Detour: Austin, Texas

This trip to Austin will be a working vacation -- writing all day, rocking all night -- and I really needed to get started on the plane this morning (cancer stories don't write themselves). However I blew it before we even took off, thanks to Love Is A Mix Tape, a book loaned to me by Mike from the Hidden Mitten. (Mike Mitten would be so much easier, but he already has a couple of cool last names just like me. Oh well.)

I decided to read a few pages of the book until it was OK to use electronic devices. Big mistake! It's not that Mix Tape is the best or worst book ever, but it's pretty good and, more importantly, it's about the two things almost every musician (certainly myself) cares about most -- songs and love (the third is probably drugs and alcohol, but I'll leave that to Alice in Chains and the Alkaline Trio, respectively). Each chapter of Love Is A Mix Tape starts with the contents of a cassette the author and his wife used to listen to before she died, completely out of nowhere, from an embolism at about age 30.

You know where this is going, maybe? Well, if you guessed I was weeping before the plane's wheels even left the ground, good guess.

Music and love are the most powerful gifts humanity has to offer. They often feel like one and the same to me. When I'm happy, every song sounds like church bells and a raucous gospel choir. When I'm heartbroken, music makes me feel better -- or lets me wallow and feel worse until I'm ready to feel better, which is a crucial step unto itself. Of course, the tough part is that sometimes my love of music takes me away from the love of my life, and SXSW is going to be a rough week for both Patrick and me, which bites. I'm not going to say, "when you love someone set them free." Screw that. It's more like, when you love someone, don't give them hell for going on tour with their band or being locked in a video game design studio for 12 hours a day. Ah, modern marriage.

Anyway, I'm at the part of the mix tape book (a true story) where the young wife has just died and the husband is suffering with how every song he hears reminds him of his wife or makes him wish his wife could have heard it. God, how I know that feeling. When friends and members of The Personals came with me to The Broken Spoke a couple weeks ago for Dad's birthday, I played my childhood favorite song ("I Wish a Buck Was Still Silver") by my dad's favorite singer (Merle Haggard). The lyric "Are the good times really over for good?" has gone to a whole other level in the past three years. Same goes for "He Stopped Loving Her Today" by George Jones, another favorite of mine from childhood and now a regular on Erin's Jukebox of Perpetual Mourning. (When you grow up the daughter of a honky tonk dad, a lot of your childhood soundtrack ends up being pretty sad or at least based on the "Think I'll Just Sit Here and Drink"/"Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down" story arc. Thankfully, my wonderful mom also raised me on the Beatles, so I had silly songs about yellow submarines, eggmen, walruses, and fields of strawberries to keep me child-like, too.)

I've said this a million times, but I am so grateful my dad got to see The Personals play once before he died. And now I'm grateful to be playing the bass he gave me in my new band in Chicago. I hate that he'll never see me play with the Hidden Mitten, too, at least not in person, and that I can only imagine his gleeful reaction to the Wisconsin photos from last weekend. (Oh, how Captain Dave loved an adventure! And loved to take surprise, bad-hair pics of my sisters and me on roadtrips. Lovely.)

I look at the Estelle's photos from Saturday night, and I fucking hate that I have to dance with a stranger now instead of you, Dad. It was fun -- spontaneously swinging around the middle of the barroom with some random, benignly friendly guy -- and the look on my face in the Flickr photo is probably a lot like both of our faces were when we danced together at the Spoke. (I'm glad I can still smile like that. For a while, I wasn't sure I could.) Now I wish you could see how happy I am in Chicago. I wish you could come to the Hideout and see Devil in a Woodpile and dance with me while that one dude plays the washboard, like we did in Austin. We would show those Yankees how it's done, ya know.

If I were a character in a movie, maybe I would close my eyes and dance by myself, imagining you as an angel swaying to a slow song on the toes of my black ass-kicking boots, like you used to let me stand on your brown cowboy ones when we would play Hank Williams records in the den when I was little. (I would have to save that for the movies, or maybe one of my book characters someday -- 'cause when real people dance with ghosts, they look batshit crazy and frankly I don't need any help from you or anyone in that department. Heh.)

When Mike and I were at a bar in Wisconsin on Friday night, I played "Ramblin' Fever" on the jukebox. I was surprised to see it there, but playing that song is one of those things that cannot be helped. If "Ramblin' Fever" is available, it must be played -- I don't want you to look down and see me being "a rock and roller" when I could be singing along with the Hag.

My hat don't hang on the same nail too long / My ears can't stand to hear the same old song / If someone said I ever gave a damn / They damn sure told you wrong / I've had ramblin' fever all along.

Hey, Merle and Dad, that makes three of us.

So my new friends don't know, but my dad and his friend Gary famously used to go to SXSW together every year. They would make it a point only to see bands my dad would normally avoid like the plague -- Japanese keyboard pop, Brazilian punk, Swedish dudes in wigs hitting each other on stage with dildos (seriously!! you should have heard the phone call from Dad the day after that show!). A few years ago, Gary and Dad invited me to join them, and we got a new, Three Festkateers tradition going over the next couple years. The twentysomething, the fiftysomething, and the techie from California who was somewhere in between. I took the guys to see Cruiserweight and They Might Be Giants and Satan's Cheerleaders. We ate pizza in the street and I gave my dad a joking hard time for being extra nice to the waitress at a blues bar. One year we played tambourines in the crowd with a cajun band and got to keep the tambourine. (Last I checked, it was still in my dad's closet. My stepmom tried to give it to me after he died, but I wasn't ready. Maybe I'll try to get it on this trip.)

There's a lot of SXSW backlash this year from Austinites, myself included. But no matter how long the lines get and how hipster-mafia the band selection process seems, the festival will always be a special, bittersweet time for me because of my memories of being the punk rock daughter (as he thought of me, despite the fact that I don't know if I really qualify) on the town with her country and western dad. If you see me get a little teary during Birdmonster or Limbeck next week, it could be because I am sad Lucero cancelled their showcase. Or it could be because I miss being David Walter's SXSW sidekick.

The plane lands in an hour and I'm going to see if I can't finish Love Is A Mix Tape before we touch tarmac (without getting tears on your book, Mike, promise!). I hope you're ready for me, Texas. I will be rocking out for two -- myself and that unforgettable, unstoppable honky tonk angel stepping on my combat boots.

LOVE & GUITARS.
Erin

P.S.-- Well what do you know? The guy getting off the plane in front of me turned out to have a t-shirt with "ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO" on the back in big letters. Wow. That's where the Walters are from, and you never met a more devoted Roswell guy than my dad. I'm going to take that shirt as a good sign for this week. (And yes, the Roswell thing does likely make me at least part alien. I told y'all I didn't need any help in the crazy department. Hee.)