Houston is a city where the blues remains more culturally present than most places — in fact, almost anywhere outside Chicago, Memphis and maybe New Orleans — and in many ways, House of Blues could rightly be called a 21st-century juke joint. Albeit most certainly one with 21st-century prices.
HOB's corporate parent, partially Houston-based entertainment megacorp Live Nation, may have spared no expense, but everything about the multistory facility at 1204 Caroline is obviously designed to foster a down-home, intimate atmosphere. The dining room is festooned with folk-art portraits of stock Southern scenes and musicians like Janis Joplin; the furniture could have come from the parlor of some New Orleans antebellum estate.
And don't think House of Blues doesn't know its local history. A pantheon of Texas blues greats, including Houstonians Lightnin' Hopkins and Albert Collins, peers out over the dining room from a massive mural. Upstairs, the lounge adjacent to the 1,200-capacity main hall has been christened the Bronze Peacock, HOB's tip of the fedora to the Fifth Ward nightclub owned by Houston record mogul Don Robey where T-Bone Walker, among many others, became a star.
As a venue, the music hall is A-plus. The upstairs balcony seating is virtually on top of the stage, and there's not a bad sightline in the downstairs general-admission area. The sound is impeccable, and the drinks are as stiff as they are steep.
Noise lost his HOB virginity, as it were, in about the coolest way imaginable: Watching Jay-Z and his dozen-man band tear through the Brooklyn rapper's phone-book-thick catalog — topped by the thunderstruck, "Back in Black"-borrowing "99 Problems" — as Bun B, several Houston Texans (and Texans Cheerleaders) and the rest of the sold-out house got their swerve on in high style. Missing, strangely enough, was Mrs. Jay-Z, but he got a big laugh when the band lit into the first few bars of his and Beyoncé's 2003 hit "'03 Bonnie & Clyde" before abruptly switching to another song.
Two nights later, the invite-only, see-and-be-seen grand-opening gala headlined by the Blues Brothers Band was a textbook manifestation of House of Blues' strange duality. Dan Aykroyd, Jim Belushi and their revue of largely Texas-born top session musicians stoked the revelry with R&B/soul chestnuts like "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Land of 1,000 Dances" (Noise's pick of the night) and plenty of mugging, including the ever-popular bring-a-bunch-of-hot-girls-onstage-to-dance maneuver.
The show was exciting and fun as all get-out; Noise is fairly certain there were a few more empty seats than usual at several leading Houston churches Sunday. But deep down, much deeper than anyone on hand cared to delve with all that dancing going on, it felt somehow hollow: the blues as more of a brand than a band.
This, of course, is House of Blues' critics' chief complaint: The chain has sacrificed the blues' integrity at the altar of capitalism, turning one of America's richest musical resources into a means to make a mint off Jake and Elwood sunglasses. Fair enough. Perhaps.
First of all, no bluesman or woman, alive or dead, has ever walked down to the crossroads with any other intention than to find somebody willing to pay them to record their songs or play them live. And a significant amount of all those bar and restaurant receipts gets funneled into the International House of Blues Foundation, which funds several school and community programs whose sole aim is to educate people about who those musicians were and are, and just how fundamental the blues is to the makeup of modern American pop culture (and thus pop culture everywhere else on the globe).
Besides, you never know — some young Cobra Starship fan may be curious enough about that Lightnin' Hopkins portrait to Google him when he gets home. Not long after, he's downloaded "Black Cat Bone" and is impressed enough to put down the Nintendo Wii and pick up a guitar.
And remember, the blues didn't come anywhere close to being commercially successful or widely appreciated (outside the black community, of course) until English disciples like Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and the Rolling Stones introduced them to millions of middle-class American rock and roll fans in the 1960s. Forty years on, this music has traded its status as the often bitter voice of black American social commentary (a mantle it ceded to funk and then hip-hop) for the affection of a dedicated class of music fans — largely but hardly exclusively white — whose appetite for the music is voracious and whose resources to consume it are considerable.
