I've known hundreds, if not thousands, of working musicians - some that have done pretty well for themselves, and some that still have day jobs. But few of them are more dear to my heart than Dana Davis and Lynda Millard.

So when I got an email last week from Dana mentioning that she was coming down from New England, where she'd been living and working, to play, with Lynda, some stuff off her upcoming album, "Cosmic Radio," at a club off of Sixth Street, La Zona Rosa, everything else on my To-Do list got bumped down a notch.

So I jumped into Otto Tuesday afternoon to make the trip to Austin, about a two and a half hour run, as it turned out. I got there just as they were finishing setting up and getting their sound check.

Lynda was astonished to see me there. In between hugs...

"Marcus, you don't live in Austin! What are you doing here?"

"Well, I do have a car, you know. It's not that far."

I guess Dana was expecting me. She just looked up from tuning her guitar and smiled.

"I see my email got through."

"You betcha."

We chatted for a bit, but they looked busy, so I went back outside the club to change out of my comfortable driving clothes, and into the nicer concert duds I'd brought along. They were not scheduled to start for about forty-five minutes, so I took the chance to stretch my legs a bit after the drive, and saunter around the Austin club district centered around the Ground Zero of Sixth Street. It'd been several years since I was last there.

I meandered around, poking my nose into the live music bars, reading the handbills and posters to see who was playing that night in the legendary haunts where the guys like Stevie Ray and the Fabulous Thunderbirds paid their dues. It's funny how each place can have it own unique aroma, when the basic ingredients of the scent are all the same - stale beer, sweat, and cigarette smoke. You could almost identify each joint with your eyes closed.

This early in the evening, and on a weeknight, to boot, all of the concert venues were dark and empty, almost cold inside, as the operators cranked the A/C down to anticipate the late night crowds. The restaurants and bars were fairly busy, though, filled mostly with lawyers and businessmen macking on the pretty girls serving them drinks, and young couples out on dates.

I walked by a coffee bar, and saw though the window that they were having a poetry slam, as one bohemian looking dreadlocked white kid, festooned with tatoos and piercings, read his stuff to an even more bohemian looking crowd. Isn't rebellion terrific? It's so essential that every generation has to re-invent it all over again, as proud of it as a kindergartner with his first fingerpainting.

I wished for a moment that I'd brought something of mine to read, but oh well... I wouldn't have had time for that without missing the show, anyway.

Next door was a Irish bar, all dark wood, brass, mirror and leather. I saw a respectable collection of draft taps growing out of the back bar, so I hung a hard right, picked out a seat at the bar, and, after perusing the selection, ordered a Murphy's Irish Stout from the tatooed and pierced coed working behind the bar. Must be tough to find 'em in a college town.

I looked at the droplets of condensation as they formed on the pint glass, drawing out the delicious moment before I took the first sip of beer that I'd had in about two months, since I had resolved to cut down and get back into something resembling a shape, not that round isn't a shape.

I sat there for a moment, just thinking about things, trying to pin down a feeling that had been wandering around, lost and inchoate, since I'd walked into La Zona Rosa, and had grown more stridently urgent since I'd started my walkabout.

Absence does make the heart grow fonder. The beer tasted wonderful. But that wasn't it. I realized that seeing all these places brought on an almost nostalgic wistfulness for the days back when this world, this business of selling live music and whiskey, had been my own.

But only for a moment.

I once, talking to a friend also in the business, likened running your own nightclub to nailing yourself to a cross, where you hang in pain in exchange for a princely compensation for as long as you can stand it, with all the free booze you can drink to help deaden the pain.

The fact is, even if you own it, it turns out to be nothing more than a very highly paid, intensely stressful job from which there are no vacations or sabbaticals, or at least ones that are not harmful to your business in direct, or perhaps, exponential, proportion to their length.

I was never as happy then as I am now, wealthy or not, and going back to bed with the Dark Mistress that is the club business would mean giving up most of the things and people that I enjoy so much now.

I liked the club business well enough, I suppose, but I always considered it more of a vehicle for making Big Bags O' Money than a true calling. After I found out that having the Big Bags didn't make me any happier, as I always thought it would, the industry lost a lot of it's luster.

Still, if the Dark Mistress is a bitch, she's a mighty seductive one. Few people get their ass kissed with such frequency and fervency as the man that carries the keys to the club. (I say man because it remains a occupation with few women in the owner or manager ranks. Why, I don't know. I think maybe women have too much sense.)

Women want to do you, men want to be you, everybody wants to be the friend of the owner. Every day, it seems, there are people desperate to sell themselves to you. Cute coeds want a job. Current employees want the more profitable schedules. Bands are begging for that first break into gigs that actually pay money. Beer and liquor vendors want you to push their brands. Patrons want to know the Magic Word that makes them a VIP, able to bypass the lines and the cover charges. Even people with scads of bucks that want to invest in your next location. Whatever. And some of all of the above are willing to do just about anything to get whatever it is they want from you, to include all sorts of Things Your Mother Warned You About.

You become a fairly well-known character, too. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people coming through your doors, and it doesn't take them long to figure out who the Head Honcho is, even if you wouldn't know them from Joe Bagadonutz. It's the culmination of the procees that starts when you take that first gig as a doorman or bartender in a happenin' joint.

When I first started dating my ex-wife, (who I met when I served her a drink in one of the big singles bars where I had been slinging whiskey) it became a neverending source of amazement to her. We never went anywhere together, out to eat, a movie, shopping, or of course, out to a bar, that we didn't run into someone that knew me. Of course, about 75% of the time I had no idea whether the guy pacing up to me wanted to thank me for buying him a beer, or try and kick my ass for tossing him out on his keister, but such is the nature of the beast. I used to joke with her that she'd never have to worry about me cheating on her, 'cause there were battalions of spotters out there covering the city for her.

It's a pretty heady intoxicant, and some of those drinking this brew make the mistake of confusing all this celebrity, popularity and fundament frenching as something reflecting some real intrinsic personal qualities, and not simply the trappings of the office. As my old friend Byrnie Jackson used to say, they become guilty of reading their own press releases.

I recall Byrnie telling me once to always Be Nice, 'cause you meet the same people on the way up that you do on the way down. Good advice, but widely ignored, as evidenced by the flaming two and a half somersaults with a half twist in the pike position crash-and-burns staight into the shitter I've seen more than a few club entrepreneurs perform during a mercurial career.

In the live music business, club owners have an additional power - they stand as the first obstacle the musical dreamers have to surmount to make it to the Big Time. While it's true that there are the stories of young talents that are scooped up and molded by the big record companies, and cut loose on the public sprung from their foreheads, as it were, most of the people you see mentioned in Rolling Stone did it the Hard Way, night after endless night of anonymous gigs in wherever will have them, building fans and reputation one night at a time. For every Destiny's Child or Backstreet Boys, there are dozens of Bruce Springsteens, Georgia Satellites, Huey Lewises', Bonnie Raitts, Smithereeens, Jewels, that had to work hard and long to finally get there.

By choosing which artists get to play music for a living, and those that have Day Jobs, the music clubs filter out the ones that are unwilling to do all the hard work, to spend those always scarce funds on more promo packages, more demo tapes, an upgraded amp, or a new water pump for the band van, the undisciplined that always arrive late, get drunk, play too fucking loud, and of course, those that simply have no talent.

That latter case is actually fairly rare. Musical talent abounds in the human race, to tell you the truth. It's not talent that decides who gets to make millions and write ridiculous concert performance riders that make sure that the promoters provide at least two pounds of peanut M&Ms with all the yellow ones removed and some goose pate for the band's poodle. The very best singers and players I've ever heard in my life are ones you've never heard of, and most likely never will. For whatever reason, be it family responsibilities, other interests, or simply just a distaste for the process, many of the most talented never even try to Make It Big. They just don't have the Fire in the Belly. Worse, even, are the ones that have all the talent, pay all the dues, but just don't have the luck it takes to get that one big break.

"Would you like another Murphy's?"

I was yanked out of my reverie by the bartender. I was startled to see that I had finished the beer while I sat there doing what I do best, that is, woolgathering.

I looked at my watch. It was only a few minutes before I needed to get back.

"No thanks, hon, I've got a show to see."

I hoofed it back into La Zona Rosa, waving at the two tattooed and pierced doormen that had promised to remember that I'd already paid the cover, just as the band took the stage.

Playing with Dana was her old partner in crime Lynda, of course, along with the drummer and guitar player from Maggie Drennon's band, on loan for the night, as it were. While I was gone the club had filled up a bit, I'd guess about a hundred folks, maybe a bit less, and all obviously hard-core fans. Not a bad showing for a early weeknight.

Dana's made her living singing just about every style of music there is. In her teens, she was singing country on stage at Gilley's, the legendary Texas mega honky-tonk. She's sung torch music wearing sequins in jazz bars, and classic rock in cover bands. When I was booking them in the early 90's, with Dana on keys and guitar, Lynda on bass and flute, and both of them singing, they were my house opening act, playing everything from Zeppelin to Beatles and Billie Holiday. I also headlined them a few times when I'd do an outside street party in conjunction with some local music festivals.

Then their record deal came through, and they left me to go on the road with Velvet Hammer, an artsy, heavy, Heart, Jethro Tull, CSN&Y amalgam, if you can imagine that. They came that close to the Big Show.

Dana has a sultry, alto voice, but with range enough to spare when needed. She sounds a bit like one of the Wilson sisters of Heart, frankly, I forget which one is which, but the one that did the greater part of the singing. (Dana will be the first to tell you that Heart is one of her biggest influences.)

Dana does not sing happy songs, it seems. Her lyrics, both in the songs she writes now, and the ones I remember from her with Velvet Hammer, have common themes of betrayal and loss, anger, love bought, sold, or given to wrong one, and redemption, couched in imagery and analogy from both the pagan and Xian worlds.

From her song "Medusa": <font color=maroon"> "...you were beautiful then jealousy betrayed you and all the hearts that loved you turned to stone."

And "Cliche": "...the songbird you hypnotized is so grateful to be free of the charming prince of tarts"

Her voice rings with a rich, earthy, sensuality, and she alternates, sometimes in the course of a single song, from a seductive little innocent girl voice to the primal scream of an angry siren watching Ulysses slip away, protected from her spell.

On stage she radiates with a primal, supernatural energy, as if animated by some elemental force beyond her, face constantly changing, expressive, sometimes cooing into the mike, sometimes seething in a near whisper, sometimes spitting the song defiantly out into the world.

I think my favorite song she did that night was one I think is called, "Dungeon." It's not on her CD yet, so I don't know for sure. It is inspired by a night in the the French Quarter bar of the same name, a bar where I'd spent several freakish nights my own damn self. It's that sort of a place. It's an eeerie, witchy, song, just right to be on the soundtrack of the next Anne Rice movie.

After her show was over, and Maggie came on with her band, I visited with Dana & Lynda for a while over a few beers, catching up on old times, with just half of one ear on Maggie's performance, which is really a shame, as she plays very tasty Celtic-flavored rock.

At one point, Lynda introduced me to one of her other friends as "the guy that supported us back when we were first getting started," referring to that steady gig they had from me back then. I got him to snap a pic of me with them, for the scrapbook.

They both commented on how much younger and happier I looked now than I did then. I attributed it to my current stress-free, or should I say club-free, existence.

Still, I could hear the Dark Mistress faintly whispering in my ear, "Wouldn't it be great to own a joint again, just to give these girls a place to play whenever they wanted?"

I think I need to borrow some of Ulysses' beeswax.

Related Links:

www.wyrdgrl.com www.dreamtrybe maggiedrennonband.com www.lazonarosa.com

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