Blogs

(Rooting through yellowing copies of the Press, I found the following listings from ten and 15 years ago)

15 years ago in Houston music:

The Boredoms and Brutal Truth opened for Pain Teens at Emo’s…Then-Press music editor Brad Tyer highly recommended readers to go see Jason Nodler’s play In the Under Thunderloo at Catal Huyuk…The Franchise, Under the Sun, Toy Subs, Global Village, and Venus in Furs all played the Pig Live…Beat Temple and Ooga Booga hosted a “Super Funk Party!” at Fitz’s, while the Missiles opened at the same club the next night for Jason and the Scorchers…Hollisters forerunners the Rounders played every Thursday at the Bon Ton…GG Allin came to town…Carolyn Wonderland hosted an open-mike night at Dan Electro’s on Thursday, played Tuesday at Last Concert and Friday at Catal Huyuk, Sunday night at Billy Blues, and Sunday afternoon at Bo Beaux’s and a KPFT benefit at the Boat Yard and at an AIDS benefit at Fitz’s. The Flamin’ Hellcats played Rudz on Friday… The Hightailers played Thursday night at Last Concert.

I knew it had been a long-ass time since we were last graced with a Tom Waits show in these parts, but I had no idea just how long it had been. According to his singularly obsessive fansite, it will have been a full 27 years and one month since we last heard the extreme bluesman and song poet. A full Houston tour history follows, after the jump…

When you get right down to it, most often the blogosphere is usually a pretty obnoxious place. But every now and then you find a story like the first one in the comments box of this post on John Gonzales’s old Bayou City History blog.

Here’s some backstory and an excerpt to get you started. The post was left by an anonymous woman. In 1955, she writes, she was 15-and-a-half years old and in the Milby High drill team. She and the rest of the drill team were was assigned to work as ushers at Elvis Presley’s 1955 concert at City Auditorium.

Here’s a little nugget from the vaults. In 2000, when punk/rappers Simpleton released this, there was more excitement about baseball here than there had been since about 1986.

The Astros were moving into Enron Stadium! It was Lima time! The Killer B’s! We were gonna go to the World Series! Rap-rock ruled the earth! Man, it all seems a lifetime ago.

What’s the first rap song by a Houston artist? It’s debatable but most cite a few records that came about between 1985 and 1987.

But there’s another much older often forgotten candidate – Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Telephone Bill.”

By 1980, when he made “Telephone Bill,” Johnny “Guitar” Watson had long been based in Los Angeles, but he was born and raised in Third Ward.

The official version of “Think Twice” barely dented the pop charts in 1966, though it was something more of an R&B hit.

This NSFW version, recorded just for fun at the end of a recording session, was never even released. And given that the two of them sing about cocaine, reefer, cunnilingus and sing just about every swear word in the English language, right up to the C-word, it’s easy to see why.

Smokey Johnson
It Ain’t My Fault
Tuff City Int’l

You often hear band people say a variation of this: “You’ll really like his drumming. He’s a very musical drummer.”

It’s one of those seldom-defined, shorthand phrases like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famed definition of pornography. I can’t tell you what a musical drummer is, but I know one when I hear one.

Hell, maybe I can tell what a musical drummer is: a drummer who knows that rhythm is melody, and what’s more, can act on that knowledge with style.

Funk pioneer Joseph “Smokey” Johnson, who quit playing after a stroke in 1993, is perhaps the most musical drummer I have ever heard. A New Orleans native, like so many of my favorite drummers, Johnson broke on to the scene as Fats Domino’s drummer during the 1950’s and ‘60s.

As some of you may remember, I wrote about visiting the graves of southeast Texas music legends on Day of the Dead. Last Friday, Press music listings editor Brett Koshkin and I did just that.

Or tried to, at least.

The plan was to head up to Navasota’s Oakland / Resthaven cemetery, where both Mance Lipscomb and Joe Tex rest. Then we would head east on some back-roads to the tiny Grimes County hamlet of Richards, where legendary itinerant blues singer Alger “Texas” Alexander sleeps in the piney woods. From there, we would blaze back into town on I-45, stopping off at the north side grave of Juke Boy Bonner, and then head down to Forest Park Lawndale for Lightnin’ and Ted Daffan.

That scheme proved to be a trifle ambitious.

Back in the late ‘40s, Houston Post columnist Hubert Mewhinney memorably described Houston as “a whiskey and trombone town.” No doubt the King and Carter Jazzing Orchestra (pictured) contributed to that atmosphere.

This picture, taken in 1921, is all over the Internet, but I was unable to find out anything about these Jazzing fellows. Does anybody know anything about these guys? – John Nova Lomax

“Wasn’t your grandfather the guy who discovered Leadbelly?”

Having the same name and being in the same trade as John and Alan Lomax, I get questions like that a lot. And yes, I am related to both of them, but neither was my grandfather. John Avery Lomax was my great-grandfather, and Alan Lomax was my grandfather’s brother. John Avery Lomax Jr. was my grandfather, and though he is not as widely remembered as his father and brother, his contributions to American music and that of Houston deserve remembering in their own right.

Since today is the 100th anniversary of his birth, at the risk of great self-indulgence (hell, isn’t that what blogs are for?), I’d like to post a little something about him.

Big Mike Somethin' Serious Rap-A-Lot

By the time this1994 Dirty South landmark solo debut was released, New Orleans / Houston rapper Big Mike already had toiled at a local Olive Garden, cut an album as a member of the legendarily filthy and violent Rap-A-Lot group the Convicts, roomed with (and influenced) the pre-fame Snoop Dogg out in Los Angeles when both were part of the Death Row camp, and served as the temporary replacement for Willie D in the Geto Boys for the Till Death Do Us Part album. All of this experience, save perhaps for the Olive Garden stint, was brought to bear on Somethin' Serious. While his Convicts album was pretty much straight hardcore, his stay on the West Coast taught him, as he put it in a Murder Dog interview from a couple of years ago, how to be a fly gangsta. "Me being around Dr. Dre and hearing a better quality of beats put me up on game on how to make my stuff sound better," he said. "I got just that all around fly attitude that's out there on the West Coast. They gangsta to the fullest and they had that flyness about them too. That kinda soaked into me too so I sorta blended all of that with my Southside flow and I mixed it up all together and I came up with a winning recipe." That there's no idle boast. Somethin' Serious offers up a textbook example of what hardcore Southern hip-hop once was and could and should still be.

Lucinda Williams Happy Woman Blues Smithsonian-Folkways

Way back in 1980, long before she was on all those magazine covers, long before the Grammys and all the other accolades and her status among the NPR set, the woman who would be the Queen of Americana made this gentle, rootsy and unassuming little album right here in Houston's Sugar Hill Studios. It would be her last for eight years. In the late 1960s, Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark had ignited a very strong local folk/country/blues singer-songwriters scene here, and by the late '70s, it was centered on Montrose and blazing its last vivid radiance. It was one of the most fertile scenes Houston has ever had, and it was organic — what separated the Houstonians from the rest of America's folk-rock pack was their attachments to regional music like the country-gone-city blues of Lightnin' Hopkins, the ancient pre-blues folk of Mance Lipscomb and Clifton Chenier's red hot zydeco. These artists weren't just trying to cash in by copying Crosby, Stills and Nash records off the radio — that type of mercenary, carpetbagging folk scene would come later. While patriarchs like Clark and Van Zandt, along with their star pupils Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell, were gone to Nashville by the mid-'70s, many remained here who had yet to heed the siren calls of Music City and Austin. Anderson Fair and the Hard Thymes Soup Kitchen and a host of other venues were still the stomping grounds of such talents as Richard Dobson, Vince Bell, Gurf Morlix, John Vandiver, Don Sanders, Nanci Griffith, Eric Taylor and Lyle Lovett.

Welcome to the inaugural installment of Catfish Reef, Houstoned Rocks's ongoing exploration of Houston's rich musical history. Once a week, we'll rifle through the crates in the Bayou City's collective trash can and dust off a record you really ought to hear and why you ought to hear it.

We'll begin with a collection of neglected Albert Collins instrumentals from the mid-'60s.

Albert Collins Truckin' With Albert Collins Blue Thumb Records

If you think of Albert Collins was just another axe-wielding Alligator Records blues genericist, this album is a key part of the antidote to that misconception. Originally recorded in 1965 — when Collins was fresh off a day job washing dishes at a River Oaks soda fountain -- for Bill Hall's TCF Hall label in Beaumont, this collection was re-released after Collins's rediscovery in 1969 by Canned Heat's Bob Hite. Truckin' finds Collins doing just that through ten instrumentals and one slow blues vocal. Most of the tunes here have "cool" titles and they all live up that description. There's "Frosty" and "Don't Lose Your Cool," both of the show-stopping shuffles he played right up to the end of his days, but there's also so much more here.