Riffs, Roams and Raves: A Weekly Column

Riff: Bob Livingston, Part Two

Last week we learned that Buddy Holly’s “vibey desk” in Miss Honey’s classroom, in which he was allowed to sit, offered up one final bit of advice for young Bob Livingston – “Get out of Lubbock.” And get out he did. In ’69 he moved to Red River, New Mexico where he met Ray Hubbard, “Before he was Ray Wiley Hubbard,” he said in a tongue-in-cheek aside that poked fun at his pal’s branding team.

By 1970 he was signed to Capital Records which led to a move to California where he met Michael Murphey. He collaborated with Guy Clark and Roger Miller and ended up joining Murphey’s band to play on two of Murphey’s albums, “Geronimo’s Cadillac” and “Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir.”

By ’71, Bob was in Austin playing in a band that alternated between Murphey and Jerry Jeff Walker that became The Lost Gonzo Band. The Lost Gonzo Band helped usher in the progressive country genre that developed, with other influences, into the Austin sound.

Bob told the story of the first time he met Jerry Jeff Walker.

“I was sitting at the Les Amis café just off the UT drag and 24th Street when a guy wearing cowboy boots, a vest and swim trunks walked in that turned out to be Jerry Jeff Walker.”

For the Bugle Boy audience, Bob launched into “You got my goat, you might as well take my dog” from that era and persuaded the audience to howl along. While touring in the band, Bob rubbed elbows with a lot of wellknown people like Dennis Hopper, Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange and Richard Brautigan. For example, he met Bob Johnson who produced Bob Dylan’s albums “Blonde on Blonde” and “Nashville Skyline,” as well as Leonard Coen at the Rubaiyat Club in Dallas. The list is a long one.

In 2019 Bob released an album under the name of “The Lost Austin Band” that captures the music of those years with songs like Original Spirit, Tequila, Pancho and Lefty, Cosmic Cowboy, and Jerry Jeff’s London Homesick Blues, with the refrain that became Austin’s anthem, “I want to go home with the armadillo . . .”

In 1987, Bob began a series of music tours sponsored by the U.S. State Department that took him multiple times to Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Syria, Kuwait, Qatar, India Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand and Morocco. It was to usher in an exciting new chapter in Bob’s life. Stay tuned until next week for part 3 of Bob Livingston’s story.

Roam: Brenham and the Silver Wings Ballroom

For me, the town of Brenham evokes images of Blue Bell ice cream, the Rose Emporium and Lyle Lovett. Although Lovett actually lives an hour west of there in Klein, TX, my mind insists on placing him in Brenham.

About two hours east of Wimberley, Brenham is situated in rolling pastures edged by pines and dotted by a few ponds. A far cry from our toasted landscape, it is still a little green in the area despite the heat, and wonderfully free from traffic.

I went in search of the Bluebonnet Opry for a performance of steel guitars that I’d read about in the Texas Polka News. Sure enough, the Opry musicians were assembled in the Silver Wings Ballroom, an expansive roller skating rink with wooden floors that had been converted into a ballroom. By 7:30 p.m., Silver Wings was full of people – 350, I learned – seated on folding chairs and facing a raised stage.

The evening’s program was a combined lecture led by writer Gary McKee and a performance by the band that featured two steel guitar players, Steve Palousek and Craig Schmidt.

McKee writes a feature article each month in the Texas Polka News, and for August, he’d penned the “The Origins of the Steel Guitar.” McKee would read a section of his article to the audience and the steel guitarists would demonstrate a lick or two. In time the entire band joined in.

We learned that the present day steel guitar goes back to the Hawaiian Islands.

“Vaqueros from Spain,” McKee wrote, “came to the islands in the mid-1800s to develop a ranching industry [and brought] . . . the Spanish guitar which the Hawaiians had never seen.”

Legend has it that Hawaiian musician Joseph Kekuku “was walking along the railroad track and picked up a bolt and tried it out on the neck of his guitar. The sound it produced intrigued him and he began experimenting . . . before he finally settled on a polished steel bar that fit in his hand. Today, the bars are still called “steels” and have given the instrument their name.”

The steel or lap steel has made its way into just about every style of music: Western Swing and Country, Classic Rock, Electric Blues, and what McKee calls “jam bands” like the Grateful Dead. The band played several Western Swing songs by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, including the 1949 “Bootheel Drag,” and a song by Ray Price to demonstrate the instrument’s adaptation among genres. Other examples followed as McKee presented his article.

Two-steppers of all ages and abilities took to the floor as the band played, including one athletic couple who dazzled. Most people observed from their seats in the audience.

Co-written by Mark Jackson, McKee’s article was thorough and can be found in the August edition of Texas Polka News.

Rave: Oppenheimer, the film

While the heat continues to rage outside, consider immersing yourself in the film “Oppenheimer,” the threehour film about the American theoretical physicist who brought the atomic bomb into reality through the Manhattan Project in World War II.

In the title role is Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who you might remember from the Netflix series “Peaky Blinders” that debuted in the U.S. in 2014. Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon headline as does Gary Oldman in a small but significant role. Director Christopher Nolan gives us full-screen views of the actors’ faces, especially Murphy’s sculpted face and deep-set blue eyes, to balance, I think, the theoretical aspect of the story with the human experience. The film is visually stunning and elevates computer- generated imagery and visual effects as it imagines fission and the chain reactions that follow the process of splitting the atom.

Adapted from the 721-page book, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the biography was twenty-five years in the making and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006.

I opened myself to the full experience at EVO in Kyle and barely blinked until the credits rolled. The film allows us to witness the tremendous pressure involved in such a momentous project and the uncharted ethical territory that followed. Add the political hysteria of the era and we get a bracing, grownup film to watch and to think about for a long time after.

Some critics complained about the length of the film and the complexity of the subject matter, but most applauded it. I loved how the director let us watch without imposing judgment.

For me, the film is a real antidote to the glut of films drawn from comic book heroes and dystopian fantasies that don’t come close to the power of this real life event.