One of the newly formed band's members was a guy just passing thru who had a Crown Royal bag full of harps in different keys and he was top notch Luekenbach quality for the time,which was plenty damn good.
There were so many really good musicians back then that I can't recall but a couple of them that really stood out from the rest.Everything was acoustic and nothing was pre-arranged.
Thats the way I'm recalling it, you could ride in on your bike, sit and sip a Shiner Bock, and be blown away by the musicianship around them tables out back.
Now they have a stage back there and a live band playing on weedends at least. Must be that spectators like me came to outnumber the musicians too much so they had to crank up the volume, and I expect those bands are pretty good. But it aint even in the same ballpark as what went on before. I expect it aint a place to sit and improvise when you've got guys with amps on stage just fifty feet away.
It used to be a place you felt priviledged to be at.
Along the same lines we would often climb on our bikes at the end of the day to take in the bat flight out of the old railway tunnel near Grapetown, just about ten minutes away. Or five on a bike
Past the Old German shooting range there are two steep and sudden drainages that when you hit 'em at eighty on a bike the earth drops away from underneath and you go airborne, same again when you clumb back out, and then repeat in the next drainage ten seconds on down the road
You could sit on the edge of the railway cut and be IN the bat swarm, feel the breeze off of their collective wings like it was a floor fan, and smell the reeking ammonia stink that came with it.
So many bats it was like special effects, and you could follow the progress inside the tornado by focusing on the albino bats in the swarm.
Then the state look it over....
...nowadays stern, uniformed, short-haired ladies of uncertain sexual orientation yell at you to keep quiet "to avoid disturbing the bats". An upscale restaurant now sits nearby where the entrance to the old hippie commune used to be, high dollar homesites further down that same road.
Birdwatcher
