Houston Blog

Jay Lee

Rocks Off would wholeheartedly like to wish Ms. Stevie Nicks a very happy birthday today; since she's the epitome of a rock and roll lady, we'll refrain from revealing her actual age. At Fleetwood Mac's Toyota Center concert earlier this month, Nicks seemed to be walking with a limp, and her voice was noticeably raspier than on record, but her performances of "Gypsy," "Sara" - during which she walked over to embrace Lindsey Buckingham near the end, a clearly unrehearsed and utterly moving bit of stagecraft - "Gold Dust Woman" and "Silver Spring" were nevertheless riveting.

Instead, this gives Rocks Off a chance to write a few lines about one of our favorite Nicks songs, her duet with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around." The lead single from Nicks' 1981 solo debut Bella Donna, it rose to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and, as Petty jokes on Peter Bogdanovich's 2007 documentary Runnin' Down a Dream, totally torpedoed the Heartbreakers' single at the time, "A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)."

So in addition to not being able to get T.I's "Whatever You Like" outta our skulls since last fall, here comes blonde pixie Anya Marina's sultry acoustic version of the hip-hop hit.

Marina is based out of San Diego, Calif., and when she's not writing sweet lil' acoustipop with her backing band, she's a morning DJ for one of the city's radio stations. She reminds us of another San Diego-area artist, Jewel, who wrote plenty of come-hither jams on an acoustic guitar, except Marina hasn't been on "Dancing With The Stars" or married a rodeo dude. Fingers crossed.

Sometimes you can just tell it's going to be a good week. Rocks Off heard "It's Only Rock N Roll" - the prize of the Stones' interregnum between Exile on Main Street and Some Girls (sorry, "Angie" fans) - on the way home last night and, sure enough, it does help ease the pain. You can almost see Keef nodding off during that extra-dirty riff, and Mick - as usual - is taking no mess: "Bet you think you're the only woman in town." (If anyone knows different, it's him.)

Be that as it may, "It's Only" makes a solid case that rock and roll will forever be the Stones' true mistress - and for a band that hardly needed explain itself in 1974, moves the curtain aside just enough to show that Mick sticking a knife in his heart and spilling it right onstage isn't just a metaphor.  

Rocks Off is never really not on an Uncle Tupelo kick, but it sure came flooding back after he heard "New Madrid" on Fred Imus' Saturday-morning Trailer Park Bash satellite-radio show last weekend. Even among such future alt-country touchstones as "Acuff/Rose," "The Long Cut" and killer Doug Sahm duet "Give Back the Key to My Heart," "New Madrid" has always been Rocks Off favorite song on the late St. Louis band's final - and probably best - album, 1993's Anodyne. Only "Gun," from 1991's Still Feel Gone, keeps it from being his favorite Uncle Tupelo song, period.

Spurred by a loping banjo lick - played by Max Johnston, now of the Gourds - "New Madrid" is one of Jeff Tweedy's best Tupelo-period lover's laments, as well as one of the very few UT songs to still appear regularly on Wilco's setlist. His lyrics contain several references to the earthquakes near New Madrid, Missouri, in 1811 and 1812, still thought to be the biggest quakes in U.S. history. Had the Richter Scale been around back then, seismologists believe they would have registered around an 8.0, a category appropriately designated "megaquake." They were severe enough to alter the course of the Mississippi River - hence the line "Rivers burn, then run backwards."

That lovable scamp Mojo Nixon just played this song on his Sirius XM Outlaw Country shift, and now only God knows when Rocks Off is going to be able to scrub his mind clean of "Pussy-Eatin' Pamela," "Suck-'em Silly Shirley" and a few others he can't bring himself to type. And, in case you are denser than plutonium, yes, this is extremely NSFW.

Allow Rocks Off to repeat: N. S. F. W. But it's a scream. 

Look at it this way: Rocks Off could have posted Coe's "Masturbation Blues"...

I will be the first to admit that when it comes to music, I get misty at points. I guess it's the sentiment of a song, if it lines up with something that I could never intimate to someone else. Love, death, remorse, all the biggies that get that lacrimal gland going in our everyday lives. I have even frequently wondered if it's some evil recipe in the chords and sounds that makes me turn into a bald and tattooed mass of nerves.

Whenever a song makes me tear up, I get all angry at the artist. Like they sat in a studio and said, "Fuck that dude! Let's write a song that makes him cry in traffic like a bitch!"

When Justin Townes Earle recorded "Mama's Eyes," the first track released of March's Midnight at the Movies, he probably added "And let me make damn sure it reminds him of his spotty relationship with his dad and touches on the fact that he looks like his mom, but with a beard!"

Among, you know, a few other things, the past 24 hours have been the start of a very, very big year for the band Rocks Off affectionately refers to as the Best Band Ever. U2 appeared alongside Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, "One" pal Mary J. Blige and many more as Barack Obama's opening acts at yesterday's massive "We are One" concert on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

"Restraint" is not a word normally associated with Bono and the boys, but they showed it yesterday. Not so much in their two-song set of "City of Blinding Lights" and "Pride (In the Name of Love)" - what, did you think they would play "Exit"? - but because the band could well have used the occasion to debut the first single from its forthcoming No Line on the Horizon album (due March 3 in the U.S.), a fuzzy, frenetic little number called "Get on Your Boots."

The Gourds didn't invent the idea of a ragtag roots-rock band spicing up its set with hip-hop and R&B covers, but thanks to their cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" (endorsed by the Doggfather himself), everybody probably thinks they did. But Gourds co-frontman Kevin Russell, playing as solo alter ego Shinyribs, managed to outdo even "Gin and Juice" Wednesday night at the Volcano.

Although his excellent hour-plus set included other standouts like "Shreveport" from the Gourds' brand-new album Haymaker! and a tender cover of TLC's "Waterfalls," Rocks Off thought the highlight of the night was Russell's version of R.Kelly's tautological 2000 exercise in misogyny, "Feelin' on Yo Booty."

Swapping out Kelly's plinking Oriental melody for a glistening Glen Campbell-esque country chord progression, Russell brought out the loneliness of lyrics like "Now your body's got me feelin' like spending/ With a back room I could come to live in" in a way that completely transcended irony. He turned a song that, at best, is a textbook example of Kelly's rampant egomania into something that might actually work as a come-on. 

Players wanna play, ballers wanna ball, rollers wanna roll. Well done, Shinyribs. Carry on.

It may come as a great shock to regular readers that Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' Damn the Torpedoes has been in Rocks Off's heavy rotation lately. Or maybe it won't. Either way, the entire album could pretty much apply to Can't Get It Out of My Head.

"Shadow of a Doubt (A Complex Kid)" was a tough call over power-pop treasure "Century City" and absolutely heartbreaking country ballad "Louisiana Rain," but this performance (which appears to be from Japanese TV from around the time of Torpedoes' 1979 release) sealed the deal. Benmont Tench alternates between sweeping "Refugee" organ and the majestic grand piano of "I Need to Know," while Mike Campbell peels off a savory guitar solo reminisent of the one on Torpedoes' "Even the Losers."

And Petty's lyrics... let's just say "She's always been so hard to figure out" has a lot of meaning for Rocks Off at the moment. - Chris Gray 

Waylon Jennings, "Ain't Livin' Long Like This," live in 1980

Rocks Off is a big musical-phase guy. It's not unusual for him to get stuck - if "stuck" is indeed the proper word - listening to an artist or genre for weeks or months at a time. This summer it was Tom Petty (which he's still far from over) and the Rolling Stones; more recently the Pretenders, Wilco and the Band; and lately the classic/alt-country hybrid of Sirius/XM's Outlaw Country.

Phases should never be forced - a few weeks ago, Rocks Off tried to force himself into an indie-rock phase and barely lasted an hour before throwing up his hands in disgust. Thanks to his recent OC obsession, he was sure a Waylon Jennings phase was just around the bend, mostly because probably his favorite Waylon song, "Ain't Livin' Long Like This" - done most recently as a rip-snorting AC/DC-style stomper on Waylon and son Shooter's band the .357s' new album Waylon Forever (Vagrant), recorded shortly before Waylon's death in 2002 - comes on OC several times a day.

Instead, though, it seems to have had the opposite effect.