The old Masonic Hall in Pensacola stands on the corner of Palafox and Garden. The ground floor has been converted into a music hall with a smallish stage and a balcony. There are bars upstairs as well as on the main floor. In the back there is an area with couches and small tables. We went there last Friday night.
When we entered that night, I looked around. For all the world, it looked like we had walked into the cast party for the movie Deliverance. The room smelled of beer, cigarettes and diesel. These were working people, hard working people. They were bikers and cowboys and aging hippies. We soon realized, though, they were more like the cast from Mayberry RFD than Deliverance.
The opening act featured Jesus Christ on keyboards, The love child of MamaCass and Jabba the Hut on vocals, Joseph and his technicolor dream coat on bass, Prince Phillip on rhythm guitar and Soul Billy on drums. They were an eclectic bunch to say the least, but they laid down some pretty nice tunes. They played four about an hour, then using their walkers, they wobbled off the stage to tremendous applause.
In the 1980s, I first noticed him. I was sitting in a little roadside beer joint called Roy’s First Chance/Last Chance just south of Paragould Arkansas. It was the kind of place where anything from Country and Western to Edgar Winter might blare out of the juke box at any time. I was shooting pool, and losing. The song started innocently enough, nothing special. I barely noticed it. It was a song about a lost love, or something. Not really remarkable in any way, till the end when everyone stopped what they were doing to join in singing “I was drunk, the day my momma got out of prision…..”
I have enjoyed David Allen Coe’s music ever since. He is the original rhinestone cowboy. An Ex-con who Johnny Cash helped get out of prison, he was a poet as much as a song writer. He wrote rock hits like ‘Please Come to Boston for the Spring time”, and great outlaw country songs like ‘Long Haired Redneck”. He had a way with words. In describing his father and the ‘parts cars’ in his front yard he wrote ‘They looked like tombstones in our yard and I never seen him when he wasn’t tired…”
We all drift away a little from things as we age. I haven’t seen a photo graph of DAC in probably 30 years, but I never expected to see him live like this. He struggled on to the stage slowly with a cane, and sat heavily a stool like a boxer after a bloody and tough round. A young helper handed him his guitar and positioned the microphone. He was big, and old, and bent. His long gray hair and beard made him look like an old and fat Zeus after a hell of a bender. He began to sing.
Age may have played hell on him, but his voice and spirit arrived in Pensacola intact and we had a great time listening to him.
Go see your favorite acts now. Don’t wait. They are getting old and dying every day. Already they don’t look anything like what you remember. One day, they will be gone and you and Keith Richards will be left with nothing but memories, echoes and fading tattoos. We won’t always have the opportunity to see them. Go see them now.
As I looked at the battered remains of David Allen Coe performing on the stage last Friday night, it was all I could do to keep from crying.…..
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