strider57

I live in Beaumont, Texas, which is the 10th largest city in Texas, shadowed by Houston 70 miles away to the West. I've lived other places, San Antonio, LA, and Denver, but this is home and after coming back in 1999, I resolved this was where I would make my final stand. I like it here, I have my own little business and I'm pretty well known around the area. I'm an NRA and RNC member, which means for the most part I'm a pretty rampant Republican, but that has not much to do with who I am in my personal life. I'm a musician, old school from back in the day when the bands I played in, "Third Coast and White Chapel" rocked the local venues every weekend! That was a long, long time ago, but I think to a degree we all tend to live in the past, at least our fondest memories of the past.

Beaumont has a few claims to fame. Texas oil started here with the Spindletop gusher and oil is still king in this town. We've also produced more professional football players than any other city in America, but underneath in all, Beaumont is a music town!! Janis Joplin, Edgar and Johnny Winter, The Big Bopper all grew up here and country star like Tex Ritter, George Jones, Tracy Bird, Mark Chestnutt, and Clay Walker also!! I'm not into it, so I have to claim ignorance, but word is a few pretty famous Rappers also hale from this area. Point being, music runs deep in the soul of this community and last night I had the pleasure of seeing the future.

Once a year, we have a little thing here called "Connect The Dots" where local musicians invite locals bands from all over Texas to come together for a weekend of great music!! I went last night, because it was an opportunity to get together with a lot of great friends and enjoy the purest forms of music. The guys who practice in their parent's garage, live in vans crisscrossing endless miles of Texas highways every weekend, going from one gig to the next, only to come back home dead tired on a Sunday night having to face the next full week at their day job, before going out to do it all over again!! They don't do it for the money, because it doesn't pay shit!! Truth be told, they finance it all by working throughout the week on a normal job like every other working stiff in America! Playing the odds, none of these bands are ever going to make it "Big Time," and they most probably know it. There are a few fringes...there are the girls in every town that want to fuck the guys in the band, and back in the day when I partook of those casual benefits, it was a time when the worst consequence of such actions was just a shot, not DEATH, so I wonder if things haven't changed these days?
No, I seriously doubt it's about the sex and certainly not about the money, it's about the music and that's what makes it a beautiful thing!! Last night I saw some kids taking the stage and pouring their hearts out to all of us who had come to listen. It was fucking AMAZING!!