Shakey Graves

Shakey Graves’s first official video

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:40:18 -0400

Shakey Graves’s first official video

Found writings on Pioneertown circa 2009

Sat, 11 May 2013 15:12:20 -0400

her name is Tiadora.

shes the piece of jewelry you leave at home but always want to be wearing.

at a point, in between the desert sand and the moonless sky, i sat, mumbling about lighters and yelping at shooting stars.

with Tiadora giggling behind me.

sometimes life is sweet to you, and girls tickle your arm for no particular reason.

and then you leave when the sun rises.

and the dust clings to you easier than the human interaction you worked on all night.

sleeping seven feet away from someone you want to be sleeping five inches from boggles the mind and urges and urges.

but at the end of the day, same as the night before and the ones before that, I will end up walking, out to the road, down away from the lights

waiting for something to find me, something to attack, something to bite my neck and reveal the mysteries of the dark.

but duty calls, must build tents, must survive, must survive as a leader amongst men.

outside of the circle of light, I can smoke my pipe and sit on my fence.

i am a good dog.

hello Shakey :) wondering what your ethnicity is...?

Sat, 11 May 2013 15:08:31 -0400

brown

Sorry, I've looked online but haven't found it...who did the original of "Tomorrow"?

Sat, 11 May 2013 15:08:19 -0400

oh whoops, yeah i did.

So can you clarify which songs on your "The Story of My Life" EP are covers? I know "LA" is a Neil Young cover but my friend insists "Chinatown" is as well, but I'm convinced its not a cover lol. Are there other covers besides "LA" on there?

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:27:54 -0400

Chinatown was written by me and so was story of my life, the rest are covers

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:26:16 -0400

Hey Shakey, greetings from Houston! I noticed you like the open D tuning. How did you come to use it and do you write in open D exclusively or translate it from standard? Like your style man.

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:57:47 -0400

The majority of my songs are in standard tuning but I started writing in open D about five years ago. It came out of natural stagnation/symbiosis and the general need to keep my brain guessing as to where my fingers were going. Open tunings allow for a wider range of simultaneous rhythmic and melodic finger picking patterns and generally sounds fairly bad ass.

THE STORM APPROACHES!

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 13:56:36 -0500

SHAKEY GRAVES SXSW SCHEDULE!

MARCH 12th: 9pm OFFICIAL SHOWCASE @ THE PARISH!

Super excited to be playing my home field with some of my favorite bands in town…the bill includes my homies Wild Child and the mighty mighty Mother Falcon….Big time City Of Austin showcase.

MARCH 14th: 1pm Americana Music Association @ Antones!!

This bill is too good, one of my all time heart throbs Billy Bragg will be playing later in the day

8pm HEARTBREAKER BANQUET @ Willie Nelsons Ranch

This is the crown jewel of my SXSW line up…the bill includes Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Shovels and Rope, Phosphorescent and more! Tickets are hard to come by but I am giving away 25 free tickets RIGHT NOW!

Go to: https://heartbreaker.preferredfan.com/
and type in the code: shakes!!

hurry, because even if you have the code the tickets are 1st come 1st serve. Each code unlocks an allotment of tickets so there will be more than one chance.
Once you have a ticket confirmed you will be emailed your ticket. Make sure to print them out or bring your device with barcode so we can scan you in at the gate! If you dont have a ticket, you will not be allowed on a bus or in the gate.

MARCH 15th: 5pm EYE IN THE SKY’S FUTURE OF MUSIC SHOWCASE @ The Shiner Saloon

A bunch of homies will be jamming out all day in this clusterfuck of music in the heart of downtown….A lot of my personal favorites including Wild Child and Hello Caller!

MARCH 16th: 1pm SXSJ! @ Hotel San Jose

Awesome day party at the beautiful Jan Jose with bands like The Heartless Bastards and Dawes

And finally……
MARCH 17TH 11:40 PM…..SECRET FAREWELL SHOW AT STUBBS!

And by then hopefully we have survived!!!!!!!!!!

How old is Shakey Graves?

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:20:45 -0500

Shakey Graves - Proper Fence shot by austin 360 shot in my new...

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 03:42:00 -0500

Shakey Graves - Proper Fence shot by austin 360

shot in my new house…..badass

mattrainwaters: Outtake from an upcoming feature with Austin...

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:06:54 -0500

mattrainwaters:

Outtake from an upcoming feature with Austin musician Shakey Graves.

TOUR DATES 2013

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:15:00 -0500

TOURING WITH HE’S MY BROTHER SHE’S MY SISTER & PAPER BIRD

FEBRUARY

22-Feb The Parish Austin, TX

23-Feb Fitzgerald’s Downstairs Houston, TX

24-Feb One Eyed Jax New Orleans, LA

26-Feb Blue Canoe Tupelo, MS

27-Feb Club Down under Tallahassee, FL

28-Feb Back Booth Orlando, FL

MARCH

1-Mar Skipper’s Smokehouse Tampa, FL

2-Mar Vagabond Miami, FL

3-Mar Burro Bar Jacksonville, FL

5-Mar Pour House Raleigh, NC

6-Mar ISIS Asheville, NC

7-Mar The Earl Atlanta, GA

8-Mar High Watt Nashville, TN

9-Mar Plush STL St. Louis, MO

New Shakey Graves EP

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:11:00 -0500

Donor Blues EP by Shakey Graves

Will The Circle Be Unbroken

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 18:07:00 -0500

FRIDAY OCTOBER 2nd 2009 - 8:15pm - FULL MOON
Rachel puts a few chocolate squares in my hand and gives me one of those looks.
She tells me that the band is basically giving them away.
Edward Sharpe and the something something.
Ive heard the name on the radio a few times but who is counting.
They are setting up on a small outdoor stage to play to a large dusty crowd of white people dressed like Indians and confederate soldiers and I am about to be irreversibly on psychedelic drugs.

The setting is right.

Pioneertown California, an unincorporated village in the Morongo basin that
started as a live-in old west motion picture set, built in the 1940s. The movie set was designed to provide a place for the actors to live, and at the same time to have their homes used as part of the movie set.

Since the golden glow of Hollywood turned chrome, the cantina set was converted into a crazy biker bar/restaurant called Pappy and Harriets which
is the only decent bar in miles. Great musicians seem to flock there to play obscure shows to withered desert oddballs and trippy youths who had the gumption to drive two hours into the middle of nowhere.

I fight my way up to the front of the crowd to try and figure out what the fuck this band is doing.
Alexander mulls around in a white suit, drenched in eastern jewlery while the piano player hands chocolate out by the handful to select soldiers.

I followed the He’s My Brother She’s My Sister clan out here to watch them play the Manimal music festival and am now melting into a beautifully surreal fake western tourist trap. They dont even play until the next day, but we are out on the prowl, full of piss and fungus.

Edward Sharpe kicks into their cult like set and the crowd throbs with enjoyment. I am baffled by how many people know every damn inch of this music, its excited and a little overwhelming. The face paint and the cowgirls, the fringe and the bandanas after about four songs its all too much for me.

This band is haunted.
Must flee.

The scene inside is a whole different monster.
Amanda Jo Williams is playing with her psychedelic country band.

5 Track is using his guitar to speak, Feather uses her body to drum, and Bron from Crooked Cowboy plays his thick psycho bass licks.
This is more my pace.
This is more my home.

I pause and think how odd it is, these familiar strangers who I adore.
I mull over this sense of scene and participation.
The voice screams about how this all means something, how this is all headed somewhere, and it chirps about the road that brought me here.

You see there always seems to be one ominous step from which you can can trace the circumstances of your present life back to.
In the medical world its often referred to as the patient zero or the Index Case.

JANUARY 2009: THE INDEX CASE

After a little less than a month in Los Angeles I awoke one morning and the voice in the brain said that needed to see live bands.

I decided to feed the beast and promptly took to the internet in an attempt to find some amazing sound to go witness.
I started in on the local music reviews and found the usual hodge podge of things I could care less about and eventually stumbled across a lengthy article about a local Indie Rock foursome called Lemon Sun.

According to the review they had played an amazing show the night before at Spaceland and the writer praised the group for its catchy hooks stage presence. There was an offhand mention that towards the end of the show the lead singer invited his girlfriend and sister on stage to perform a couple of songs.
They had just started a side project called “He’s My Brother She’s My Sister” which at the time consisted of his tap dancing lady and his singing sister. The review explained that the two groups combined to make a sort of ramshackle family band and praised the night as a total success.

For whatever reason, this was the only review that I read in its entirety that day.
I found myself on the Lemon Sun Myspace listening to all the tunes and pondering the joys of having an Indie rock group.
I imagined some future me standing on a stage band leading some good cheese.

I closed the window and moved on, never to think about Lemon Sun again.

The only other name that stood out in my web hunt was a woman named Amanda Jo Williams.
Coincidentally, months before, I had gotten an internet friend request on myspace from this odd dame.

She wrote odd country songs with elaborate twang and at that point I was totally convinced that her accent and mystique were a complete sham.
I figured she was just some gorgeous 20 something with a web cam who knew she was gorgeous and wrote cute songs on the internet for her cat…named Gorgeous.

Lo and behold, Amanda Jo was playing somewhere in Silverlake that night.

I considered the oddity of it, and her name seemed to glow a bit in the sea of confusing band monikers.
So I looked closer, after checking out the other band she was playing with and was instantly sold. They were a group called Crooked Cowboy And The Freshwater Indians and they kicked ass.
So the plan was set.
Go see Crooked Cowboy and figure out what the fuck was up with Amanda Jo’s crazy little girl voice.

So, later that night I descended on the city in a garish cowboy hat, trying my very best to wear my state on my sleeve.
Just me, cigarettes, and an overpriced bar to kill the time.

I found the strange gallery, jostled for a decent position, posted up and pretended I was born there.

Amanda Jo came on stage with her circus of country musicians and played her crazy children’s guitar while chirping bizzarely sexual death/love songs.
She was great.

Amanda Jo Williams and her son in their home 2009

I was taken aback by the realization that her accent wasn’t fake and that her stage presence was tremendously interesting.
Crooked Cowboy followed and blew me away with their psychotic spaghetti western opera music.

So far the night was a sonic success and within about an hour I was approached by a man.

“Excuse me, do you play guitar?”

The hat must have worked.

“um…why yes I do”

”oh…cool. Well my name is Rob I’m in a band called Lemon Sun and we are looking for a new guitar player.”

I was taken aback.
Lemon Sun?
You mean the lead singer of the only band I had heard about in L.A. just inquired whether or not I might be able to play guitar with them?

I told him the story, he seemed mildly surprised, and we chit chatted a bit before he wandered off into the show and disappeared.

Rob Kolar in the Lemon Sun practice space 2009

SATURDAY OCTOBER 3rd 2009 - 1:15 am - FULL MOON

I am sitting in a room at the Joshua Tree Inn surrounded by a panel of my personal heroes.

Amanda Jo is sitting across from me playing her children’s guitar, Bron (Crooked Cowboy) is inaudibly shredding on an electric bass next to her.
Rob, Rachel, and Lauren are there there bathed in a pink light from the psychedelic oil lamp we have set up.
It paints a large pink and yellow circle on the ceiling of the room which mimics the heavy full moon that hangs in the night sky.

In 1973 Graham Parsons passed away in one of these little bungalows, he had been out in the desert chasing the same UFOs and talking to the same cacti that I am now plagued by.
The whole room seems like some steamy throwback.
Everything is psychedelic and talented, a new guard of local oddballs sing their hearts out while friends and strangers lounge in the dark and roll on the floor. Dark moody oil projectors and confused people makes the boring hotel room a wet dripping environment.

Without a doubt this is a moment that will always stay in my mind.
It was the first night I ever heard Rob play “Touch The Lightning”, it was the first night I ever played “Roll The Bones” for anyone.
At one point we are all singing a haunted version of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” which seemed to me the most frighteningly nostalgic song I could imagine singing.

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, Lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky

Something about it rang all too true while the poor hindu hotel manager pleaded through the open door for us to stop.
But we wouldn’t.
We couldn’t.
The Ghosts were flowing and the blood was mixing.

Later that night Rob and I spot what appears to be a flame hovering hundreds of feet in the sky and instantly decide to chase it down.
El Pipe got wind of our adventure and jumped into the car as we peeled out of the driveway with our heads craned out of the windows.

We took off listening to George Thorogood And The Destroyers, chasing the fire in the sky, following the ancestral oddities of the California desert.

“What is that?”

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!”

“What. is. that?”

We never determined where or what the fire in the sky was.
We drove for miles but the flame never got closer, it seemed to stay at a relative distance, flickering, licking the air.
We considered just chasing it, forever, to Mexico if we had to but the sun was rising, the night was ending, and they had a show to play in a few hours.

We all felt that the journey itself was a reward and that the mystery was always worth the chase.

He’s My Brother She’s My Sister plays Manimal Music Festival 2009

In researching the time frame I came across this article from LA Record written later that year:

” …The road called my name and I traveled back up it toward Silverlake Lounge. When I arrived there, I was informed that I missed Shakey Graves, a solo artist who played with only an acoustic guitar yet was still capable of enthralling the crowd. Following Shakey Graves was the Amanda Jo Williams group, who collectively play a very stylized brand of “rural-folk.” In addition to her already stellar lineup of musicians, Lemon Sun’s and He’s My Brother, She’s My Sister’s Robert Kolar joined his girlfriend Lauren “Little Feather” Brown on stage for percussion on a song; additionally, the room was full of musicians such as drummer Pipe from both Lemon Sun and HMBSMS and Leslie from the Badgers, giving the evening a warm feeling that I imagine the original C.B.G.B.’s possessing long ago.

-LA Record Nov 11 2009

FOR MORE PHOTOS VISIT: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjtBxx8U

2009 Introduction: City Of Unemployment

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 14:54:00 -0500

I have been playing live with an acoustic guitar in various shitty restaurants and bars for over seven years and only within the last two have I been able to properly represent myself in front of an audience.

For most my friends and family Shakey Graves is a weird pile of burned CDs in some treasure drawer Covered in drawings and full of hissy bizarre home recordings.

I am loaded down with easily 200+ recordings in various states and of different qualities that have gone unheard. I have spent so much time simply trying to emulate music that deeply affected me or trying to write trashy songs to express the horrid weight that sits on the human spine.
Recently in listening to these songs I realized that they hold as much weight as any tune I have put in the public arena thus far.

At one point I made every album differently and titled every CD Individually.
At times I would sell up to 15 different albums at one show.
Throughout Texas and California there are all sorts of bizarre hand crafted paper sleeves, cut out of magazines and full of hand drawn crap crumpled up in the back of peoples cars or buried in a “might be important” pile.

So, for posterity’s sake and my own sanity I have decided to start releasing the music, drawings, photographs, and writing that oozed out on the journey to what now has become “Shakey Graves”. Most of these unheard songs are written very specifically due to influences that might never come around again. So now, for the first time I am going to try and explain it all.

Why? Who for? What was I eating? What was I smoking? Who was I trying to fuck?

Lets start with 2009….

Preface:

We pick up the journey in January of 2009.

Our hero, having raped and killed a woman on the Lifetime Channel had made a decent sum of money.
So, he did what any hero would do: Buy a fancy white car and move to Los Angeles to make more money.

Little did he know what awaited him.

This was not his first bout with Los Angeles.

Years before he moved here with his mother to do the very same thing.
This went well, but culminated with her becoming bed ridden in Texas with an emergency hysterectomy and our hero losing his mind and ending up in an insane asylum (a tale for another day).

yet! Still! Even after this amazingly improbable event occured, our hero once again found himself waist deep in the city of angels perusing his dreams a mere year after the tragedies of circumstance had challanged…..but this time he brought a girl.

Oh, how closely the city of angels placed its mirror.
Old unholy shadows called forth the unholy ghouls that gather above the head of a boy in his late teens as our hero met his first ghost.

started playing the haunted music (a tale for another day).

So once again, with pride in full swing and a room purchased sight unseen our hero gallantly drove down his haunted ancestral trail with his white stallion.
Towards the haunted roads of children and purchase where he had faced the only true battles of his young life.

And here the tale begins:

When I moved to Los Angeles in January of 2009 life rolled out in front of me like a thick carpet. It was a prime example of life having its own ideas and in retrospect this was without a doubt one of the most crucial and formative years of my life thus far.

I was holed up in the back unit of an old school triplex in Culver City.
I took over the space from a fellow named Doug who knew my mother.
Apparently Doug had recently broken up with his long term girlfriend and decided to do what any blue blooded American hippie would do.

He sold all her stuff and bought a ticket to Hawaii.

So this translated magically into me occupying a fully furnished wood-paneled bungalow with my own fireplace.
Dishes in the cabinet and sheets on the bed, a fully set up man-boy-bat cave.

I hung my Red Rider BB gun over the mantle, and nestled in.

My next door neighbor/landlord was an outstandingly interesting fellow.

He was a genuine OG vato in his 50s with a smooth accent and a perfect mustache who washed his Mercedes daily and kept his house in immaculate shape.

Coincidentally, my mother was out doing some work in LA when I moved in so she came and checked in on the house. I was Ill prepared for the following circumstance.

You see, my mother grew up in south Texas where there are essentially four things to do,
Get born, play football, drink beer, and eventually die.
All of these things involve Jesus in some serious way and the mindset lends itself to a classic blend of spanglish slang and smooth, rural, hispanic gangsters.

Long story short, my landlord meets my mother and latin sparks fly.

Suddenly my mom is walking strangely, her years shed and she is a coy catholic girl with nothing to lose.
My landlord matches suit and starts opening doors for her, checking his hair in every reflective surface and laying on the border charm.

They have a riot, I have a heart murmur.

That night, after the mama dissapears, my landlord and his eccentric roommate have an impromptu barbeque to welcome me to the hood.
I had driven to Los Angeles with my two favorite road cohorts (Camie Cox and Wesley Stewart) and the three of us stood around burning meat and rubbing elbows with my new California family.

My landlord informs me that my mother is “Fiiiiiiiiine” and that he basically considers me family now. He’s got my back.
He apparently never drinks but has started downing Tecates like a pro and soon enough things take an odd turn. He starts to puff his chest.
He starts to flex and roll his head.

Eventually he goes into a speech and time stands still.

“you know what OG is Alejandro?”

“umm….yes?”

“it means original gangster…..you know who I am?”

“….no?”

“That’s right…you don’t….I’m your landlord…..I’m JUST your landlord…..”
“oh”

You could cut the air with a knife

“This whole neighborhood knows me. This is my neighborhood. You understand? If anyone fucks with you, you tell them my name. You have a problem you come to me. You understand?”

“yes”

Immediately his roommate starts to calm him down, sooth the beast.

My friends and I excuse ourselves for a beer, go in the bathroom, and freak out.
we get his hints, we have seen movies, we have no idea whats going on but we are aware that he is my landlord…..hes….JUST….my landlord.
After much jumping up and down, finger pointing, and loud whispers we emerge from the bathroom to find that everything has returned to normal, no one is acting like a murderer and my landlord has returned to the persona of sweet older Hispanic patron and treats me with massive respect for the entirety of my stay on his property.

My landlord never gets drunk around me again.

From then on out the odd circumstances that surround my home start to make sense.

January 8th 2009:

I am alone, and without remorse in my new home.
It is a mighty palace from which I can stage a great assault on Los Angeles.
Along side me are old soldiers and ghosts of great men. Nipping at my heels are the dogs of wisdom and despair stealing my wallet until i steal it back.
This city is The Angel’s.
They do with us what they may, and many of them ask me for less than a dollar so that they can eat for a day, But I’ve never felt closer to my fate.
Ive never rubbed elbows with my future in such a palpable manner.
The new Alejandro is fully equipped for his twenties, plenty of unknowing to go around, but also I’ve been here I’ve seen it. I am what I am, and with this old knowledge of new places I stand on the verge of wandering the earth until I am found.
I am soon to be found.

twinhorizon: Hand-stenciled a #ShakeyGraves shirt today,...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:53:55 -0500

twinhorizon:

Hand-stenciled a #ShakeyGraves shirt today, spreading the word around Shanghai -i

Tour Day Twelve - Eighteen: Collected Works

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 02:47:11 -0500

In which our hero escapes into the last leg of his journey through the desert and is turned into a statue:

I pull into the Marfa liquor store at sundown.
I drive along the street.
I notice that the street lamps are a loud yellow color and that the houses are dark.
I notice a lit yard emitting the smell of young money.

I grab my smokes, an excuse (my WWII spy novel), sixty dollars from a corduroy bag and cake on my best “Im supposed to be here” face.

Armed to the teeth, I slide into the rustic fancy and Immediately wish I had armed myself more.

Leather would have been appropriate.

Hell, a feather headdress would have been fine, horn rimmed glasses, throw back kicks, something that would yell my press credentials to the strangers.

I dont even have time to light a casual smoke.

“Ali?”

One of my ex girlfiend’s best friends is sitting a table away from me.

“Miguel?”

Well, cripes and daisies.

In my brain I figured that Marfa would be a ghost, a place haunted and insenced, a place where I could easily hide in plain sight and write, read, generally escape into the desert.
Instead, I quickly realize that this strange little outpost is haunted exclusively by my personal spooks.
Miguel instantly reminds me of my relationship that broke apart over the course of this last year.
For the first few minutes of our conversation I cant stop thinking about the way that this interaction will telephone its way back to Austin.

Luckily for me He’s a tremendously fun fellow.
out of my Ex’s assorted friends Miguel stands as one of my personal favorites.

The night instantly becomes a shade more interesting.

Cue the dream sequence

EXT. COCHINEAL RESTAURANT. - MARFA, TX

We sit and wine, we dine off terribly small food.
We pay good money for ambiance, the restaurant is a clown car and Miguel and his friend Katzia know every single person who walks by us.

Soon enough I’m in an empty bar on an empty street.

CUT TO:

INT. GENOVEVA CHAVEZ COMMUNITY CENTER. - SANTA FE, NM

TITLE: 2005

I am ice skating in a leather biker jacket and a cape.
After the angels had their say, after the police released me to the bin, and after the bin decreed me sane enough for freedom, my father took me to Santa Fe so that he could keep an eye on his little baby wizard.
I am bright and buzzing from this contact with the grand mystery.
I have grown quite fond of dressing like a super hero.
I am in love with Ice skating at the Genoveva Community Center.
This chapter of my life is an odd favorite, it is the part where I first began to sit and pull music from behind the veil, it was the begining of a haunting which later would blossom into “Shakey Graves”.
I made a horrible loud cassette record in three parts which I distributed to key people in the Santa Fe area.
Part one was a crunchy loud indie rock album called “The transient life of Mr. Sitcom”
Part two was a dronier clone of the former called “Hospital Eyes”
And part three was a cover album called “Used valentines” which was entirely produced using a tape recorder, a children’s guitar, and a pack of Lucky Strike filters.
All are lost in time.

CUT TO:

INT. GENOVEVA COMMUNITY CENTER. - SANTA FE, NM

TITLE: 2012

I am ice skating in a bomber jacket without a cape

Ben snaps a black and white photo of me huffing and puffing on the Ice.

I remember that I always bring people to this place before a new chapter.
When I used to cut the ice here I was certain that some sort of fame awaited me, it was part of the lunacy.
It was a beautiful time for me.
It felt as though the air was of a different quality.
And when I pass through Santa Fe I can still see the world through my lost eyes.
This whole region of the untied states burns in my memory, and I feel as though Im painting over specific parts of the same canvas.

CUT TO:

EXT. EL COSMICO.- MARFA, TX

TITLE: THE NEXT DAY

Crawling on my belly through the dust, eating a lizard, clipping my fingernails.
Dirt, metallic dirt.
The desert has me, I am old hat.
Three days in this vortex has turned my body on itself and somehow I am bleeding out money.
How odd to find my veins filled with cash.
In this chosen corner where every dog has an owner and every bar has a cat. Where every home has been haunted by someone I knew, where every street has been driven down, where you can find your lost friends by yelling.
There is no escape in Marfa. There are beds and hammocks and roads leading in.
But it seems that all of the momentum of the last two weeks are no match for my final stop on this lovely quest.

Hold me not! Scold the man who sold me the rack of lamb! cuss the bottle of french wine!

End dream sequence

This place is the last thing I need.
The place where people gather and behave like an installation.
God forbid we are nothing but collected works.

Tour Day Eleven: Dead Pawn

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:05:00 -0400

After a long hiatus we pick up with our traveler as he abandons his traveling circus and heads off on his own beaten path.

After Jackson Hole the He’s My Brother She’s My Sister van took off on a grueling 16 hour drive from WY to AZ which I wisely opted out of.

Playing Arizona would have been amazing, for some reason the dust seems to gather good ears for my tunes and I have received a hand full of sweet requests from the citizens of that hot state. Alas, my brain alerted me that driving is a delicate art, and the ass can only take so much, so I carved a detour and pulled a changing of the guard.
Up to this point my passenger seat had been filled with a tall girl, and now I was dropping her off at the secret bunker/airport and making room for the long limbs of Ben Sklar.

“You know what my favorite memory of you is Ben?”

“Oh no.”

“It was at a party at your house.”

“Of course.”

Ben was a resident of The Speedway House, a building that must have been built by a drunk cult on some sort of drunk vortex that certainly still draws children from far and wide into its boozy arms.
I told him about the time that we were at a raging party in this palace of underage drinking and he was obviously having a night where he was wishing he did not live inside of 1982 college movie. Some horrid guy was flapping his jaw non stop, being a total prick, and not leaving Ben alone. Suddenly in one majestic move he lifted the kid off his feet, slammed him on the floor, dragged him to the front porch and literally tossed him outside.

I remember being blown away.
Somewhere deep in your brain you often think about doing this to people.
Just tossing them outside.

Ejected.

“yeah….I remember that,” he admitted rather sheepishly. “He was talking about my high school sweetheart that I had just broken up with after four years.”

Makes sense.
Ben seems to me a perfect observer, and a great companion for this path.
He rides the fine line between stubborn college athlete and introspective photo dork which has somehow collided and created a fearless body with a great eye for situation.
He came across a fair amount of acclaim during hurricane Katrina by driving his jeep into the storm and holing up with a group of EMTs. He ended up snapping some amazing photos which ended up in Time magazine and other national platforms due to his access to the gruesome waters.

“stupid”

As he plainly describes it.

“I could have died. It was stupid.”

Ben is a man of honest questions and straight forward statements.
A person who drives his car into a flood on purpose and only realizes later that death is standing all around him.
A cartoonishly perfect freelance photographer.

A month before we ran into each other at a bar and had a conversation that went like this.

“Hey Dude!”

“Sup”

“Im going on tour”

“I should come. Snap photos”

“Yeah you should”

“Rad, I will”

And now poof:
Ben and I are sitting in the back of Bodie Johnson’s sweet Denver abode where I had been invited that night to play to a crowded living room filled his friends and compatriots. In straying from the herd I had accidentally dove back into the comfortable realm of art spaces and house shows. The first belonged to the aforementioned Bodie Johnson, a manager who works for the highly respectable firm “Red Light Management” and who’s sweetness I can not overstate.

This guy is candy cane pie.

He cleared a space in his living room and filled his home with jovial Coloradans, all who seemingly mountain bike, wine, dine, and persue every rocky mountain cliche that I can fathom.
Let me be clear, this is not a bad thing. Unlike the citizens of Boulder - land of free nothing - the Denver folks seem to genuinely fit in their North Face coffins the same way that Austinites will be buried clutching a breakfast taco. Bodie basically bent over backwards to make me feel comfortable.
He dropped a pony keg, prepared his spare bedroom, ordered pizza and made me feel like I was at a 5th grade sleepover in heaven.

And now, after the show is over, and the Coloradans have all ridden their mountain bikes home, Ben and I sit in a quaint back yard and tell terrifying high school drunk stories to a girl named Peggy. She is a great audience and shares her depressing tales of working for a museum where she displays and sells Indian Jewelery and relics.

Peggy explains to us the tragic concept of dead pawn, which refers to an item that was pawned for cash but has never been redeemed, a common practice in the Southwest, and often referring to American Indian jewelry.
Traditionally, Native American families would keep their ancestral wealth in jewelery and other heirlooms and often these priceless and culturally relevant pieces would get pawned to ensure monitary survival.

So when collectors go looking for priceless grub, the term dead pawn often means they’ve found the real deal.

It means the treasure hunter has found something that was never particularly intended to be lost.

As she is talking I begin to remember that three of us are all strangers.

I have known Ben for years but we have shared minor interactions.
And now the awareness sweeps over me that the fate of this fellow and I are somehow woven together.
This tour has really begun to beat the dead horse.
The lesson of strangers is being taught to me day in and day out.
The facts say that life is a fever dream pending.
On the outskirts of your daily life all the characters that you once deemed merely footnotes are waiting to play a key role in the future that you will soon be overtaken by.

This leg of the journey is the first bit of backtracking Ive done in weeks.
I have climbed these mountains, I find my own footsteps and scat.
Hopefully Ben will keep me sealed in my own shoes, out of the water, and stave the potentially detrimental flood of memories tied to this region of the United States.

The mountains of the Southwest seem to be a place that I have died a few times before, and now in a fancy back yard with a professional photographer and a white girl who sells dead people treasure I am opening a new chapter of this book.
One in which I return to the lost hills and retrieve my own dead pawn on this long sonic path.

Behold.

Chapter 3: The High Desert.

Father Jerzy Popieluszko Square

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:17:28 -0400

The old man who used to sit in the park is no longer there.

I saw them remove his statue on a stretcher last winter, sadly he is no longer available for public viewings due to the weather.
What long story brings a man to die in public?

Now, in fair climate more figurines have taken his place:

The slumped man in a green parka, covered in bags, without a face.
The polish couple with matching silver canes.

New York City.

The quality of life here is staggering and costly, erupting with supermodels and old people engaging in the fashionable strut.

I adore this nonsense.

Shakey's Calendar - home games

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 17:42:09 -0400

Ok folks….here are some great upcoming home shows in NOVEMBER!

NOV 1st - CACTUS CAFE - With Aaron Behrens of Ghostland Observatory
NOV 2nd - STUBBS - Hello Caller album release show!!!!
NOV 1O - BALL FARM - SHOWDOWN AT UNOBTANIUM 2O12 TESLA VS. EDISON
NOV 13 - ANTONES - WHISKEY SHIVERS VARIETY NIGHT!

MORE TO COME! HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!!!