Changes to the Texas State Park System

My work is a swirling soul pantomime, a slow two-step danced in a country-western cathedral under a lone star sky. The power of this place at this time lies in the concatenations; our own ghostly fathers live among this selfsame dust. I picture myself flowing outward, releasing steadily, and leaving a trail of photographs, poems, and prose that says “this is who we are and this is how we lived and this is what we loved.”

I hope you tag along, dropping by from time to time to see where I am on my journey. And if you see me out there somewhere, stop and say “howdy!”

Earlier today, I was at the intersection of Braker Lane and Lamar Boulevard in north Austin. It’s a standard, nondescript intersection. There is a CVS pharmacy on one corner,  a Goodyear Tire Center on another, a Penske truck rental place, a Thai restaurant —- your typical north Austin suburban scene. But that particular intersection is anything but typical for me, filled as it is with ghosts and memories of youthful innocence and echoes of long ago.

It all slides indelibly into the past …

1979. The summer between my junior and senior years in high school. I was 17 years old, skinny as a rail and, having recently purchased my first car, exploring the world around me for the first time.

I had headed to Austin with my friend Eric to spend a week with his older brother, Jeff, who was a senior at UT. Jeff had a roommate named Darcy, a beautiful, blond graduate student with a great smile and a crackling wit and sparkling, knowing eyes. She was worldly and radiant and she’d go braless in the apartment and I’m pretty sure that I started sweating whenever she was around. I was awestruck by the idea that Jeff was living with this woman in a purely platonic fashion. It was treated so matter-of-factly, as were it a simple matter of course and the most natural thing in the world. I fell in love with Darcy, who was way out of my league but kind enough to pretend not to notice. And I fell in love with Austin, a magical place where such creatures abounded in a time of free love and so many other flavors of goodness.

Jeff was in summer school and one night he went to the library while Eric and Darcy and I stayed at the apartment and drank beer. After awhile, Darcy said, “Let’s go to the Stallion and get some chicken fried steak.” So we drove over to North Lamar and pigged out and drank even more beer. Mind you, the drinking age was 18 at the time and I was only 17 and I was just SURE the waiter was going to ask for some ID but this was Austin and it was that summer, that wonderful summer when everything was safe and there were no terrorists and nothing was scary and we wore flip-flops everywhere and slept in late whenever we wanted to.

When we were done eating, Darcy said, “I want to show you guys something.” So we piled into her little VW Super Beetle and headed north on Lamar. It began to get kind of rural-looking by and by, especially after we got north of 183. Darcy said, “you know that this street, Lamar, used to be called the Dallas Highway? It’s true. Before they built I-35, Lamar was the highway that you had to take to get to Dallas.” A couple of minutes later she whipped into a dusty parking lot on the west side of the road —- exactly where that CVS pharmacy on the northwest corner of Braker and Lamar is,  where I was earlier today.

We got out. There was a full moon and I could see a long, whitewashed, wood frame building in front of us. Darcy started getting mystical, launching into doe-eyed Stevie Nicks mode. “Listen,” she said, “Can you hear it? Can you feel it?”

“Feel what?” I asked.

“Shhh …. listen close,” she said. “Can you feel the vibrations?”

We’d been listening to John Prine’s “Illegal Smile” on the 8 track in her VW as we’d been driving along and I was beginning to wonder if Darcy had secretly partaken of some things that Eric and I had been unaware of. Because, you know, Darcy was all about the partaking.

“Darcy,” Eric asked, “What the hell are you talking about?”

That’s when she pounded Eric in the chest with the palms of her hands. “What am I talking about? I’m talking about Elvis, man! I’m talking about Hank Williams! I’m talking about Johnny Cash and Johnny Horton and ….”

“Who is Johnny Horton?” I asked.

“You know, Johnny Horton,” she said, “he sang that song about the Battle of New Orleans.”

Then she launched into the chorus:

“We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they commenced to runnin’
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico”

I remembered the song because my dad had practically worn it out on our record player when I was a kid.

“Okay, so what about Johnny Horton?” I asked.

“Guys,” she said, “you are standing in front of the world famous Skyline club. They closed it down a year or two ago. The Uranium Savages played there on the last night of operations and then they shut her down. Anyway, this is the place where Elvis sang and where Johnny Cash sang and where all of the greats used to sing when they came to Austin.”

I stood looking at the building in the moonlight. Maybe it was the beer, but I WAS beginning to hear, or feel, something.

“But this is the strangest thing about this building,” Darcy said, “it is the place where Hank Williams performed his last concert, at the end of 1952. He died in the backseat of a car less than two weeks later. And it’s also the place where Johnny Horton played HIS last gig, about 8 years after Hank Williams played his. Horton finished his performance that night at this club, got into his car, and started driving back to Louisiana. He never made it. He was killed in Milano, about sixty miles from here, when an oncoming driver crossed into his lane and hit him head on. So both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton played their very last gigs right here, in this building right in front of you. You should both kneel down. You’re in the presence of greatness!”

I admitted that it was a pretty strange coincidence that both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton had played their last shows in this building.

“But it gets even weirder than that,” Darcy said. “Hank Williams was married to a woman named Billie Jean when he died. After he died, Billie Jean remarried ….. to Johnny Horton. She and Johnny were married at the time Johnny was killed in Milano. So not only did both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton play their last gigs in this building, but they were both married to the same woman when they died.”

I shuddered, beginning to feel kind of uncomfortable with the whole thing. I thought maybe she was making it all up. But I found out later that it was all true. Legends had played at that place and a few of them left it and never played again.

*********

Hank Williams played his last show at the Skyline Club on December 19th, 1952. Witnesses say that, in spite of his terrible health and drinking and drugging, he tore it up that night, playing for three hours. Less than two weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, he died while en route to a show in Canton, Ohio.

Here is a photo of the advertisement that ran in the Austin newspaper at that time:

Here is a sketch of the Skyline Club:

And here is a photo of Hank Williams and Johnny Horton together. Hank is second from the left and Johnny Horton is on the far right:

**********

I only saw Darcy a few times after that, but I still think of her from time to time, even now, even after all of these years, wondering what became of her.

After the Skyline Club closed in the mid-1970’s, the building sat vacant for a few years before it became the second incarnation of Soap Creek Saloon. It operated as Soap Creek before Soap Creek moved south of the river. The building fell into disrepair and was finally bulldozed in 1989, bringing the end to an era the likes of which we will never see hereabouts again.

So anyway, next time you’re at Braker and North Lamar, stop and look at that CVS pharmacy there on the Northwest Corner. Say a prayer for Hank and Johnny and Johnny and Elvis, and consider the sad things that we do to the past.

Somebody —- I can’t remember who —- once said that longing on a large scale is what makes history. I never knew what be meant by that,  but sitting at that intersection while waiting to make my left turn onto Braker Lane, I began to get an inkling. So I punched up some Jerry Jeff Walker on the Ipod and sang along:

I FEEL LIKE HANK WILLIAMS TONIGHT

Well, I could live my whole life, without a phone call
The likes of which I got today.
It was only my wife, said “hello” then “goodbye”.
And told me she’s going away.

Well I didn’t cry, It was all cut and dried.
I hung up before I realized.
Turned up my stereo, I walked to the window,
Stared at the storm clouds outside.

Chorus:
And I play classical music when it rains,
I play country when I am in pain.
But I won’t play Beethoven, the mood’s just not right
Oh, I feel like Hank Williams tonight.

There’s no explanation, not even a reason,
No talk of the good times we had.
Was it me, was it her, I don’t know for sure,
And that’s why I’m feeling so bad.

Chorus:
Hey, I play jazz when I am confused,
I play country whenever I lose.
Bird’s saxophone, it just don’t seem right
Now, I feel like Hank Williams toight.

Lately I’ve been thinkin’, I just might quit drinkin’.
Now I don’t know all-in-all.
I just might stay home, get drunk all alone,
And punch a few holes in the wall.

Chorus:
But when I’m real high I play rock’n’roll,
I play country when I’m losing control.
I don’t play Chuck Berry quite as much as I’d like,
Now, I feel like Hank Williams tonight.

A man gets a lot of time to think about things as he’s wandering the back roads of Texas. On March 6th, my thoughts inevitably turn to the Alamo.

The first question is why the battle was even fought in the first place.

In retrospect, it’s apparent that neither side should have engaged the other at the Alamo. Santa Anna had no strategic need to take the mission because its location 125 miles inland from the gulf coast did not command any indispensable land or water routes. Not only that, but supplies for Santa Anna’s army could have come more easily by  river or along the coast from Matamoros.

Having said that, Santa Anna had several "moral" reasons for wanting to attack. One was to avenge the defeat of General Cos a couple of months earlier in San Antonio. Another was to show the Texians that they would pay a price for resisting. But he needn’t have attacked. He could have waited a few more days for the siege guns that were en route and that would have reduced the Alamo to rubble without much in the way of Mexican losses. But his stupidity and his ego (that whole "Napoleon of the West" thing) cost his army several hundred of its best soldiers, weakening it.

Likewise, the defenders had no good strategic reason for defending the Alamo. Neill and Bowie made the initial decision to defend the Alamo just because they thought they could. Then, after they were trapped, basic beliefs of honor and manhood took over. After it became clear that they were not going to get help from outside and that surrender was not an option they basically had the choice of trying to escape or fighting to the end. They started saying to each other, in essence, "I’ll die before I turn yella." So, even though they had no strategic necessity to defend the Alamo, they defended it for reasons perfectly clear to themselves, just as Santa Anna attacked it for reasons perfectly clear to himself.

Of course, it is also true that the the sacrifice of the men at the Alamo benefited the Texian cause in several ways. First, the destruction of the Alamo woke up the Texians, especially the older settlers who, for the most part, did not favor revolution. Second, the story of fighting to the last man stirred imaginations and increased support for the Texian cause in the United States. Third, it weakened Santa Anna’s army significantly and provided a rallying cry for Texians for the rest of the war. Lastly, by delaying the Mexican invasion for two+ weeks, the Alamo defenders gave the convention that met on March 1st the time to declare independence and organize a temporary government for Texas.

One of the things that many Texans don’t know is that, nearly a year after the battle, Juan Seguin brought his company of cavalry to San Antonio and examined what survived of the piles of charred remains from the three pyres of burned Texian bodies that Santa Anna had set alight right after the battle.

Seguin gave orders that the bells in San Fernando should start to peal, and keep ringing throughout the day, then engaged a Bexar carpenter to build a coffin. They covered the interior with black cloth, then placed the ashes, small bits of bone etc… from the two smaller piles in the box. Though the contents reflected the remains of many different men, Seguin caused to be inscribed on the inside of the lid just three names: Bowie, Crockett and Travis. Laying a Texian rifle and sword atop the casket, his men carried it to San Fernando, and there it remained as a procession gathered in the street outside, the bells ringing all the while.

At 4:00 p.m. Seguin led the mourners back through the main street of town, across the San Antonio river, and back toward the Alamo and the remaining pile of ashes. Seguin gave a speech (in Spanish), volleys of rifle shots were fired etc… Then the box was buried. But the spot went unmarked. They did not think to mark it. Who could forget the final resting place of the immortal Alamo garrison? And yet, within a generation, it was lost.

Today, the coffin is probably covered over by a highway or a shopping mall.

So now, if you didn’t know it before, you know the rest of the story.

And I feel kind of like Paul Harvey.

1. The Alamo Story, by JR Edmondson: A general history of the Alamo itself,  from the time before the Alamo was built to the present day.

2. Three Roads to the Alamo, by William C. Davis: Biographies of Travis, Bowie, and Crockett. Thorough but engaging.  Davis was able to uncover a tremendous amount of new material, especially about Jim Bowie. Some have criticized his take on Bowie because it’s less than flattering, but let’s face it: Bowie was a flawed man. To my mind, Davis’ account is both fair and even-handed.

3. The Alamo Reader, by Todd Hansen: The most thorough collection of complete primary accounts about the Alamo. This is where you can read the actual accounts written by the Mexican generals and other participants and spectators.

4. The Illustrated Alamo 1836 - A Photographic Journey, by Mark Lemon: A detailed study of the Alamo Compound in 1836, it’s hard to understand the battle without understanding the ground it was fought on. Mark Lemon gives us an historically and archaeologically verified view of the Alamo compound.

5. Texian Iliad, by Stephen L. Hardin: A general military overview of the Texas revolution. Note that Texian Iliad is not about the Alamo per se, though the Alamo is necessarily part of the story, but about the entire military campaign that lead to Texas independence.  It places the siege of the Alamo in a broader military context.

“Here I am living on a soil that my people have been living and working and dying on for more than a hundred years—the soil, as it happens, of Texas. My roots go down into this soil as deep as mesquite roots go. This soil has nourished me as the banks of the lovely Guadalupe River nourish cypress trees, as the Brazos bottoms nourish the wild peach, as the gentle slopes of East Texas nourish the sweet-smelling pines, as the barren, rocky ridges along the Pecos nourish the daggered lechuguilla. I am at home here, and I want not only to know about my home land, I want to live intelligently on it. I want certain data that will enable me to accommodate myself to it. Knowledge helps sympathy to achieve harmony.”

Wise words, indeed. Having left you with them, I’m going to go out with my camera to acquire certain data that will enable me to accommodate myself to Texas.

Preservation Texas is the only private, nonprofit membership organization in Texas that is dedicated to being a full-service statewide preservation organization.  They have just released their Annual List of Texas’ Most Endangered Places.  Please consider Volunteering  or Donating to help these fine folks out. 

TEXAS NEEDS YOU!

A really great video of Billy Gibbons, Frank Beard, and Dusty Hill talking about women, money

I wonder how strange it must be for these guys to play places like Paris and Stockholm, Sweden and see tens of thousands of fans in the audience. Not bad for that little ol’ band from Texas, eh?