Live Local Music with Chris Edwards Release Party and the Piney Rats Opening...

There's a music scene happening with local bands in Nacogdoches, Tx. Last night Maklemore's a restaurant located just a few blocks north of the campus of SFASU was the venue for a record release party sponsored by the Fire House Nac for Chris Edwards with Celtic punk band the Pineyrats opening.  

Chris Edwards is a singer songwriter square in the the long Texas traditional of the many troubadours who have drawn on the culture of the Lone Star State and Nacogdoches is a town where most of them have performed so this was a fitting stage for the release of his Homebrew album which you can purchase on Bandcamp. If you order a physical copy it will come autographed. I am occasionally lucky enough to play in the Brazos River Rats with Chris and once he autographed a copy of his book "Nobody Comes to Visit Anymore" for me. I suggest you get your autograph while he's still giving them out.   

Once Cathy and I were up on stage playing a Todd Snider song at a show. Suddenly out in the audience the damndest whooping and hollering I had ever heard broke out. It was just Chris having a good time hearing a song he liked. In a day and age where we often feel we have to choose this because it's not as bad as that Chris is a real and generous person. As Cathy says "I'm a Chris Edwards fan because he's my fan." 

The band was good and I'm sorry but I did not get their names.     

Opening for Chris was local Celtic punk band the Pineyrats. It was their first show and they did well. I've seen the big Irish punk bands, Flogging Molly and the Dropkick Murphys but I had to get in my car and drive several hours or buy a plane ticket and fly several hours. It was very nice to catch this show 30 minutes from my house. Music at many of the local restaurant venues can be a country band or DAG (dude and guitar) act grinding out pretty much the same set list and if your music tastes are as eclectic as ours punk music can be a palate cleanser. It's people up there with backs to the drum riser making a stand with music about things that mean something to them.     

I visited the Pineyrats facebook page and did the old copypasta so you could have the band members names. 

Bryan Stokes - Bass
Casey Sizemore - Vocals/Guitar
Justin Oakley - Guitar/Banjo/Other Strings
Jeff Jurgonski - Drums

To add in some authentic Celtic/Irish flavor they had tenor banjo. Where else can you go in East Texas to hear tenor banjo? Cathy's late father was a tenor player in the traditional jazz style and I can fake it on tenor banjo but my playing is better suited to an African gourd banjo style but this was the real Irish punk thing. I bet you have used the expression "keeping it real." That's what this guy did.     

The Piney Rats even punked up a Chris Edwards song and I think that leads us to one of the most significant observances of the night. There are those that play it safe with their music. They put it on the channel they like and dump the recliner back. They pull the phone out and let the algorithm do the picking. Luckily we have the people that combine two kinds of music that really don't go together into a live show and it works. It's fun. People came out to the gig, watched and danced. It was a thing that happens in other places in the world and it happened here in East Texas last night. 

P.S. 

We ate supper at Maklemore's. It was good. I had the PhillyNac sandwich which had good fresh peppers but the cream cheese stuffed flank steak Cathy ordered would have fed both of us.    

 

Vicksburg Battlefield Tour....

Recently we visited the Vicksburg National Military Park. I'm not sure why they call it a park considering the horrific things that happened here. I noticed when my kids were young that if I used the word park it set certain expectations and I know pet owners that must spell out the word P-A-R-K lest old Spot become excitable with expectations also. 

I saw no kids playing and certainly no pets when I looked out over the cemetery. These are not just causalities of this battle but after the Civil War there was an undertaking that I cannot hardly imagine.  Many hastily buried people were disinterred from battlefields all over in the years after the war and reburied with some measure of dignity in a known place. There are also vets and their spouses from other conflicts. The small flat headstones are the unidentified.      

This was actually my third visit to the battlefield. Seems I recall as a child a tour of a museum in an old house. There were many battle artifacts with the inference they were from the property where the fighting raged around the very spot we stood. On leaving the proprietor flipped back the door mat to expose an unexploded shell we had walked across to enter the place. My child's imagination felt shot at and missed. 

I don't remember where that house was but the only remaining structure from the battle is the Shirley House.  Here's a picture from the time of the 18 month long campaign that ended on July 4, 1863.  

This is my photo of Cathy at the house. I'm standing where the dugouts were that sheltered troops from the meatgrinder area just down the road.  

Reportedly my father, a WW2 infantryman was asked on his return from the war by a solider headed over for European occupation duty for any tips he might have for things good to know. My father asked what the soldier's job would be. "Infantry" he answered. My father said, "get out."

The slaughter of infantrymen attempting to storm defenses in this battle is hard to comprehend in this day and age when we call for trials and investigations when military adventures are costly. This battery overlooks the old course of the Mississippi which was the main river at the time of the battle and has since changed by floods. Causalities were light at this dug in position but I imagine not too pleasant of a time for those below.     

There are many monuments honoring men from all the states who sacrificed at the battle. We won't ever know how this expense makes those guys laying in the cemetery feel but maybe if we look around history enough we won't make the same mistakes. 

I don't know if I had any ancestors at this battle. The only other Civil War battleground I have toured is Mansfield, La and I suspect I had Texas people there due to the proximity of the campaign and the general area of their service. I do know that old George Washington Massingill, my 4th great grandfather lost two sons to sickness during the war. Hopefully they lay in a park and rest easy.    

      

 

The Longest Day of the Year...

I'm a slide guitar player and once at a blues jam I covered an old tune by slide great Elmo James. Afterwards someone took me aside and explained I had not done the song like SRV did it. I'm an SRV fan seeing him many times back in the day up close and personal in small Texas roadhouses and I was not aware that he had cover that tune also. 

Another time we got a little band together for something and with a keyboard player we were going to cover a Beatles tune. In the course of rehearsal someone stopped the band and informed the drummer that Ringo had hit the high hat cymbal 4 times right there instead of the three times he had hit it. The keyboard player missed the gig for some reason so we never did the tune and I don't know if the drummer ever mastered the suggested changes.   

I spent yesterday on and off jamming with my grandkids. I played tuba and guitar. They grabbed up whatever was handy blowing and banging with uninhibited glee. It was everything I had ever wanted in a jam session. People were creating and making it all up as we went along. It happened to be the summer solstice and I would say there was a definite old soul primitive ancient mysterious celebration to the feel of these tunes.          

Later when browsing the events of the world on the internet I found this. It really resonated with me just as these tunes had resonated with this band of heathens. I've played on stages and concerts halls and done all kind of things but this sums up what it has really all been about for me. It's just been hard to find people that felt this way also.

 

 

Way Back in Days of Old...

We made a nice little tour through north eastern Louisiana and Mississippi. This 4 night campout marks the 17th or 18th nights this year out in the camper. I know people make much longer trips even living in their campers but we are getting good use from ours and with local visits to our favorite fishing holes, trips to music festivals and this trip that had as it's main interest the ancient Mound Builder Culture of Poverty Point, La.      

I have documented through this blog on my trips to the old places where I think it's important to stand in the places long ago where things happened that we don't quite understand and ponder what is happening now, to us personally and to the world in general. Poverty Point dates back to 3500 years go to the time of Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt. 

They have just barely scratched the surface of what was going on here. What they do know is that periods of occupation and abandonment stretch through the history, the people that lived here were hunter gathers, there was no evidence of farming, no domesticated animals other than dogs, no burials, there was a trading network with other groups and someone knew something about societal organization and engineering.      

The white markers indicate a pole circle. Other places in the world circles like this seem to be linked to celestial observation but they believe this was used as a barricade to keep something in or out. They have found 37 circles so far and believed the cypress posts used were often picked up and moved over to be reset in a new circle for unknown reasons.  

The semi circles indicated on the map are ridges, believed to have been 6' tall where rows of huts sat in an orderly formation. Most ridges are reduced to less than 2' by the farming of the area from the 1840s to the early 1970s. Note the large mound that is centered.  

The view from 70' up on the large mound A. Through the gap in the center I believe that is the oldest mound which is on private property. While most mounds show stop and start construction through the centuries the large mound seems to have been built in one push that moved 30,000 dump trucks of dirt in 30 to 90 days. I think modern man can take a lesson in problem solving from this effort. 

The mounds are either flat or conical tops which possibly indicate different purposes. This mound is flat topped, and may have had a structure on top. It's made of 18 layers of soil which our tour guide told us makes quite a striking pattern of different colors when viewed in an excavated hole. We don't know what that was about. All flat plaza areas, once part of the Mississippi River flood plain with drainages creeks and sloughs were raised and leveled.  These were prehistoric people using the most primitive methods. 

I once wrote a song with the line, "...modern man has ruined his brain, he's lost sight of the cosmic plane..." I'm not saying this was aliens but stand in an old place and feel the difference. It will make a difference. 

  

 

 

Check Hits the Mailbox...

 Cathy's Social Security money hit the mailbox today, or more accurately for this modern era it was a digital deposit right into the bank. She likes to tell the story of how when she was a teen, working that first job and she got a check only to see that all her money was not there. They had held out a fee for taxes and Social Security. Today when she performs that daily logging on to the computer to check the online accounts while enjoying coffee it will feel like things have come full circle. There's that money was held out so long ago. 

They tell me that things may not be the same for the generations that come after the people the age of Cathy and I. Of course I recall hearing that social security might not be there for me when the time came but it has been so far. I was lucky enough to have two real good paying jobs that combined occupied about 39 years of my work life. I worked many hours, nights and weekends. Cathy worked nights for 30 years. One of Cathy's stories from the years before our marriage when we were only acquaintances is that she would see me at a party packing up my guitar just when things were getting good and ask "where's that guy going?" People said, "to work."    As I was headed out for a shift I did not really want on a weekend I often heard of friends that I knew making less money than I did taking grand vacations. I admit I was often jealous but at the same time I was paying those big bucks into social security, retirement accounts, living in the same old house for 40 years, driving cars till the wheels fell off and we feel like those things have came to roost or maybe I should say sit on the beach and fish. It's an added bonus we have our health to do this and grandchildren to keep us laughing while we do it. 

Some may say, "well you guys are just a bunch of barefooting dirty stinking hippies and you don't need all that much." That might just be the key. I hope younger people, my kids and grandkids do as well as we did. I would offer advice but there's the danger that it might be so out of date that it's not relevant anymore. All I can say is that we are all born at a time in history when things are a certain way. How we use those things to find our way is up to us. 

   

Brown Pelicans at the Beach...

There is usually a camp animal on our trips. Most of the time it's the catfish but sometimes we camp in places where we watch the alligators swimming by, the deer come up to be hand fed or maybe there are armadillos waddling through the underbrush. I guess on our beach trip the camp animal was the brown pelican. Cathy says that in her youth when she was fishing with family in the Galveston area these huge birds were almost extinct due to pesticide use by humans and the first attempts to protect the species from hunting were when Teddy Roosevelt set aside Pelican Island in Florida as a wildlife refuge in 1903.   

Cathy caught some good photos on her phone but I managed to get a photo of her talking a good photo of the pelicans. They seem to line up to fly in single file sometimes out over the water but they seemed to also like following the dune line which ran right behind our camper.  

Birds are a big deal to us and we see many kinds during all the times we spend near the water. We and most of our dirty hippie tree hugging friends have an app on the phone that identifies bird calls. That's kind of hard to use when it's noisy like from wind and surf but around the house when sitting on the deck is when I get the most service from this technology. It seems to be very accurate and when it IDs the call and shows a picture of the bird I have usually already visualized it so it helps match call and species. 

The weather is just turning hot so we have the air on but just a week ago we were still sleeping with the bedroom door open to the deck and in the mornings I would wake to busy bird calling. A split screen, it's opening held together by magnets to keep it shut to bugs hangs in the doorway and hearing these calls I dreamed I slipped my hand holding my phone through the opening to try and pick up some of the sound. I looked at the phone app and it identified the call as coming from a bird called a Joy Jamar. 

Cathy later told me that in the eighth grade her and a girl named Joy Jamar got sent to the principle's office. I think she's gaslighting me. Not about the trip to the principle's office but about the girl named Joy Jamar.      

I don't think these birds are good to eat but Teddy protected them because they were hunted for their feathers. In Latin America, the Caribbean and occasionally the U.S people still collect the eggs to eat. The banning of DDT basically saved the species but the thing most likely to do a pelican in is discarded hooks and fishing line.      

 

Beach Camping...

On Sunday afternoon when we arrived at Surfside Beach this was a parking lot. Lots of people out having fun in the sun. This is the free beach. Driving and camping is free on this part compared to the county maintained fee area that begins at the red light where you come off the bridge. We got on the beach at Access Road #2 and driving toward San Luis Pass the day trippers were in full force but we only saw a handful of campers. We picked a spot probably less than a mile past the landmark of the container houses. We set up next to the dunes and sun worshipers cleared by the evening though the last hard cores continued driving up and down Mad Max style on into the night till Monday morning when we were finally alone to the sound of surf and wind.     

This was our first trip to camp without hook ups of any kind. While the Rpod can do some stuff on battery and propane power the generator allows you to run air, big lights, microwave if you need that kind of thing and wall plugs for a coffee pot and phone charging. We picked the Champion 4650 dual fuel generator. We might have made due with something a bit smaller but generators are like tow vehicles better to have more than you need and it has been coming in handy around the house for water slides and power outages. Only draw back is the weight but as long as I only have to set it out of the pickup on the ground by the trailer tongue where we chained it for security as it's our most high dollar camping item I think I'll be ok. 

With the Gulf breezes we opened the pop out tent windows and air conditioning was not necessary. We have not run the air yet on four camping trips from April up till now.    

Beach camping tip: With the generator it's a good idea to run the porch light all night. Probably not needed on less crowded weekdays but I felt like late night drivers could see us. 

We did come home a day early as gusty wind to 30 MPH threatened our pop out tent. With a 13 year old camper there's usually a few things to fix after each trip but they are minor and by leaving we avoided major. I don't think we could have cooked on the fire pit in this wind anyway. 

Last year during May and June I had seen good fishing reports and I was hot for that kind of action but with the wind churning the surf I remembered why I always preferred late July on into the fall. If the wind shifts north and east the water is calmer and clearer. When I was a young man I'd battle that kind of water but now days I'll even give up swimming to just sit and watch the waves and birds.    

We both like the beach and have many fond memories of childhood, coming of age teen trips and vacations with our own family to the beach. We will be coming back as we hone our cut the cord camping.  

 

Boykin Springs Hike and Cool Creek Water...

We spent Memorial on a hike and a swim at Boykin Springs and the surrounding Angelina National Forest. I was probably about 16 years old the first time I camped here with friends. As a young adult I spent good times in the late 70s and early 80s with my dad and friends camping and fishing for the stocked rainbow trout and have continued all these years to hike and fish there with my own kids. Mary has kept up this tradition bringing her family down here for hikes, swims and as a backdrop for family photos.   

Right near this spot in the photo is where I picked up my blues name, mudbelly. It came about as I was sliding down the muddy spring water slickened banks of the creek to splash into deep cool pools.

I noted that while there was plenty of spring flow the old artesian well pipes look to have run dry. Once while in college we were camping there we decided to shower under the cold flowing water of the natural bathhouse. Once a couple of us got well started on our bathing the rest of our camp buddies suddenly appeared with cameras and took plenty of photos. Years later when one of these friends married his wife discovered the naked photos of me and reportedly destroyed them. Occasionally I get emails saying something like, "we have pictures of what you been doing." I don't know if any of those photos survived and have been posted on the internet but I would click on a link sent from a trusted source.   

I think I'll sit in this cool creek water a lot this summer. I'll have probably wear a swim suit. 

That's equivalent to me picking up a 75 pound rock.  

Creek bank caves. 

Dam building 101. Man can't help even at 6 years old from making environmental alterations. 

I would guess that one quarter of the old lake has been sanded in since the late 1970s by the spring feed creek that feeds it and the down stream creek that flows to the Neches River. There was a time when I stood at the tree line and casted rooster tail spinners to catch trout where the sand is now.   

Things change but it is the perfect place for a first cold Texas creek water experience. 

I think this summer we will go upstream to find cool pools. It's fine sand and there are no step banks and slippery rocks. The grand kids handle those things just fine but I'm pretty big to be toted out if I fall and break a hip.  

I believe that round post on the right of the photo is all that is left of an Eagle Scout project  built by Matt of our old Troop 135 that was sponsored by St. Patrick's Catholic Church. The bridge has been wrecked by the relentless push of water and sand. It was part of the trail that ran from Bouton Lake Bouton Lake to Boykin Springs. I have never hiked the whole thing and only spent time on the Bouton Lake side. I can't seem to find an internet map so it may not be open.  

Nice hilly rock features in the area. There was an emergency landing field here during WW2 where bomber crews could put down if they had trouble during training missions over the vast East Texas forests. 

The old Aldredge ghost town. I was 16 the first time I rode down here with Gil Stovall in his 1964 Fairlane station wagon. The car had no air conditioning and the roads were so dusty that anywhere we touched in the car left hand prints. On this trip hikers we met on the trail reported turning back because of the mud so we drove on good gravel roads in late model cars to within a couple of hundred yards before hiking the rest of the way on a clear trail. Bring skeeter spray.   

My Senior Parks Pass got me in Boykin Springs free. US Forest Service parks, at least in this area are a bit rougher that the nice Texas State Parks I usually camp at but the facilities are good enough to wash up a baby after a day in the woods.