Chucobilly at the Desert Crossing

On Monday, Cinco de Mayo, I went to a rockabilly show at the Desert Crossing.

Cinco de Mayo is a holiday popularized by beer companies the way florists pushed Secretary's Day. They don't even celebrate Cinco de Mayo in Mexico. It comes at a good time for a holiday, in the long doldrums between St. Patty's and Memorial Day. Like I need an excuse to party.

I drove my truck Rolling Thunder past UTEP and cut over to Yandell. I swept down the ramp to catch the river road, past the old Fort Bliss and the cluster of buildings with international frontage, through the yellow lights illuminating the border, between the smelter and the brick factories. I took the Anapra underpass and crossed the river.

The Carousel is closed now, almost forever. The Morocco is some kind of spiritualist church. Before Texas got liquor-by-the-drink, in 1966, these were the old roadhouses, the places a man could go to pound a cold one, or drink a highball, ice cubes clinking in a tall glass. The Mecca Lounge was a roadhouse then, and now it's reborn in Ardovino's Desert Crossing, up by the railroad tracks in the foothills of Cristo Rey.

I drove to the upper lot and angled Thunder into a space up by Robert's house. People milled in the parking lot. Men in tight t-shirts and slicked up hair. Harley bikers in their colors on leather and denim. Girls in Betty Page retro.

I revved the engine to let the straight pipes rumble.

Like Al Gore invented the internet, I invented rockabilly in El Paso. Or maybe it was me and some other guys, like the Fernandez brothers, and the Hemperly's, and maybe Troy Calhoun. Maybe rockabilly in El Paso was like calculus, developed by Leibniz and Newton at the same time separately.

Maybe its time had come.

My bar, Wildhare's Booze and Adventure, was born in the Modern Golden Age of Rockabilly. Wildhare's filled a geographic niche for touring bands, located, conveniently, in a nine hundred mile stretch of desolation, between Tuscon and Austin, or Phoenix and Dallas, or someplace distantly east and another remotely west. The tagline on the t-shirts, glib and coincidentally relevant, read Conveniently Located Halfway Between Warsaw, Poland and the Fiji Islands. We got all the great rockabilly bands. Candye Kane. Billy Bacon. The Paladins. The Red Elvises. El Vez, the Mexican Elvis. Ray Condo. And dozens of other hepcats that you never heard of, either.

The Wildhare's phenomenon, the endless string of national touring acts, couldn't be replicated today. The same kinds of bands, the rockabilly and blues and roots rock bands, aren't touring as much today, and the other clubs, in Phoenix, or Tucson, or Albuquerque, the ones the bands could hang a tour on, the clubs that would pay big bucks for a Friday or a Saturday, and let me pick up a Tuesday for chicken feed, those clubs have all dried up.

Lloyd Tripp and the Zipp Guns was one of the bands that played Wildhare's. He was the headliner at the Desert Crossing on Monday, too. Lloyd's a Brit. Europe was infected by Gene Vincent in the sixties. Rockabilly stuck.

The Stray Cats repopularized rockabilly in the eighties. But other bands, like Social Distortion, are a more nuanced interpretation of the rockabilly sensibility.

Rockabilly's more than music. It's turning a wrench on an old chunk of Detroit steel, preferably Mopar, but definitely your own or your buddy's. It's rolling up a pack of Pall Malls in the sleeve of your too tight t-shirt. It's four inch folded cuffs on brand new blue jeans. It's wearing bangs, like Betty Page, and smacking bubble gum. It's the fifties, and Elvis, and Jerry Lee, and the sixties, before the Beatles and Timothy Leary. It's big blocks and hot rods and honest grease under your fingernails. It's leather jackets and tattoos. It's Grease, and West Side Story, and Rebel Without a Cause.

Rockabilly is a modern distillation of the rebelliousness of the fifties. James Dean. Marlon Brando. American motorcycles.

Hot Rod Boogie opened the show on Monday with raw, bass thumping power. The Star City Dreamers played a melodic set in the middle, before Lloyd Tripp and the latest version of the Zipp Guns took the stage and burned down the house. All the hep cats and kittens juked and jived.

Those cats are real gone.