Three Lone Stars

True Stories From Taco Land

By Russell

Place: Tacoland
When: One Night in 2003
Who's Playing: Pillow Of Wrongness
Ram Factor: One-Chinaman Limit

My band was touring through Texas in 2003, and we played a show at Taco Land. As far as I could tell this was the cool place in town to play, despite the lack of a website or answering machine. I did successfully reach someone at the bar on the phone, and booked a monday night at 11:00 P.M., which I was told was when people started coming in there. I called back about 3 weeks later to reconfirm the show, and this crochety-sounding guy with a heavy mexican accent answers the phone. I explain to him that we're a band from L.A. and we booked a show there. He looks at the calendar and says we're not on it. I say we booked it through this woman at the bar, whose name I forget, and he says "she don't work here no more." At this point I'm thinking of saying "thank you" and hanging up, but he says no to worry we could play there. but they don't have a P.A. system. So I look for San Antonio bands online and write to find out if anyone has a P.A. and wants to play with us that night, and sure enough we hook it up.

When we get to SA the first thing we do is spin by the place to check it out. It looked comlpetely abandoned, like it had been closed for 5 years. We were a bit nervous at this point, but decided to go to our hotel, settle in and come back later. Our bassist, Albert, was Korean, and let's just say him and Texas didn't seem to get along that well.

This was our last show of the tour, and he said that he'd just sit in the car until show time, which was 2 hours from then. We told him he was being ridiculous, that there was nothing to worry about, no one was looking at him funny, etc. The rest of us go in, and from first glance were in love. and then we met Ram. probably took 2 or 3 glances to fall in love with him, but here's how it happened. We went up to the bar and ordered 3 Budweisers. He say "Ok, that's a dollar each." Being from LA we were already in heaven. As we're handing over the money, he pulls out 3 Lone Stars from behind the bar, and says "But if you want these, they're free for band members. "We all stare at each other, look back and say "Three Lone Stars!!" This starts the beginning of a very drunken evening.

We go out to the car and get our bassist and tell him to come in cuz everything's fine. He steps foot in the door, and we tell Ram that he's in the band too, so he can get free beer. The first words out of Ram's mouth were "We have a One-Chinaman limit here." Well, I guess he should have stayed in the car after all. It was a priceless moment. In fact there was another woman of Asian descent in the bar, and despite Ram's quip, and several other Asian-related points of humor he exounded upon that night that I won't share.

Ram was making out with aforementioned Asian lady an hour later. We didn't take stage until 12:30 at night on a Monday, and for whatever reason there was water all over the floor by the stage, and it looked like it could easily hit the power strips and amps, so our guitarist grabs a mop and starts soaking it up. It's to date the only gig that we've had to mop the stage before playing due to danger of electrocution. but, again, priceless.

Ram called us pussies a dozen times, gave us stickers saying "Is it too loud for you PUSSY??" and at the end of the night, he took us back by the bar, pulled out a six-pack of Lone Star and says "here, take this for the road. "It would be impossible to forget the one night we spent at Taco Land, and I always figured I'd get back there soon... I guess not. But at least we were there.