Houston Music Blog

Craig Hlavaty

Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas

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Warning: Some of these videos contain very graphic images.

Anyone who knows Rocks Off, even in passing, knows of his fierce JFK assassination obsession. The theories, the scientific data, the literature and the various opinions shooting through the Internet with a lightning-fast velocity are all like catnip to us. We even make the trek up to godforsaken Dallas every year to visit the Grassy Knoll and throw down our own conspiracy theories about JFK's death with what is now a familiar group of fanatics and quasi-academics. For the record, we believe that a high-level conspiracy involving the military industrial complex is at fault, whose goal was to line the pockets of war profiteers and to ensure we stayed in Vietnam.

​Most mornings, Rocks Off wakes up to Elizabeth Cook's country-as-cornbread drawl on her Outlaw Country satellite-radio program, "Apron Strings" (Sirius 63, XM 13, 5-9 a.m. Mondays). On her 2007 LP Balls - produced by the Houston Kid himself, Rodney Crowell - Cook was as frank and charming on songs like "Times Are Tough In Rock and Roll" and "Sometimes It Takes Balls To Be a Woman."

Cook recently appeared in the stage musical The Conway Twitty Story as the Arkansas-born crooner's daughter Joanie; her next album, this time produced by Don Was (Willie Nelson, Rolling Stones), is due in March. Rocks Off spoke with the rural Florida native earlier this week as she traveled from her home in Nashville to Texas, where she opened shows for Guy Clark in Austin and Dallas in addition to her date with Dwight Yoakam at the Arena Theater Saturday.

Rocks Off: Are you as chatty and homespun in real life as you are on "Apron Strings"?

Elizabeth Cook: I think so. I don't know. I haven't really had the time or energy to develop any persona that I would adopt for purposes of the radio show, so yes.

RO: Do you use any notes for your airbreaks, or are they completely off the cuff?

EC: It's completely off the cuff. No notes. I did at first. [Cook has been doing "Apron Strings" a little more than two years.]

Providence, R.I., band Deer Tick may hail from "Up North" but their sound is purely steeped in grungey folk and rockabilly yelp. They, in fact, hear this description so much that the band has started to rebel against it by in fact upping the dosage on their new More Fuel For The Fire EP, which just hit iTunes this week.

The band has been the brainchild of lead singer and songwriter John Joseph McCauley III since the very beginning in late 2004. He was joined by a full band in 2007, right before the release and recording of that year's War Elephant full-length. Around this time, the band gained a rep for playing what lazy critics would call "alt-country" rather than the Creedence Clearwater Revival stomp that McCauley was building in his mind. War did incredibly well critically, as did follow-up Born On Flag Day, which features probably one of the best songs with Houston in its title that isn't necessarily about our city, "Houston, TX."

Photos by Chris Gray

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Under the Volcano does not feel like Under the Volcano. The TVs are off, so no more NBA on ESPN. Hayes Carll's Trouble In Mind has come and gone - in its entirety - on the jukebox, taking its bad livers, broken hearts and drunken poet's dreams with it... mostly.

Earlier, a regular - appalled that there were actual music stands in the bar's small performance nook - asked Rocks Off if he should "mess with" the members of the Houston Symphony and other area orchestras setting up for Wednesday evening's "noncert," a bizarre program that will turn out to be half classical recital, half happy-hour mixer.

"That's up to you," we told him, managing to hold our tongue any further. "This isn't exactly three chords and the truth."

Now the musicians are ready to begin, and the evening's MC has an announcement. They understand it's a bar, so they're cool with people talking during the upcoming music, or as cool as they can be for people accustomed to performing in complete silence. But, he adds, "If you're breaking up with your girlfriend on your cell phone, you should probably go outside." Or, ahem, hitting on the blonde at the bar.

Richard Ramirez, "Removal Off...(Live)"

​Now this is the sort of noise that plasters a big dumb 'ol smile on Friday Night Noise's normally dour mug. How can you hate this sort of stuff, this all-over-the-place, sliding-around-in-oil roar where the crud flies here and there with absolutely no strategy whatsoever, where a piercing bit of feedback could theoretically turn out to be a perverted scream, but maybe it isn't? Where the artist's aim seems to be to super-soak you with as much distorted video-game scree as he or she can muster, psychotically, preferably as loud and looped as possible.

In this case, we're vividly reminded of Carlos Giffoni's Welcome Home. This is dangerous noise, you know? Reality-eclipsing noise. Given that this track - from 2002's Past Buildings That Have Fallen (Spatter) - was recorded live, the mind boggles at what the experience of hearing this in a crowd at deafening volume must have been like.

Alan Ball was known for his masterful use of music in Six Feet Under. He's lost none of his touch when it comes to his current HBO series, True Blood - which happens to be set in the Louisiana swamps, not terribly far from Houston. With Season 2 just completed, Rocks Off is now working our way backwards through the episodes we missed as HBO begins reruns.

Episode 1.6, "Burning House of Love"

"You're playing with fire" is one of those phrases you hear all the time that doesn't really make any sense. If nobody had ever played with fire, there'd be no iPods or McRibs., would there? The intended implication is of course the inherent danger of jerking around with a hazardous substance, which is why we do it in the first place. So hold the image of deliberate endangerment for the sake of the thrill as you let the tale of a rich girl's runaround with a rogue steal molecules of air from your ears as told by Cleveland indie band Cobra Verde in their song "Play With Fire."

The song, a cover of the Rolling Stones' 1965 B-side to "The Last Time," is sinister, there can be no doubt, never quite delivering on a horrifying end, but leaving you certain that somewhere past the end of the song someone is going to end up in a ditch. It's a great little tune from a band that is making quite a mark in television these days.

Welcome back to Five Spot. Every Friday, we'll examine a recent bit of music news and, sometimes awkwardly, tie it to a bit of Houston rap. It's five videos and occasional cussing. Send tips to introducingliston@gmail.com.

​After you interview somebody in preparation for writing something about them, there are always things that you want to mention that get left out of the article because of flow or space restrictions or whatever. It's the nature of the situation, we suspect.

When we interviewed E.S.G. for this week's music feature, things were no different. So we cobbled together a few of the notes and put those things together. Booyah:

1. E.S.G. ducked this interview a good two or three times. When we were finally able to get him on the phone (the messaging up until that point consisted mostly of general text messages) he literally said "Meet me in Pearland around 6." Not a street or an intersection or a neighborhood; he told us to meet him in a city. So we just drove to 518 and parked. We did not pick the correct spot.

2. After a bit of chit-chat, we decided to conduct the interview inside the Chili's right there off 288 and 518 (which was about 20 minutes from where we were parked, and about 40 seconds from where he was). We got there, walked in and stood at the little station where the greeter greets and seats you and waited. And waited. And waited. The restaurant was far from busy, yet no one said one single word to us for long enough to make the situation a bit uncomfortable. That shit was not cool.

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Oh lord. This could get ugly. Sorry, mom. When it comes to - ahem - unresolved issues in a relationship, almost nothing is better to help us commiserate, haterate and self-medicate than music. She Said sometimes likes to image what the soundtrack of her life would look like. The songs below would be played during the sappy scenes, where one lover meets another or leaves another.

As tempting as it is for us to hit below the belt (pun intended), we'd like to think of ourselves as a little more mature than that. But also, unlike George Strait, almost none of our exes live in Texas. Lucky for us, they probably aren't reading.

​One of the typical byproducts of getting older is that, by and large, you don't tend to get as angry anymore. Not necessarily the "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention" social-awareness type of anger, but the hard-edged, passionate type of anger which seems to be a prerequisite of the teen years.

You come to understand over time that anger of that sort does absolutely nothing to the object of said anger, and, in fact, does a whole lot to you in terms of screwing up your day, occupying way too much of your mental energy and just being down right bad for you physically.

That understanding and all the level-headedness it implies should not make us lose sight of the fact, however, that given the stresses and anxieties of this thing we call living, it can be both physically and emotionally beneficial to indulge in a little anger catharsis every so often. Given our passion for music, we at Rocks Off think a great way to do this is by mining through the more aggressive nether regions of your musical catalog and swimming around in the rage, cynicism and visceral roaring that's hibernating there.

After a particularly challenging Monday recently we did just that. We threw the cell phone into oncoming traffic, drew the blinds, moved the furniture out of the way and mixed up a potent musical cocktail.

According to an email Rocks Off received from none other than the World Toilet Organization, today is World Toilet Day. We're told it's an "internationally recognized" occasion for drawing attention to the plight of the 2.5 billion people on the planet who lack proper facilities. To this end (heh), they're encouraging people to participate in something called The Big Squat.

Rocks Off's knees aren't what they used to be, so we'll have to pass. You've already seen our sister blog Hair Balls' suggestions for songs to help you pinch a loaf, but we took a different swirl on the matter, if you will. After the jump, a look at songs featuring creative lyrical references to shit, as well as placing each song in a specific category. No need to thank us, it's what we're here for.