Got Legs
The story’s a modern-rock fable, as pedestrian by now as the playlist at the Buzz: Regionally promising band self-releases good stuff, gets noticed, jumps to a major label, releases a debut with, suddenly, inexplicably, almost zero backing from a support staff that’s already busy losing interest in its next next…
Hell on Wheels
Corporate America is a war zone, and Laura Hembree’s Car Pool shows just how the high casualty rate can get when the suit-wearing soldiers march into battle armed with little more than their leather briefcases and a mission of self-preservation. Dark, bone-hard and painfully smart, Hembree’s script explores the effects…
Out of the Loop
When it officially opened in December, Danzoo (6130 Richmond) billed itself as the club that broke all the rules. The place fancied itself as a spot where people, regardless of age, creed, color or sexual orientation, could go all ass-out. Apparently the concept spooked a few folks, because just months…
Bedroom Philosophers
The four characters wandering through Kahan James’s The Standing Wave are hard to care about. Self-involved, emotionally tepid and utterly confused, each one suffers from the sort of banal problems that would most interest a bored coed. And with her bare-bones production at Ashland St. Theatre Co. — lots of…
Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash
If you dare call yourself a bastard son of Johnny Cash, you better say it with a smile. Better yet: You best get the blessing of The Man in Black himself. The eponymous band has been twice blessed by Cash — the first time at the group’s inception in 1995,…
Hitting the Highs and Lows with Little Joe Washington
Little Joe Washington is up on stage, a five-foot-four-inch pencil of a man wearing a white blazer and clutching a black guitar he just got out of hock. It’s Wednesday-evening happy hour at the Continental Club on Main at Winbern, and Little Joe is, if nothing else, happy. “Hey, white…
Eric Taylor
We hereby nominate Eric Taylor as Houston’s musical poet laureate. His ex-wife, Nanci Griffith, and former protégé Lyle Lovett would no doubt second the motion, as they both sing his praises (and his songs) and reflect what they’ve learned from him in their own compositions. But with the release of…
Bringing Down the House
The omens are plentiful: in the hands of a child, in the dearth of witnesses, in a solitary white balloon floating past in the hot blue sky. They are — or they could be, if you care to look at things this way — little signals, acknowledgements and fragments of…
Playbill
Through the ’90s and beyond, Amarillo’s Groobees have been doing the Panhandle proud with their mega-contagious mix of pop polish, folk songcraft and porch-swing twang. Vicarious success struck the band from big sky country in 1998, with the triumph of the Dixie Chicks’ recording of Groobee co-vocalist Susan Gibson’s “Wide…
Walking the Tab
More than two dozen mentally ill people could be left homeless due to an administrative foul-up that cost Harris County a half-million dollars in federal housing grants. Local mental health officials have until the end of the month to come up with a financial plan to save the Safe Haven…
Playbill
Armand Van Helden isn’t some regular touring spinner. Having the DJ do his thing for us fortunate folk is right up there with Plácido Domingo working his pipes on stage at the Wortham Theater, Johnny Cash commanding a sold-out audience at the Aerial Theater with just a six-string and his…
Crispy Critters
Nothing scared Ginny Anderson more than learning about groundwater contamination more than ten years ago. It was suspected of causing some cancers and even deaths in the section of Brazoria County between Friendswood and Pearland, a place she calls home. Authorities minimized the health concerns and attributed the problems to…
Playbill
When guitarist John Fahey passed away last month, Leo Kottke lost a friend and mentor. An iconoclast, Fahey blurred the lines between folk, country and blues. His style had a haunting quality that has never been adequately defined or categorized. It was as if he sensed the darker undertones of…
Road Hog
The news was disturbing. A nice Jewish couple in their fifties living in the Westchester subdivision in far west Houston woke up Sunday morning, March 11, to find a severed pig’s head on the front doorstep, with various fish parts strewn around their property. Was this an anti-Semitic attack, a…
Dirty Rotten Seducers
We can run, we can hide, we can even try switching films, but there’s just no escaping that pesky Gene Hackman. He starred in The Conversation; he is ubiquitous, and revere him we must — virtually every single time we go to the movies. (There’s even a song by Robyn…
Welcome to His Nightmare
“Generation Landslide” [4:31] (A. Cooper/M. Bruce/D. Dunaway/N. Smith/G. Buxton) When Dan Tuttle was ten, his brother bought him his first Alice Cooper album. Back then, in the early ’70s, Alice Cooper was still a snot-rock, shock-your-parents band, not yet a snot-rock, shock-your-parents solo artist. The group sang about dead babies…
Mass (Murder) Media
Around 20 years ago, writing under a pseudonym, Stephen King made a couple of rare forays into science fiction with the short novels The Long Walk and The Running Man. In The Long Walk, contestants must keep walking until all but one has dropped dead, while The Running Man features…
Brown’s Diss-functional City Hall Family
It seems there’s never a dull week these days in Mayor Lee P. Brown’s third-floor domain at City Hall. The latest stir came when his personal assistant recently dodged a random drug test, and then took one, but resigned before the results reached the mayor. Of course, despite the possible…
Show Time!
Even if the menu offered nothing of substance, it would be worth a visit to Zula just to look at the place. When it opened in the historic St. Germain building last October, the two-story dining room and loft impressed diners with its art deco/retro design that accentuated the details…
Energy Rules
We here in Houston, we love the energy industry. At least we do if we work for the Houston Chronicle. The Chronicle has never been shy about being an enthusiastic cheerleader for energy companies and the politicians who support them. The week of March 11, though, the paper gifted us…
Feasted Upon
In this cynical age, cynics like to observe that pioneers are the ones who take the arrows. As a corollary to that, it should perhaps be observed that successful pioneers, the ones with the arrow scars, are likely to be shot in the back by the heavy artillery of the…
Letters
Out of Harm’s Way Penry’s lesson: Thank you for a well-written article [“Knowing Right from Wrong,” by Steve McVicker, March 8]. The story was well told without undue bias. I, too, have personal conflicts with the death penalty; however, it is the job of the criminal justice system to help…
Architecture of a Menu
Speaking off the toque: Benjy Levit, co-owner of benjy’s [2424 Dunstan, (713)522-7602] and Dish [2300 Westheimer, (713)528-2050]. Q. Does decor in a restaurant influence the styles of food served, or are the two always independent of each other? A. Yes, it does seem to. I had eaten in restaurants in…
A Well-Rounded Production
Broadway is looking a lot more like Hollywood these days. In the eternal hunt for blockbusters, the Great White Way has gone for bigger sets, better special effects and big names like Nicole Kidman (even better when they’re naked, of course). Rather than risk funding an unknown quantity, producers have…
Juiced Up
Not all fast food is fried in vegetable oil. Jamba Juice [2506 University Boulevard, (713)529-3225; other locations] offers the fastest food around, with a twist: It’s actually good for you. If the five-a-day plan — that’s five servings of fruits and veggies daily, for those who have already forgotten the…
Opera in a Box
Unlike the Wortham Center’s lavish Brown Theater or the elegant Moores Opera House, the “black box” Wortham Opera Theater at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music isn’t exactly friendly to the often lavish art form. There’s virtually no wing space, making set changes nearly impossible. The cramped orchestra pit holds…
In His Own Write
Where do you start with Jesse Dayton? Do you go all the way back to a Beaumont childhood spent begging licks from itinerant blues players and soaking up the reflected glow of then-local George Jones? Do you jump ahead to Austin, the early patronage of Clifford Antone, a honky-tonk apprenticeship…
Texas Thunder
Roll back to 1985 to a moribund strip center on Richmond Avenue. There, housed in a converted disco, is the original incarnation of Cardi’s. Anthrax is on its first headlining club tour of the country, with Houston’s own Helstar in tow. When a third band is needed to round out…