Music, Music, Music

Our last three days in Austin certainly continued the 'Austin Means Music' theme - but introduced us also to another seemingly burgeoning obsession over here - dog ownership!   On Sunday morning, we'd roamed around the Pecan Street Festival - and arts and crafts event which covered the whole of E 6th Street, with several live bands playing at each of the intersections.   We were really surprised, though, to see that just about every third stall was selling dog-related items - everything from doggy coats and dresses(!), different kinds of painted leather or glittery collars and leashes, portrait or caricature painters who would capture your dog's beauty or quirky nature, to doggy exercise machines, buggies or toys.  Not surprisingly, there were also dozens and dozens of dogs being walked around the festival stalls by besotted owners, all vying with each other for attention and praise for their furry loved-ones.   Perhaps it won't be too long before Austin becomes known not just as the music capital, but also as the dog-besotted capital of the US?

Pecan Street Festival

 On Monday, we did more strolling around the City streets and parks, and enjoyed another typically Texan barbecue meal at Coopers on Congress.   There's certainly been no let-up in the competition between barbecue restaurants for the best reputation for their long, slow, smokers of all cuts of meat.  

Coopers Barbecue on Congress

In the evening, we went to yet another fabulous gig at the famous Antone's night-club, who were hosting a tribute to the recently-deceased Lazy Lester, a blues musician who'd been playing the harmonica and blues guitar since way back in the 1950s.   Included in this nearly 3-hours long gig were local veteran 'stars' like Denny Freeman, Sue Foley, Jimmy Vaughan, Lou Ann Barton, Derek O'Brien, Speedy Sparks and Grady Pinkerton.   Truly amazing virtuosity all round, and a really great atmosphere.
Once again, we were accompanied by Veronica and Jay, and so got introduced to a number of the performers, all of whom Jay was clearly well-known to.

Tuesday saw us once again at one of our favourite spots, Shady Grove on Barton Springs Road, for a lazy morning breakfast - where being shady was a real necessity:  the temperature was in the hight 30s and the humidity up to 80%.   Phew!

Shady Grove

In the evening, we met up once again with Veronica and Jay to enjoy a session by a Django Reinhardt-inspired band, strangely called 8 and a Half Souvenirs, at C-Boys on South Congress.   Andy and I had shared a table at Saxon's Pub on Friday with two other couples, one of whom turned out to be the lead guitarist and singer of the Souvenirs, and he'd invited us to come along to his gig.   He's a French-born Texan resident called Olivier Giraud, and he'd been telling us that the band, originally formed way back in 1994, had recently re-formed after a 20-year hiatus.   Their music - one song of which Olivier dedicated to his 'new-found English friends' in the audience (we two!) - played a really wonderful mixture of French cafe-style jazz swing and rockabilly, with lots of good-humoured joshing between band members.   They were clearly enjoying and having fun with their playing as much as we were enjoying listening to it.

Olivier Giraud

We'd had a strange experience while we were walking to C-Boys for the Souvenirs' gig.   As in so many places in Austin over the past week, there was a large street stall encouraging people here to register to vote (in time for the mid-term elections on November 6).   This particular stall, however, had an 'inside out' photo-booth, and they were asking people to stop by and have their photo taken, for display as posters on a huge wall of a nearby building.   We'd stopped to talk to them about their campaign, explaining that we were not US citizens and therefore not entitled to vote.   They nevertheless pressed us into having our photos taken, just to add to the diversity of photos they had.   We stayed long enough to learn that Andy' photo had worked, but that they'd run out of paper to produce the one they'd taken of me.   We thought no more about that little fun escapade until we were walking home from C-Boys late that evening, only to see this huge poster of Andy's mugshot leering out at us on the wall of this South Congress building - despite the fact that the Register Here to Vote stall was no longer there!

We took our leave of Jay and Veronica, our slightly whacky, warm and fun-loving Airbnb host, on Wednesday morning before our fight to New York.   It was rather like saying goodbye to old friends, we'd spent so much time enjoying each other's company and our shared music tastes, and we feel pretty sure we'll meet up again in Europe or back in the US some time in the future.

Veronica, Jay and Barbara