandstone cliff-edge looking nearly 1,000 feet down to a bend in the Colorado River.
Needless to say there was some conflict when we found ourselves walking around Sixth Street in Austin at night. I felt I was home and Marci felt she'd somehow ended up in the very real plot of a true-crime book. I wanted to stay on the street as long as possible, and all she wanted to do was get back to the car, lock the doors, and drive off to suburbia.
I prevailed because I can be a bastard. I don't mean to be. I just am. I need to see. I need to feel. Not participate. I care less about that. I just want to be wide awake in America, the film-strip in my brain running, running, running, as light and music and motorcycle engines rattle and roar. I need to be there taking in light and shadow.
And so we walked Austin at night and we saw. Willie, was there, bigger than life, painted on the side of a building, a rainbow world around him, big as Buddha, a drunk disciple sitting cross-legged leaning back against his thick arms, a couple of motor cycles up front, one black and one neon yellow. Damn. What beauty! And so we walked.
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| Willie mural by artist and musician Wiley Ross, East 7th Street and Neches Street |
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| Sixth Street Austin, Texas |
Finally, we came to Antone's, a place we could agree upon. We both came specifically looking for the blues. I'd expected to find it blasting from every third bar lining Sixth Street. That is the Austin I remembered from the 80's. I'd only been there once, at Halloween, but I hadn't forgotten it. The street shook as different rhythms oozed out of various one-room clubs and mixed and mingled with the crowd pushing through the street. It was hot; it was electric; I was twenty-one, I think. I had driven down from Dallas with my friend Molly. If I remember right, Phil came along with us. It was wild, it was weird, the costumes were funky, but what I remembered most was the mix of country and blues streaming out of blue-lighted bars. My friends wanted to be pushed down the street with the flow of carnivalesque insanity. I just wanted to find a bar and sit and listen to the blues.
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| Antone's, 305 E. 5th Street, former playground f Stevie Ray Vaughan |
Sixth Street is no longer that place. Its fame killed it. It has become a place where tourists like Marci and I go to find what they think Austin is. Meanwhile, the real Austin has moved out to places like Rainey Street. I was somewhat prepared for that, and had played with us going to Rainey Street ourselves, but nostalgia won over. I wanted to again experiences the music I remembered pouring out of those compact little clubs like I'd heard that Halloween night long ago.
Part of it might have been that we weren't there on a weekend, but I think mostly Sixth Street has evolved into an upscale neighborhood too expensive for the music that made it famous in the first place. So we left Sixth Street behind, walking.
In the end, the walk was worth it because we found the "Home of the Blues," Antone's. I guess because it was a week day, the club was all but empty. Still, the music was good, very good, and for a bar, the sodas were cheap. We found what we came for--an inexpensive place to experience good music.
I wish I knew the name of the band we heard, but I don't. They were not the scheduled act, and so it was not their name on the marquee that I took a photo of. But there they are below. If you recognize them, let me know. I am a big fan of what to me is The Unnamed Band from Austin's Antone's Home of the Blues.
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| What I know as The Unnamed Band from Austin's Antone's Home of the Blues |
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| Marci finally enjoying Austin--all because of Antone's |
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