Courtesy Jacksboro Highway

L-R: Pete Best, John Lennon, Delbert McClinton, Bruce Chanel, Paul McCartney, George Harrison

​Lonesome, Onry and Mean didn't get in much trouble in school. So his parents were a little disturbed to find the eighth grader in the principal's office on the afternoon of February 10, 1964. He and his best friends, Mike Clowdus, Brad Rutledge, and Larry "Suitcase" Simpson, had been written up and sent to the office by Mr. Stephen Haynes, the eighth grade honors algebra teacher.

The infraction? Combing our hair like the Beatles.

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Courtesy LC Media

​I was living in Holland in 1977 when my younger brother, who had attended Wayland Baptist University on a track scholarship until booze and girls were discovered in his dorm room, came for a visit. While living in Plainview, his stomping grounds had been the gin joints of Lubbock. Upon arrival, he immediately opened his suitcase and pulled out an album he said I had to hear. It was some guy he had seen play in Lubbock who had just put out his first album.

It was what is known as Joe Ely's "white album." Self-titled, it has sometimes been referred to as the "No Loud Talk" album because of the sign on the wall behind the band on the back photo.

Dropping the needle on side one of Joe Ely, my entire musical horizon changed.

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​Lonesome, Onry and Mean was sad to learn via Chuck Prophet's Facebook page this morning that Reg Presley, lead singer of Sixties proto-punkers the Troggs, has been diagnosed with lung cancer.

The Troggs are known primarily for their 1966 hit "Wild Thing." LOM was a sophomore in high school when the tune came blaring out of the speakers of the car radio and rocked our world. It seemed that within a week every rock station in the country was playing "Wild Thing" once an hour. It was literally everywhere.

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​The comments sections on several articles about Linda Chorney, the woman who gamed the system and social networked her way onto the final Grammy ballot in the Americana category, tend to be pretty negative, although Chorney's publicist, husband and a few friends are trying to staunch the flow of irate bile that has gushed like BP's Gulf well last year.

Lonesome, Onry and Mean has been following Americana music since long before we first went to work in country radio in the early Seventies, and we've never witnessed anything quite as shameful as Chorney's calculated internet march to the Grammy ballot. We were revolted by our first listen to Chorney's tepid folky Emotional Jukebox. We can think of a handful of women in Houston who could kick Chorney's musical ass with one arm behind their backs.

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Courtesy of Miller Outdoor Theatre Advisory Board

Doyle Bramhall

​The unexpected passing of Doyle Bramhall of heart failure November 12 has caused Lonesome, Onry and Mean to revisit the man's career. And while Bramhall is probably best known for his association with Stevie Ray Vaughan, who cut several of Bramhall's compositions and copped his singing style, Bramhall's greatest musical achievements may have been during his tenure with Marc Benno and the Nightcrawlers.

Benno and Bramhall formed the Nightcrawlers after the break up of Texas Storm, Jimmie Vaughan's band that included Bramhall as drummer and vocalist. The Nightcrawlers recorded a stellar string of albums in the mid-70s and had quite a bit of buzz but never really caught that one big break. We caught up with Benno, who was in a reminiscing mood, via phone today.

"I didn't fully realize until I was at the funeral what a big part Doyle had played in my life," Benno said. "It was a very moving service."

Benno recalled rough and tumble days in Austin in the early 70s "when we were all strung out and running wild."

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​OK, Facebook finally went too far last night when it casually offered me a chance to "like" Yoko Ono. Six others I'm somehow connected with via F-book (and I'm starting to wonder why I'm connected to them at all) "like" the 78-year old Mrs. Lennon.

So when does an "artist" of Yoko's fame and fortune decide the time has come to stick up a Facebook page so people can "like" them? Yoko currently has some of her work showing at Colton-Farb Gallery here, so it seems she's still got plenty of connections to get her rather blasé art out to that section of the world with enough money in the bank to write her a fat check for the privilege of having something with "Yoko Ono" scrawled across a corner on their walls.

Could it be something on the part of her publicists or backers who (accurately) perceive that she is not and will never be as popular as her deceased husband? If she somehow gets 8,000,000 "likes" on Facebook, I'm willing to bet she'd still not have one one-hundredth of the "likes" John can pull in spite of his bad boy sneer.

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​Another Austin music legend, Joe Gracey, passed away this morning of cancer complications. He was 61.

When Lonesome, Onry and Mean arrived in Austin in June, 1973 after having worked in radio in West Texas, Gracey immediately became our hero. A disc jockey at the notorious KOKE-FM, Gracey and cohort Rusty Bell were the voices of the progressive country movement, having invented a format that basically spun nothing but what we would today call alternative country. It was an amazing mishmash that included Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Murphy, Jimmy Buffett, Commander Cody, Kinky Friedman and a host of others who were making what would later be termed Redneck Rock.

Gracey, who had ties to all the Austin bands bubbling along in that red hot scene -- Freda and the Firedogs, Greezy Wheels, the Lost Gonzo band and a dozen others -- was the coolest cat on the airwaves. What he and Bell achieved at KOKE caused the staid, old-school country stations like KVET to up their game, yet this was just the tip of the iceberg of achievements of Joe Gracey in a life of activity and creation.

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Checkout the slideshows of the bands and the crowd at the Houston Press Music Awards Showcase.

Photo by Jason Wolter

Texas Johnny Brown

​I spent most of the my Houston Press Music Awards day circulating between five contiguous venues: Dirt Bar, Ben's Beans, Reserve 101, Pete's Dueling Piano Bar, and the House of Blues Foundation Room. Some random notes:

Drifting toward House of Blues on foot, we saw Little Joe Washington flash past in the passenger seat of an antique car; game face on, he looked like a man on the way to his 10,000th gig.

Texas Johnny Brown at Ben's Beans: He still has fire in his fingers and butter in the low end of a voice that can go from Bobby Bland to Barry White. We could've given all the awards to Brown and called a halt.

Caught the last number by supper club singer Kristine Mills, basically sung to an empty room. I've been to funerals that were livelier.

The Octanes had some tech issues, but also the best line all day: "I tried and tried to be true / Until I just got sick of you."

Recently publicists have been insisting Clory Martin is "the next Norah Jones," so I drifted into the middle of her set. Note to Martin: Don't teach your band the song during your awards showcase. This ain't amateur hour.

Rivers, a young power trio, aren't there yet but they've got a good direction and show much promise.

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Photos by Marc Brubaker

Buxton at Rudz in August

​Lonesome Onry and Mean has been spinning local sensation Buxton's upcoming release Nothing Here Seems Strange for almost two weeks now.

And we're sorry, but we still don't get it.

Maybe we are old and jaded and out of it, but to us it sounds like a bit of Clem Snide or Mumford and Sons lite, only in our opinion Buxton doesn't have the chops, the vocal abilities, or - probably the most important dealbreaker - the memorable lyrics of those comparable bands.

We're not implying there's some calculated scheme to make the record fit a Mumford template going on, but LOM's biggest complaint after hearing the album a couple of dozen times is that nothing sticks, not even "Blown Fuse," which we assume will be the single New West Records pushes to college radio when the album finally hits the street in January. (A remix in Los Angeles pushed back the expected September release date.)

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Photos by Jason Wolter

Horseshoe at Rudz in May

​Greg Wood and his band of merry men known as Horseshoe slide into Under The Volcano Wednesday night for the late-'90s warhorses' second "reunion" gig since getting back together at Rudyard's three months ago. Wood has been described as a songwriter extraordinaire in the local press going all the way back to Horseshoe's beginnings in 1995. The band's first CD, King of the World, stood H-Town on its ear, but it took five years for the band to issue its second album, 2000's Moving the Goods, as it spiraled toward oblivion.

And what a mish-mash Moving the Goods was, like a 50-car pileup on the Southwest Freeway. Openers "First Car" and "Last Concert Café" seemed to pick up right where King of the World ended, our jaunty ne'er-do-wells finding the slippery, trashy old groove that was as comfortable as a smoking jacket and a good cigar.

But midway through the album, it quickly became apparent that we were no longer in Camelot but in some lower level of Dante's inferno. It didn't take a genius to figure out that there were serious problems. Serious, serious, serious problems.

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