Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization Read online

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  The Fender bass neck could sometimes feel like an inverted Louisville Slugger. Ideas were sparks trailing from a screwball whacked deep into a crosswind. A dreamy lope toward the bleachers and, reaching a gloved hand up, over her shoulder, The Catch! . A major scale riff held her barely awake, thumbs, fingers, nodding off, scribbling, nodding off, notes plucked, scribbling, eyes too heavy to keep open?

  In the still of nights I know my rights

  Tales told under summer lights

  High pop flies and weightless rides

  Where gravity tugs at my insides

  To take off, climb, to fall from space

  If not for grace, a time and place

  The daily special is good today

  Dishes washed and put away

  A bird in the pan, the bush of a ghost

  A waitress, a cook, a heavenly host

  O say, can peas butter beans in sauce light?

  Survive the journey, make the next flight?

  Where swollen moons shine on the water

  And jokes are told about god's daughter

  We sit and sigh, put on dark glasses

  And kick ourselves, kick our own asses

  We take off, climb, then fall from space

  No chance, no grace, no time or place

  ?with hours to go before she woke, the final yawn, banking over oceans of silence, turning away from the last heartbeat.

  Side retired.

  -

  Fall

  "?the more carrots you chop,

  the more turnips you slit,

  the more murphies you peel,

  the more onions you cry over,

  the more bullbeef you butch,

  the more mutton you crackerhack,

  the more potherbs you pound,

  the fiercer the fire and the longer your spoon

  and the harder you gruel with

  more grease to your elbow

  the merrier fumes your new Irish stew."

  -James Joyce

  IX

  "Those who can, do.

  Those who can't, teach.

  Those who can't teach, do research.

  Those who can't do research, do music journalism."

  -Anon

  In 1993?

  ?Rondo Von Questador was an Austin, TX music writer who one day missed his deadline. The UK transplant was all set to cover the doings of a big outdoor event of hoopin' and hollerin' honcha, mama, rollin' down woodstockian hills of armadillion ding dang! Yeah, buddy! But just when things got important he missed his deadline and never made it to the festival barriers or into the football security paddocks that weekend, where he would have pressed flesh and chewed fat with the big gunnery guitar guys a-sweatin' in their denims. All the usual sing-a-ling-ching songwrights were gonna be drinkin' backstage and, though Willie was busy payin' off his IRS debts, it was a sure bet some of the not so poor boys was gonna be there too.

  But RVQ missed the whole shebang and left the concert promoter wondering why. Left him frowning upon the writer's unused backstage laminate. Tarnation. He was one of the most knowledgeable scribes in the US of A or any place, for that matter, on the subject of Ameri-Cana-Rama-Lama-Dag-Nabbit-Rabbit kinda post-"Nashville done sent me a present and ah threw it in the dustbin" kinda music. Needless to say, the local weekly that the writer worked for was also displeased, and when he showed up in their offices a week after the fact, he insisted there was a reason, a tale to tell, and was lucky to have survived.

  He said (in far less romantic words): Yes (he said), he had crawled from the wilderness of Harley-related dreams and Davidson-told chrome exhaustings that crossed roads of Telecasters and chorus pedals. No longer a two-step, it was a tale of accordion jackrabbits jumping up and down on the Speed King of 4/4 time, a mobile slam dance on the sound of the big custom-shop guitar, strummed to the heart of conjunto fingers, brown faces laughing in the wind, and he was a fee-fi-fo-fum English-mun who was not fond of the newfangled rock & roll. He hated metal or anything that snapped to alternative, and the dark hand of hip-hop was foreign to his senses. He was a man enamored of the Texas Music Thang, the Texican, the Mexican or anything relative to the Holy Buddhas of Lubbock, but here he had been the protagonist in a southwest edition of Sleepy Hollow dimensions. Still, the man from London had a journalistic code and duty dictated he should write about what had happened.

  But who would listen to him now?

  Who would believe the burpings of jackals in a town swarming with professional grackles? Birds of a feather? Bulls of a queue? No one watched past the Super Bowl of conflicting interests anyway. The local weekly listened but, under the circumstances, they couldn't be bothered; his ramblings weren't palatable and he had left them hanging when he missed his original deadline. So he rang a colleague at the local daily (who brightly said, "Sure, Rondo. Tell me what you got!") and told that reporter of the hair-raising, high-speed chase. It was the stuff of high adventure fluff, a Hollywood action film, low cost hirings, no unions to deal with. He insisted it wasn't a movie and if no one believed him, he would tell the story ?