On Saturday afternoon, Rayce Hardy sent me an email telling me that J Keyser was playing that evening at the VFW Club. You may remember that Sena lived with Rayce for a few years. He’s still teaching economics at the Community College and I encounter him from time to time. Rayce said that Keyser, whom I haven’t seen since a funeral last Autumn, about a year ago, was going to play with some local musicians and was scheduled to start at about 9:00 pm. I left the house about 8:10 and walked downtown. The streets were strangely silent – no cars and no one outside, except one lady walking a little white dog in the gloom. I cut across some parking lots and, then, followed Main Street down to the SPAM museum where I walked past the bronze statue of the farmer with the two fat pigs and, then, crossed the vacant lot next to the new Courthouse and Law Enforcement Center. A man and woman were standing in the vacant lot, in the middle of grassy lawn – for what purpose, I didn’t know. On the windowless west wall of the VFW, there was a big banner that said WELCOME PACELLI CLASS OF 1970. There were a couple of tables near the front door where people were sitting. I found Keyser at a fold-up picnic table near a second bar (the place is set up to serve from two locations) facing the stage. The VFW is a big single room about 30 foot by 80 with a stage pushed up against the corner farthest away from the entry. The toilets occupy a kind of wooden shed or lean-to up against one of the inside walls. Next to the humble bandstand, there are plaques with pictures showing past commanders of the VFW dating back to the thirties. Several flags are stashed along the wall and there’s a big wooden cabinet lit from within that displays about eight carbine rifles – these are the guns that are used to fire salutes at military funerals in town. There’s usually a white drift of pull-tabs under the stools around the horseshoe-shaped bar, but they had been cleaned up for the Pacelli Class Reunion. It was about 8:30 and I didn’t see any signs of the Pacelli reunion. Steve, J’s son, told me that the Pacelli folks has vamoosed when the house band began to play – that is, around 8 pm. The place was fairly busy, about half-full and the hard-core music fans were seated at some more white picnic tables across the dance-floor from where the band was playing.
Keyser knew the musicians from way back. The leader of the house-band is Mark Conway, a guitarist that used to play with Keyser many, many years ago, when I followed the Austin music scene. In those days, around 1982, Keyser fronted the town’s dominant band called “Shapes”, I think, and they played just about every weekend in one of the seven taverns downtown that featured live music. Mark Conway and his wife Paulette were also in “Shapes” as was Randy Broughton who later became the steel guitar player for the Gear Daddies. In those days, the Gear Daddies were learning their trade in the Austin bars; Brad Zellar traded off his with his brother, Marty, singing lead vocals at the old Leisure Bar. (They still sometimes perform in this way – Marty and Brad both appeared at the Women’s Club of Minneapolis, a dignified auditorium just off Loring Park downtown, last Tuesday and Wednesday.) Conway is a good guitar player and the house band featured Matt Gosha as drummer. (Matt Gosha was Sena’s drummer when she performed with her father in Plan B.) The house band has a superb steel guitar player, a rough-looking dude with a boozy red face, a mouth full of broken and rotting teeth, and greasy hair. I didn’t know this guy although I talked to him later after Keyser’s gig.
Keyser was wearing his trademark black John B. Stetson hat. He looked pretty good. Of course, he has huge watery lemur eyes. About twelve years ago, he was diagnosed with hyper-sensitivity to chemicals and had to quit his day-job which was providing tech support at a parochial school in Richfield. Keyser told me that he had to to go outside to get some fresh-air. By this, he meant that someone’s perfume nearby was bothering him and so we went outdoors to sit at a table in parking lot. Some old Austin musicians talked to Keyser in the parking lot where they were smoking. One of them had a little case full of “harps”, that is, harmonicas, but he said they were all broken. Keyser’s car isn’t working and so, Steven, his son, had to drive him to the gig from St. Paul where he lives. Keyser has had some health problems – he had COVID and was very sick (he’s an anti-vaxxer and so wasn’t boosted); then, he fell out of his bed and broke some ribs. It was sort of cold in the parking lot, maybe about 45 degrees, and, after awhile, we went back inside. Keyser wanted to talk to me about de Tocqueville, an obsessive passion with him, and he delayed going on-stage so he could tell me about his most recent discoveries reading this writer. About six months earlier, I had participated in a ZOOM conference with Keyser in which we discussed de Tocqueville’s book about France before the revolution – the book is called The Ancien Regime. (J Keyser is important to me for several reasons, but, perhaps, most importantly because he taught me how to read Plato.) People were summoning Keyser to the stage and, so, he reluctantly went up on the bandstand with Conway and the others. J is fussy about sound and he spent five or six minutes adjusting microphones and doing checks on the amplification. Then, he began to play.
Julie bought me a purse for my birthday and, so, I was carrying it across my hip. I’m no longer allowed to keep my wallet, moleskin, and phone in my pockets. Instead, I have to carry them in my man-purse. This makes me uncomfortable, but what can a girl do? I was a little uncomfortable but no one seemed to notice the purse, even when I dug around in it to find money for the beer that I had ordered. A woman named Kelsey R– (I once represented her on personal injuries from a car crash) was seated at our table along with the Superintendent of Schools. The Supe has a villain moustache in a style circa 1895 with villainously curling tips. Somehow, he knew Kelsey and was chatting with her. Kelsey seemed to be on a date with Manicoochi, a well-known drag-queen here in Austin. Manicoochi (whose cis-name is Dylan) had a big blonde bee-hive hairdo, was heavily made-up with garish lipstick and eye-shadow, and was wearing a sensible-looking pants-suit, the sort of thing that Mrs. Clinton might favor. I guess my man-purse was not too noticeable next to the flamboyant Manicoochi.
Keyser played a couple of songs including one of my favorites “The True Story of Billy the Kid”, a tune with an elaborate, brooding flamenco-style introduction. But he wasn’t satisfied with the sound and kept demanding that Rayce Hardy turn him up. He did another sound-check before performing his signature song “I Believe”. Rayce told me that J kept turning up his volume in response to Mark Conway who was also matching, and, even, exceeding his amplification. So the music kept getting louder and louder, an irritant to some in the bar because the VFW is a convivial place where old alcoholics gather to discuss the events of the day and sociable conversations of that kind are not possible when musicians are dueling to increase their amplification. Rayce said: “Mark turns up and, then, Keyser turns up and so it goes.” I replied to Rayce: “Well, they’ve been doing this for fifty years.” And, to my amazement, that statement wasn’t even an exaggeration. For fifty years, on and off, Mark Conway and J Keyser have been playing together and they aren’t really friends, more rivals, and, as a result, they have spent a half-century of gigs trying to out-amp one another.
Keyser sounded rusty although he remains a phenomenal guitar player. He did a great version of “Tom Thumb Blues” – a song that first appeared, I think, on Highway 61 Revisited. “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez / And its Easter time too ... Don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue / They’ve got some hungry women there and they’ll make a mess out of you...” Keyser used to play this song with some searing guitar solos at the old Loading Dock in Austin, at the Colonial, and Smith’s Royal Bar aka The Shady Lady, on the stage in the loft above Marvin’s Gardens that he shared, sometimes, with strippers and, needless, to say the music brought back a lot of memories, not all of them happy or unalloyed with grief. Although he can still play with weirdly effective reverb and distortion, Keyser messed up on several of the cues, botched the bridge on the tune, and forgot some lyrics. It didn’t matter. The song is great even in ruins and I was glad to hear it played. The VFW is a haunt for old alkies and the place empties out pretty quickly after about 10:30 and, so, when Keyser was done playing at 11:15 pm, most of the audience had gone. The drag queen left at 10:30 with Kelsey and the educators all went home to bed at 11:00 and, pretty soon, it was just me and a half-dozen giddy and drunk girls who had wandered in from some tavern on Main Street, a couple of Mexican dudes with big ten-gallon hats who were buying drinks for the steel guitar player, Rayce Hardy and three or four old men who seemed to have no place to go. Mark Conway took the stage again and began another set, playing to an empty room – without having to compete with J, he sounded more alert, louder, and more clear and the steel guitar cut through like a knife.
J was chatting up some woman, maybe, an old flame from forty-five years ago. She was wearing dark glasses even though it was now pretty gloomy in the bar. The staff had shut off most of the lights except on the stage and, in that corner of the tavern, the only illumination came from the funeral-rifles lit as if by candles in their wooden gun cabinet. I said goodbye and walked out the front door, crossing the empty lot next to the cop-shop on the diagonal. It was about 11:30 and I was glad to see that downtown was alive. Hispanic guys in pick-ups were cruising Main Street and there was a roar of amplified Mariachi music coming out of Mexican cantina squeezed in between the financial planner’s offices and the accounting firm. There were people wandering around and cops were on patrol and the whole place had a vaguely festive aspect, a bit like a working class neighborhood in Mexico City. (When I was with Gabriel in Mexico City, actually Coyoacan, we ate at blue-collar joint with big black and white pictures of movie stars from the golden age of Azteca and Churrubusca Studios, people like Cantinflas and Ranchero stars whose names I didn’t know, strong cowboy-types, and, of course Dolores del Rio and Katy Jurado. The place had concrete floors and looked like it had once been a car body repair shop and the waitresses had sinister tattoos, but it was lively and something about the scene on Main Street in Austin at 11:30 pm reminded me of the place.)
A few blocks away from Main Street, among the churches, it was quiet again. A cat crossed my path. I remembered all the nights I had spent listening to J Keyser and Mark Conway and their band, now forty years ago, the icy cold nights when the sidewalks were slick and the hot nights, particularly in some of the old bars that didn’t have functioning air conditioning, the people fighting in parking lots, the alleyways between the taverns – you could go out one joint’s backdoor and cross a narrow alley under a yellow light bulb, a place like someone’s basement with wet walls and garbage stacked-up next to the bricks, and enter the next bar only twenty feet away and, in all those bars, there were young people, just kids, with live music playing, the rooms all dense with blue, smoky air. My whole life was ahead of me then. Nothing was known for sure; everything was just a possibility, just something latent concealed in between the lyrics of the songs and the guitar licks. It seemed that life would go on forever and that the future was endless.
On the sidewalk, a lamp casts a shadow through a fragile, freshly planted sapling. The pattern of shadow-leaves and shadow-branches is very neat and precise. On my block, it’s still. In the house, my old dog is too stiff to greet me. She just looks up from the couch where she is sleeping. The rooms are empty and cluttered. Julie is asleep upstairs. I’m too excited to go right to bed and, so, I watch the ending of an old film noir, Criss Cross (1949) with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo. The lovers are cornered in an shadowy cottage, backed up against the glittering expanse of the Pacific shot day-for-night in velvety black-and-white. The bad guy barges into the cottage and guns down the lovers. Then, we hear sirens and flashing lights register on the screen and the title The End appears.
In another context, T.S. Eliot said “Life is very long” – he’s actually citing Joseph Conrad's Captain Lingard from The Outcast of the Islands. My dear readers, however old you might be, remember that you have your whole life ahead of you and that you can make a difference in things. “Life is very long” until it’s not. But you have so much possibility ahead of you so don’t despair.
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