Photo courtesy of Columbia Records

Willie Nelson in the early 1960s

Working on this week's cover story on Willie Nelson was a blast -- and a blast from the past. One minute I'd be typing and the next the phone would ring.

"Hey, this is Johnny Bush, I hear you're doing a story on Willie. Why didn't you call me?"
Stuff like that just kept happening. Willie's worldwide.

Cover Story:

Mr. Record Man: Willie Nelson, Houstonian

And this week's cover was not the only Willie work in the past couple of months. I also had a long feature in "Willie's birthday" issue of Texas Music magazine that hit the usual outlets April 1.

One part of all this Willie-ing that got left on the cutting-room floor was a highly interesting email from none other than Joe Sample, the extraordinary keyboardist and composer of the Crusaders who himself recently appeared on a Houston Press cover.

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Photo courtesy of Columbia Records

Willie Nelson in the studio in the mid-'70s, making gospel album The Troublemaker

This week and into next, the State of Texas and the rest of the world will join together in saluting American hero Willie Nelson on his 80th birthday. Rocks Off would certainly like to add our congratulations, but we woke up today -- well, yesterday -- looking to start an argument.

The standard line in Willie's current bio is that he has released some 200 albums, and recently it sure seems like he has something new in stores every few months. Since 2008, his original, non-compilation titles include Two Men With the Blues (with Wynton Marsalis), Country Music, Willie and the Wheel (with Asleep at the Wheel), American Classic, Ray Charles tribute Here We Go Again, Heroes, and the brand-new Let's Face the Music and Dance. There may not be a stone-cold classic in there, but most of them are above average, and there certainly isn't an outright dog in the bunch.

True, Willie has said before that all he really does these days is play music and play golf. But he's still releasing albums at a clip that -- even considering that the Charles tribute and Two Men With the Blues were largely recorded live in one evening -- would put a man half his age to shame. There are a lot of reasons to admire Willie Nelson, and his laid-back but dogged work ethic is a big one for us personally.

Now, imagine that through some cruel twist of fate, you do not own any Willie Nelson albums. At all. That's where we come in. Of course these are not the only Willie Nelson albums you should buy, just the five we think you should buy first. But please don't stop there.

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One of Time magazine's Top 100 English-language novels of the last century, the late David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is a gargantuan book. Its cutting, comedic views cover a broad swath of American life, but focus on family dysfunction, chemical dependency, depression, entertainment saturation and the notion that everything in this country is for sale.

Set in a not-very-distant future, the book's events occur over several years, designated no longer by numerals, but subsidized by corporations willing to shell out the most dough for naming rights. As it were, many of the novel's events occur in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, rather than, say, 2017.

Infinite Jest follows the Incandenza family, Bostonians of considerable pedigree, whose Enfield Tennis Academy is a collective of supremely intelligent students and administrators. They live up the hill from Enett House, a halfway house for recovering addicts. The bulk of the book's characters reside in one or the other. Everyone is broken in some fundamental and hard-to-fix way.

Wallace was the embodiment of the "write what you know" adage. The book's nearly 1,100 pages (and 388 endnotes!) are filled with poetic wisdom on depression. Wallace struggled with the disease for years and committed suicide in 2008.

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Photo by Marco Torres

Teaching jazz at Texas Southern University was probably the last thing on the mind of Joe Sample when the Phillis Wheatley High School graduate returned to his native Houston after tearing it up in Los Angeles for 40 years.

But Sample, who left TSU in 1958 with members of the Jazz Crusaders -- which would later become the Crusaders, a wildly successful band that married jazz with Fifth Ward-inspired funk-rock -- has been doing exactly that since the fall 2012 semester.

Aside from molding talented college students into potentially top-notch musicians, Sample, in a way, has been anointed to lead TSU out of the doldrums.

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Cover by Monica Fuentes/Photo by Marco Torres

This week's Houston Press cover story is about ScoreMore, the Texas-based concert promotion company that has, in the estimation of many, become a vital part of the rap ecosystem in the Southern United States.

For these types of long-form stories, a fair amount of research and reporting is involved. In this case, ScoreMore principals Sascha Stone Guttfreund and Claire Bogle allowed me to be part of their world for six weeks, both in person and in the crevices of their varying inboxes (text, voicemail, tweets, etc), answering approximately 400,000 questions about everything that has ever happened about everything, grand to tiny, since the universe first spat out energy.

As such, there were parts of the notes that, due to space restrictions (and wanting to maintain the general narrative arc), were not included. The four best:

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Photos courtesy of Gary Sapone

Jewel Brown and Milton Hopkins at the Continental Club, May 27

Along with Lightnin' Hopkins's cousin Milton Hopkins, Houston jazz diva Jewel Brown heads north to Chicago this weekend, where she and Hopkins will entertain folks with their new album, Milton Hopkins and Jewel Brown.

The festival is paying tribute to Lightnin' Hopkins since this would have been his 100th year had he lived.

Ms. Brown, at one time the singer for no less a band than Louis Armstrong's All-Stars, has been in semi-retirement, although she still takes the occasional choice gig. Check this week's print edition of the Houston Press for our in-depth feature on Ms. Brown.

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Like to go out? Want to get paid for it?

Of course it's not quite that simple. But the Houston Press has an opening for a bar/nightclub columnist effective immediately. As of this week's column, our now-former Nightfly, Shea Serrano, is moving on to greener pastures and better hours. And another kid, his third.

Shea estimates that in his four and a half years as Nightfly, he wrote some 136,000 words. He went any place we wanted him to go, hit his deadlines (mostly), did not develop a crippling alcohol addiction and only made his editors want to throttle him once in a while. (Kidding.) He's a small dude, but those are big shoes to fill.

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Cover image by Monica Fuentes

Things have been quite noisy since Houston's new noise ordinance became law.

In this week's cover story, Houston Press examined the effects of the citywide sound ordinance, which Houston City Council passed on October 10.

While a Houston Police Department officer is confident that the noise ordinance task force (who isn't required to carry a decibel meter) is doing a good job, critics think the law is framed in a language vague enough to allow enforcers wide latitude in interpreting "loud noise."

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This week's Houston Press cover story, "Playing For Keeps," dives into the world of vinyl records, with interviews with local collectors and shop owners who are helping keep the medium alive in the Bayou City. Research for this cover story took me as far north as Dallas, where I visited with A&R Records' Stanley Getz II, who showed me around his record pressing plant.

Our trip to A&R was highlighted by getting to see the Flaming Lips' Record Store Day release The Flaming Lips And Head Fwends -- which was pressed and completed at the Dallas plant -- before all 20,000 copies got ready to be shipped to record stores all over the country.

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Jason Wolter

Texas Johnny Brown at The Big Easy, August 25

Rocks Off would like to congratulate one of the stars of this week's "Old School" cover story, Texas Johnny Brown, who will receive a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail this weekend.

The monument for Brown, 83, will be dedicated at 4 p.m. Saturday in downtown Ackerman in Brown's native Choctaw County. Brown and his Quality Blues Band will perform a post-dedication concert after a "meet Texas Johnny Brown" reception at the Choctaw County Economic Development Foundation office. Hope the weather holds out.

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