Ike Hits Close to Home & .357 String Band

I’m happy to announce that the GREAT .357 String Band has a new MySpace profile. PLEASE everyone gets your ass over there and add them. Their other profile was irrevocably infected with spambot crap, and has to be 86’d. I’ve been trying to help them with this because I think this is one of the best bands out there, but they have had issues with their online stuff.

If you don’t know who the .357 String band is, you’ve got to go check them out. Think of it like this: What Hank III is doing to country is the same thing .357 is doing to bluegrass. Not newgrass or hippiegrass, but pure high octane BLUEGRASS. I wrote about them and gave a short review of their new album Fire & Hail in THIS BLOG .

They’ve also got a bunch of new YouTubes up of their stuff, including from the recent Deep Blue Festival in Minnesota, so check that out. Here’s one of my favorites:

Ike Hits Close to Home

I normally don’t put personal stuff in these blogs, but I thought some of you might find it interesting. I’m not looking for sympathy here because there’s many people who lost much more that I have, and that’s where your sympathy should be directed.

Some of you might know that I’m originally from Texas. My family history is from Galveston. My great grandfather came over as a stowaway on a merchant ship from Greece when he was 13. Here’s a picture of him and my dad walking down Galveston’s seawall that was built after the 1900 hurricane, which was the worst natural disaster in US history.

A gangster and a bad hombre.

The pier behind them was a restaurant my Great Granddad owned. It was a speakeasy. Back in the day during prohibition, Galveston was like the modern day Las Vegas, because it was an island and it was easy to spot the Federal Agents when they came looking for booze and gambling. The reason they built the speakeasies over the water at the end of long piers was so when the Federalies showed up at the front of the pier, by the time they made the long trek down the pier, the booze and poker chips had already been thrown into the gulf.

The place that my Great Grandfathers speakeasy was in has been abandoned for years, but the pier and building were still there. Unfortunately they are there no more. When the guy in the following video talks about the place Frank Sinatra played, that was my Great Grandfather’s club.

Our thought’s are with ALL the people down there who have suffered, and the people in Louisiana and the Carolinas who’ve been affected by this year’s storms.

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