Wanda Jackson IS Oklahoma City, she is a legend here , the Queen of Rockabilly, sometimes called the Lady Chuck Berry. 

A self-professed hard-headed woman, hard-living and hard-drinking, writing and playing her own songs, a guitar wizard, doing exactly what she wants and forget anyone else, in 1955, unbelievable. I cannot imagine anyone listening to her and not at the very least being impressed with Wanda’s force of spirit, I’ve also heard her referred to as “The Party”.

Mean Mean Man was the first song of her’s I heard, thanks to this version by Vancouver’s Maow, featuring (at the time Emily Carr student) Neko Case on drums and vocals, it’s still my favourite Wanda song.

Wanda is also one of the last of the first generation Rock and Roll stars who are still around, 80 years old and still recording and touring, this is her latest, a kickass cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ recorded with Jack White in Nashville. Wanda has the awesome audacity to change Bob’s lyrics too, switching the verse about chasing Alicia Keys all over Tennessee to chasing Jerry Lee Lewis all over Tennessee.

Oh my!

It always feels weird to me to post stuff about somber sites that I visit, memorials and places of remembrance, maybe that’s silly, who knows.

There is one iron chair for each victim, they are arranged where each person would have sat on the building’s nine floors when it stood in that spot.

The Dallas subway gets instant points for having the best name ever… 

Ride the Dart… Dallas Area Rapid Transit!

Ok, so it’s not exactly a subway, it’s light rail that runs partially underground, closer to Skytrain than to a traditional subway, the city of Dallas has actually just approved a plan for a full subway system under the city with construction to begin next year (interesting to see major American cities finally clueing in to the need for underground transit, at least half a dozen are currently frantically digging to try to catch up to what they should have had in the first place)

I rode around for a few hours on the Red Line, the Blue Line and the Green Line. Outside of some downtown underground stations most of the lines are road-level, overhead powered trolly-style electric rollers. The cars are big, Texas-sized even, and cheap, a full day pass for the entire system is $5.

I was not familiar at all with the style of the train cars so did some Googling, turns out the DART is all Kinki Sharyo stock, very fancy, the same Japanese concern that builds the Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan, the Cadillac of Light Rail Transit.

The underground stations are an interesting mashup of Brutalist bricks and Soviet styles that would probably surprise a lot of Texans to learn of.

I took a little side trip to Boswell, Oklahoma as the greatest road movie of all time, Two Lane Blacktop, spends a good bit of the movie there.

Two characters known only as The Driver and The Mechanic drive their muscle car across America, rarely talking, rarely smiling.. it’s a hard movie to explain but amazing. At Dixie’s Cafe in Boswell they meet The Girl.

From the movie:

I actually did a lot more today and saw a lot more today but one bar of cell reception near Boswell is making posting this a marathon task, signing off for tonight, more Oklahoma tomorrow.

Day 2

MC 900 Ft Jesus is a Dallas local and his first couple albums sound perfect tonight as I write this. He played a show in Dallas last month and is doing another in Houston in two weeks, his first shows in over 15 years. I would love to go to the Houston date but it would require some pretty severe roadtrip backtracking.

The first half of today was taken up with getting the van ready to head out, picked up a mattress, bedding, a cooler and curtains and spent time test fitting everything.

Everyone I ask had told me to go to the Pecan Lodge for BBQ so I headed there after poking around a couple record stores (more on that later) to kill time assuming arriving mid-afternoon would ensure no lineup.

The lineup continues around the corner and down the block. I waited in line for around an hour and hadn’t really moved all that much. Eventually the pit master came around and said that because of the line anyone who was ordering for takeout could move to the front of the line to try to thin things out. I think I heard him first and ended up slipping right to the front, got a sampler with collared greens and made a picnic in the van.

It’s 1:40am as I write this so I am not going to get into detail on the BBQ, it was exactly as amazing as you would expect, end of story. This was also breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Grabbed a quick nap and then headed back out again.

Tonight I was fortunate enough to take in two great shows at two different venues.

The first was at the super cool Kessler, I read in a few places how special the sound is there and I have to agree, I cannot think of a live music venue I have been to that sounded this good, the quality of the sound was literally joyous.

The sound was probably also helped by who I got to see there tonight. Margo Price and her backup band The Price Tags completely and totally blew me away. So good and so tight and having so much fun I literally started crying happy tears. Margo is the spiritual successor to Dolly and Loretta and she kicked so much ass tonight, I’ll stop now but bore each of you in person about her.

Here she is live at ACL, her voice live is as good as anyone I have ever seen.

Once the Margo Price show ended I had just enough time to zip across town to the Gas Monkey Garage and jump into Electric Six’s set, missed just the first couple songs.

They were exactly as fun as you would expect, if you don’t know Electric Six think of a cross between The White Stripes and Tenacious D with a healthy scoop of Spinal Tap as well.

Lots of singalongs, lots of pogoing and fist pumping, my voice is shot and I am about to fall asleep.

After the festival I headed to Shibuya to a ramen place I kept hearing about. 

Lined up outside for about 20 minutes, then in side where the line slowly leads down a staircase into a dark, cramped, windowless basement. Eventually I came into the ordering room, should have gotten a picture, insert money into machine, select buttons for exactly what ramen you want, customize everything, then it spits out a ticket, take the ticket and get back in line.

Green curtains are kitchen, red curtains are stalls for diners.

The board below shows which stalls are available or about to be available.

My eating stall! It’s not sized for me, my shoulders touched each side, lol.

Handed my ticket through and 5 minutes later received ramen, curtain comes down, eat, slurp, go back upstairs and outside, wonderful.