How-How-How-How

Living in America, the music I used to listen to in Holland as a teenager and college student now has a whole new dimension. Take ZZ Top. I was in the second year of library school in Deventer, around 1980. My boyfriend and I had broken up but we still lived in the same student house and he would play his music really loud when he got back from the bar at 1 a.m. He drove me nuts, pretty much literally. And definitely consciously. A friend of mine who was in a biker phase at the time introduced me to ZZ Top and it was the perfect music for being mad.

One day I was so angry at my jerk of an ex-boyfriend that I put my ZZ Top record on really loud, with the speakers face down on the floor–he lived downstairs from me–and left. Not much of a payback, since it was a record, and after 20 minutes it would just stop, but it was the best I could do at the time.

Of course the lyrics were about Texas, South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley even, about Brownsville and South Padre Island and the Driskill Hotel in Austin. I had only a vague idea where Texas was within the USA and didn’t know anything about particular places. So it’s funny that I married a super-nice, really great guy from the Rio Grande Valley, lived an hour from Brownsville, went to South Padre Island regularly, and drive by the Driskill hotel almost daily. Go suck on that, Leo!