Revenge of the Nerds
Caithlin De Marrais is afraid she sounds like a dork. “You know how MTV has those shows that have little snippets of other music in it?” she sheepishly asks on the phone from her home in Connecticut. “Just recently, a song from our new album was on during the Top…
Up a Creek
Dick Rogers began learning the cattle business at the age of nine, when his father put him on a horse and told him to keep the cows out of Oyster Creek. It was a maddening job come deep summer, when the heifers found the spring-fed stream hard to resist. “It’d…
Racket
Montrose Radio’s backers thought of themselves as champions of liberty, but the FCC called them pirates. They were both right. Truth is, the pirates of the high seas have always gotten a bad rap. Though there were some bad apples among them, so were there among the kings of England,…
Positive Love
Rochelle and Rhonda are sitting next to each other, eating M&M’s and recalling the day Rochelle almost died. It was complications from Rochelle’s HIV that landed her in that emergency room, so dehydrated, she says, that the doctors and nurses could barely squeeze one drop of blood out of her…
Toni Price
Through four albums, Austin’s Toni Price has meandered through a myriad of twists and turns — and encountered the occasional dead end — while dabbling with various styles of American roots music. She’s sashayed through fields of bluegrass, lighted hearts aflame with ’30s-era torch songs, knocked back a few with…
Waivering Rights
In 1988 Christopher Ochoa confessed to raping and murdering a young woman at an Austin Pizza Hut. The 22-year-old man implicated his friend, 19-year-old Richard Danziger. Twelve years later, DNA testing proved they didn’t commit the crime. It turned out that Ochoa had falsely confessed after being threatened with capital…
Crash Comfort
Fronted by former Twenty Mondays vocalist Ken Sheppard, Houston’s Crash Comfort strives to make original and earnest rock on its debut CD. But while there are a number of bright spots in these 14 tracks, the overall impression is a faint one. Much of the material simply fails to make…
Beating the Bush
Tony Adams espouses — though he doesn’t call it this — the paper-clip theory: A bend to the right requires a compensating overbend to the left, simply to get the clip back to its original, functional shape. Accept for the sake of argument that paper clip = American politics and…
Playbill
Sacred cows make the tastiest burgers, says the Reverend Billy C. Wirtz, and he should know: The grill master has no equal in skewering and roasting the status quo, preaching the evils of greed, hypocrisy and TV evangelists from his boogie-woogie pulpit. Social satire seems a dying art in the…
Shoe-Shop Shaolin
The route to this ragged neighborhood of southwest Houston is lined with abandoned buildings, for-sale notices and commercial signs understood only by those versed in Chinese. Across from a weed-strewn lot bisected by high-power lines is the nondescript shop hawking leather shoes. Next to the store, weathered stairs wrapped in…
Playbill
Just nominated for Best New Act in the Houston Press Music Awards, Arthur Yoria has generated quite a buzz around town with his frequent gigs. Yoria’s self-produced, self-titled EP on his own label, K Oso Records, available at Cactus, is his first release under his own name. He’s not a…
Throwing In the Towel
When the Montrose Clinic merged last January with Bodypositive, a nonprofit wellness center with HIV-positive clientele, operations director Thomas Taylor began shopping for a linen service to clean the center’s dirty towels. He settled on Admiral Linen and Uniform Service, which advertises its ability to serve Houston’s medical, dental and…
New Orleans Juice
If you took the Big Easy in your hands and squeezed it into a cup, it would sound a lot like New Orleans Juice. There’s a cup of funk, a couple of tablespoons of jazz, and a teaspoon or two of blues. But with NOJ, there’s an outreach to the…
Going Both Ways?
While Houston City Attorney Anthony Hall crafted an antidiscrimination ordinance that would accord gays the same legal protections as recognized minorities such as women and ethnic groups, his lawyers successfully won a dismissal of a federal lawsuit by arguing the opposite. Defending against a damage suit brought on behalf of…
Depeche Mode
Trying to overcome the stigma of being a piece of retro ’80s kitsch, Depeche Mode returns with something for everyone on its new album. Exciter is the band’s first U.S. studio release since 1997’s Ultra. To appease fans and still make “Music for the Masses,” DM mixed both older and…
Letters
Strip-Search Sass Grin and bare it: Well, the Press finally panders to my level. After seeing the recent cover [“Naked Shame,” by Wendy Grossman, June 28], I look forward to Richard Connelly’s next News Hostage, where he exposes the Press as sanctimonious hypocrites or issues an apology to the local…
Yellowjackets
When the Yellowjackets grew out of Robben Ford’s Charles Ford Blues Band in 1981, it looked like another short-lived fusion venture à la Mahavishnu Orchestra. Sure enough, two years later Ford left the band in ’83 to return to his first love: the blues. But Russell Ferrante, Jimmy Haslip and…
Viking Makeover
Sure, we all know what Vikings were like. They’re the savage, sword-wielding rapists and pillagers of the movies. Or the horn- helmeted Hagar sheepishly taking orders from his wife in the funny pages. Or even the idiot wearing a fur vest and little else, cheering on a catch by wide…
Bland Ambition
Back in her early teens in 1991, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her big-screen debut, Man in the Moon. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits like Pleasantville, cult faves like Freeway and Election, and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…
Uncle Cedric
Perhaps it was good buddy Steve Harvey, his boss on The Steve Harvey Show, his running mate on “The Original Kings of Comedy” tour, and his co-host on the recent maiden BET Awards, who best described Cedric “The Entertainer.” In an Entertainment Weekly article a year back, Harvey likened him…
Declawed
Now that A.I.’s out of the way and it’s safe again to read movie reviews without dictionary and No-Doz in hand, onward and downward to the Summer of Dumb. Who has time for the serious and thoughtful when there’s plenty of stupid to slather all over audiences that like to…
Heat Stroke
Summer in Houston is all about seeking cold comfort, not another excuse to sweat. But trust us, you won’t mind wiping your brow once or twice for the crawfish zydeco salad ($8.95) at Copeland’s of New Orleans (6353 Richmond Ave., 713-953-9448). This Louisiana dish is tossed with spinach, tomatoes, boiled…
Bad Kitty
You might say that the Red Cat Jazz Café suffers from an identity crisis. Is it one of Houston’s hip new downtown nightspots or one of its hip new restaurants? The very question is the problem. The concept of pairing quality food with live music — particularly live jazz –…
Music Awards 2001
Whenever anything so wonderful as music is concentrated in a small area in our giant sprawling behemoth of a town, it is truly cause for celebration. For once, you’ll run into friends walking in the street, instead of obliviously blowing past them on the freeway. If you tire of indie…
Stirred and Shaken
I enter through the side door of the old mansion known as La Colombe d’Or (3410 Montrose Boulevard, 713-524-7999). It’s quiet inside. Too quiet, if you ask me. Still, the tables in the dining room are all set up with white tablecloths for diners to arrive. I turn right, into…
Joydrop
Seen by the suits at her U.S. label as Canada’s answer to Gwen Stefani, Joydrop’s Tara Slone, the part-time TV action star and practicing Buddhist, is vying to become MTV’s latest pop-rock hottie. Yes, indeed, Tommy “I’m No Has-been” Lee plays Slone’s “love interest” in the video for “Sometimes Wanna…
Sacred Blues
Up on the stage, the lead guitarist snaps off a down and dirty blues riff on a Les Paul, his nimble fingers dancing up and down the fretboard. A drummer and bassist pound out a steady rhythm that supports two more smoking guitars and a screeching harmonica. “Go on! Play…
Life Begins at 41
The liner notes for Eternal and Lowdown, Ray Wylie Hubbard’s new record, open thusly: “If F. Scott Fitzgerald had known Ray Wylie Hubbard, there’s no way Fitzgerald would ever have conceived that notion about American lives having no second act, much less put forth the idea.” And if the story…