Gone on down to Cowtown

This is my first rodeo

Ellie (bandmate) and Nico (horse) on a trail near Los Angeles.

For a minute it looked like the tour bus would be overrun by rodeo-goers in Fort Worth, Texas.

Eleven tour-tired band and crew stumbled out of the dank bus into sunlight and a relentless stream of behatted, deep-blue-jeaned, you-bet-your-ass-they-were-wearing-cowboy-boots fans of Professional Bull Riders, who were set to compete at the Cowtown Coliseum across the street from our venue, right before our show.

We had heard that the organizers of the rodeo tried to buy out our promoter—pay them for every ticket and then cancel our show—so that the whole Stockyards neighborhood could be the sovereign land of PBR. The promoter said no, thankfully, because we’re in the business of playing music, not in the business of reverse-extortion not to play music, and the promoter is certainly in the business of making money from people playing music.

Meanwhile, our friend Jenn wandered the grounds around the Coliseum in the afternoon and was handed a free stack of tickets to the rodeo. So we went.

We flinched even before we got through the front doors. Pyrotechnics exploded with a bang you never wanna hear in a crowded place anymore.

I felt like a trespasser, not wearing the right stuff, knowing we were the pesky musicians Professional Bull Riders tried to boot out of town.

It took maybe fifteen minutes before we could pick our jaws up off the floor at the sensory onslaught of it all. The smell of gas (from ATVs in the ring), the dusty air, the over-the-top announcer, and the uniform audience of blond cowboy hats and checkered button-ups. I took one photo before an usher snapped at me, “No cameras!”

Why no cameras? Maybe because of the risk of gore. Throughout it all, we couldn’t get over the threat of imminent mortal harm. Not to the bulls, but to the people. (According to a friend who’s familiar with rodeos, bull-riding is harmless for bulls, and because they’re very valuable, they’re pampered at home. But, you know, there are nicer things to do with animals.)

We saw an eighteen-year-old rider get flung off a bull and then stepped on—a nearly one-ton animal, coming down on your ribcage. The rider was okay. He walked it off with the same limp that you or I would have if we stubbed a toe. But it felt like we had just watched a child get his internal organs smooshed. Is that what people come to the rodeo for? To see organ smooshage?

I don’t think so. People are there for community and sport. It’s incredible that these athletes can hang on to a bucking bull for more than even one second. And looking around the crowd, there’s no question that if you grow up in these parts and live a ranch life (or a ranch-adjacent life), going to the rodeo is like… going to a rock show? See people you know, see people who make you feel like the world is full of others who kinda get what it’s all about.

Watching people in the stands enjoy themselves, I felt dueling impulses to judge them and to judge my peers in the music community for hypothetically judging them. On one hand, I think there’s nothing wrong with rodeo-going people at all. Their pastime just looks different than ours. Rock shows are also loud and dirty. Rock bands guzzle gas to get from place to place just like bull transports. And while there’s a little more diversity of expression and identity in the music community, we’re all still pretty uniform, just like Cowtown’s sea of matching cowboy hats. We can’t throw stones in this indie rock glass house.

On the other hand, there are obvious clues of repression and political bullshit in the rodeo crowd. Professional Bull Riders are sponsored by federal police. Their bull-handlers wear cheeky jerseys that say “Protected by U.S. Border Patrol.” They might say that’s about stemming the tide of illegal guns and drugs, but we know it’s really meant to say, “This country—this country exclusively made up of immigrants and formerly enslaved people—is for me, not for you,” and it’s based off a misdiagnosis of the problems in our economy (greed, not immigrants) and a doomed prescription for the chaos at the Southern border.

I abhor the whole package of social Darwinist beliefs. I don’t think anyone in Cowtown is sitting there saying, “I’m a social Darwinist,” and frankly I’d need to spend more than half of a PBR elimination round with them to really get a read on any of this. But the clues are there. Bootstrapism, isolationism, “traditional” family values (anti-gay and anti-women’s-freedom values), some ugly springs of racism… It’s not just the dusty air and loud sounds in Cowtown that shock our systems. It’s the perception of these real divides, of ideas that have consequences even as they’ve declined in our cushy urban circles.

Photo by Chris Elise/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images.

That world is inhospitable. It makes for a tough life even if you’re someone who feels like they belong in the Coliseum more than I did.

It brought to mind the time my family stopped by a demolition derby near Belleville, Illinois, on our way back from visiting my grandpa many years ago. We watched slack-jawed while everyone around us, small kids included, shouted vile shit and cheered for maximum injury, just giving off a general air of malice. My dad was emotional, looking to Sammy and me like, See? I wasn’t making this shit up. Can you imagine being a kid who’s into poetry in a crowd like this?

The way I see it, there’s only one thing to do in response to this clash of culture. It’s to question harder, avoid arrogance, and stay vigilant against my own dogma. The only opportunity we have to tug American life away from dire inhospitality is to stay open and sharp and to continue to make the case that a mutually supportive social arrangement is better than the every-man-for-himself one. Assuming that “our side” has got it all figured out, permanently, erases that case.

Please forgive the obvious: Musical progressives are not irrevocably better-informed than anyone. Good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes. We’re just as susceptible to intellectual laziness, ignorance, and failures of humaneness as other groups. If we believe we’re permanently more correct, we forego the serious investigation that leads to improvements in quality-of-life, in general, in the first place. Thinking of myself on the right side of history has never been a good enough recipe for being on the right side of history.

I want the same thing for music people that I want for rodeo people on the other side of Fort Worth’s Exchange Avenue: recognition of our fallibility, hospitality (which entails diversity), and good treatment within and without. There are people in the Coliseum who want those things, too. If five odd musicians ended up in there, how could there not be?

Observations: Year Two is being printed by For the Birds Trapped in Airports in LA as we speak. I’ll start shipping them in June. You can buy a copy here.

Thank you for your comments of love and support regarding Steve Albini.