Friday, May 15, 2009

...again, who said anything about boundaries?

My buddy Scott Chaffin again posted a comment here that was so good I had to bring it to the front page:

Here's a Texas Limit for you: Stevie Ray Vaughn and Don Walser and ZZ Top and Waylon Jennings and Pantera and Van Cliburn. See if you can a place in there you can fit, Wade. Or go sit around with Pat and Jack Ingram and have a good cry. Idiots.

As you might remember, I was raving about Pantera last week in this space. I had almost forgotten about them being a Dallas band. And I didn't even think about the Fort Worth classical pianist Van Cliburn! So I guess one could say I am guilty of the same thing Wade Bowen is, but to a lesser extent, that is, not taking a wide-enough look at what "Texas music" really is, from classical to thrash metal. But again, as this comment so brilliantly illustrates, Texas music is ALREADY so much more than just red-dirt country. Hell, Cross Canadian Ragweed gets put in the country section at the music stores and classified by the fans as red-dirt country even though they'll freely admit they're a rock band. ("You wanna talk on the phone all day? Or d'you wanna make a rock record?") And if Wade Bowen has a problem with being classified as a Texas-red dirt country artist, still, it's ultimately his own fault — and not just because of his music. After all, he runs with those guys, Stoney LaRue, Jason Boland and all the rest. (From what I understand a lot of the guys on the Texas scene are personal friends as well, which only reinforces that perception of ALL of them as "Texas-red dirt country," in spite of the fact that it's not all straight-ahead Haggard-and-Jones-type stuff.) I know Bowen played with CCR on that live set recorded in Tulsa a couple of years ago and I remember quite well how Cody Canada referred to him and Stoney LaRue as "our brothers...the fifth and sixth members of Ragweed." It almost sounds like Bowen is actually ashamed of that. Who knows. Maybe I am reading too much into all this, but that's how he comes off to me.