When I was a young man, I spent a lot of time listening to music in taverns in Austin, Minnesota, the place where I went to practice law. Austin had a vibrant music scene: a symphony orchestra, High school choruses and glee club groups that were known throughout the State and a large coterie of exceptional bar-band musicians. It's cheap to live in Austin and you could almost make a living playing every weekend in the taverns in town or located between Mason City, Iowa and the south Twin Cities suburbs. Ordinarily, there was no cover charge and the beer was very cheap and, if you came a few minutes before the music began (usually about 8:00 pm), you could stake out a comfortable place with elbow room, close, but not to close to the stage and the dance-floor, a seat with good sight-lines and ready access to the toilets and where the waitresses could reach you easily enough for re-fills. Some of the country-western and blue-grass bands played mostly covers, but, just about every group had a charismatic lead singer-songwriter who wrote originals, many of them very good and, in fact, popular with the crowd. You don't know these songs because they never established themselves outside Austin or beyond the limits of a few counties -- but they were good tunes, rousing, and the anthems of my youth. I stopped listening to live music in bars about thirty years ago -- in the Twin Cities, the cover charges were exorbitant, but, more importantly, you paid a lot of pocket money to stand in a dark corner of a dark room filled to fire-hazard with other sweaty people and couldn't see the band, couldn't hear either, and, of course, had no chance at all when it came to buying a beer. Shows like that were endurance tests -- uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and frightening -- and, so, after a while, I dropped out of the listening game. Later, when my step-daughter Sena Ehrhardt had a successful career as a Blues singer, I returned to clubs to hear her play -- but, in many instances, the milieu was unpleasant: too hot, too crowded, sitting somewhere way too far from the bar or the band. Worse, I thought, were the festivals -- for instance, the Blues Festival in Duluth: for me, those affairs were an ante-room to hell: enforced proximity with grizzled Biker wannabes and their tattooed molls, elbow-to-elbow crowds around the stage in inclement weather (either terrific suffocating heat or deadly sunshine or mud and cold rain), noisome porta-potties and vastly overpriced beer and food always accessible only at the end of a long smelly line of fans. The speakers boomed, but the sound quality was low -- it was like listening to music over a telephone.
On November 10, 2018, I ventured out to the Austin VFW to hear Billy Dankert and his four member band, the High-Meds perform. Jim (Billy) Dankert is the drummer of the Gear Daddies, the most successful of the Austin home-grown bands, and he wrote several of that group's signature songs. Dankert also is a fine graphic artist, an excellent cerebral painter, and he fronts a band comprised mostly of men from Austin with whom he graduated from High School in the mid-eighties. (Dankert has released a number of solo albums that are also well worth acquiring.) The show at the VFW was a benefit and it reminded me forcefully of the good old days -- the place wasn't overly crowded and the music was both relaxed and superb. The waitress was accommodating and there was no problem keeping a full beer in front of me on a table with a good view of the stage and musicians. Dankert's band has a ferocious attack and his songs are unpretentious, hard-rocking, and short -- most of them seemed to be to be about three minutes long. This is garage-band music elevated to art: Dankert's tunes are have infectious riffs and are carefully constructed. They seem built to last. (I once talked to a friend who was learning piano by playing songs by Joanie Mitchell -- my friend showed me the chord structures and how the melody was founded in that inexorable progression of chords and said that the songs "were built like a brick shit-house", meaning that as a compliment, of course. Dankert's songs seem similar -- they have a rotary motion like a turbine engine and the things spin swiftly, efficiently, and produce a wall of sound.) There isn't any unnecessary grandstanding -- no guitar-hero solos or extravagant interludes: the song begans, it rocks hard for three minutes, then, it's over. Dankert barks out a brusque "Thanks" to the applause and, then, tears into the next tune. The covers are equally adept, economical, and cut close to the bone. At least, one of them was a little perverse, a pounding version of "All I want is a room somewhere" from the musical My Fair Lady. It sounds improbable but the song was excellent. Dankert is not a prolific song-writer -- he told me that he works slowly and there is obviously an enormous amount of craft invested in this labor. After all, he's spent a lot of his life working in these vineyards. The band features bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and a lead guitar with a drummer (too loud for the room on the night that I saw the band). Adding to the powerful "wall of sound" effect are the keyboards -- on the night that I saw the band, one of the musicians played organ with an enthusiastic flourish. Dankert has a good rock-n-roll voice -- he has a high tenor that spikes through the band's roar. (In the lower range, the mix at the VFW made him harder to hear.) It wasn't a flawless show but, then, who wants flawlessness in live music -- you come for the imperfect experience in the moment, the irreproducible event on that special night in that special place. Seeing this show reminds me that I've amputated a part of myself by not attending more to live music and that I should go out more.
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