BEFORE BEV

Cast Your Fate to the Winds -- I vowed to do that the day I got my army discharge, this was after Vince won a grammy for it in 1962, (Before Bev) and Mel Torme did a great version (Before Bev) and even now there is a wonderful Etta James of it (after Bev) and I think you can imagine Etta in front of Killer Joe doin' it? There are words to it and the best singer of those words is one Bev Bivens in a recording from the We Five.

Bev is the unremembered, overlooked vocal power of them days, the best unknown girl rock singer. There was always some rumor floating around that she died in an accident or a suicide, but she just went on to another life as Bev Marshall and had kids and lives up by Joanbear. No one knows it these days, the ignorant music historian bastards, but Bev was the first rock and roll girl singer to make it on the charts (You Were On My Mind) as part of a co-ed rock group. <http://www.geocities.com/officialwefive/beverlybio.htm> You have to go back to Irene Goodnight to find a hit with a girl singing with boys Before Bev.

Before Bev it was all boys (from Bill Haley to Herman's Hermits to Buffalo Springfield) or all girls (Chiffons to Supremes to Pointers, etc)

Before Bev there was a law that you din't have girl lead singers in rock bands with boys in them.

Before Bev there was a "No entrance" sign on the highway, holding back Grace Slick, Janis, Stone Ponys, and the avalanche that followed, all the way to Abba.

[ Dissemble: Abba has a soft sweet place in my heart for being there on tape one night in a disco in Tunis where at closing time I whirled and whirled 'Becca Nicholwitz in a tight embrace in the middle of a candlelit dance floor while 50 muslim girls were scandalized when 'Becca and I kissed and danced away the last half of Dancing Queen and 50 muslim guys didn't know how to get from the mosque to that kiss, and have been resenting it an' blowing up Americans before and since. Abba ain't Beethoven, but Robin, there is a part in one of the Charlie Brown specials where Schroeder plays Beethoven as the little ribbon of notes scrolls out of his toy piano, and that ribbon of notes is played by Vince Guaraldi so you can hear Vince do Beethoven if you can search out the right VHS tape in the kiddie section of the video store.]

[Furthermore: You can also rent Muppet Movies there, including a musical tape featuring the greatest hits of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, which is tommy's "that band below in the orchestra pit" featuring Animal on drums. I once filled in an application line where it asks you to list foreign languages you speak with Mock Swedish, bork bork, and got enough points to move on to the next level 'cause you needed more than one language on the application. Both my sons speak fluent Mock Swedish, and I always get a double take when I mention that my sons are Bill and Ted respectively, as if I was putting somebody on in Mock Swedish.

Keanu Reeves is not my son, but has good lines in THAT movie, quotes Axel Rose to a princess after Bill Preston gives him the most useful piece of romantic advice that has ever been uttered in Movieland: "Quote her some lyrics, Dude." I promise it works. It is the best way to make romantic order out of the chaos of love, except they outlaw love in Belgium, home of the worlds largest supercomputer dedicated solely to solving stochastic chaos theorems.

I wouldn't leave just yet, there is still fun to be had. Hershkeee dooo!]

The We Five featured Mike Stewart, as well, who was the brother of John Stewart of the Kingston Trio who was the mentor of Lindsay Buckingham; so there would be NO Stevie, and no Fleetwood Mac, without Bev having been there first.

The founder of the Kingston Trio was Dave Guard, replaced later by John Stewart. Dave lived up on Whiskey Hill Road which you can see from the trail behind Joanbear's house. I betcha you can see Bev's house from there too, as Joany lives at one of the best view areas they have to offer in all of Unitestan. I'm playin' a little Nanci Griffith right now, and I think I'll go have a bit o' Bacardi and coke and think some more about Ruth and how we all cast our fates.

"A Month of Nights
A Year of Days
Octobers drifting into Mays ..."

thassa nice piano, Mister



PS 6/23/07 My friend Robin sent me some very interesting links to add to Bev-ology: She has a Wikipedia article. And there's a nice Google video clip. And this great performance clip. Yum.

WALTZING COWBOYS

It's a big sky. Even though Montana is known as "Big Sky Country", there is more sky in New Mexico. It starts lower on the horizon here, and goes higher, and you see more of it more often. The clouds are puffy-er, the stars are brighter, clearer, and the sun is a magical Zuni/Navaho/Hopi symbol, and it's right there on the state flag. Land o' Enchantment, I guarantee. What sunsets!


We are in the Llano Estacado, the "staked plains". And it's God's country, (not Allah's ... GOD's!). It's God's country because it is land that requires you to face metaphysical questions, just like those deserts the Prophets (and Jee-zus) struggled in. There is some disagreement whether the Staked Plains are staked because the Conquistadors drove stakes into the ground to mark their way across the perfectly flat plain, landmark-less; or whether it's just that the yuccas, bayonet plants and agave all send up these stalks that look like flag poles. I don't care, I always have oriented myself to a description of the land based upon Marty Robbins' lyric, where our hero rides away from El Paso out into the "badlands of Newww-mexxx-eee-cooooh!" These are them badlands, really, the Llano. Baked dirt from the original recipe. But at night you can see every whisp of the Milky Way.


Picture that starfield from Twilight Zone and remember how the camera pans downward to the surface, and you'd see my Momma under the stars, dancing in the street. Yeah, despite the recent family tragedy, tonight she is dancing to the Texas Playboys. It's the "Hot August Nights" celebration; and she and her compadres from the line-dancer class and the local Eastern Star widows club always have a dozen old men sniffing around -- all of 'em can do the Texas two-step.


The town has blocked off the streets for two-three blocks in all directions from the intersection of Broadway and Turner in Hobbs, NM. Tonight we're taking a break from the grief and the long list of chores to kick up our heels with the whole town. Bonnie Taylor has finished up a set of country wailing just now.


The prettiest sight? Take your pick: start with an MGM movie where the ballroom is filled with waltzing couples, and costume them in jeans n' custom Tony Llamas. Beautiful, a hundred summer-straw cowboy hats, whirlin' and bobbin' under the stars to the waltzes. Waltz Across Texas, amen. Or ... a four-year-old dancing on the empty outdoor stage during a break; her long, wild, honey-blond hair flashing under the spots as she tosses it to the recorded beat of "Whiskey for my men, ... beer for my horses."


Oh yeah, Texas Playboys, the last remnants of the famous 'Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys': silverhaired cowpokes playing pedal steel and singing the classics of Western Swing. "My Confession", "Dixie Blues", the Mill's Brothers classic Jazz/Western Swing crossover "Cab Driver", and of course "San Antonio Rose". Mom and Dad used to dance to them all through the 40's and 50's at the Maurice Club out on the highway. I have danced with my Momma this evening and "made points" for it, says her best friend. Then I slipped off with best friend's drugstore cowboy retire-ee of the moment for a long pull from a bottle of Sunnybrook out from under the seat of the pickup, washing down the last of a 'la parilla samwich straight out of the taco stand behind the stage. Real Mexican food cooked by real Mexican women who -- while they chop tomatoes and fresh cilantro together -- out of the corner of their eye watch their teenaged daughters flirting around the tables, (yum x2 ... for the salsa and for their dark eyes).


The Mexican men sit upright in macho pose on city park benches as they watch the greenngoes lord it over the asphalt, remembering that Cortez had it first. The names here are older than anything anybody reading this has for a name imported into the Americas: Baca, de la Vega, Domingues, ... Tellez.


The greenngoes are your basic oilfield trash (me too, really, I admit it, it's in my blood and I come by it honestly), going back 3-4 generations to when Bob Wills played at barn dances to cowboy drillers who fought Comanches all the way into the 1920's. Nowadays they drive new dually pickups with those big Ford diesel engines and red white and blue slogans painted across the back window so you can't see the rifle racks well. But they'd fight any "raghead sonofabitch" in a New York minute, I gare-on-tee.


The slogan they've settled on here in the Llano is ... United we Stand. With the U in blue and the S in red, stars and stripes lettering all along the back glass, sometimes on the fender panel, sometimes even on the tailgate. Just a little notice that they are available to "kick a sand nigger's ass all the way back to Mecca", as if you needed to ask. (Toby Keith even has an anthem about that, too. )


No question. Here is a fundamentalism to counter the arab fundamentalist, and then some. Ever been to Cowboy Church?


You thought that pistol-waving Steel Magnolia in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" was made up???? My Momma is dancin' amongst a whole orchard full of Steel Magnolias, and if they don't all have pistols in their purses, they only have to say sweetly - batting those wrinkled old eye-shadowed lids - "Honey, let me borra that gun o' yours" in any direction ... hand outstretched. Momma's got two guns, a .38 Colt and a nickel S&W .357 Highway Patrol model with a 6-inch barrel and ribbed-vent sights. Both are home tonight, one in the nightstand, the other in the cupboard next to the china. (Don't worry, there's a loaded 20 gauge Remington semi-auto hidden behind in the curtain next to the front door, too. And at 79, she knows how, believe me.) When 9-11 happened, she could of taken the rat-shot out of the first chamber in the S&W and reloaded everything with wadcutters instead of hollow points.


So it's kind of ludicrous when Ridge and Asscroft exhort more "Homeland Security", now ... isn't it? You kind of hope Saddam or Osama or any of those terr-ists find their way to the Llano. You could sell tickets. Lordy.


I put a new roof on the well house. I cut her trees back away from the house so when the wind blows it doesn't bash branches against the shingles over the porch or the garage. I signed her up for McAfee virus protection online, and taught her how to use the CD writer. (I got a copy of the Texas Playboys CD for that). I made sure the pickup would start, and I put a new clamp on the tractor exhaust. She gets the Taurus serviced in town.


We ate barba-que at Wallace's, had the Sunday brunch buffet at the Western Sizzler with my cousins and all the after-church Baptists. We shopped at the Walmart Supercenter out at the new place on the Lovington Highway. My cousin Carolyn was in town from Dallas. We stood on the back porch while she smoked generic filters and talked about everyone who died in the last year.


I put new blades on the old bedroom ceiling fan and put a new one up over the kitchen island. Mom wanted to give me my dad's gold watch, which he carried all the time I was growing up, and he got it from his daddy; but I left it where it is, behind the glass in the china cabinet, near the Smith&Wesson. I'll get it when the time comes.


After a week of this, she drove me 100 miles to Midland and tossed me out onto the airport sidewalk (they don't let you wait at the gate to watch the plane leave, anymore). And then I took a succession of flying greyhounds, winging through that big sky back to the People's Republic of Eugene.


It's Friday now. I'm back.


Aaaah- haa!