I’m writing this at the halfway point of what has turned into a 6 week tour (July9-August18). The band I’m on the road with (Nick Curran & the Nitelifes) was supposed to finish up 3 weeks with a Saturday night in St. Louis, then drive the mere 12 hours back to Austin for a few days of well-deserved downtime. For downtime, fellow travelling musicians will read “doing laundry, paying bills, and letting friends know you haven’t dropped off the face of the earth.”

But our band van broke down, so instead of driving home, we spent Sunday driving back and forth to Autozone, scratching our heads in the hot sun, and wondering why each new part we put in didn’t solve the problem. Finally, sweaty, dusty and covered with grease we accepted the fact that we should leave car repair to authorized mechanics and stick to playing our instruments.

Monday (7/28): With the van up and running, we decided we had to bypass Texas and head directly on to the next 3 week chunk: Colorado, Montana, Caifornia, Arizona. A hot shower, good meal, and laundromat made it easier to face the next 12 hour drive, and gave me time to reflect on some of the last 3 weeks, particularly what it means to be part of the blues community in this country at this time.

The main thing I noticed is that there are more blues clubs springing up around the country, and not just fly-by-night ventures, but well-organized, spacious clubs with good sound systems. A number of these clubs also feature jazz on certain nights, which to me seems only natural as blues and jazz are part of the same family. Unfortunately, as music is constantly commodified into marketing niches, audiences lose sight of the underlying connections. It’s refreshing to see club owners and promoters who have a bigger vision. I talked with the owners of clubs like B&B’s in St. Louis, the Roadhouse in Dearborn, MI, and Boomers in Grand Junction, CO. What they all shared was a desire to provide good music in a comfortable setting. The clubs are all 300-500 seaters, with pictures of jazz and blues greats on the walls to remind patrons of the musical traditions. Nothing too gaudy; slightly swanky but the point is to provide a showcase for good music, a community resource.

I had the opposite impression when I saw the House of Blues in Chicago. Each H.O.B. has become bigger & better (the original in Cambridge, MA is funky and unpreposessing; the New Orleans H.O.B. is big and full of the ubiquitous folk art; the one in Los Angeles has a more oppressively showbiz vibe), to the point where the Chicago H.O.B. is a corporate complex replete with hotel and parking garage. One can’t help but feel that “the Blues” has been turned into a business rather than a musical genre. People go to the H.O.B. to buy some blues in the form of touristic memorabilia. Of course it doesn’t have to be, and the various clubs I played in around the country illustrate this fact. Tourism can be a first step toward greater understanding and involvement in new cultural experiences. It doesn’t have to be a corporate-controlled merchandising scheme.

Maybe the success of large scale blues and roots clubs like House of Blues has made it easier for smaller blues clubs to find an economic niche, as middle America rediscovers its own musical legacy through modern mass marketing. Maybe there is room for both the extravagant large scale ventures and the smaller music showcases. I’m just happy that in these economically hard-pressed times there are more music venues appearing that are committed to presenting good music.

Being on the road also illuminates for me some of the economic issues facing Austin musicians at home. In a lot of ways the struggles and choices we face here are a microcosm of larger economic and cultural events going on nationally. Small performance venues spring up and either find a niche or perish. Meanwhile, city planners inexorably push for large corporate development, a plan in which live music and local culture is subject to the profit margins generated by national trends. Every city and town in the U.S.A. faces these issues. A scary thought, but on the other hand, musicians and music lovers I talked with around the country all view Austin as still a bastion for creative grassroots musical culture. Which, hopefully, it will remain.