Leaving Austin, I drove to Dallas, where I spent Friday night playing some great music with one of Dallas’ many ukulele clubs. Then, on Saturday I taught a bookbinding class for a community based art center called Oil and Cotton.
O and C's neighbor, Davis St. Espresso, does not offer Internet so that people will use it as a social gathering place. The idea worked; the place was as lively as a brewpub. I guess a picture would be worth a thousand words.
Dallas is east Texas, but really it is just about exactly mid-ways across the USA, half-way between the Atlantic and the Pacific. (For reference TX is bigger than CA: Texas is 790 miles from north to south and California is 770. Texas is 660 miles east to west while California is only 250. So I had a long drive ahead of me to get to Albuquerque, NM. I soon left behind and . I drove endless hours, bucking headwinds, watching the water and pines of east Texas disappear as I entered entered the flat and dry windblown farmland of central Texas, and then there was only the high desert of west Texas.
I stopped in Clovis to visit the Norman Petty Studios, where Buddy Holly recorded his hits. Clovis is a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. It is really nowhere (did I say that before?) so hard to imagine that the music recorded there (and mostly I mean Buddy Holly’s songs) was played round the globe and influence so many budding musicians in the 1960s (like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.) I was shown thru the studio by David Bigham, who was one of The Roses, the studio band. David actually sang backup on some of Buddy's records. Buddy died at 22 and David was not much older at the time. He told me he spend most of his working life at Walmart, and pretty much never mentioned his musical career because who would believe that he actually sang with Buddy Holley on “Its so Easy to Fall in Love.” He played me the song in the control room, through the original studio monitor speakers. It was pretty amazing to meet someone like that, but what really sticks with me about the visit was hearing the music through those studio monitor speakers. It was so rich. I am so used to hearing music sound crummy coming out of a little iPhone speaker or its equivalent.
After teaching a bookbinding class in Albuquerque for their book arts group LIBROS, I left the truck and trailer in long term parking at the airport and flew home.
On March 22, 2019 Donna and I fly back to Albuquerque and then we will drive to Colorado visiting Colorado Springs 3/26, Denver 3/27, and Boulder 3/28. We will park the truck and trailer in Denver till the end of June, then drive to Santa, Idaho for Jim Croft's Old Ways Workshop. In October we will return to Idaho for a show of our work at The University of Idaho, then drive home through Seattle, Portland, and Eugene. That’s our story and we are sticking to it. To end this post, here are a few interesting vehicles I encountered on this leg of our trip: The first is Donn’s Depot in Austin. It is a piano bar made out of 3 or 4 train cars that were cobbled together.
The second is the shell of an old bus that is used as sun/rain sheltered outdoor seating for the Davis St. Espresso cafe next to Oil and Cotton.
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