Looking ahead to the Houston International Festival - never mind the SXSW bollocks - I was pleasantly surprised to see that Jody Nix and the Texas Cowboys will be playing on the Texas Stage at 6 p.m. on April 18. Not long ago in these cyberpages, we examined the gloom and doom that surrounds the musical art known as honky tonk. Well, these guys are as legit as it gets - so legit they were featured at last year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival. And looking at their schedule, they don't show an
Inmate Terry Banks broke out of jail in Missouri, prison guard Lynette Barnett by his side. They disappeared for seven weeks - until the law caught up with them in a Victoria County, Texas, trailer park.
Photo courtesy of Jody NixHoyle Nix (left) and Bob Wills, mid-1950sThere's an old saying in West Texas about Midland and Odessa, two oil towns only 20 miles apart in the middle of nowhere: raise your kids in Midland, raise hell in Odessa. True enough, Midland has all the soul of a loaf of Rainbow bread - come on, George W. Bush was raised there. Odessa, with its rows of bars up and down Highway 80 and the Andrews Highway, has always been thought of as a den of iniquity.
But in spite of all of Od
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As any proud Texan can tell you, the Lone Star State is entitled constitutionally to split into five states if it so wishes. The scenario has rarely been more in the news than it has relatively recently, when Gov. Rick Perry played to the wingnut gallery in an attempt to outflank primary opponent Kay Bailey Hutchison on the right discussed secession as a viable possibility.
But Rocks Off doesn't care a whit about any of that political BS. We do care abou
It's been so quiet in the tropics lately that even Ike-scarred Houstonians were able to forget that it's hurricane season - until this weekend, that is, when not one but three disturbances showed up "down there." (Better than some other things showing up "down there," Rocks Off can tell you that much.) None of them are likely to present any danger to our little corner of the Gulf Coast, but at least the one that showed up last and washed ashore first shares a name with one of Roy Orbison's cool
Obviously with U2 and the Pogues alone, the Irish scene has had a huge effect on the pop music of the past half century. But no list of Irish influences on 20th century rock and roll can be complete without Van Morrison.
In 1968, LOM's senior year in high school, Them played the Ector County Coliseum in our West Texas hometown of Odessa. By 1968, Morrison had left the band, but the rest of Them moved to the States and toured until the money ran out.
Them made some very interesting bluesy roc
