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buy the book

Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air: Legends of West Texas Music
by Christopher Oglesby
Published by the University of Texas Press:
"As a whole, the interviews create a portrait not only of Lubbock's musicians and artists, but also of the musical community that has sustained them, including venues such as the legendary Cotton Club and the original Stubb's Barbecue. This kaleidoscopic portrait of the West Texas music scene gets to the heart of what it takes to create art in an isolated, often inhospitable environment. As Oglesby says, "Necessity is the mother of creation. Lubbock needed beauty, poetry, humor, and it needed to get up and shake its communal ass a bit or go mad from loneliness and boredom; so Lubbock created the amazing likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Joe Ely."

buy the book

"Indeed, Oglesby's introduction of more than two dozen musicians who called Lubbock home should be required reading not only for music fans, but for Lubbock residents and anyone thinking about moving here. On these pages, music becomes a part of Lubbock's living history."
- William Kerns, Lubbock Avalanche Journal


Buy the book
Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air: Legends of West Texas Music
by Christopher Oglesby


Coincidence, Flying Saucers,
and Paleolithic Man
by Christopher Oglesby

If you know anyone from there, you probably know that people from Lubbock have a inexplicable tendency to speak about that place and its environment with an intensity usually reserved for the discussion of ex-spouses: Obsessive criticism, but Woe to the outsider who speaks ill of her out of ignorance of her many charms! For some reason, Lubbock expatriates just won’t let others forget that they hail from a place more bizarre than Twin Peaks, Gilligan’s Island or any place Chris Carter of the X-Files could dream up.
Joe Ely once said to me, "Lubbock has this way of, while you’re there, making you feel like its the most normal place in the world; not until you go away and start comparing your experience there to the outside world do you realize that Lubbock is really one of the strangest places anywhere." Austin fiddler Richard Bowden lived for over ten years in Lubbock as a member of The Maines Brothers Band (which featured legendary pedal-steel guitar-man/music producer Lloyd Maines, father of Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks.) Bowden attributes Lubbock’s strangeness to the UFO’s which were sighted, and even photographed by Texas Tech professors, over Lubbock in the `Fifties, the so-called Lubbock Lights.
"I tell ya’, it’s the flying saucers," Richard often exclaims.

I grew up in Lubbock, and no one can accuse me of ignoring my duty to make the world aware that Lubbock is still producing more than its share of entertaining weirdness. I am writing a book that I am calling Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air about all the amazing, creative people who hail from my hometown (i.e. Buddy Holly, Joe Ely, Terry Allen, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Lloyd Maines, Butch Hancock & the Rolling Stone’s saxman Bobby Keys, to name a few).

My work is an effort to answer that question: "Why this horde of musicians, poets, writers, and artists that are being emitted from an obviously fertile womb of creativity, and all these from arch-conservative, xenophobic Lubbock?"

Part of my theory has to do with the relationship of subjective intent to objective reality; Put more simply: The Power of Dreams. For Lubbock is a place constructed of almost nothing but dreams, a place devoid of almost everything but dirt, sky, and wind, a place where a human consciousness is forced to dig beauty and meaning out of its deepest hiding places within the mind and soul because there damn sure is nothing outside in the environment to stimulate the senses into believing the ego is alive. However, living there for any length of time, one feels as if there is something buried in that prairie soil, something real and subjective (call it a Spirit if you dare) just waiting there to be discovered by those sensitive enough. 
This is the Spirit I seek to define, the same Spirit that moved Buddy Holly to create Rock-n-Roll.

Dealing with such a mystical force, I have had many strange, intriguing experiences while pursuing the creation of this book about this strange place.
February ‘98 in Lubbock, I was waiting in town a few days for an opportunity to interview Don Caldwell, the man who operated the only recording studio in Lubbock for years and was responsible for many of these artists’ first recordings. Being Lubbock, there seemed to be not much to do in the meantime; however, my friend Angela Paschal, an artist who also worked at the Lubbock Municipal Library, took interest in my project and introduced me to her friend and co-worker named Rob Weiner. Coincidentally, Rob is a music historian who has published some biographical articles about Tom X. Hancock, "Lubbock’s Original Hippie," owner of the Cotton Club, spiritual father of the Flatlanders, patriarch of the Supernatural Family Band and the Texana Dames.
Following fortune, I plied Rob for priceless information at my favorite chile relleno place on Lubbock’s east-side, Taco Pueblo. Afterwards, he invited me to attend a remarkable poetry reading which Rob was sponsoring the next evening. The poetry was "inspired by the Grateful Dead", a truly astonishing moment in Lubbock cultural history in any case, as there is little Dead-head culture on the South Plains.
  It was at this poetry event where I chanced to meet a man named Warren Kinney. Warren happens to be an archeologist who digs at the Lubbock Lake Landmark Site. The "Lubbock Lake" is the one site in North America where there is evidence of continuous human presence since the Ice Age; this is because the site is located on the Yellow House Draw, headwaters of the Brazos River and the only natural source of substantial surface water for miles in every direction.
Warren is a wild-man of the prairie, and we naturally became fast-friends. He invited me on a private tour of the Lake Site. What an unexpected opportunity! I figured I better learn why paleolithic people were also insane enough to dwell in this desolate place; Maybe I would be a step closer to discerning "What is up with Lubbock?"

Once at the site, I discovered (in accordance with my theory about subjective intent and objective reality) that another guest on the private tour happened to be Kent Mings, oldest of three brothers who form the core of The Texas BelAirs, a smokin’ Lubbock country-blues-rock band in the tradition of Joe Ely. Coincidentally, here's another significant artist to interview for the book, and I had been on my search in Lubbock for only three days!
One fact about Lubbock which Warren shared with us on t6he tour is that, not only are there obviously no natural trees in Lubbock, there are no natural sources for rock within a hundred miles in every direction; only dirt. This fact is archeologically significant because, by uncovering their rock tools, we can discern from what areas migrant hunters were coming to hunt in the Lubbock environs. More incredible, there is no evidence of permanent dwellings or burial sites; These people simply were walking from hundreds of miles away to hunt meat and then returning home to whence they came.

So there Mings and I are, standing out there in the "Lubbock Lake" (today not more than a small, dry arroyo.) We had seen the dioramas and paintings in the Welcome Center of the Ice Age animals which congregated here; HUGE beasts: Bison Antiquus, Giant Ground Sloth, Woolly Armadillo, as well as the ultimate hunter himself Saber Tooth Tiger. 
We began imagining together, aloud, "What if we were paleolithic men? It is so flat and barren out here, nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. If ole’ Saber Tooth is downwind, he’ll be on us before we could even think of escape."
We have none of the security that goes with being "Head of the Food Chain." I begin to really feel like a stone-age man of the plains. 
So here we sit, visible to all nature, even at night under a vast canopy of stars, hunted as much as hunter, with our big rocks we have toted across hundreds of miles of waterless emptiness. We wait patiently trying to figure out how and when we are going to leap down into this small canyon onto the back of some behemoth-beast and smash it on the head with our rocks, without becoming dinner for one of many creatures much larger than ourselves.

We discovered one is required to be a mad genius to survive in Lubbock, even in the Stone Age.

What a bizarre experience: slipping back to the "Natural State of Man," so nearly animal but obviously conscious of himself and his world. Nothing is certain but the fact that one is alive and compelled to live. I experienced something there in that dry creek bed which is so foreign to "ordinary, everyday experience" it was startling; closer to that reality associated with dreams or psychedelics. And I wasn’t three miles from the ordinary two-story house with white picket fence where I was reared.

   Upon leaving the Lubbock Lake Site that afternoon, one of the women with us pointed to the remarkable life-sized bronze statue of an anatomical recreation of Bison Antiquus.
"The church people had a fit over that thing," Tanya So, who works for Texas Tech’s Southwest Collection, told me. I knew the people she spoke of: the arch-fundamentalist Southern Baptist Church and their equally as conservative counterparts, The Church of Christ, maintain as strong a hold on Lubbock politics as the Jews do in Jerusalem. But I could not imagine what criticism they could have with this beautiful artist’s recreation of one of God & America’s most amazing (albeit extinct) animals.
When I questioned Tanya she pointed to the huge feature between the animal’s mighty legs. "They didn’t like looking at his dork."

Yes, my hometown Lubbock, Texas, is an exceptionally paradoxical place. Writer and actress Jo Harvey Allen (wife of musician/visual artist Terry Allen who recorded the critically acclaimed, classic Lubbock album "Lubbock: on everything") describes Lubbock most frequently with that one word: PARADOX.
Describing her feelings about Lubbock, Jo Harvey relates this anecdote: her son Bukka Allen (now a musician, considered one of Austin's best keyboard players) was 6 years old and sitting on the toilet. He had just heard the word "paradox" for the first time and asked his mother from the restroom what it means.
Jo Harvey answered, "Paradox is like how if your soccer coach uses that word 'nigger' one more time we’re gonna’ get his ass fired but your granddaddy uses the word everyday of his life and we love him with all our hearts."

Lubbock is truly astonishing. While difficult for many of us to be there some times, once away, we realize it is truly an amazing place to be from.


Do you like what you just read?
Buy the book by author Christopher Oglesby
Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air:
Legends of West Texas Music

"As a whole, the interviews create a portrait not only of Lubbock's musicians and artists, but also of the musical community that has sustained them, including venues such as the legendary Cotton Club and the original Stubb's Barbecue. This kaleidoscopic portrait of the West Texas music scene gets to the heart of what it takes to create art in an isolated, often inhospitable environment. As Oglesby says, "Necessity is the mother of creation. Lubbock needed beauty, poetry, humor, and it needed to get up and shake its communal ass a bit or go mad from loneliness and boredom; so Lubbock created the amazing likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Joe Ely." - University of Texas Press

buy the book


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