If only more of our musicians would listen to and heed the words of Leadbelly, the blues and folk legend. Leadbelly also lived here for a time, taking a job for a car dealer after winning release from the prison farm in Sugar Land. Way back in the mid-1930s, in one of the first songs to mention Houston by name, the King of the 12-String Guitar had some sage advice for the people of our fair city, words of wisdom that run like this: "If you're ever down in Houston / Boy, you better walk right / And you better not squabble / And you better not fight / Bason and Brock will arrest you / Payton and Boone will take you down / You can bet your bottom dollar / That you're Sugar Land bound."
It's too bad Messrs. Bason and Brock et al. couldn't have stopped Tony Shore sooner. For those of you who have been under a rock for the past couple of weeks, police arrested the 41-year-old local tow truck driver and pianist- guitarist in connection with four strangulations of women and girls dating back to 1986. Shore has confessed to the murders -- and he now joins former recording artist Charles Manson and Texas rapper Big Lurch (the guy who butchered a woman and then ate a portion of her internal organs while high on PCP) in the ranks of the most truly depraved musicians of all time.
Moving on to lawbreaking musicians of a much less evil variety, we have Houston "slip-hoppers" I-45, who on November 8 will be playing their first show in Houston since some time around last Christmas. Rapper Tony Avitia hesitates to use the word hiatus, but that's just what it's been for his group, which was awarded the Best Rap trophies in our Music Awards in 1999 and again in 2002. (In 2000 and 2001, the Best Rap award went to Carlos Coy, a.k.a. South Park Mexican, who also has had no small trouble with the law.) Avitia is working full-time and taking 15 hours of classes as he works toward a finance degree over at UH, all of which keeps him too busy to perform or get into trouble, which is important because he will finally be off probation in two months for assault.
Avitia is also dealing with another less-than-desirable side effect of the hip-hop life. "My ex-wife is being a total prude about me seeing my child, which totally sucks," he says. "Another rapper with babymama drama and issues with my daughter. I wonder who that sounds like."
Fodder for the next I-45 record? Come to think of it, will there be a next I-45 record? "That's always my place to vent," he says. "And we still have a bunch of stuff sitting around the studio, but whenever we try to do something with it, somebody ends up in jail or we don't have enough money or whatever. It will come out, though, and when it does, it will be the shit hitting the fan. We're never gonna go away. We're not one of those bands that sends out that press release that says, 'Well, we tried, but we're shutting it down forever.' We're like the Geto Boys, dude. We can't be stopped! Bullets to the eye, jail time, babymama drama, it doesn't matter!"
Another band that can't be stopped is Pimpadelic, the Fort Worth rap-rock group that bills itself as the "Most Hated Band in Texas." And from HPD's view of things, they were certainly the most hated band at Fitzgerald's on October 26. The band is no stranger to trouble -- Pimpadelic rapper Dirty K. barely escaped going to jail in 1996 when his involvement in a robbery led to a second-degree felony charge and a guilty plea. Fortunately for Murphy, he got off with probation. And his cohort on the mike Easy Jesus has "motherfucker" tattooed on the side of his neck. But this time around, it wasn't exactly their fault.
No, according to Fitzgerald's talent buyer Jake Fisher, we could kind of pin this one on yet another band with a lengthy rap sheet, specifically Scottish punk ne'er-do-wells the Exploited, who played Fitz's on September 28. These would be the same guys who were turned away from the Canadian border by customs officials a couple of weeks after the Houston show, and whose subsequent nonappearance at a Montreal gig caused the worst riot in that city's history since Les Canadiens last won the Stanley Cup in 1993. The Canadian officials denied them entrance because, as reported in The New York Times, some members of the Exploited had criminal backgrounds and some had lied, saying they were coming to the country as tourists. This didn't seem plausible to customs officials since they arrived with a truck full of equipment, the Times said.
