It was the Friday before my three-final Monday and I had studied so hard that week I’d thought my noggin might fall off my neck. All my friends were either out of town or on their own study-benders, so I was sitting on my bed, all sorrowful because I wanted to go out and do something when I got a notification that a KVRX member (whom I had never met before) was looking for someone to tag along with him to a Rattlesnake Milk concert at Sagebrush in an hour. I contacted him, got some boots on, and took an Uber over.
I hadn’t listened to too much Rattlesnake Milk, I knew a few of their songs and that they were Lubbock boys. I was also in a time in my life in which I’d been completely addicted to the visuals of the South and Old West. I’d been painting old homes at historical sites and the interiors of saloons, so my interest in seeing the band had some visual aesthetic motives besides just wanting to hear a good band. Sagebrush is a 21+ honkytonk venue with supposedly one of the oldest dancing floors in Austin. It was my first visit, and it was all decorated for the holidays with two pool tables and Marfa Lights twinkles on the wall. Yair, the KVRX member who’d invited me, and I had made quick friends. Denis ODonnell and his band opened first, long and slow love songs and an awesome crying steel guitar. Chris Acker and the Sentimental Family band went on second, and couples in the crowd found their more upbeat songs danceable enough to two-step to. I not only did not know how to two-step, I also was without my girlfriend and would have been a little too embarrassed to be swept away by another man (though, it wouldn’t have been the first time). I was also embarrassed to not know how to dance, so it was really a lose-lose situation.
Rattlesnake Milk came on with a song about a dying dog that wasn’t on any of their albums and I was immediately smitten. They were loud and spinning and Lou Lewis sang into the microphone with the guitar in his hands in this biting, despair-struck way I found perfect. The men were dead-eyed and would glare at each other, dire and unsmiling when they played together wordlessly in breaks in the song. Every member pulling their weight and endlessly watchable. Dead-eyed and displeased is the nature of this Southern gothic music style, I’ve often found. This genre is about rainless months and your daughter working at the diner: melancholy with shallow respites in drink and the lot lizard you picked up in East Louisiana. It’s a favorite genre of mine, and Rattlesnake Milk was one of the best live acts I’d seen this year. I wish I had been able to see their second night in residency at Sagebrush, they’d filled up the hall with sound and commanded attention so effortlessly, with lyrics any Texan who’d spent any time in a holler would find significance in. Hearing Rattlesnake Milk live reminds you that when the dust gets its claws on you, it’ll be the thing to carry you home.
I recommend their 2022 album Chicken Fried Snake, despite me being in love with the cover of their 2014 album Snake Rattle and Roll which depicts what must be George Went Hensley, the Pentecostal minister who popularized the use of snake handling in American protestant churches. Just perfect.