The negative things in your life eventually become positive if you give them time and mileage. Anybody can do it, but many people give up when the effort seems futile. Making sure your information is accurate requires a work ethic akin to, as Kurt Vonnegut described the writing discipline, inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. And history has a very definite right or wrong. But with age and experience comes knowledge that can entertain in a much more satisfying way. When I was a young writer, I didn’t really know anything so I relied on a fearless attitude to get folks to read my stories. It wasn’t until my mid-40s that I realized nothing makes me feel more alive than telling the stories of the deceased musicians whose influences still reverberate today. I considered myself more like a roast comedian with a backstage pass.īut zingers don’t linger, and these days I’m a tyrant only to my tires. I was tagged a contrarian, with which I totally disagree. I could be outlandish or just like everybody else. There was no right or wrong, only interesting or boring. Before I devoted myself to history, I was prone to hysteria, as a rock critic in love with the notion that opinion can’t be proven incorrect. I wanted to be where the action was, where the music roared and the spirits flowed. Long-dormant clubs used to be dead to me. I stood there, in that place where it all started, for a long time, letting the space inhabit me as much as I did it. George Jones, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard are among the many legends who have acknowledged a debt to Frizzell’s jazz-like phrasing. Highway 80 in Big Spring is a shrine of Texas music, as important to the development of the honky-tonk sound as Liverpool’s Cavern Club was to the British Invasion. As the former Ace of Clubs, this decrepit structure at 2605 W. What drew me, though, was the small wooden clump of a stage where Corsicana native Lefty Frizzell invented a new, syllable-stretching way to sing country music in the late 1940s. The building had most recently been used to store dog food for the Howard County Humane Society, which attracted the vermin. Without fear, I stepped into the shards of sunlight coming through the broken windows. Rats! But I didn’t drive six hours to be turned away by the threat of hideous, long-tailed disease carriers (though I have driven six hours because neither window or aisle were available). So when I entered the abandoned building from an unlocked door and saw the colony-size bag of rodent poison on the floor, I lurched back. Those are my biggest fears besides death. Rats and the middle seats of full flights.
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