What becomes a legend most? In music, particularly during these (waning?) days of TikTok, when DIY artists can create dedicated fan bases by more than just songs on an album, it’s hard to say. But, one thing that will always draw interest in an artist is that artist’s exploits, the weird, humorous tales from the road or the quirky ways which musicians choose to connect listeners to their music. With those elements in mind, allow us to present to the uninitiated the legend of Ponch Bueller.
Bueller is a person, or maybe a collective of persons. Even he doesn’t seem to know. He grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, has lived in Babylon, emerged from the Thistle! and it’s probably a toss-up whether he’s better known in America’s punk rock bars or honky-tonks, especially those in and between his home in New Orleans and Houston, where he’s performing Thursday, January 9, with tourmates Yes Ma’am and Mary Fuego.
Bueller is touring to support In Glorious Technicolor, an album split with his friend and fellow singer-songwriter Azad Safavi. The split released in August 2024.
“It’s the same band for the whole album but he’s doing five and I’m doing five songs. He’s my bud, he’s a really good songwriter, so I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this split,’ and he was down, so we did it. It was pretty fun. One of the songs we each did was a cover of the other’s – I did one of his and he did one of mine – and we thought we should not give each other any insight into how these songs actually go so that we didn’t influence the cover and that was really fun.”
Bueller covered Safavi’s tune, “Pennsylvania” and Safavi, who also lives and works in New Orleans, put his spin on Bueller’s “Rainwater.” The album is a similar format to Lickety Split!, the 2021 Ponch Bueller record which teamed him with Bridge City Sinner’s guitarist/vocalist, King Strang. That album featured some of Bueller’s best-loved songs to date, countrified rave-ups like “Heartache, Whiskey,” which got the Punk With a Camera video treatment, and “The Day That I Met You.” Those tracks and others from Lickety Split! were rearranged for last spring’s The Legend of Ska Bueller. As the title suggests, Bueller pulled a Jeff Rosenstock and presented songs previously written for the backwoods Louisiana bust-out joints in ska format.
Bueller is able to do a project like Ska Bueller because he’s got a diverse background in music and fun notions on how he wants his music to be presented. Over the years, his real-life alter ego, Brew Breaux, has been at the helm of projects like King Babylon – reggae with an edge – and folk-punk bands like Thistle! and Beautiful Jugs, to name just a couple. Ponch Bueller isn’t just the project that has perfectly pulled those seams together, he’s also the sort of character who embodies all the motifs that came before him. Wearing an ever-present infectious smile and western regalia, with a bit of a Cajun twang when he’s instructing skankers to “Pick it up!” on songs that were meant for boot-scootin’ rather than boot-stompin’, he’s now a fully-realized version of whoever came before him musically.
“Probably the first band that I really did was in high school, for sure. Me and my buddy had a street punk kind of band,” he said to our surprise since his new music is much closer to Lost Dog Street Band than a street punk band like The Casualties or Sham 69. “We recorded everything on, what do you call it, a camcorder, or something? Where the little side video thing opens up. We had a CD of like five songs or something. That would have been when I was 16 or 17 and I’m like 30-something now.
“I actually started playing guitar music and stuff because my relationship with my dad was not very good. He’s like the kind of dad that would want to get in there and do everything for you and music was one thing he actually had no knowledge about, so I could do it by myself and not have him tell me how to do it. That’s actually why I started doing it.”
Once he knew he loved creating music, it wasn’t long before he found he loved performing it for crowds even more. Bueller’s real-life alter ego has a day job and has been a professional in his chosen industry for a decade. On the road though, Bueller springs to manic life and this is where the legend has grown some.
We’ve never seen a Ponch Bueller set in person but were there for sets from the souls who existed before this showman reincarnate. When the band was Thistle!, they played the ribald standard “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” live because they’d heard a certain Houston Press writer enjoyed that tune. It unraveled into an impromptu strip tease from one of the band members. Once, at Super Happy Fun Land, the band did a marathon version of “Champs-Elysees” for lucky listeners. They turned what must have been a 10-minute version into a spirited, drunken sing-along.
And, we won’t go into the whole story – you can revisit it in this long-ago Press piece about touring DIY bands crashing couches on the road – but it may or may not have been Bueller who once got lost in a suburban neighborhood while carrying an axe (with absolutely no malicious intent – quite the opposite, actually) and wound up breakdancing at the Fort Bend County jail (again, we can neither confirm nor deny Bueller’s role in this escapade).
Bueller did say some shenanigans do still occur on tour, though they’re far more sedate these days. He sprung to life in novel fashion, but now it’s not clear whether Ponch Bueller is the name of the band or the outrageous character who fronts the band. It began as the latter, he told us, with Bueller created to participate in a proposed song series where artists would fight WWE-style about music.
“Like a show where we’d start playing whatever country song and the other would be like, ‘That’s my song, you stole my song!’ and then hit you with a chair,” he said. “It was initially a character who I could be onstage but now, at this point, I feel more like that’s the name of the band.”
For a while, he’d don a big-haired wig for performances but said he’d tired of the joke after five years of disguising his true self. He lost his boots once in Fort Collins and replaced them with resale shop rollerblades, which he wore for shows and made driving the tour van from Colorado to Louisiana a lot more interesting.
“The last tour, we played in Pensacola and the show got moved. It was supposed to be at one place and it ended up being at this local bar with a kind of get-off-work-and-get-a-beer kind of situation,” he said. “They told them it was a country show and that was chill, like Ponch Bueller is pretty close to country. But the other band was like a metal band and one was a “Fuck the government, fuck America!” kind of band, and they went on first. The bar people were like ‘What the fuck is this?!’ and hated it. They were like, ‘Why did this happen?!’ There was this old lady double-fisting beers and she was like, ‘If that’s what they call country, they can have it!’ She was so mad.”
Bueller said they saved the day by playing a Jimmy Buffet song to soothe the crowd before launching into their country-adjacent set. Fiddles and yodels restored order to the shaken bar and ended the night without violence. It’s the kind of move that comes with years of experience, playing shows in punk bars and honky-tonks across the country, while wearing wigs and rollerblades and giving the crowd something to dance to and think about. Legendary stuff.
The legend of Ponch Bueller continues Thursday, January 9 at Trip Six HTX with tourmates Yes Ma’am and Mary Fuego and locals Escape From the Zoo. 6230 Rupley Circle. Doors at 8 p.m., $10, cash only.
