The White Water Tavern, loose parent it might be, is one of the best dive bars I've ever played. The rundown shack is located in an empty lot on the side of a concrete underpass through a desolate abandoned industrial district in Little Rock. Had someone in our caravan not been there before, I doubt we would have ever found it. We walked in and immediately they served us up some of the best bbq pulled pork sandwiches, fries and slaw I've ever had the pleasure of eating, and provided us with bottomless mugs of PBR and Miller Lite. The bar was decorated with all the classic dive paraphernalia: Guinness adds, punk graffiti, one television playing sports, and the local color of an Arkansas flag behind the corner stage. The early crowd was a mix of ages and races. Tuesday is three dollar pitcher night at the White Water Tavern, and yes I mean three dollar pitchers, which brought out the youth in droves as the night went on.
A combination of the packed house and the fact that I was about to play two hours worth of music I had just learned the day before in front of all these people set my adrenaline running through the roof. I was nervous and wired. And people kept handing me plastic cups of beer. Most of the crowd was walking around with pitchers in their hands; for three bucks why bother with a cup? Zeb played first and there was a room full of people paying attention to a band they never heard. Considering it was our third time playing those songs, I think we did great. Sam played next, and there was obviously a core group of fans that had come out to see her. By the time I went on with Justin, the crowd had thinned. I guess people still have jobs in Arkansas. But still, more people stayed than I expected to be there in the first place, and those people seemed to enjoy our set. While Sam's assertion that the prettiest girls in the country live in Little Rock may be an exaggeration, I have to admit it was a surprisingly attractive crowd all around. I did strike up a conversation with one young woman standing at the bar. This woman, however, wasn't standing so well once she stepped away from the bar by this point in the evening. After a bit of flirting, I realized this woman was more sheets to the wind than a hotel laundry room in a tornado. I spent the next twenty minutes trying to convince her to drink some water and make sure she was getting home safely with her friends. This experience gave me the delusion that I was much closer to sobriety than any sober assessment of my situation would have judged.
I had two more strikes against me coming during the night. First strike was that there was no food to be found at 2am in Little Rock. Second strike was that everyone was too drunk to muster up the energy to get out of bed and turn down the heat in our hotel room. The Arkansas style sauna that was our La Quinta room dried up all the water in my body, so that what was left of my constitution was 45% PBR and 45% Miller Lite. Woe was me the following morning. Dan, my bedmate, had had the brilliant idea of getting up to expel some of the demons in the middle of the night. If only I had followed suit. I couldn't even keep water down until three thirty in the afternoon. Kyle had to run into Walmart to buy me a bucket for the van. It was not one of my finer moments.
By the time we pulled into Tulsa, I was feeling 74% human. We played the recently reopened Eclipse, which had been one of the big punk clubs in the eighties and nineties. You couldn't really say the show was well attended, but some people stuck around and we played fine. The lack of any free drinks for the bands suited me fine that evening. After the show we drove across town to the Mercury Lounge for Tom Skinner's Science Project, a sort of open jam for great musicians of the Tulsa Sound. Apparently Oklahoma has two distinct sounds, the Red Dirt Music that is more country and folk influenced, and the Tulsa Sound, that is more blues and jazz influenced, it's most known local hero being J.J. Cale. Mr. Cale's long time keyboardist, Rocky Frisco, who must have been in his seventies, was playing with this group at the Mercury Lounge. This music was so laid back, it just sat there like a joint smoking in an ashtray. We got there after midnight, and the band was just starting their last set. The old-timers up on stage would periodically bring up young musicians to play with them. Sam's new guitarist, Jesse, was one of the young musicians and he just nailed the solo for The Weight. It was really something to see this local tradition being passed on from one generation to the next. Sam got up and sang two songs, then everyone insisted that we get up and play some songs. Zeb chose a song that Dan and I hadn't played since our one practice in Portland a month ago, but I had my crib sheet and it went over well. Justin played a fast honky-tonk number, and Rocky Frisco got a huge smile on his face from the audience and rushed back to his keyboard to finish off the number with us. It felt like what playing music is supposed to feel like, but rarely does. When the house band finished their great set, the barkeeps kicked us all out into the cold cold night. While driving through downtown Tulsa the next morning, on the way to a breakfast joint, I was struck by the vast potential that is all the parking lots that make up ¾ of American downtowns. We're unfortunately stuck with the grid for the most part, but if some city government got ambitious enough they could actually make some interesting residential and mixed use communities. New streets could be cut through the grid in many downtowns' existing parking lots, creating the potential for new non-rectangular buildings, parks with commercial space on two or more sides, attractive city walks, and car restrictive streets. It would require city governments getting eminent domain of many of the parking lots, or some inspired developers to get the idea in their heads. It saddens me that we call ourselves a democracy, yet our elected officials have such little power to do what is good for the community compared to the whims of the wealthy. But I'm trying to think positive, and rather get depressed by all the wasted land covered in asphalt this morning, I let my mind take a flight of fancy with visions of new streets for people, and mixed-income communities throughout the semi-abandoned downtowns of my country. When god gives you lemons, you gotta' make lemonade.
In a note of shameless self-promotion, my old solo-album, of which maybe 60 copies exist, made it onto a top ten of the decade blog by my buddy Tim Appel. Read it here:
http://decademix.blogspot.com/2010/01/tim-apel-mix.html
Thanks Tim.
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