Racket
Rock historians have long debated the First Rock Song question. For years, the consensus had it that Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was this Holy Grail. Haley was supplanted in turn first by Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right, Mama,” and then when the critics pulled their heads out of…
Lost Boys
Three days after Christmas, 1998, Judy Ann LaVergne Walker visited her son Reginald at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Michael Unit. For his 18th birthday she bought him an orange soda and a book from the Left Behind series. He proudly flexed his muscles, bragging that he was doing…
Dave Navarro
Though the cover of the advance release of this debut solo effort has the former Chili Pepper and Jane’s Addiction guitarist placidly eating a bowl of cereal, a better stab at truth in advertising would show him prone on a psychiatrist’s couch. That’s because Trust No One (and the title…
Riding Out a Dot-com Downturn
George Molho is hurtling down U.S. 59 South in his black Land Rover SUV, the one he drives because he “likes to be up high.” He is a large doughy man with a moon face, dark hair combed forward and dark eyes to match. Just last week he turned 30…
Four
Metal is a tough thing to define these days, having become at least as fragmented as any other pop genre. Rap-metal, nu-metal, death metal, grindcore, progressive, trad, power, doom, goth, industrial, stoner, etc., all can somehow trace their roots back to something simply known as heavy metal. The term now…
Paper Chase
At 4:30 on a May afternoon, Jason Armando Flores left his north Houston home to pick up his mother from work. He’d driven just two blocks when a deputy constable caught sight of his shiny red F-150 and noticed that he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. The officer had the…
Playbill
Just for laughs, I’d love to see ol’ Willie open this show by leaning into the mike and intoning, “And now, we’d like to begin with a tune by Mr. Ornette Coleman…” Nope, in what is probably music’s surest bet, the red-going-gray-headed stranger will punch the opening chords to “Whiskey…
Punched Out
Houston, get ready. Every grandma who’s been baffled by a VCR, every technophobe who’s quailed at having to program a new remote control, every significant other who’s ever refused to Read The Goddamn Manual and instead just yells for your help when the printer isn’t working, all of them are…
Playbill
Having Wu-Tang Clan members Ghostface Killah and Raekwon (also known as Raekwon the Chef) in town is more of a good thing than people realize. Apart from the charismatic Method Man and the walking Behind the Music episode that is Ol’ Dirty Bastard, not everyone is well versed in the…
Forgotten Footprints
An unusual slogan and graphic grace the Web page for Gerald Womack’s Houston City Council campaign. Next to a photo of Womack — a 44-year-old, pencil-thin real estate company executive and former congressional staffer — is the headline “Footprints Through District D,” accompanied by a pop-up silhouette of tracks made…
Playbill
The year is 1979. Punk rock has seized a fearful public eye, forming base camps in the UK and the East Coast. London bands like the short-lived but immortal Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks have established a buzzing dissonant sound; East Coasters like the Ramones have made their signature with…
Way Out There
When Time Warner Cable and the Belo Corporation, the company that owns Channel 11 and The Dallas Morning News, announced earlier this year that they would be starting a new 24-hour all-local-news channel, some people worried that it would just be a low-rent operation showing the same borrowed video clips…
Minibill
These Miami ska-punkers don’t give a shit about the happy, horn-y bop of their categorical contemporaries. Instead, their aggressive music and stridently political lyrics on everything from nuclear waste and corrupt cops to human rights and water show up on their latest, 24 Hour Roadside Resistance (Hopeless). (And thank God…
Dust to Dust
Ten years ago, Robert Harris picked up the phone to find on the other end a relative stranger bearing extraordinary news. This man was at a film exchange in Toronto, where movies are housed and rented out to exhibitors, and he was holding in his hands canisters of film containing…
Minibill
Although June of ’44 and REX vet Doug Scharin hails from the American Midwest, him, his 13-piece dub/Afro-jazz/tribal ensemble, sounds as if it would be more at home as the house band at the hippest spot in Lagos, Nigeria. This is music to sip banana beer or palm wine by,…
Letters
Music Mayhem Spanish rock: First, I’d like to thank you and your staff for nominating my band (Moscas) for 1999 and 2000. Second, I’d like to ask you if you honestly believe these results you printed [“Houston Press Music Awards 2001,” by John Nova Lomax, July 26]. The whole thing…
Tasty Slice
For a few moments, American Pie 2 tastes every bit as stale as junk food left out on the countertop for two years. “Just like old times,” says one actor to another as they amble through settings borrowed from the first installment of 1999’s Last American Virgin revisit: Jim’s bedroom,…
T-6: The Evolutionalia
Tamarie Cooper sits at a small table at Brasil, a Montrose-area coffeehouse, pencil in hand, laboring over a piece of paper. It’s the choreography for a dance number in the final scene of Tamalalia 6, the upcoming installment in the Tamalalia series. Founding artistic director Jason Nodler and other members…
Cavity Search
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed cleverness as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an art form (or, more likely, fart form) in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one…
Rainbow Rodeo
It’s time we stopped branding all cowboys as gun-toting, chaps-wearing, horse-riding white guys. Throughout history, there also have been gun-toting, chaps-wearing, horse-riding African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and women. More than 300 of them will be taking up lassos for this weekend’s Cowboys of Color Rodeo. “On the subject of cowboys,…
Befitting the Bard
The Houston Shakespeare Festival thunders in grand style across Miller Outdoor Theatre as one of the best that producing director Sidney Berger has put together in years. Pairing one of the Bard’s most obscure works, King John, with one of his most popular, Romeo and Juliet, Berger has filled the…
Put Down That Fish!
Counterfeit Scottish smoked salmon may never engage the attention of the producers of Sixty Minutes or Hard Copy, but for Joe Williamson and his wife, Margaret, it’s a topic that inspires passion. The couple, along with their two children, daughter Jo Ann, now 17, and son James Alexander, now 16,…
Natural Plastic
“Mixed media” are the two words this writer most hates to see on a wall label beside an artwork or on the checklist of a gallery exhibit. What a cop-out, he grouses, knowing full well that if the artist accommodated him and listed all the ingredients of a particular work,…
I’ll Be Jiggerered!
Wolf Loescher loathed the three years he spent in Scotland. His German-born father had taken a job as general manager of an American-owned semiconductor plant and relocated the family from Texas to East Kilbride, near Glasgow. For the young teenager, it was three years of attempting to find a context,…
La Bonne Vie Outside the Loop
I’ve never done this before,” says the black-clad woman in the backseat as we slow down to pay the toll at the Westheimer exit on Beltway 8. “Done what?” I ask from behind the wheel. “Taken a trip outside of Houston just to have dinner.” “This place is worth it,”…
Choo Choo Ch’boogie
No matter what some delusional musicians might spew forth in their diatribes about “art” versus “commercialism,” few bands would call for a ghostbuster if the specter of success actually paid them a visit. Selling a pittance of records to die-hard fans while gigging at endless clubs is not the apex…
Waiting for a Train
The opening of Enron Field and the accompanying boom in bars and restaurants have given everybody a little taste of what it would be like to have a thriving entertainment district downtown. Dylan Murray, chef de cuisine at Saba Blue Water Cafe (416 Main Street, 713-228-7222), worked in trendsetting downtown…
The Naked Truth
This much was clear: She wasn’t coming back on her own. “Where’s Lu?” a woman, apparently a manager, was asking. “We’re late.” Lu was last seen standing behind the outdoor stage, just after the rain had soaked Laclede’s Landing on the St. Louis riverfront, flipping through a thick black binder…
Stirred and Shaken
The young woman in the micro-miniskirt sitting next to me is raptly attentive to the goings-on in the center of the dance floor. “What do you think of Kipling?” I ask her. The activity around us calls to mind Kipling’s dictum that “East is East and West is West and…
Nouveau Zydeco
It’s Saturday evening, and Our Lady Star of the Sea parish hall is filled with families enjoying cold beverages and homemade gumbo. The event is an old-fashioned zydeco dance, but the sounds coming from the stage aren’t what most people expect at a church event. Tonight, J. Paul Jr. and…
Delicious Dive
The exterior of Barnacle’s (9401 South Gessner, 713-777-0620) doesn’t even begin to hint at what’s in store inside. This deceivingly decrepit place has a downright cheery interior, with high ceilings, loads of plants (okay, so they’re fake) and the expected seaside motifs of netting and anchors. But the best reason…