Freaky Friday
A new documentary explores the deep connection between Numbers and its patrons.

Like thousands before him, Marcus Pontello first went to Numbers as a teenager. At the time he was a sophomore at HSPVA and a fan of headliners the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It was the openers, masked San Diego grindcore unit the Locust, that really taught him how far beyond mainstream tastes the venerable Montrose nightclub could accommodate.

“I was, like, terrified,” he laughs.

Pontello says he went back a few weeks later and witnessed an even more representative experience: Classic Numbers, the weekly night featuring ’80s alternative dance music and vintage video clips. Today Classic Numbers is a Friday night rite of passage for generations of young Houstonians and a cornerstone of Friday I’m In Love, the feature-length documentary director Pontello hopes to complete by this fall, the submission deadline for many film festivals.

Pearland native Pontello and his partners in Dinolion, the local production company run by Jeromy Barber and James Templeton, have been working on their film for four years. It’s taken that long to build the kind of trust necessary for some subjects to open up on camera, Pontello explains. “Not that there’s some big dark secret, but it is personal for a lot of people, especially people that have been [going] there for 35 years,” he says. “It is a lot of people’s lives.”

But the filmmakers’ time investment is already paying dividends. Pontello says it’s become common to hear from people who have met their significant other or best friend at Numbers. Musician alumni like Ministry’s Al Jourgensen have been candid about their memories, and the staff at Numbers has given Pontello’s crew their blessing. Now, after 90 hours of interviews (and counting), the director figures he’s facing two main challenges to bring Friday to the screen. One is working without the direct input of former owner Robert “Robot” Burtenshaw, who passed away in 2013. (Helping to compensate, Pontello says, are the hours-long talks he’s had with Burtenshaw’s voluble onetime partner, Bruce Godwin.) The other is to show the club’s complex history in a way that will be compelling to audiences who may never have heard of Numbers.

“I hope that outside audiences will see the kind of universal story [here], which is this coming-of-age kind of place where young people, and older people, have consistently found a sense of belonging or community,” Pontello says. “I think that’s the story more than the music.” — Chris Gray


Gold Rush
Twenty-two-year-old MC Rocky Banks sounds royal on 2017’s first major Houston rap tape.

Rocky Banks likes gold.

When he wears it, he feels like a king, part of a royal line of rulers who cannot be denied family lineage or a right that is God-given. When he walks, you see him flash golden fronts. Two gold pendants adorn his neck; a cluster-filled watch grips his wrist. Hair braided down the middle, gold frames on his face, he dresses like a star because that’s how he views himself. His family didn’t buy him his first gold chain; he worked for it. In his eyes, he’s earned every step he’s made to get to this very moment.

Inside the Marriott Marquis, the brand-new downtown hotel with the winding, Texas-shaped pool, people notice him. They glance over and size him up before going on about their business. But they can’t ignore him, him or the Yellow Hearts that follow his every move on social media or musically.

“I wanted to be more positive,” Banks says. “A leader who promoted more positive as opposed to glorifying the negative results of where I grew up. The Yellow Hearts are people who are focused and striving on being better, both mentally and physically.”

For the past two years, Banks, 22, has overcome not just his own impulses but the ups and downs of crafting music. Last March, The FADER premiered the video for his track “A Lot,” which set in motion the next nine months of Banks’s career. More people began paying attention. More artists inquired about collaboration. His project, In Other News, I Don’t Do Drugs Anymore, was an audio confessional about finding sobriety after years of mixing uppers and downers and nearly dying. He remembers his final day vividly, a bender piecing together Xanax, dabs, tabs and more. His lungs began shutting down and paramedics told him he was near death. “I was too busy pulling in and out of it,” he says, recollecting. “It was really about self-control.”

Stories of finding himself stretch throughout Banks’s music. His partnership with producer Mufasa Enzor delivers jazzy, introspective moments starring Banks as the key protagonist; the two of them challenge each other to be greater. Banks is already on schedule to deliver the year’s first major Houston rap tape, Trust In Banko, days after the Super Bowl. There are easy comparisons to other artists, but Banks has taken months, if not years, to find his voice. He could rage in the vein of a punk rocker or attempt to stack bars on top of one another for pure fun. Now, tracks like “Hi And Bye,” from In Other News…, and “Favor,” from Trust In Banko, speak to where he’s been and where he wants to be.

When we move back into the hotel lobby, children and adults shoot various glances. Banks barely notices. “I’m an introvert, so while they’re in their own world, I’m in mine,” he laughs. “And most times, that world comes out when I record.” — Brandon Caldwell


Fighting Back
Houston musicians stand poised to confront the Trump administration in song.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows: Donald Trump, in just over a week, will be the 45th president of the United States. He won. Now our country faces a hundred-year storm, one that rumbles with naked xenophobia and dangerous incompetence at our highest levels of government.

Luckily, Houston knows how to get ready for a storm.

When democracy gets sucker-punched, good citizens fight back. We’ve got plenty of guns and music here in Houston, but our guitars might be the better tools to resist a Trump presidency. Houston musicians are part of a splintered, sprawling network of artists considered separate from Trump’s “real America.” They’re plucked from the melting pot of Texas immigrants, refugees and other people who make this city a vibrant model of down-home cosmopolitanism. They speak with the rising voice of an America that so many Trump voters feared — brazen, brave and often very, very brown. Voices like these are uniquely able to speak truth to Donald Trump’s power — voices that embody the “come and take it” spirit required to hold four years of authoritarianism at bay.

A laundry list of Houston artists will likely be fighting Trump on the front lines. There’s the Wheel Workers, with their indie-pop take on progressive folk tunes. There’s Giant Kitty, with their lighthearted yet trenchant queer punk rock. And there’s Lyric Michelle, whose deep rhymes weave personal and political pains. But ultimately, individual artists aren’t as critical to creative resistance as the roots of the Houston music scene itself. Artists who come up here are roses that grow from concrete; they make their way through a grass-roots web of tiny labels and DIY venues without the support seen in larger music cities like Austin or Los Angeles. Now, in Trump’s America, the Houston music scene’s divorce from the music industry at large is its greatest asset. Our artists will have the freedom to resist because they have nothing to lose.

The resistance, however, will need more than just musicians. It will need those 700,000 Harris County voters who pulled the lever for Hillary Clinton to shell out money for shows and cassettes. It will need our newly elected officials to protect the First Amendment rights of musicians who criticize the government in ways the government may not like. And let’s be clear: This revolution will not be on Facebook. If you’re not out with your fist in the air, singing along to the songs of refusal, than you aren’t doing much for the fight.

Remember, Houston: This land is our land, from the Baytown refineries to the downtown skyline. If you love this city’s independence and diversity, then it should hurt you to see our country get hijacked by a shameless, inexperienced, predatory bigot. But if you truly know this city, you also know we’ve got the ability to fight back deep in our DNA. It might not be through a battered old acoustic guitar — we’re more the beats-and-microphone type — but Houston music, the heartbeat of this hustling city, has the power to kill fascists in 2017. — Katie Sullivan
Dystopian Dreams
Names you should know from Houston’s fringes this year.

Unless you’re tapped in directly enough to the main power grid to know firsthand whether real power struggles more closely resemble the doings of Veep or House of Cards, you owe it to yourself to forget the long, hallucinatory gastrointestinal struggle that was 2016. Times are tough all over, but the sounds to listen for in 2017 are coming up from under the bleachers, in cryptic guises and improperly captioned, even as the juggernauts stumble.

After sitting out a few rounds, Civic TV is back to gather and display more of those flowers that bloom in the night soil of this unlikeliest of places, meaning there is one more place to seek out the marginal and outre beyond Walters, Notsuoh, and AvantGarden’s They, Who Sound programming. Misanthropic Agenda will be curating shows from the world of the traveling and the homegrown avant-garde, and The Wiggins will be holding a monthly matinee, in a custom-painted environment of his own making à la Mr. Peppermint, Ms. Pussycat and the public-access all-ages freak beat of Chic-A-Go-Go.

It used to be that if you told an out-of-towner you were from Houston, he’d invariably bring up Rusted Shut or the Geto Boys, and that was that. So God bless Cop Warmth and Muhammadali and all who sail with them; without them Houston would have been further adrift in the horse latitudes. But as they used to say of the idea of God, if the new noise-rock groups didn’t exist, we would have had to invent them.

Blue Dolphin has a limber, fast-moving take on that never-ending split-second in time before punk becomes doctrinaire and macho. KA approaches the machinery of rock and roll production the way Jean Tinguely took to the machines of industrial production, which is to say they are saboteurs, giddy ones, with a penchant for no-wave horns and grinding rhythmic passages that fulfill the dictum of John Cage: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four.”

Milk Leg and Mouthing, though infrequent performers, stand to spray a few street corners with their musk in the spirit of all that is good and gross. As fast and furious as a cage match, Dead Time recall the primetime of a scarier Houston, when head injuries served to prove one’s attendance at shows, when the streets were littered with the husks of burned-out Range Rovers, and when there was Internet, but less of it.

Spit Mask are differently instrumented than the aforementioned groups — depending more on drum machines and electronic things, with an aesthetic more closely related to Chondritic Sound or the Xerox-and-bondage aesthetic of Bliss Blood in the Pain Teens than to Jandek with half-cabs, but they’re noisy enough, with hardcore roots and a slow-burning and unsettling sense of purpose, and they’re looking to go places and do things in 2017. If you encountered Subsonic Voices, or remember Balaclavas, you won’t be surprised by the hopped-up sci-fi power-prog of Rough Sleepers, not by their carefully crafted sound design nor their unstoppable rhythmic force, but they fit the dystopian promise of this new era like a cute little alien head popping out of a bloated human belly. — Tex Kerschen