Freddy Fender / Doug Sahm
Music Club’s sublicensing of Huey Meaux’s Crazy Cajun catalog from the UK’s Demon/Edsel Records continues with these two releases, which join Sonny Landreth’s Prodigal Son and Ronnie Milsap’s Wish You Were Here: The Collection and another Sahm package on stateside shelves. Sadly, neither can be considered an essential recording. Of…
Handled With Care
Before the audience is fully hushed, Tom Wingfield appears upstage in a gray half-light. Utterly ordinary, the quiet wire of a man pokes his way across designer Tony Straiges’s elegant set. In the background, a fire escape leads to a lace-trimmed door that opens to the fragments of Tom’s worn…
Playbill
Don Walser is living proof that dreams can come true. Raised on classic country in Lamesa in far West Texas, he started out singing in honky-tonks as a teen, visions of the Grand Ole Opry no doubt in his head. For more than four decades, the devoutly Mormon Walser played…
Dream Weaver
Mention surrealism to someone, and they’ll probably think of Salvador Dali’s melting clocks. Or they might recall René Magritte’s bowler-hatted businessmen raining from the sky. These images, reproduced over and over in magazines, on note cards and posters, and in advertising campaigns, have become so familiar that they have long…
Drug Money
Just over a year ago, the small Texas Panhandle town of Tulia, located in Swisher County, made national headlines when police rounded up more than 10 percent of the city’s African-Americans and jailed them on drug charges. All of the arrests and charges were based on the uncorroborated word of…
Rage Through the Night
Way back in elementary school, Vanessa Banville got tagged up with the nickname Katara. “It’s a Japanese name that actually means ‘graceful fighter,’ ” explains Banville. “And it’s a mock of me, number one, because I am small, and you can’t exactly picture me as fighting anybody. I don’t exactly…
A Night in the Tub
This definitely wasn’t the planned destination for the evening. On the bed across the ward from me, two men in white were forcibly catheterizing a very drunk, very beat-up Hispanic guy who kept shouting, “Man, I’m pissing on myself!” “No, you’re not,” one of the interns replied in a sensible…
Blue Crab Standard Time
The sun is getting ready to plunge into East Galveston Bay. The slanting light casts a pink glow on the platter of barbecued crabs in front of me. I suck a tangy claw and admire the still life with shellfish. It’s Saturday evening at Stingaree Restaurant on the Bolivar Peninsula,…
Wild Bills
A brave new world began in Texas September 1. On that day more than 900 new laws, the sum of the wisdom and acumen of the state legislature — not to mention our governor — took effect. Most notable, of course, is the ban on open containers of alcohol in…
Danke Schön
We can only say thank you to Brenner’s (10911 Katy Freeway, 713-465-2901) for offering an alternative to the national meat of Texas — chicken-fried steak. Like its dining room, a relaxing setting with wood paneling, a cozy fireplace and an elderly waitstaff, the steak house’s wiener schnitzel ($21.95) exudes a…
Third Degree
Geography, Dr. Michael Doran often explains, is important because it explains not only where something is but why it is where it is. At the start of this fall’s semester at the main campus of the University of Houston, students struggled to get an explanation on why something — their…
Stirred and Shaken
A comrade of long standing has just received word his book has sold to a New York publisher. This, I believe, is the time for a celebratory libation. We drive down to the very center of the city and approach a building with a somewhat garish facade constructed during an…
Sunny Side Up
Idle chatter blends with the clinking of dishes and the sizzle of pancakes on the grill. The smell of eggs freshly scrambled in oil wafts through the air. Cops hover over tables, chowing down bacon and toast, while men in work shirts and jeans belt out a belly laugh or…
Stepchild?
Ivy Levingston was flying high May 18. Returning from an educators’ conference in Kansas City, the Houston Independent School District principal was buoyed by that kind of post-seminar confidence in which all things are possible. Just after touchdown on that Thursday, her pager went off. It was a 911 call…
GOP Jitters
Harris County Republicans may reach the apogee of their power in 2002, but the vibes within local GOP circles are strangely troubled. With virtually no Democratic incumbents to go gunning for in next year’s judicial and county races, consultants are sharpening their knives — or bolstering their officeholders’ defenses –…
Salman Fury
It was clear in 1981 that Salman Rushdie was a writer to be reckoned with; his reading of Midnight’s Children in New Delhi drew a crowd so large that it spilled outside the auditorium and was forced to listen via loudspeakers. Rushdie became a household name when his Satanic Verses…
More District D Footprints
After The Insider aired City Council candidate Gerald Womack’s checkered past as a realtor three weeks ago, his campaign team complained that we had not done a similar house-cleaning on his opponents. Womack publicist Georgia Provost, whose business letterhead motto reads “creating and promoting positive public images,” helpfully mailed over…
The Diary of Rob Frank
In Robert Frank’s 1971 autobiographical film, About Me: A Musical, he makes a peculiar decision: He casts a young actress named Lynn Reyner to play his part. Reyner not only is the wrong age and sex but also the Swiss-born Frank’s antithesis — thin and delicate with a mop of…
Hard to Say Good-bye
The Axman cometh to the Chron. For months, employees of the Houston Chronicle had watched anxiously as newspapers across the country announced cutbacks, layoffs and downsizing. The paper introduced some drastic slashes in things like travel expenses, but personnel cuts remained off limits. Until now. On August 22 employees got…
Border Crossings
U.S. businesses setting up shop in Mexico are hardly news. The current president of the country, after all, is a former executive of the Coca-Cola corporation’s Mexican subsidiary. The gaseous beverage is ubiquitous enough in that country for a former poet laureate of Mexico to have dubbed it “La agua…
Letters
Silent Echo Prison retaliation: I loved your treatise of the TDCJ journalism stew [“Prose and Cons,” by John Suval, August 23]. The Texas Department of Confusion (forget about Justice, there is none) got scared because less than a handful of inmates sounded intelligent in The Echo and perhaps tried to…
Pure Spunk
Radney Foster has always been equal parts pop, punk and country. His twang is unrepentant and omnipresent, whether in conversation or from the stage, but he has until recently layered on enough sheen to pass country radio’s rough-edges test. What sets Foster apart from any number of twangy pop crooners…
Playbill
With the way she vehemently (and notoriously) turned down millions to sing alongside her former chum Diana Ross for the much-publicized Supremes reunion tour last year, you’d expect that Mary Wilson wouldn’t want to leave her house, let alone perform anywhere. But since the aforementioned tour soon became an embarrassing…
Stone Soup
Over the course of Davíd Garza’s two major-label albums, a lot of weighty names have been dropped on his shoulders as critics try to come up with a handle for the stylistically elusive Austin-based artist. Names like Prince, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Jeff Buckley and even Donovan all have been…
Minibill
It’s hard to believe that country’s sassy spitfire, long the wildest cowgirl in an increasingly staid Nashville, is only 42. Then again, when you have your first hit at age 13 (the monster “Delta Dawn” — take that, LeAnn), you have the potential for a lengthy career. Songs like “What’s…
Racket
Despite his 24 years of age, Brad Turcotte, the founder of Houston’s brand-new Compadre Records, is already something of a music-business veteran. He’s a local representative of the new breed of music-biz pro, trained in classrooms and armed with several years of internships, a few high-profile jobs (radio promotion for…
Not Dead Yet
Comedy. Adventure. Musical. Epic. Shrubbery advertisement. The biggest challenge in writing about Monty Python and the Holy Grail — a mere quarter-century and change after its miraculous inception — is in choosing a tone. Should a critic rave, in the manner of a ruthlessly self-indulgent columnist, about how he and…
Simon Shaheen & Qantara
With the Cuban son boom of the late ’90s finally fished out, label execs are casting about feverishly for the next world-music prize catch. Former Police producer Miles Copeland insisted in a recent interview that it’s Arabic music. According to Copeland, this music offers the “same infectious energy and vibe”…
Played Out
A year after Cameron Crowe climbed back aboard the tour bus for one last spin through rock’s golden days of giddy hedonism and phony heroism comes a film set a decade later, in the mid-1980s, when the parties got harder, the music louder and the musicians prettier. The world of…