Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive

Nobody in Houston was ever worth a shit," writes Houston-bred honky-tonk legend Johnny Bush in his forthcoming autobiography Whiskey River (Take My Mind). "To my way of thinking, with my young skull full of mush, Hank Williams was great because he was from Montgomery, Alabama. That's why he made it. Webb Pierce was from Monroe, Louisiana, that's why he made it. Houston, Texas was square.…full of rejects or wannabes.…Nobody'd ever come out of Houston that I'd heard of."

The two honky-tonkers residing in Houston whom Bush respected -- George Jones and Floyd Tillman -- he classes as non-Houstonians since they had come here from other towns. Even though Bush is writing about the country scene in the early 1960s, it's still a depressing passage, because all these years later, that attitude is still going strong. Sociologists speak of the "cultural cringe," which Wikipedia defines as "an internalized inferiority complex which causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries." I would argue that it applies to cities as well.

The concept was named in the Australia of the mid-20th century. At that time, Aussie culture was deemed inferior to British culture in every way, by both the Brits and the Aussies themselves. There was no question about it. How could a 150-year-old former penal colony offer up any idea or work of art that was worthy of respect in the home of Shakespeare and Dickens, Newton and Darwin?

I would argue that a similar self-hating attitude permeates every level of our city's self-image. At the very top you have the boosters and their endless touting of our world-class status, which they underpin by bragging about stuff like symphonies, art museums and playhouses, all of which warehouse the cultures of faraway, presumably superior, cultures. Don't get me wrong -- it's great that the Museum of Fine Arts and the Alley and the Menil and the like are here, but in countries like France and Holland, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum are crammed to the rafters with works by native artists. Not being Dutch or French, I can't say for sure, but I imagine it must feel really cool to walk into a museum packed with tourists from all over the world who have spent thousands of dollars to come gaze at the art of your people.

So how must local musicians feel when only a couple dozen people will pay a few dollars to hear them play their songs? Pretty bad, I would believe -- like Houston must be, as Bush put it, full of rejects and wannabes.

Former Houstonian Mary Cutrufello was an unusual figure on the local scene for several reasons. She had a national reputation and a major-label deal, for one thing, but she also had a working knowledge of scenes in other cities, including Austin, Nashville and New York. A few years ago, I talked to her after she had left town and set up shop in Minneapolis, and she said that the difference between the bands there and the bands here was that the Twin Cities acts believed in themselves. "There are so many bands that have come out of here and made it to the next level in the past 20 years," she said, citing Soul Asylum, the Replacements, Hsker D, Prince and Semisonic. "What that does to a scene is make people suddenly think that going to the next level is not something that other people do. Any one of us could be the next person to write 'Closing Time' or 'Runaway Train' or 'Purple Rain' or whatever it may be. I think that really makes a difference in the way a scene perceives itself."

At the time we talked, the two biggest national success stories in Houston rock history were ZZ Top and, to a much more limited extent, King's X. (Even with those two bands, I am given over to cultural cringe-y misgivings -- after all, two-thirds of Top is from Dallas, and King's X moved here en masse from Missouri. Neither band was an organic growth from Houston's musical soil. )

Since then, of course, Blue October has hit it big. But what kind of message has their success sent? As local musician/ man-about-town David Beebe pointed out in a note on one of the posts on our blog, there was once, long ago, something interesting about Blue October's sound. It definitely didn't sound like Houston, whatever that means today, and it was neither my idea (nor Beebe's) of great music, but it was somewhat unique. But after they got signed and dropped and signed again, they totally junked whatever that unique thing was. Today, they are Nickelback with a fiddle. They could come from anywhere, from Fort Lauderdale to Vancouver, but sadly, right now, they are our rock and roll representatives to the world. Today, when outsiders think of Houston rock, they think Blue October, and they heap scorn on us, and that just furthers our sense of cultural insecurity.