Free Press Houston New Year's Cataclysm Fitzgerald's December 31, 2010
See more photos from the Free Press's New Year's bash in our slideshow.
Aftermath rang in 2011 at Fitzgerald's Friday night, bathing in Houston music, liquor and a mass of hearty revelers. At one point we escaped down the street to Onion Creek to breathe and coat our collective stomachs, seeing that we wouldn't be able to breathe on either patio, and our nicotine habit wasn't exactly going to hold any quarter.
The event was a culmination of a year of change for the club, which began 2010 as an alt-rock outpost in the Heights and ended the year a hub of all things indie, metal and country by the time the ball dropped at midnight.
The place was full of new faces, boys and girls, mostly younger-looking kids sans drinking wristbands. The ones old enough to drink were guzzling beers or chugging out champagne out of the $20 bottles the downstairs bar was selling up until they ran out before the clock struck 2011.
A dozen or so bands were lined up for the show, which was headlined by the Wild Moccasins, Weird Party and B L A C K I E, with 2010 conqueror of the year Fat Tony making a quick appearance early on downstairs in the lounge before running across town to host the other hot ticket for the evening at at Groundhall.
We did see and hear Brains For Dinner turn in a rock and reggae-infused set downstairs in front of 100 new faces when we arrived an hour after the doors opened. The band is uncharted territory for us, but by the looks of their crowd, we should probably get hepped pretty quick.
The Moccs rang in 2011 dressed in their finest and dapper suits and glitter upstairs, beginning a year that will see Cody Swann's crew heading to Europe to spread their gospel in the early spring. The band gets sturdier by the year, and we are interested to see how the Old Country will receive Houston's reigning indie-poppers.
Weird Party laid everyone to waste on the same stage an hour later, reeling out a set of songs that would feature a few broken beer bottles, some warm stale champagne, and a guitar thrown into the crowd by guitarist Bryan Agan. It grazed the back of a female bystander who was not facing the stage. She seemed fine, if not a little aggravated. Her male friend didn't seem too thrilled.
A big surprise was the relentless chugalug of Hamamatsu Tom, the brainchild of guitarist Tom Triplett and featuring Young Mammal Cley Miller and drummer Chris Ryan. They were simply a wall of blues-noise, coming right after the midnight hour downstairs, ushering in 2011 with three songs of dissonant, Can hopped on Muddy Waters tributaries.
Personal Bias: What bias? Biases are so '00s.
The Crowd: Everyone in the Houston music scene who wasn't at the Groundhall show, a house party, or Austin.
Overheard in the Crowd: "I love drugs.com so much."
Random Notebook Dump: Fat Tony told us that a random girl thanked him for being so punk rock. We can co-sign on that.
Editor's Note: Pegstar owner and Fitzgerald's partner Jagi Katial sent us this email shortly before 8 a.m. Saturday: "If you live in Houston, are between the ages of 17 and 25, and have not been to a B L A C K I E show, you are missing out on a significant experience of your youth."
