PLAZA PULSE
Sometimes I wonder if Santa Fe can handle its own music scene. For one, this obsession with bluegrass is bewildering. Why on earth, in a dry-ass land thousands of miles away (both metaphorically and literally) from Appalachia, are we fixated on mandolins and banjos?
And then there's the laser-like focus on blues. Blues, blues, blues. Even growing up in Texas, I've never seen the types of dance floor orgasms derived from blues music that I've seen here. What's up with that?
And finally, there's the conviction that the only music fit for public events is "traditional" New Mexican music. With, maybe, a smattering of bluegrass or blues.
OK, before you fire off your angry letters, let me just say, blues, bluegrass, traditional music-it's all amazing and great and gorgeous. But our collective fixation on very few genres works to negate others, especially during public events. This, I think is one of our biggest failures, one that embodies what is wrong with our perspective concerning Santa Fe/New Mexico culture.
Case in point: A few days ago I headed down to the Plaza to check out Cherry Tempo (formerly known as Shortwave Sweetheart), a cute little indie-rock group derived from now defunct local favorites Mistletoe, at the Santa Fe Summer Bandstand series. Cherry Tempo is one of the best bands in Santa Fe right now, not just because the group echoes current trends in the actual United States (there's a whole great big world out there beyond Albuquerque, ya'll), but because they do it so well. Unironic, good-hearted rock, centered around a melange of vintage keyboards, Brian Wilson melodies, Rickenbacker-sounding guitars, geek-chic, glasses-wearing sensitive boy rock is what's happening outside of our state's border's, and thank God some local musicians are paying attention, drawing from the national scene and being so damn good that
someone's
gotta pay attention.
And Cherry Tempo's that good. They're catchy but far from cloying, earnest, intelligent. In a sense, they're more than the sum of their parts: Bell-like guitar fills, fairly simple keyboard lines, sneakily inventive melodies. They're subtle.
And maybe that's the problem. Their aesthetic is more fit for geeky shoe-gazing music critics than folks who wanna shake their tailfeathers. And there are all sorts of arcane and insider-y reasons for a music critic to love this band that would be of no interest to the average music listener. But I believe in this group-they've got something, that uncanny ability to take all the "right" indie-rock influences and create something heartfelt and smart and catchy. I can't understand why that doesn't translate to, I dunno, cross-cultural, cross-generational popularity.
But, at least in Santa Fe, it doesn't, and the Cherry Tempo set proved a sadly apt example. As I was laying (against city code) in the Plaza grass, it all started so nicely. The band was cruising along. The afternoon showers had cooled everything down and then given way to a baby blue sky. Tourists and locals mingled about, actually excited about the concert. I thought "Hey, this is nice. I mean, we could use a hot dog stand, but this is what the Summer Bandstand is all about, folks coming together, maybe listening to some music they've never really heard before, opening their minds…" But my idealistic little reverie was rudely interrupted by someone walking by who said, "Hey, I thought it was Latin night," in a really disappointed voice. The person walked away. I looked up and saw about 50 people, their eyes glazed over, confusion flashing briefly across their faces. They just didn't think this was "community" music-e.g., blues, bluegrass or traditional-and that drives me nuts. This dismissiveness, it's disheartening and downright destructive, and it makes me wonder if we deserve music on the Plaza at all.
TRAVIS-TY?
Does anyone else think the new fancy flashing crosswalk lights on Grant Avenue are just an extension of the decor at Swig? I swear, when I first saw them I thought the club had expanded its tentacles out onto the city streets like a disco ball octopus. An understandable reaction, considering Swig owners Cliff Skoglund and Robert Hall recently purchased the Palace Restaurant across the street from Swig-they seem to be snatching up every piece of real estate in that neck of the woods, so why not a crosswalk? Recently, they gutted the old Palace and transformed it into…Señor Lucky's family style restaurant, which I visited for the first time this past weekend. I'll leave the food and decor reviews up to the devices of SFR's other reviewers, but, at the very least, musically, it was an odd experience.
OK, maybe more than musically. Part of me felt like I was back in my hometown of Fort Worth, surrounded by frat-ish guys in starched white button-downs slurping margaritas. It was so damn conflicting, as I endured a surge of nostalgia about something I'm not particularly fond of. Another part of me was heartened by the freaky and incongruent presence of several BLOC-BUSTA revelers, hanging about, being drunk and smart and kinda stinky. You know: art freaks. To my mescal-blurred brain, it looked like those aerial shots you see of when the freshwater Mississippi River finally meets the salty sea, creating a specialized, delicate balance, murky and beautiful simultaneously, symbiotic and yet teetering on disaster. Which, you know, is what Santa Fe is all about.
The soundtrack to all this was a mix-tape of country music from the '80s and '90s-George Strait, Randy Travis and the like-again prompting the same sort of inner conflict the Texas nostalgia caused: Does this music suck? Then why do I like it so much?
The thing is, George Strait and Randy Travis also represent a moment when two incongruous things clash and reach a momentary Hegelian balance before it all comes tumbling down. Strait and Travis were present at that instant when country music shifted from dark Hank Williams beauty and Dolly Parton trailer-park celebration to the icky, lipstick Judd-ery we see today. Remember when the stoic hillbilly majesty of Loretta Lynn was replaced by a leather-clad Shania Twain frolicking in the desert in the video for "Damn! I Feel Like a Woman"? That transition in Nashville's aesthetic was embodied by the likes of Strait and Travis, who wrote some damn good songs, one foot in the traditional world of honky-tonk, one foot in the horrible white-trash commercialism of Garth Brooks. Strait and Travis simultaneously tried to save country music while contributing to its ruin.
Could the same be said about Señor Lucky's relationship to Santa Fe? I know attendance at the Palace had been dropping for years. The place was just dying. Something needed to be done, and Skoglund and Hall did it. I suspect the proprietors don't give a shit about what kind of music is playing as long as they can shill mango-ritas to it, but, hell, if it gets different types of people out together at the same time, I don't care if they play a tape of gorillas having sex. So, as the frat boys and the art weirdos danced around each other on the Señor Lucky's patio, I wondered if the delicate balance would last, or if at some point all parties would retire to their separate metaphorical corners-maybe not this particular night, but eventually. We'll see.
