Blues Story Peters Out...

"I see you standing in the shadows
and the hallways,
where are you?..."
- Tommy James, Mirage

By PABLO FANQUES
Special to The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - The blogger boys have gone on to something else. Politics. Something about torn political signs and fat women seeking office and still more trouble in the public schools. The Blues, ballyhooed for weeks as the Next Big Thing here, have turned a rotten brown. The Blues have died on the vine. Pick your cliche; it applies.

It wasn't that long ago that bloggers Jerry McHale and Jim Barton plugged away at trying to set the tone for the town's nocturnal hula-hooping. In serial, maquiladora journalism, they pumped-up evening scenes of outright fun and frolic, each taking their turn at noting this or that band shaking the town to its bones. It was the music, they said. That's what was new, that's what had come to this dusty outpost at the colon end of the Rio Grande. Some guy with a guitar sent Barton to the outs of fandom as he typed breathlessly about a sound he'd never heard before. McHale followed with a story about the latest bar venue, a novel joint sure to catapult Brownsville into the Blues heavens.

So, what happened, boys?

Not a peep has come from either blogger about - what? - the demise of the Blues?

Already?!

Jeepers, creepers. Holy, moly, me, oh, my, what became of the apple of my eye? But, who knows? Things appear to take shape here all-too-often before they evaporate into clouds of doubt and of what-might've-been. It's part & parcel of the story of this bordertown. Someone gets a wedgie in their pants and off they go to spread the news from Ghent to Aix, from Milan to Minsk. It's an ingredient in the local joke. You know the kind - no punchline.

McHale is a known prankster. We expect such exaggeration from him. Barton we do not know. Perhaps he's captured by McHale's zen, by merely wishing to belong, even at the expense of credibility. It happens in blogging. Sooner or later, the smoke & mirrors influence becomes influence-peddling. They'll write: I was at the La Ultima Cumbia Blues Bar on Boca Chica Boulevard last night and the fuckin' place was rockin' like nothing I've ever seen befo'! It's a heavy chain bloggers wear around their necks, this desire to spread the seed. Some soon discover that making it up throws you onto another stage, that of fiction writer. Nothing wrong with that, is what I say. Blogging is 90% entertainment, 5% rumor and 5% fact. Know that and you're with the program.

The Blues are what they've always been in Brownsville, just another sound to hear. Buy a record, take the ride. Something stupid like that. I know I'm cheating you already. Life is funny that way, especially here. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway - music is everywhere, all kinds of music. You can hear Tejano in Berlin, country & western in Afghanistan, classical in Mexico, rock in Moscow. All musical roads have been paved, in other words.

The problem for Brownsville's ever-reaching bloggers, in this case anyway, is that it is simply too damned late to write that the Blues are now, suddenly, here. They've been in town all along...

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