Last time in our "things that don't suck" series, we looked at some educational songs ( ) that our children could learn from without being bored to death. This week, we're looking at the Punk Goes... series, and some of the worthwhile tracks to grab from the series.

Punk Goes... has long been the bane of real punk rock fans around the world. Often the bands doing the covering aren't really punk bands and their covers are convenient cash grabs, trying to make a quick buck off the novelty of hearing a pop song covered in a "hard" style of music.

That being said, even a broken clock is right twice a day and out of the 13 Punk Goes... releases, it was inevitable they'd stumble on a few worthwhile tracks. Here's the ones to download, now that with the advent of iTunes you no longer have to buy the whole damn CD for one good track.

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Alan Alda as Caryl Chessmen in Kill Me If You Can

Not to brag, but I've got a copy of the new Hates album, People's Temple, and it is (as usual) a fantastic little CD that every punk fan in Houston should own. We're still waiting on a confirmed release party at Cactus, but before that happens there's a song on the disc we want to talk about, "Do the Caryl Chessmen."

Today marks the anniversary of the execution of Caryl Chessman, who expired in the gas chamber even as his stay of execution was being sent over the phone in 1960. Chessman had spent most of his life in and out of prison before being convicted for 17 counts of robbery, kidnapping, and rape in 1948.

Note that murder isn't on that list. Chessman ended up with the death penalty due to a quirk in California's kidnapping law that said if a person dragged his or her victim a sufficient enough distance it counted as kidnapping, a capital crime. In Chessman's case he dragged a rape victim only 17 feet. The courts found that sufficient.

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Photo by Marc Brubaker

The author watching Free Energy at Fitz in 2011.

I had a hernia operation in the early summer of 2006, and had nothing to do all day but hobble around with cool cane a borrowed from Grandpa Hlavaty and play on the Internets for two months or so.

I had developed the injury while working at Domino's, but it was cool because their insurance helped pay for it, and the cool pills that came with the painful surgery.

That summer while trolling around on Craigslist for stray local writing gigs, I saw that then Houston Press music editor John Nova Lomax had put out a call for freelance music writers.

A-ha.

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Your financial situation be damned, Record Store Day 2013 is coming this Saturday, April 20, to drain your wallet of life and those little green pieces of paper.

This Saturday your dance card should be full with all the major indie record stores in Houston and the surrounding areas offering up giveaways and special RSD merch, along with their own in-store markdowns.

This year's RSD ambassador is Jack White, the veritable king of the modern vinyl movement, who loves wowing fans with oddball promotions through his Third Man label.

As part of the festivities this year, certain stores -- including Cactus Music -- will be showing the documentary Last Shop Standing: The Rise and Fall and Rebirth of the Independent Record Shop, based on a book by Graham Jones and directed by Pip Piper, centering on dwindling British shops.

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harmarsuperstar.com

Har Mar Superstar hits Mango's on Wednesday night a week before his newest album, Bye Bye 17, hits physical and digital shelves. The collection of songs are heavily-influence by vintage soul and R&B, but still have his cheeky, lovelorn swagger going for them.

He recorded the album in Austin at Public Hi-Fi with Spoon's Jim Eno co-producing. Eno, a co-founder and the drummer of Spoon, opened the recording studio in 1998.

"This is the first Har Mar album I wrote primarily on guitar, so that dictated a lot of the outcome," says the artist, whose real name Sean Tillman. "I wanted the album to sound really live, old, and futuristic. I think we accomplished that."

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Saturday afternoon at 5 p.m., tattooed Black Flag disciples are encouraged to stop by Vinal Edge in the Heights for sweaty fellowship with their fellow "barred" brethren to celebrate the release of Stewart Dean Ebersole's Barred for Life: How Black Flag's Iconic Logo Became Punk Rock's Secret Handshake.

The book looks at people who have tattooed Black Flag's iconic four bars logo onto their skin, whether it be on their neck, hands, bicep, or ankle. I have even seen the bars inside a gal's lower lip.

According to Flag history, the bars were Raymond Pettibon's idea after the band changed their name from Panic. As the band's in-house graphic designer, he also created their iconic album art, posters, and flyers, and he also happened to be guitarist Greg Ginn's brother.

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Every time I come home from work, I find myself going to my guest-room closet and staring at crates and crates of compact discs and vinyl I don't know what to do with. Aside from the ones that I hold dear to my musical development or use for my DJ work, I have tons for which I have no sane plan.

Do I keep them to hand over to my kids one day as a dusty relic of Dad's "cooler" years, the way my folks let me take charge of their vinyl collection, or do I haul them to a record store or Half Price for store credit or cash?

When I begin making a pile to banish from life, I end up rediscovering music I forgot I owned. And then the pile dwindles into just my music and nothing changes.

I have even tried to convince myself that I am really just putting music into better hands to enjoy it, and then I get greedy and get worried that I will lose it forever. A two-terabyte hard drive be damned. What if I lose the hard drive? Then what?

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Big Boys, the hugely influential Texas punk band that, among other things, inspired two Austin music festivals, have been getting some big press lately thanks to the reissue of their first full LP earlier this month.

Industry Standard/Where's My Towel, a record born from Big Boys' frustrations with the Austin music scene, was originally released in 1981. The album became part of a CD compilation by Touch and Go Records in 1993, and a reissue followed in 2005. Now, Light in the Attic Records has re-reissued 3,000 hand-numbered copies, complete with colored vinyl, new art and inserts and more goodies.

Big Boys was founded in the late '70s when the members were barely out of school. Biscuit, the singer, had an energy onstage that has been compared to James Brown. The band's ethos was as much about accessibility as anything else. They often ended shows by saying "Now start your own band!"

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Eminem, Keith Richards, Lil Wayne on the November 2011 cover of GQ

During a certain period in time, any given date between 2003 and 2007, when Lil Wayne decided to fully abandon his cartoon-gangster image, the one who sported a Cash Money medallion almost everywhere he went and whose teeth were ripe for a jeweler's appraisal, into the hardest-working man in rap.

From the moment Wayne's flow improved on those Sqad Up mixtapes to his free-association apex on Dedication 2and Da Drought 3,  he was rap's most celebrated hedonist. We figured his string of creativity that reached into whatever made sense to him via nonsequiturs and outer-worldly similes, and he could never be burned out.

Much like Keith Richards.

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Two of the last shows I have covered for Rocks Off, Elton John and George Strait, had set lists full of classic songs that I have been humming and tapping my toes to since I can remember. With careers with such longevity, both artists have touched generations, with their music getting passed on to the next generation.

For a lot of people, "Bennie and the Jets" was their first favorite song. Many of us in Houston knew the words to "The Fireman" before we could read.

This all got me wondering what everyone else's favorite first songs were. Which songs did they hear and go "That's mine"? Or rather, which song could they agree on with their parents, since those people are our first musical channels?

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