My Twelfth Entry - Rahr & Sons Texas Red Amber Lager

All right, I'd like to say a little bit about my band here.

We're not your ordinary group of instrumentalists.

Everybody here one time or another was putting people in prison.

This song is about a murder case that happened a few years back.

Every woo-oord is true.  It's a documented fact.

            - Introduction to "Don't Say Nothing 'Til the Lawyer Come," David Mitcham

I'd like to say a little bit about my band here.

In 1995, two things happened that changed the direction of my life: then-District Attorney Johnny Holmes asked me to leave the Appellate Division and be his General Counsel, and Bill Delmore, the guy I replaced, asked me to replace the keyboardist in his band, Death by Injection.

How could I have said no?

In the nineteen years since then, I've played nearly a hundred shows with Death by Injection. I've played on three different keyboards (a Yamaha SY-22, a Yamaha SY-35, and a Korg SV-1), and I've learned all the words to the three songs I sing with the band ("Start Me Up"; "For Your Love"; and my original song, "Witness Stand.") We've played gigs in tuxedos and gigs in swim trunks. We've played in front of hundreds at Splashtown, the Galveston Sandcastle competition, and the Italian Festival, and we've played for less than five people at the Continental Club and other hole-in-the-wall bars. We've played outside at golf courses, inside of residential homes, at Rice University, at political fundraisers for both parties, in my own backyard for my wife's birthday, and at church bazaars (where we try very hard to remember not to sing the dirty parts of our Rolling Stones covers). For about a year, we changed our name to the Convictions and then we changed it back (potential clients kept passing on the Convictions and asking whatever happened to Death by Injection).

The five guys I play with in DBI - Doug O'Brien, David Mitcham, Glenn Gotschall, Hal Kennedy, and Bill Delmore - are my brothers in arms, my mates.  They are endlessly patient with my efforts, letting me noodle around the best I can, as long as I somehow remember to pound out the chords to "Louie, Louie," "Wooly Bully," "Hang On Sloopy," and the keyboard solos in "Centerfold" and "Pipeline."

I have learned that band chemistry can be volatile and that success is based as much on compatibility as it is on talent. In this respect, our band is remarkably stable and balanced. We have some characters, but no jerks. We argue, we mope, we make bad jokes about each other, but we still enjoy making music together. Having been through nineteen years of practice, some good gigs and some really, really terrible gigs with them, all I know is that I love, trust and respect each of them like my family. No matter what happens - boos, arguments on stage, complaints about the volume by blue-haired society women at the Westin Galleria - we still have each others' backs. That's why our band works.

_____________________________________

Although we are pretty much a cover band, we did make our mark on posterity in 2001 when we recorded a CD of original songs called Down at the Courthouse (which you can find on iTunes and CDBaby). My song "Witness Stand" is the fifth track on the CD, featuring my basso profundo growl about the travails of testifying in a criminal case. 

The melody to "Witness Stand" came to me in a dream: I was watching a woman with her back to me (it might have been Lisa) swaying slowly next to an old-fashioned jukebox in the corner of a Florida beachside bar and the melody was something I'd never heard before.

I woke up, ran to my keyboard and tried to remember the chords.  In thirty seconds, I had it: Bbm7, Eb7, resolving to an F.  I wrote the lyrics that morning and we recorded the song that night.  It sounds like what it is - a crude blues with a pretty neat bass line - but it is one of the four works of original art of which I am most proud.

Here's a performance of the song that my daughter and I taped in 2002 (she was seven years old, so cut her some slack on the shaky camera, and I am a big goose, so cut me some slack on my lack of charisma - I reserve all of my stage flair for when I sing "Start Me Up"):

Why all this about the band?  It's because we're playing a gig at the St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church at 8200 Roos Street in Sharpstown from 11 to 1 on Sunday, May 4.  We'll take your requests from the set list - heck, if you buy us a beer, we'll even let you sing with the band.

How can you say no to an offer like that?

_____________________________________________

The other three works of original art of which I am most proud?

(1)  A kind of dirty haiku I sent to my wife that only two legal scholars like us could fully appreciate:

Her (cite) form is great.
His briefs are packed with content.
It's appellate love.

(2)  My Dishonorable Mention entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in 1982, in which the competition was to write the first line to the worst novel ever written.  My nearly-winning opening line:

In the city of lost souls that was Los Angeles, the silvery halo glittering above Kitty Gillis's head blinked out a neon message to every two-bit grifter and pimp in sight: "I'm alone, I'm from Kansas, and I'm a virgin."

I still hope to write the rest of that novel someday.

(3)  An insult poem I wrote to a defense lawyer who made a snide remark about one of our Appellate Division lawyers who had used poetry in her motion to extend time to write a brief.  At that time, I was also in the Appellate Division and we were all greatly offended.  I decided to fight fire with fire, and I sent the commentator this poem:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
I think that I also shall never see
A more pusillanimous jerk than you.

In my old age, I think I'd now be honored to get a poem like that from someone.

___________________________________

This week's beer is from Rahr & Sons Brewing in Fort Worth.  It's the Texas Red Amber Lager and it's pretty good.

(c) JDurfee99

Rahr & Sons is coming up on their tenth anniversary, having been founded by Fritz Rahr and his wife Erin in 2004, shortly after his graduation from TCU.  On the bottle, Rahr claims a brewmaster lineage going back to his great-great-grandfather in 1847.  I love these origin stories because they say so much about the motivation and the passion of the people who start these breweries.

Drinking craft brews has opened my eyes to how much of this kind of small-bore artistry is out there in other fields.  It's the same with small mom-and-pop restaurants, food trucks, butchers, and artists. They do it because they love the work - if success follows, great, but it's not what got them into the business in the first place.  Now that I think about it, there are some lawyers who are like that.

The Texas Red bottle is old school: a pen-and-ink drawing of two men on horses guiding a herd of Longhorns. The tasting notes are kind of helpful:

(c) JDurfee99

This amber lager is a tip-of-the-hat to our home state. It's got a balanced flavor with notes of caramel and a sound malt character that's perfectly balanced with just a bit of hops. Super-smooth and very drinkable, this is a beer just for Texans.  (And anybody who wishes they were one.)

I concur with the drinkability comment: this is a smooth, almost non-hopped beer that goes down fast (and its 5% ABV keeps it from hitting too hard). I think I drank it in about four minutes. I also liked the color of the beer: it had a rich reddish-brown glint that gave the beer an attractive glow in my pint glass.

I'm not sure it beat Lenny's Bittersweet - this is a really good beer that I could drink all day, but it's not very complex, and thus not as interesting as some of the other Fifty Beers. I liked it a lot, but it's not enough to dethrone the champ.

Till next week, this song should hold you over.  Cheers!