Houston Music Blog

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We finally have a winner in Rocks Off's photo contest for those Live Nation Club Passports we started giving away back when George W. was president. Not really, but it seems like it. Congratulations to Houston's Mitsy Parsons, whose shot of her with NYC up-and-comer Ryan Star at September's Collective Soul show at House of Blues (above) was our popular choice. (You can tell Star hasn't had a whole lot of media coaching yet, because his eyes are closed.) Enjoy!

This week's Live Nation "No Service Fee" promotion, by the way, is something called the "Ultimate Access Triple-Play Wednesday," which was good enough for three exclamation points in the press release. Hey, this has been going on a while - they have to do something to keep it interesting.

Anyway, everyone who buys a ticket for pretty much any show at House of Blues or Verizon Wireless Theater (see here, because we're too lazy to go back and list 'em all again) will not only be exempted from those pesky service fees, but be entered to win an "Ultimate Access Pass" that gets them into any show at that venue throughout 2010. Starts at midnight; as always, see www.livenation.com for further details and to purchase.

And finally, we have another winner for the Club Passport: Andrea "Mrs. Oldies" Greer, whose shot of her, Banana Blender Surprise's Gerard Choucroun and late Who bassist John "The Ox" Entwistle was so sweet and prize-worthy we convinced the LN folks to give us another pair of Passports. (Thanks, y'all.)

Choucroun also emailed us with even more background about the photo last week, some pretty juicy stuff Entwistle told him and Greer about Paul McCartney stealing Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman's date one evening in Monaco, and lots more. See what he had to say after the jump.

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"As you know, Ms Greer has been cohabitating with Allen Hill for over a decade, so please excuse any mild-to-moderate memory impairment on her part," Choucroun begins. "She is mostly right, actually - a few minor points and additions:

1. "There was a LOT of Who talk when we sat with them, Andrea's wrong about that. He was working on a three volume biography of the Who, he was excited about that project. He and I had a goods time ragging the details of Bill Wyman's tedious autobiograhy Stone Alone (which we'd both masochistically read in the past few months) for a really long time.

"Entwistle had a great story of finding a slot machine in a Monaco casino with Paul McCartney and Bill Wyman in 1967-ish that dispensed money every time someone played - rock's three most famous bass players in a casino raking in cash from a broken slot machine. Paul McCartney then played footsie with Bill Wyman's date under a cocktail table that night, and left with her, thereby putting an end to the Beatles v. Stones non-argument."

2. "It was not an Allen Oldies gift box we gave John Entwistle; It was bizarre assortment of stuff from Allen and Andrea's apartment, some Beech Nut chewing tobacco, and a VHS tape of Allen playing Who songs with his relentlessly unrelenting classic-rock cover band Maddoxe. It was sort of a goof gift. We thought it would be nice if John Entwistle watched that at some point. For perspective."

3. "Entwistle drank 9 cognacs, i counted and tried to keep up. He was really quiet until about cognac No. 4, and then the conversational train started rolling and did not stop until they kicked us out at 2. (it was the Ritz-Carlton off of San Felipe.)"

4. "In that night's Ringo show, the drummer (Ringo's son Zak) played very very well on the Entwistle song "My Wife." In the bar, everyone came up and said "Zak did such a good job on 'My Wife'!" This sentence amused him to no end. He never got sick of saying 'Zak Starkey did a good job on your wife?! WHAT?' Not until this moment did that joke strike me as funny.

5. "He was hugely resentful of Pete Townshend. His prime sticking point was that Pete allegedly went back into the studio after Who's Next was released, and overdubbed his own bass and vocal parts to create the definitive version, sans Roger and John. Allegedly."

6. "Re: Roger Daltrey. 'I hate all singers. Egos.'"

7. "His girlfriend, Lisa Pritchard Johnson, was a very polite and conversationally generous person. She had recently broken it off with Joe Walsh, which was a touchier-than-hell conversational topic. Every time the Eagles came up - which was a lot, I can not fathom why - it got ugly. Lots of jokes about Timothy B. Schmidt 'not being a fan of the ladies,' that type of thing. But she was really nice, and absolutely was interested in Andrea's majestic descriptions of rowing crew, fall folliage in New Hampshire and the Galleria."

8. "The next time I saw John Entwistle in Houston (backstage at Rockefeller's), there was a highly odious, seemingly menopausal skank on his arm. I asked about Lisa and received a dirty look."

"Sadly, both John Enwistle and Lisa Johnson would overdose in the next few years. "That night at the Ritz-Carlton was really fun and the fact that pics were taken is a nice touch. But it feels lonely for them in retrospect, they were the only members of Ringo's band hanging out with random 22-year-olds in the bar.

"They both clearly struggled with something which would eventually kill them. But they were very, very nice, they seemed like regular folks who had just happened to have been in the Who and been engaged to Joe Walsh, respectively.

"At the time, it was a random fun night for us, it was a good vibe, they seemed to have fun. We definitely did."