"You just can't live in Texas if you don't have a lot of soul"
- Doug Sahm, "At the Crossroads"
If the Texas music scene ever had a soul, it belonged to Doug Sahm, the leader of the Sir Douglas Quintet who passed away ten years ago Wednesday. It didn't matter whether he was knee-deep in the blues, hammering on a three-chord rocker, or sawing on his fiddle, Doug Sahm was 100% Texan to his core.
Sahm had a storybook career, from child prodigy who was asked to join the Grand Ole Opry and sat in with Hank Williams to the elder statesman of Texas music as leader of supergroup Texas Tornados. He also had a lot of Houston history, recording his breakout hit "She's About a Mover" here with legendary producer Huey P. Meaux in 1965.
Not really sure whether it's our alcohol mixture, some pharmacological imbalance our sex life or just male menopausal phenomena, but lately Lonesome, Onry and Mean has been on an evil bluegrass jag. Nothing like playing our Stanley Brothers 45-rpm of "If I Lose" - "If I lose, let me lose/ I don't care how much I lose/ If I lose a hundred dollars while I'm tryin' to win a dime/ My baby, she's got money all the time" - to make us feel like drinkin' a barrel of moonshine, sharpening our razor and ambushin' some revenuers or strangling the no-good lyin' woman who done us wrong and burying her down in the holler by the sycamore tree.
Here are a few of the meaner nuggets in constant rotation this past week:
Stanley Brothers, "Rank Stranger": Certainly the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou, with its spot-on Dan Timiniski version of the Stanleys' "Man of Constant Sorrow," brought both bluegrass and Ralph Stanley back into the public consciousness after a long period of dormancy where the music was literally of interest to few people beyond the rabid aficianados LOM often refers to as Bluegrass Nazis.
The late Bob Claypool did exhaustive research for his book Saturday Night at Gilley's.
Other than his adopted Los Angeles, Houston may be the most important city in country singer Dwight Yoakam's career. Yoakam's music finally found a rabid country audience in Houston when KIKK disc jockey and music director Joe Ladd began to spin Yoakam's cover of East Texan Johnny Horton's "Honky Tonk Man" in 1986. Houston went wild for "Honky Tonk Man," which gave Yoakam the national breakout he was looking for.
It also didn't hurt that late Houston Post music critic Bob Claypool was an early supporter of Yoakam's. Claypool, the consummate hard-drinking country-music writer, knew the real deal when he heard it. In his book Fifty Years Down a Country Road, legendary Nashville disc jockey Ralph Emery dedicated several pages to a remembrance of Claypool, even relating that Claypool used to ride around in an old Lincoln with Dwight Yoakam before Yoakam had made it: "I love the idea of Bob rocketing round Texas with Dwight Yoakam playing Buck Owens tapes."
Lonesome Onry and Mean vaguely remembers someone telling us a couple of years ago that Las Vegas bookies actually had a line on whether Chuck Berry would die that year (we think it was 2007). The macabre factor aside, remembering this Wednesday got LOM to pondering about the Godfathers of Rock and Roll and who would indeed be, per the title of Jerry Lee Lewis' recent album, the Last Man Standing. Not meaning to demean the contributions of artists like Dave Bartholomew, but in our mind there are only four giants left: Berry, Lewis, Fats Domino and Little Richard Penniman.
Chuck Berry - Born Oct. 18, 1926 (age 83): While LOM has a tender spot in our heart for all four of these amazing artists, for us Chuck Berry will always be The Man. We were lucky enough to see the Father of Rock and Roll play with the Rolling Stones at Moody Coliseum in Dallas in 1969. Chuck was riding high on "My Ding-a-Ling" at that time and his antics were, to us, an embarrassment.
But other than that, the guy could still rev it up. For all his showmanship and guitar technique, Berry is one of the truly great American songwriters (Scott Miller once called Berry the best Americana songwriter ever). While the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has included three Berry songs - "Johnny B. Goode," "Maybellene," and "Rock and Roll Music," our favorite is and always has been "Brown Eyed Handsome Man." Other favorites include "Nadine," "Oh Carol," and "No Particular Place To Go."
Ah, here we go again with local artists trumpeting "Grammy nominations." The latest is Atascocita-grown country singer Susan Hickman, who seems to fancy herself as a Miranda Lambert/Martina McBride type. We stumbled across Hickman accidentally through MySpace's "Status Updates," and our eye was immediately drawn to: "Susan Hickman Up for 6 1st Round Grammy Nominations."
Now Lonesome, Onry and Mean doesn't claim to know everything about what's going on around here, but we do try to keep our ears to the ground about 23 hours a day for what's happening in the local live music scene, especially the country music scene. And, to lay it on the line, we've never heard of Hickman.
What gets LOM is the overblown bullshit of touting "6 1st Round Grammy Nominations" by a virtual unknown. Such public-relations malarkey may fool the average fan, especially if their music diet is the by-the-numbers Nashcrap Hickman specializes in, but it doesn't fool anyone in the working press or most club owners. Remember local folkies Sugar Bayou getting their public relations teat caught in the Grammy hype ringer with John Nova Lomax about five years ago?
U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. - and the author's daughter - Sara Blount, on duty in Afghanistan
"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields."
- Lt. Col. John McCrae (1872 - 1918)
For a peaceful country, we sure do a lot of fighting.
As a child, my Veterans Days centered on World War II and the Korean conflict. My uncle Billy Manning was a foot soldier in WWII. He left tiny Gatesville, Texas, a hell-raising cowboy country bumpkin and came home an entirely different man. Billy looked and talked a lot like Audie Murphy, and I don't think I ever saw him without his tiny worn Bible in his shirt pocket.
He used to let me ride with him as he looked for cattle in the hills and valleys outside Gatesville in what is now Ft. Hood, and I'll never forget asking him why he always carried that little Bible.
While anyone who follows this column knows that Lonesome, Onry and Mean can't stand about 90 percent of what gets touted in Best in Texas magazine and labeled Texas/Red Dirt music, we have always had a soft spot for Stillwater, Okla., rockers Cross Canadian Ragweed.
Our son took us to see CCR in Lubbock just as the band's career was beginning. A couple of years later, when they'd hit it big, they dropped by Blanco's to hang with him and he sat in with them on "Them Boys From Oklahoma."
Two alumni of Houston's fabled folk scene return to Anderson Fair this weekend.
Vince Bell lives in Santa Fe, N.M., these days, but he will always be associated with the heyday of the Houston folk scene and Anderson Fair. Mentored by Townes van Zandt and Guy Clark, Bell had a major influence on Lyle Lovett, who recorded Bell's "I've Had Enough" on his album Step Inside This House. Nanci Griffith, another Anderson Fair regular back in the day, recorded Bell's "Sun & Moon & Stars." Bell is touring behind his new album, One Man's Music.
Lonesome, Onry and Mean just noticed that venerable listening room McGonigel's Mucky Duck has a major streak of high-grade talent Nov. 12 through 17. Beginning with the Subdudes on the 12th, the Duck quickly plows through Texas legend Ray Wylie Hubbard (13th), troubadour-poet Tom Russell (14th), one of Nashville's biggest talents, Darrell Scott (15th) and George Strait hit writer/two-time Grammy winner Jim Lauderdale (17th).
Since reforming a couple of years ago, the Subdudes have been packing out the Duck whenever they pass through town. Like the Iguanas, the 'Dudes bring it the old-school New Orleans way.
Lonesome Onry and Mean is torn as to his whereabouts this evening. Drive-by Truckers will be knocking down walls and eardrums at House of Blues, and that's where we'll probably end up. But if Galveston was 70 miles closer - it's not the drive down, it's the drive back! - we would certainly be headed for Wrecks Bell's Old Quarter Acoustic Café tonight for a singularly fine songwriters show with the elusive Richard Dobson, David Olney and Sergio Webb.
The Truckers are touring behind their final New West album, The Fine Print, an extremely fine record despite its billing as an assortment of outtakes and rarities. In fact, the album has probably gotten more play in my truck in the past month than anything else I've received. From the opening track "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues" through covers of Tom Petty's "Rebels" and Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," The Fine Print holds together with more glue than most albums can muster these days. And when the Truckers get down the fine points of southern existence - the love/hate relationship with TVA, used-car lot arson and insurance fraud - they hit the bullseye.
In conjunction with the Truckers' show, frontman Patterson Hood will be doing an instore at Cactus Records at 5:30 in support of his new solo album, Murdering Oscar (and Other Love Songs).
Lonesome, Onry and Mean has never hidden our distaste for Christmas music. So if we were ever called on to choose our favorite Christmas song, the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" would win hands down.
We can still remember the day - we were still Pogues virgins - when the lyrics, waffling between an aching level of poetic sentimentality and the utter down-and-out drunken surly hilarity of a marital spat ("It was Christmas eve, babe, in the drunk tank") finally penetrated the cranial area and we thought, "Now that's a damned interesting Christmas tune!" It captures perfectly the mixed emotions that always attend the season.
Man: "You're a bum"
Woman: "You're a punk"
Man: "You're an old slut on junk
"Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
Woman: "You scumbag, you maggot
"You cheap lousy faggot
"Happy Christmas your arse
"I pray God it's our last"
Obviously with U2 and the Pogues alone, the Irish scene has had a huge effect on the pop music of the past half century. But no list of Irish influences on 20th century rock and roll can be complete without Van Morrison.
In 1968, LOM's senior year in high school, Them played the Ector County Coliseum in our West Texas hometown of Odessa. By 1968, Morrison had left the band, but the rest of Them moved to the States and toured until the money ran out.
Them made some very interesting bluesy rock tracks, but the band is primarily known for two things: Van Morrison and Morrison's garage rock classic, "Gloria." To Lonesome, Onry and Mean, "Gloria" stands shoulder to shoulder with the Standells' "Dirty Water" as one of the nastiest, rocking tracks of the '60s garage-band era.
Morrison wrote the song in Germany while on tour in late 1963, and in the hands of Them it became an extended nightly jam with Morrison continually improvising new verses and his crazy scats. But the three-minute hit single remains to this day one of the eternal milestones of mid-'60s rock and roll.
Ed. Note: Here's a personal choice from 1970's His Band and the Street Choir:
Wonder what the Pogues show Thursday is going to look like? Here's our guess...
"I had the good fortune to meet Liam Clancy of the Clancy Brothers once and while talking with him over a cup of tea I mentioned my affection for the Pogues to which he replied, 'The Pogues are a cross between the Clancy Brothers and the Sex Pistols...with five teeth between them.'" - customer review of the Pogues' If I Should Fall From Grace With God on Amazon.com
The Clancy Brothers - Paddy, Bob, Liam, and Tom - and Tommy Makem are almost single-handedly responsible for the popularizing of Irish traditional music in the United States. Beginning with their first recording of Irish rebel songs, The Rising of the Moon, in 1956, the Clancy Brothers went from a little band of Irish actors singing on the side to international renown.
One of Lonesome Onry and Mean's favorite Pogues tracks is actually Steve Earle's great anti-war song "Johnny Come Lately" from Earle's Copperhead Road album. Earle has frequently spoken of his affinity for Ireland, particularly Galway, which we might call one of his retreats.
It was through Earle, and his song "Galway Girl" on 1999's Transcendental Blues that LOM first learned of Irish accordion virtuoso Sharon Shannon.
After the Earle introduction, LOM became somewhat obsessed with Shannon, and delved into her extensive catalog. A master of Irish traditional forms such as jigs, reels and hornpipes, it was quickly apparent Shannon is not only prolific but extremely eclectic.
Her first solo album in 1993, Sharon Shannon, is the largest-selling album of Irish traditional music ever. Yes, that's what it says: ever! And that's saying a mouthful when you consider competition from bands like the Chieftains and the Dubliners.
If there is a ticking time bomb signaling the impending end of the '80s hair-band nature of mainstream country music, Miranda Lambert is probably lighting the fuse. Lambert's third album, Revolution, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Country Albums chart last week and sold 23 percent more (almost 69,000 units) out of the gate than her previous album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which ended up as the 2008 Country Music Association album of the Year.
It doesn't take many listens to the searing Revolution to realize Lambert, nearing superstar status at age 25, has matured greatly as a writer and interpreter. Certainly of all the leading ladies of Nashville, Lambert is taking more artistic chances and pushing the boundaries farther and faster than anyone - and getting away with it commercially.
Take one listen to the guitar solo and the busy, rocking production on "Sin For A Sin," and it is immediately obvious this girl's musical ambition is too big to be limited by the usual Nashville strictures. The current single and opening track, "White Liar," has more in common with Buddy Miller and the Dixie Chicks than it does with Toby Keith or Carrie Underwood. And yes, that's a steel guitar, an honest-to-God steel guitar. Now that's country.
The Pogues are only one week away, so no time like the present to reflect on Irish music.
For many Americans, no song epitomizes Irish music like "Danny Boy." Lonesome Onry and Mean was gently prodding my Irish and European friends at the boozer recently regarding their opinions about the top recorded versions of "Danny Boy" and was met with studied indifference and we-don't-know-how-to-explain-it-to-him sheepishness.
Long and short of it, it doesn't seem that "Danny Boy" is anything the average Houston-Irish citizen cares about, or would be seen dead acting as if they ever cared about. Something told LOM we weren't going to find a Pogues version of the song on YouTube.
Oh, well, no one ever hung out with this hard-drinking crowd for their cultural enlightenment. Perhaps the problem our Irish fellow imbibers have with the song is that it was written by an English lawyer - exactly the kind of thinking that has mucked up the Middle East for years. Whatever the nationality and politics of author Frederick Weatherly, the song has struck a chord across ethnicities, generations, and genres. LOM can hardly remember a time until recently that the song wasn't in some sort of vogue.
Arty Hill is a Baltimore, Md., honky-tonker who has been playing regularly in Austin the past couple of years. He also reads Lonesome Onry and Mean's blog religiously and has already penned a couple of new songs based on the goings-on in these pages. He recently contacted LOM about Mike Stinson's list of great honky-tonk drinking songs, noting that none of Stinson's featured women in the central roles.
Hill writes to LOM: "I really liked Mike's list of his favorite drinking songs. Then I started making mine, and quickly realized they were all about women. Drunk women. Ah well... I've sorta set up my own classification system."
The Big Bang"The Wild Side of Life" - written by Arlie Carter and William Warren, as recorded by Hank Thompson; "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud Loud Music)" written by Max Fidler, Joe and Rose Lee Maphis, recorded by Joe and Rose Lee Maphis
"I always think of these tunes together. They're from the early '50s, when all songs about derelicts - let alone the female kind - still had shock value. And they're plain and simple, which is why they never sound dated. "You'd rather have a drink with the first guy you meet / And the only home you'll know is the club down the street." True yesterday, true today."
A small band of Irishmen frequent Lonesome Onry and Mean's local waterhole, and they are all abuzz about the arrival of the Pogues at House of Blues October 29.
Led by the charismatic and erratic Shane MacGowan, the Pogues set the music world buzzing when they burst onto the London scene in 1982. Their brilliance lay in the combination of Irish traditional music and instruments with the politics and the aggression of the punk movement.
While at the beginning they mostly covered old Irish songs, by second album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985), they emerged as one of the UK's major acts and were working with the likes of the Clash (Joe Strummer produced 1990's Hell's Ditch), Elvis Costello and the legendary - but soon to go bankrupt - Stiff Records. MacGowan began to flower as a writer during this period with tracks like "The Old Main Drag" (which appears on the soundtrack of My Own Private Idaho) and "A Pair of Brown Eyes."
Lonesome, Onry and Mean's buddy Kenny Pipes has been hosting a very cool house concert series at his home in Pasadena for a number of years now. Pipes' "Almost Austin" series has not only featured numerous local players, but also stellar left-of-Nashville acts like David Olney, Sergio Webb and (most recently) Tommy Womack, as well as Austin heavyweights like former Houstonian Carolyn Wonderland.
Pipes has alerted us that he's got plenty of room this weekend for a show by veteran Nashville troubadour Steve Young. Our friend Lisa Rogers just forwarded the above YouTube video of Young playing his haunting tune "Silverlake" she filmed last weekend at the Conroe Cajun Catfish Festival.
Pipes can be contacted about tickets at kpipesjr@aol.comDoors open at 6 p.m. for a pot-luck supper, music starts at 8.
If you're into no-booze, no-talking, listening-room shows, NiaMoves, the yoga studio/concert venue just north of downtown, has a good one tonight with Eliza Gilkyson.
Gilkyson may be a folkie, but she always digs deep lyrically and musically. Her music is not for the faint of heart or the lace-doily crowd. The daughter of L.A. writer Terry Gilkyson and sister of guitar-slinger Tony Gilkyson (X, Randy Weeks), Ms. Gilkyson is a fixture on the Austin scene always in demand for concerts, co-writing and harmonizing.
LOM's dad loves to tell a story about being at the Petroleum Club in London in 1978 when Darrell McCall's "Lily Dale" came on the sound system. Some wiry little guy stood up on a chair and hollered, "Shut up, you Limey sons of bitches, they're playing the Texas National Anthem."
"I thought surely someone is just going to throw him through the window, but nothing happened. And the place got quiet and people listened."
Boorish? Sure. A caricature of the overbearing ugly Texan? Obviously. True? In many ways.
Honky-tonk man and recent Houston transplant Mike Stinson knows a thing or two about a bottle. Lonesome Onry and Mean asked him to list his all-time favorite drinking songs, many of which you will no doubt hear this evening at Under the Volcano.
"So many classic drinking songs, I could put together a box set in a hurry," Stinson says, "but here are a few of my faves."
1. Webb Pierce, "There Stands The Glass"
"The first song I sang at my very first show. So grateful that no tape exists of that performance, but my love for this song has never diminished. A few simple lines saying it
all. Makes life a little more tolerable."
2. Cindy Walker, "Bubbles In My Beer"
"One for the ages. I've heard versions by Bob Wills, George Jones and Willie Nelson and they're all home runs. "The dreams that I made now are empty, as empty as the bubbles in my beer." Yeah."
"American man in the laundry pile/ With the rain check claims and the skateboard child" - Chuck Prophet, "American Man"
We admit to being full-fledged, card-carrying members of the Chuck Prophet Party, but it still took Lonesome, Onry and Mean longer than usual to get the ears and head wrapped around Prophet's chaotic new Yep Roc Records album ¡Let Freedom Ring! The album may have the widest stylistic scope Prophet has ever laid down, although CP is known up front for going all over the rock and roll map in search artistic fuel.
But, as always happens with Prophet's records, the separate parts of the thing eventually come together, the wholeness of the disparate parts reveal themselves and, one day riding down the freeway with the stereo blasting, the brain says to the body, "What an album."
If you're into song swaps by serious writers, today's Troubadour Tuesdays happy-hour show at House of Blues should be right up your alley. KPFT disc jockey Rick Heysquierdo has just announced that Mike Stinson will be sharing the stage with Oklahoma folk rocker Jubal Lee Young.
Young's newest record, The Last Free Place In America, is his first to ever penetrate the Freeform Americana Radio charts, making it to No. 30 in its first week. Young is in the area for three weeks of gigs at various venues and house concerts, including this past weekend's Conroe Cajun Catfish Festival.Mike Stinson, "Take Out the Trash"
Texas music legend Rusty Wier has passed away according to a post from North Texas disc jockey Shayne Hollinger on the Galleywinter Texas music chat site.
One of the original Austin Cosmic Cowboys with the likes of Jerry Jeff Walker and Michael Martin Murphy, Wier has been a fixture on the Texas music scene for over 30 years. While Wier never had what could be considered a national hit, he was an evergreen act on the Texas circuit as well as in Europe. Wier was inducted into the Austin Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002.
Wier had been diagnosed with cancer in Nov. 2007. Details are sketchy as yet, but it is known that he had been undergoing chemotherapy and had been able to be at home.
Veteran Nashville songwriter Mark Germino will be making a rare Houston appearance tonight at Anderson Fair. The last time Germino played there, no less a fan than Steve Fromholz drove over from Austin to catch the show.
A songwriter's songwriter, Germino is one of the most revered writers in the Nashville underground. Like anyone who pitches songs in Hillbilly Hollywood, Germino's got war stories, like the day he thought he was finally going to get Vern Gosdin to cut one of his songs.
For some reason, the Nashville A-Team of great studio pickers just couldn't please Gosdin that day. After a full day in the studio, Gosdin was so frustrated and disappointed with the track that he took the tape off the recorder, walked out into the hall, bowled the tape down the hallway in disgust, ruining the tape. Gosdin never revisited the song and Germino never got his Vern Gosdin cut.
Lonesome Onry and Mean has to hand it to those people in Conroe: they know how to book a cool festival lineup. In fact, the list of performers for the Go Texan! Wine & Food stage at Saturday's Conroe Cajun Catfish Festival is downright scary from the standpoint of cutting-edge, less-than-highly-visible quality Americana acts.
Longtime LOM left-side-of-Nashville fave Phil Lee fires up at 2:45 p.m. Recently signed to Steady Boy Records, this wildman maverick - who counts Neil Young as one of his fans -has just returned from another European tour, which is happening more and more for him lately. Lee's latest album So Long, It's Been Good To Know You has been getting lots of spins on both sides of the Atlantic.
Dustin Welch's release Whisky Priest is almost certainly going to make LOM's 2009 best-of list. Not only is Welch a highly literate songwriter, he plays banjo like Jimi Hendrix. Welch will be playing from 4-5:30 p.m.
We knew it would happen, we just didn't know it would take so long. The so-called Texas music (and right-wing) lunatic fringe has finally located us and zeroed in on Lonesome, Onry and Mean. They've got their self-righteous gun-nut editorial Uzis a-blazin' like a shootout at the OK Corral over our blog about Austin Cunningham's song, "Guns and Religion."
Apparently we have Radio Free Texas to thank for our cup of bile running over. Here are some of the juiciest brain farts from the comment thread on our site.
1. Melanie thinks she has an answer. Unfortunately, it sounds like Lucy trying to "splain" something to Ricky.
"How come all these liberals are moving here to get away from their economies that have tanked because of all the special interests groups getting their hands in all the laws, creating financial burdens for the hard worker (obviously I am not talking about you)? Texas economy is in much better shape than any other and we have Bush, inpart, to thank for that. How you can sit and spout this HATEFUL, BIASED (yes, liberals can be hateful and biased too) drivel, after seeing exactly what kind of change Obama had in mind is beyond me. This is not forward thinking, it is socialism."
Wow, this is news. It's only liberals coming to Texas to look for jobs in our wonderful economy. But wait a minute, we thought liberals were too lazy to work, preferring to wait for their welfare checks and food stamps. You mean liberals are actually coming here hoping to work? Someone hurry and let Ann Coulter know, she should put a stop to this shit right now. Get Governor Ken Doll on the red phone.
Let the Madness begin. No, not March Madness, nincompoop - it's October. Christmas Madness.
Lonesome Onry and Mean doesn't know who officially decides these things, all we know is that it's the first week of October, Halloween hasn't even come and gone yet, but in the past 24 hours we've received a Frank Sinatra Christmas CD, a Ray Charles Christmas CD and an email tout for a Lee Greenwood Christmas CD.
Nothing depresses LOM more than Christmas music. LOM is not normally subject to the evils of depression except during the buildup to Christmas. But leading up to Christmas we are continually confronted with ever present Christmas music in every mall, restaurant, and gas station. We swear they throw the switch on Christmas Muzak at Home Depot at one minute past midnight on Thanksgiving. These things work bad magic on LOM's head.
Vince Bell's Houston roots go way, way back. When Anderson Fair opened its doors in the early '60s, Bell was one of the troubadours who not only played the joint, he also lived in the Montrose. If you can believe him, he ate so many of his meals at the club that he often refers to Anderson Fair in conversation as "that spaghetti restaurant."
Bell cut his teeth with folks like Lucinda Williams, Eric Taylor, Townes van Zandt, Gurf Morlix, Steve Fromholtz, Guy Clark and Blaze Foley at the old (and still open) Grant Street club.
Bell comes to town today with two purposes. The first is to hawk copies of his book, One Man's Music, 6:30 p.m. at Brazos Bookstore. The book is a chronicle of Bell's old days in Houston's folk scene heyday, but also details his struggle to recover from major brain damage he suffered in a car wreck.
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