The Return of Cactus Music and Video

"We have a 35-foot wall here and two other ten-foot walls in this room," Bishop notes. "Music-themed art always gets underestimated, and we want to change that. Take those '60s posters, for example. They are fine works of art. But then somehow by just putting a band's name on there, somehow that makes them something less? I don't think so."

The store's return marks a triumph of localism over the endless march of bland retail. The past few years have seen numerous local institutions bite the dust, as an insipid march of branch banks, Walgreens and CVS outlets, cell-phone shops and other such generica gunks up our cityscape and threatens to utterly de-funkify the city.

The Gallant Knight was razed, its site soon to be home to yet another branch bank. The Hofbrau has been Fertitta'd into yet another Saltgrass Steak House. Worse still, they are now even talking openly about tearing down the Eighth Wonder of the World, not to mention every old movie theater from the River Oaks to Pasadena.

The reblooming of Cactus is a significant counterpoint to all that jive dynamism. Businesses don't get much more Houston than this: The Cactus pedigree stretches back to 1933, when a 31-year-old former Marine, Southern Pacific tax accountant and baseball player by the name of Harold "Pappy" Daily got into the jukebox trade, opening a local outlet of Chicago-based Bally Entertainment at 1419 Travis.

In 1946, Daily branched out into music retail with a store in The Heights called The Record Ranch. Hank Williams once made an appearance there, as documented in the photo that once hung over the register at old Cactus.

Ten years after that, Daily expanded further still into owning a label. Starday, the label he shared with Jack Starnes, went on to become at least for a time the home of artists like George Jones, the Big Bopper, Roger Miller, Jimmy Dean and Hank Locklin.

D Records, another of Daily's labels, had a working agreement with Mercury and was home to the young Willie Nelson and George Strait, also releasing polka, Tex-Mex, Cajun and Western swing sides. Glad Music, Daily's publishing company, still controls the rights to "Night Life," "The Party's Over," "She Thinks I Still Care," "Chantilly Lace" and "White ­Lightnin'."

Daily's sons Bud and Don had long before gotten into their father's business, and the two brothers opened Cactus in 1975. More than any external factor, it was their decision to retire in 2006 that marked the end for the old location. The Daily brothers are both in their mid-­seventies and have long lived near Wimberley, and their age and distance from Houston made it harder and harder to stay involved in the operation of the store.

Bishop had run Cactus for the last 20 years of its existence under the Dailys' tenure, so the new Cactus will be under new ownership but the same management. "The Dailys have quite graciously allowed us to use the name," Bishop says.

The new owners are a Houston-to-the-bone partnership consisting of Bishop; St. Arnold's Brewing Company; Bruce Levy, senior vice-president and C.F.O. of Rice Epicurean and a grandson of that supermarket chain's founder; and longtime Houstonian George Fontaine, the head honcho of Austin/Los Angeles roots-rock label New West Records.

Bishop says that these "not-so-silent partners" were the people who truly kept Cactus alive. "After we closed, I thought I might try something different, but the partners pushed me toward this, and I am very excited about it."

And so are we. To mangle the words of both Paige Mann and Led Zeppelin, here's hoping that what was music in Houston should ever be music in Houston.

john.lomax@houstonpress.com