Volume 2 – Special Edition – November 1999

Welcome to another new month. I wonder what will happen next. I think it’s very interesting that we’re all about to take a step into the great unknown that begins at midnight January 1. No one knows what will happen. Maybe nothing much, maybe a lot. We may all discover how desperately dependent we are on things we take for granted. If there is chaos, we might find some beauty in it. No matter what, we are all in this together. Someone in charge of something may have forgotten one very important detail that could affect thousands of people. I expect to be at least inconvenienced a little bit. So I’m stocking up on a few essentials, like marbles, fresh flowers, smiley face stickers, guitar amplifiers and confederate money. Wow! Suddenly I’m looking forward to this. It does seem like a logical time for the end of the world to begin, especially from a Hollywood perspective. It’s just too perfect. Can you imagine some of the cheese ball movie ideas that have been floating around for the last year? Actually, though, I have thought recently that by 2000 everyone will be so jaded to the concept, the subject will be passé, not interesting or fashionable anymore. Don’t sell your soul over this one. I wonder who the most freaked out person in the world is. I wonder if that person’s friends have totally lost patience. Our cats and dogs don’t care at all. The dogs like to eat and sleep and bark and get attention. The cats like to eat and sleep and walk around a little. Our new cat, Biscuits, likes to make biscuits (you know, that paw kneading thing) on us and he doesn’t drool much anymore. That’s a good thing.

The Time/Life polka CD I compiled is still on track and set for a March, 2000 release. The licensing department has secured about half of the cuts. As I mentioned in an earlier newsletter, there will be a television ad and I think I will get to choose which songs are highlighted. I may write the liner notes also, which means I’ll get paid for rambling on about one of my favorite topics. I love to talk about polka music.

Oh My God! Here comes another holiday season. Time to dust off all that Christmas music again. It seems like we just did this. I wish we could celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving on the same day this year. Who do I talk to about this? Holidays really screw up the work week. Cause nobody’s at work and we need to get things done. We need answers, people! You know, like, what about this or that? We’re doing important work here and we don’t want anything to get in our way and slow us down, especially some holiday. Look up the word “holiday” and you’ll see what I mean. I never looked it up myself, but I bet the definition is mighty revealing. It probably says something about how futile it is to reach someone at work on a holiday. Maybe I should be more gentle and sentimental here. Maybe I should be a saint and do nothing wrong. Maybe you should be a saint, as well. Ham is a traditional food for the holiday season. Ham is made out of pigs. Turkey is popular at Thanksgiving. It’s made from turkeys. In a way, the cold weather holidays mean dead pigs and turkeys. Okay, I’m about to make a lot of people angry. I’ll stop now.

Speaking of holidays, my wife’s mother is in a nursing home and it’s a 24-hour-a-day laugh riot. She had a serious stroke a few years ago. We live less than five minutes from there, so Jane can check on her two or three times a day. It’s a challenging thing to deal with, but there is value to such an existence. You have to look hard, but you can find it. People are sad and peppy when they come to see loved ones at the nursing home. Many of the residents don’t have visitors. A woman across the hall from Jane’s mother has family in the area and they never come to see her. She also had a stroke a few years ago and can only say, “I don’t know.” But she understands almost everything I say to her. I go to the home two or three times a week and look in on some of the residents and I’ll play the piano in the dining hall occasionally. Brave Combo performs at the Christmas party every year. You’re welcome to come this year. We’ll be playing some of that darn Christmas music I mentioned earlier.

I was at the bank, standing in line behind a young man who was wearing Doc Martin boots. He had tattoos on his arm, his head was shaved and he looked like he had been working out for a while. He probably admires Henry Rollins. That’s cool. Anyway, he was standing with his dad. I wonder what they were doing there. The father asked the teller a question and the son winked affectionately at his dad. Then they suddenly left. I’ll look into this later.

Important news for Denton citizens: Television channel 26 is playing Denton music behind the community bulletin board all day long. I heard “The Happy Wanderer” and “Must Be Santa” today.

Netherlands update:
Well, the first half of November has been pretty intense. On the 4th we played at Wurstfest in New Braunfels, Texas, which is about five hours from Denton. Our second set ended around midnight and we were back home at 6 AM. Four hours later we drove to the airport and at noon we flew to Amsterdam. We arrived in Holland the morning of the 6th and our road manager, Gabriel, picked us up in the Dutch Donut (solid black van) and drove us to Roermond, which is in the southeast. We were going to close out a blues festival. This seemed a little strange. And, in fact, it was. We aren’t a blues band and more than half of the crowd figured that out right away and had little interest in a band that plays anti-blues. But there were still a couple hundred people there and I think they knew what to expect from Brave Combo. It was cool, but odd. For the next five days we played around the country, ate a lot of bread and cheese, rode many kilometers in the Dutch Donut, ate a lot of cookies and pastries, met several Brave Combo fans that know all about us. A band called Strange Combo came to our show in Utrecht. They play some of our songs and are extremely nice people and, of course, we took a big group photo. They were all wearing B.C. T-shirts. Our polkas went over well everywhere, but no one, at any of our shows, attempted to dance the polka themselves. As is the case in many places, polkas are not taken seriously, however, I believe Holland, in particular, is ripe for change. It’s an open-minded country. In fact, Tex Mex/Conjunto style music has a solid underground following. Flaco and Santiago Jimenez are relatively well-known. This was our third trip to Holland and it’s going to take some work to get our profile high, but the promoters feel it’s inevitable, if we return regularly. So, I guess we’re going back this summer. We’ve been invited to play the Lowlands Festival at the end of August. This is Holland’s biggest musical event of the year. Also, some festivals in Belgium are available to us. Our promoter in Sweden has offered us several dates as well around Scandinavia and a German polka festival is likely. Let’s spend the summer in Europe.

Have a fabulous November. It’s a special month, you know. And I’m not referring to Thanksgiving. Love something and think less.