Volume 15 – #2 – February 2012

I stopped eating meat decades ago, during the early days of Brave Combo, because I could no longer justify taking a life just to provide brief pleasure for my taste buds. The first half of my life I didn’t give it much thought. A hamburger didn’t look like a cow and tasted fantastic. Eventually, I decided to acknowledge the minute-to-minute suffering endured by animals in factory farms. A person can either open his eyes to the reality or ignore it. One is free to choose. And, believe it or not, I fully accept that about half of my friends and acquaintances don’t feel the way I do. I promise I won’t become militant about this until the fresh water shortage, in a large part due to the needs of livestock (it took 1000 gallons of OUR fresh water for YOU to have a pound of meat, MY pound of potatoes only cost US 25 gallons) starts to become an obvious problem, like in a couple years. But this isn’t about me versus you. The point I’m getting to is that becoming a vegetarian made me acutely aware of every creature’s right to live its life. I’m sure I even give bugs more of a break than most. This unbridled compassion doesn’t come without consequences, though. I find it’s really hard for me to forget seeing an animal in trouble, like a wide-eyed cow crammed in cattle truck headed to a slaughtering house or a dog trying to get my attention at the pound or a bear staring blankly out of his cage at a road-side attraction. These images never go away. One serious downside to this affliction is that my wife, Jane, and I have accumulated a ridiculous array of dogs and cats no one else wanted. They dominate our time. All I do is lead a band and take care of my little friends, knowing that another one could join the family any day. I know this sounds like hell to most people but it’s where I’m comfortable. Having a lot of hair stuck to everything we own is a big drag, as is dealing with so much poop, but, you know, it just comes with the territory. In January of 1997, Jane and I were driving to East Texas to visit her parents. Things were not good. Her mother had had a major stroke several months earlier and her father was less than a year away from death at that point. We were deep in the towering pine trees, about fifteen miles from our destination, when we spotted a lanky, brindle-coated, bird-doggy type of puppy running our direction in the middle of the highway, which was in the middle of nowhere. We stopped and called and whistled and, damn, it didn’t run the other way, barking as it looked back. It came right to us and was so happy, happy, happy. We tried to find where it lived but knew it didn’t have a home. Stray dogs roam East Texas like fleas on a stray dog. So, we adopted him on the spot and soon named him Dudley. He moved in without a hitch and continued to grow, eventually becoming our biggest and strongest buddy. He was a classic dog, an easy-going handshaker, the best friend to a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, a totally lovable, devoted mutt. All of the animals, even the cats that he dwarfed, liked Dudley. He always greeted me at the door and would walk around with me for a few minutes when I arrived home from a tour or from the store, his little oddly chopped tail quivering back and forth at lightning speed. I guess you know where I’m going with this. Dudley lived to be 15 ½ years old. Not bad for a big boy, but not long enough for me. Once again, I’ve had the pleasure of holding my pet as the vet first injects a strong anesthesia and then follows it with a second drug that stops his or her heart. That is a bad moment. I’ve been through it so many times. Geez, you would think it would get easier. Unfortunately, I see too clearly, the uniqueness of each of the little guys that share my house and when one is gone, it’s flat gone, just like people. I can’t just pluck another Dudley from a tree. If you came over to my house, you would probably think that it’s still plenty full of life, if not down-right crowded, but to us the rooms look pretty empty. I know it will get better, but right now, it sucks. Here’s to Dudley, who loved to go out to the back yard but hated to go out to the front yard, because that probably meant he was going to have to ride in a car to someplace that wasn’t his house or the back yard.

As I write this MACHINE’S PUMP I’m listening to rough mixes of our new album, jotting down a list of things that need to be fixed, turned up, turned down or erased. The more I listen, the more I hear. You can quote me on that. What I mean is that one will never stop hearing things that should be fixed when working on a recording. You just get as close as you can and then say that’s enough. Making a record isn’t always just fun and games and drinking and partying and eating and fighting and cussing and skating and cooking and reading. It’s hard work, too; tedious, actually. The big question is, “How do I make this not mediocre?”

2012 Joke
Man on the Street: Well, this is the year we have a presidential election in November and the end of the world in December.
Sidewalk knish and bagel vender: Yep.

This is a big ol’ planet. The immediacy of the internet and its constant flow of information about everything, everywhere, all-at-once, might give you the impression that you’re always in the middle of a big party and the seven billion known people are not only all invited, they’re all attending, constantly. But if you step outside your house and look around you’ll see that the same nothing is going on today that was going on yesterday. The party is in your head. Which is cool, and probably the obvious place we were all going to end up anyway. Interacting physically is hard work. You have to look at people, maybe even touch them, and worse, they have to look at you. So it makes sense that we’re all discovering the joy of increasing isolation. The point I’m making, though, is that the perception that the world is small isn’t true. It’s an illusion. With my space-shrinking, info-gathering-and-spreading iPhone I can quickly calculate how long it would take me to walk from where I am now (my house) to downtown Dallas. Drum roll. Cymbal crash. Fourteen hours, that’s how long! That’s just to Dallas, the closest big city to Denton. Actually, Ft. Worth may be a little closer, but it doesn’t matter. The bottom line is this. If I lived in Denton before there were cars (or, let’s say, for the sake of argument, even before horses) and needed to get to Dallas for something important, I would have to plan ahead and block out a lot of time for going and coming. If you were on the top of any one of the many mountains around the globe, the world wouldn’t be a small place. If you were on a raft 500 miles north of Hawaii, the ocean, which is part of Earth, would seem ENORMOUS! However, if you were stuck on Mars, Earth would seem pretty small and far away; an impossible dot to hit, surrounded by the Universe. Plus, iPhones and iPads don’t even work on Mars.

Speaking of Mars, you must attend the taping of our performance for the nationally televised program, MOLLIE B. POLKA PARTY at the Sokol Hall in Ennis on Thursday, March 8. Mollie is bringing her musical carnival from Minnesota to Texas. The shows airs on the RFD-TV Network.

I hope to have the previously mentioned new album out by early April, just in time for the spring festival season. Isn’t that convenient? Between now and then many of you will have opportunities to hear what we do best. Complain! Just kidding. We try to play music. We don’t arrest people or run a hotel. We play music. It comes out of our mouths or the instruments we play and we amplify it appropriately for the situation (we hope). Join our crazy fun whenever possible. We accept every creed, race, tribe, nationality, religion, sexual preference, whatever. Just leave your weapons and bad attitude at home. Let’s Polka!