Singer's Health Scare Prods Horseshoe Reunion

Artwork via Horseshoe on Facebook

​With a band reunion facing him in a little less than three weeks, Greg Wood is just happy to be here.

"Man, I had that heart attack when I was 35 and I never figured I'd ever see 47, but here I sit," he gestures expansively around the twilight Sunday scene at his local watering hole, West Alabama Ice House. "With my lifestyle, I'm never going to be a picture of fitness, but I'm actually doing pretty well, all things considered."

"I'm so introverted and I've had so many health problems," Wood continues. "I mean, I was virtually living at Ben Taub off and on for almost two years.

"I wasn't sure I ever wanted to do this again," he explains as he sips a 16 oz. Busch Lite. "So there we'll be July 15 doing an evening [makes quotation marks in the air] with Horseshoe. Amazing, really."

Wood will be joined by original members Scott Daniels on lead guitar, drummer Eddie Hawkins, and bassist Ben Collis. Ken Jones, who spent a long time in The Missiles, will fill Cary Winscott's spot at rhythm guitar; Winscott passed away from skin cancer complications in 2008.

​Along with his own band, which has played Last Concert Café hundreds of times, Daniels was Carolyn Wonderland's guitarist foil for a decade, Collis currently plays with honky-tonker Amber Digby, and Hawkins is a technical whiz for the Houston Symphony.

Horseshoe took Houston's alternative scene by storm beginning in January 1995, when first album King of the World was released. Rocks Off first saw them when they opened for Sonny Landreth at Rockefeller's, and we became lifelong fans that night.

There really was nothing else quite like the mix of rock and surly country that Wood and his mates were putting out, although No Depression magazine had recently coined the term alternative country and that seemed to be as good a genre description of Horseshoe as anything.

Rocks Off's then-teenaged guitar-picker son took King of the World and retreated into his bedroom, where we frequently heard him whanging away on songs like "Covenant" and "Slow Learner."

By 1997, the band had a successful California tour under their belts and Billy Joe Shaver had called their show at SXSW "some of the best damned music I've ever heard." But the wheels were already beginning to fall off.