Houston Music Blog

Craig Hlavaty

Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas

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Warning: Some of these videos contain very graphic images.

Anyone who knows Rocks Off, even in passing, knows of his fierce JFK assassination obsession. The theories, the scientific data, the literature and the various opinions shooting through the Internet with a lightning-fast velocity are all like catnip to us. We even make the trek up to godforsaken Dallas every year to visit the Grassy Knoll and throw down our own conspiracy theories about JFK's death with what is now a familiar group of fanatics and quasi-academics. For the record, we believe that a high-level conspiracy involving the military industrial complex is at fault, whose goal was to line the pockets of war profiteers and to ensure we stayed in Vietnam.

​One of the typical byproducts of getting older is that, by and large, you don't tend to get as angry anymore. Not necessarily the "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention" social-awareness type of anger, but the hard-edged, passionate type of anger which seems to be a prerequisite of the teen years.

You come to understand over time that anger of that sort does absolutely nothing to the object of said anger, and, in fact, does a whole lot to you in terms of screwing up your day, occupying way too much of your mental energy and just being down right bad for you physically.

That understanding and all the level-headedness it implies should not make us lose sight of the fact, however, that given the stresses and anxieties of this thing we call living, it can be both physically and emotionally beneficial to indulge in a little anger catharsis every so often. Given our passion for music, we at Rocks Off think a great way to do this is by mining through the more aggressive nether regions of your musical catalog and swimming around in the rage, cynicism and visceral roaring that's hibernating there.

After a particularly challenging Monday recently we did just that. We threw the cell phone into oncoming traffic, drew the blinds, moved the furniture out of the way and mixed up a potent musical cocktail.

​When Rocks Off learned that Texas countercultural icon and longtime ZZ Top graphic designer Bill Narum passed away Wednesday night, one of the first things we did was reach out to the ZZ camp for a statement. The Lil' Ol' Band from Tejas' publicist just got back to us with a message from the Rev. Billy F. Gibbons himself. Here it is verbatim - we just love the way he talks:

"Bill Narum... Man of many talents as a gifted artist, designer and persistent protagonist on many fronts. As the designer and creator of each and every early ZZ TOP cover, his hand forged the perception of the artist essence of ZZ TOP... Cactus, desert sand, rattlesnakes and javalenas, jalapenos, hot sauce and hot bluesrock imagery from way deep down in Texas.

"Scribble on, Bro Bill. You were the best!"

After the jump, a few of Narum's fellow artists remember their friend and colleague. Thanks to Margaret Moser at the Austin Chronicle and South Austin Museum of Popular Culture for her help.

"You just can't live in Texas if you don't have a lot of soul"

​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.

​Bill Narum, a key figure in Houston's counterculture in the late 1960s and early '70s, passed away Wednesday night at his home in Austin. The cause of death was an "apparent heart attack or something that took him quickly while sitting in his studio at the art table in his chair," said Narum's close friend Margaret Moser, who profiled him for the Austin Chronicle in 2005.

Austin native Narum, who was in his early 60s, grew up in Houston and discovered his talent for graphic design early on. "In the fifth grade, I'd been drawing girlie cartoons from Playboy in a notebook, and I left it in my desk after class," he told the Chronicle. "The next day I was reprimanded for disrupting class because they were passing around my notebook."

In the late '60s, Narum co-founded Houston free-form FM rock station KLOL and worked as an illustrator for underground newspaper Space City News. He struck up a long-lasting friendship with a band then just starting out, which had recently rechristened itself ZZ Top. Narum would go on to become ZZ's house graphic artist, moving from posters and album covers such as 1976's Tejas to epic murals for the band's fleet of semis and the famous cactus-and-cattle-skull stage design for the trio's legendary 1975-76 "Worldwide Texas" tour.

It seems that the stranger and weirder our world gets by the day, humanity struggles to find reasons behind all this calamity and tragedy. We try our best to find conclusions to why bad things happen, and when we can't fully fathom that the awful truth is just that, instead try to blame the influence of shadowy forces that supposedly linger in the dark.

In the past 50 years, our society turned away from accepting basic facts and has instead begun to traffic in speculation and hearsay, trumping up careless words until they became part of the greater conversation. Just as people search for new and alternate realities behind the attacks on September 11, various assassinations and even the 1969 moon landing, there are folks who don't see events in rock and roll history in black and white. There are actually people who believe that Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly were killed in some of government plot to quell that evil rock and roll.

​Time was that Tuesdays used to be the best day of the week for your average recorded-music consumer. Since Rocks Off was just a wee music nerd, Tuesdays were his favorite days of the week because it was always the universal day for all new releases to hit the stores. It started with begging our parents drive us to Best Buy or Wal-Mart, and soon morphed into illicit school-ditching trips to Soundwaves on Montrose or the old Cactus Music off Shepherd.

In these days of album downloads and illegal leaks, it's hard to get excited about Tuesdays from a music consumer standpoint. If you don't play by the antiquated rules, every five minutes at your computer can be record-release day. The last time Rocks Off remembers rushing to the store after work for a new album's debut was probably Queens Of The Stone Age's Era Vulgaris way back in the summer of 2007. Even then, we had already procured a leak of the QOTSA disc weeks before.

All one has to do now is load the tracks onto your preferred portable player and off you go. What Rocks Off does look forward to now is the day that some of favorite groups release things on vinyl, but even then you have to wait until you get home to throw those on the turntable. Whenever we get compact discs in the mail, we have grown to hate the task of opening up the plastic tray.

These days, many labels and publicists just send a download link, so we listen that way. We still love getting physical discs, mind you, because they seem quaint and personal. We also mourn album artwork in these digital times as well.

www.freepresshouston.com

​The first bit of news to report from this weekend's Westheimer Block Party is not a happy one at all. Late Saturday night, Free Press Houston staffer Lee Powers, 19, fell to his death from the Hazard St. bridge over U.S. 59.

Powers, who also worked as a cook at Mango's, did many different tasks for the Montrose publication that produced this weekend's Block Party, a visibly shaken editor/publisher Omar Afra said Sunday afternoon. Among other things, Powers interviewed Devin the Dude, helped deliver the paper and distributed flyers for Block Party and other FPH-produced events such as Summerfest this past August.

"He did everything for us," Afra said.

Rocks Off glimpsed several Free Press and Block Party staffers who had obviously been crying Sunday. Many more left the festival early - "half the staff walked out," Afra said.

"He was more than warm in his greeting, and a perpetual friend to everyone he met," FPH's Mills McCoin posted on www.freepresshouston.com Sunday afternoon.

Afra is organizing a benefit for Powers' funeral expenses scheduled for this coming weekend at Mango's. The specific date, time and performers are TBD.

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Claude Levi-Strauss died last week at the age of 100. He was one of the great minds of the 20th century, who took the tools of anthropology and used them not simply to observe and record the detailed facts of cultures but also to investigate meta-matters of philosophy and structure.

In fact, he was the father of structuralism, through which he examined, among many other things, why the myths from so many different cultures seem so similar. As he moved through this examination, he came to believe that in the face of the fading power of myth and ritual within modern Western culture, music has become our myth, with all the power and meaning which that implies.

As Edward Rothstein, writing for The New York Times, put it, "Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society."

What an incredible idea.

Anodyne: Noun. Anything that relieves distress or pain. (dictionary.com)

​When Son Volt goes onstage tonight at the Continental Club (we've heard around 11 p.m.), there's an outside chance the band might pull out Doug Sahm's "Give Back the Key to My Heart" - we are in Texas, after all. Otherwise don't count on hearing anything from Jay Farrar's former band's final album, also known as Uncle Tupelo's Anodyne.

This makes Rocks Off kind of sad, but we understand. With its last two albums, 2007's The Search and this year's American Central Dust, Son Volt is on a creative hot streak. Besides, the 14-year-old group has a plenty deep back catalog all by itself without having to stretch back into the Tupelo days.

Give Back The Key To My Heart (Album Version) - Uncle Tupelo

It's just as well. Despite the title, Anodyne is the sound of a band coming apart at the seams. Co-founders Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, friends since their teens, very publicly grapple with their growing creative and personal differences, first dreading, then denying, then realizing they're insurmountable. Uncle Tupelo broke up in May 1994, eight months after Anodyne's release. They only held on that long to give their fans one final tour.

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.

Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Elmo and Grover have something to celebrate. Sesame Street, their fictional New York borough, and the television show probably responsible for everything you knew as a kid, turns 40 today.

Created in 1969 from the psychedelic mind of puppeteer Jim Henson (back in the freewheelin' '60s, when puppeteering could actually be a career), Sesame Street is now the longest-running children's television program in history, broadcast in more than 20 other countries and several different language. In the United States, it's still funded by the non-profit organization Sesame Workshop, formerly the Children's Television Workshop.

​The show's creators always viewed the program as an experiment, which allowed them to push the envelope by bringing actors and musical guests well-known by parents into the world of their fans' children. Musical director Joe Raposo, reportedly the inspiration for Cookie Monster, used his connections on Broadway to encourage musical guests to participate in the show.

Sesame Street was one of the first programs to combine research with television production and as a result, was the first children's program with a set educational curriculum. The creators discovered that children learn better when their lessons are paired with music.

What followed was a rich tradition of serious artists toning down their message for children; everyone from Johnny Cash to James Blunt has sung with the Muppets. Executive producer Carol-Lynn Parente told the Ottawa Citizen that guest stars from pop culture help the show stay current.

After the jump, ten of Rocks Off's favorite musical performances from the land where the air is always sweet.

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The run-up to the 2009 elections has been quite a letdown compared to the fascinating and occasionally surreal 2008 campaigns. Obviously, there's nothing that can compare to last year's Presidential contests, and the local mayoral race has been less than compelling.

We were going to present this as a list of songs to listen to while waiting in line to vote, but considering that area turnout is estimated to be in the 30 percent range and you'll probably be in and out of the booth in a matter of minutes, think of these as songs to listen to while waiting to see who Bill White endorses in the runoff.

Arcadia, "Election Day"

The most compelling evidence that extraterrestrials have not, in fact, become aware of our existence is this video, because any intergalactic civilization encountering this incomprehensible exercise in 1980s self-indulgence would've been compelled to immediately disintegrate the earth for the good of the universe.

Yeah... screw this thing.

​Let's face it: the Monster Mash blows. So do many of the songs we're forced to suffer through every Halloweentide. A couple of years ago, Rocks Off heard "One-Eyed One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater" on XM Radio's Halloween-themed channel, and wanted to sneak into a haunted house and hang himself just like that urban legend.

We won't put you through that. Instead, we've compiled a playlist of a bunch of songs with spooky themes that won't make you want to hunt down and slap the top hat off Dr. Demento. We've got demons, monsters, werewolves, ghosts, the Devil and more. All you have to do is hit play on the video below and let it run... IF YOU DARE. And there's really no reason you shouldn't - we didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

You have been watching...

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Despite our collective knowledge of many arcane forms of music here at Rocks Off, we have noticed that we are remarkably deficient when it comes to lullabies. This deficiency which has been compounded by our complete and utter refusal to succumb to the twisted evil that is most children's music as we've set forth on the journey of parenthood.

​Children's music? Really? Whoever determined that kids, and by virtue of proximity, adults, should be subjected to the likes of Raffi and "It's a Small World" is either a sadist or drumming up future business for the mental-health industry. But, unfortunately, this music is like sugar to a child, leaving them wanting evermore once encountered. So we've adopted an avoidance strategy.

We still want to be good parents, which clearly involves ensuring the little ones are soothed at bedtime, so the primary enabler of this strategy is an arsenal of good songs that we can sing to them at night. If we're feeling like uber-diligent parents, we may even draw upon a section of this arsenal that includes cautionary tales, capturing a "three-fer": bedtime ritual, musical education and moral lesson.

Top of the list? Jane's Addiction, "Summertime Rolls": "Fell into a sea of grass and disappeared among the shady blades." Come on, how perfect is that? You may want to refrain from mentioning the band's full name until much later in life, however.

Daniel Kramer

The Big Man, the Boss and Mighty Max Weinberg at Toyota Center, April 2009

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Just as Bruce Springsteen winds down a frenzied period of back-to-back album and tour marathon - despite the death of Springsteen's cousin/assistant tour manager earlier this week in Kansas City, he and the E Street Band, as well as special guests Sam Moore (Sam & Dave) and Darlene Love, are scheduled to play a concert commemorating the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 25th anniversary at Madison Square Garden Thursday evening - the Boss-related library is expanding, with three new releases. Here are mini-reviews of each.

Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales

By Clarence Clemons and Don Reo

E Street sax man Clarence Clemons' autobiography is notable immediately for its odd structure. The narrative is split into three parts: his recollections, those of Reo, and the "Tall Tales" of stories which he notes up from are part fact and plenty fiction. The Boss, understandably, pops up all throughout the book, and the best parts recount the salad days of the struggling pre-superstar years. Clemons' personal love for the man is evident.

Houston appears twice, but not because of Liberty Hall. Once, Clemons remembers a "300-lb. stripper" getting onstage to take it all off at an early gig, and then for the emergency eye surgery he had done the morning after "The Rising" tour stop, with a visiting doctor popping the Big Man's Big Eye right out of its socket in the hospital for a quick prognosis.

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Halloween is Friday, so to help you get into the proper spirit, Rocks Off has selected some of our favorite creepy, disturbing album covers. We decided to go for a more "unsettling" vibe rather than "disgusting," because we didn't want this thing to turn into a Cannibal Corpse slide show, and because the most horrifyingly gross album covers contain images we'd never publish on this site - and we're morally blank heathens, so you can imagine how awful those must be. Just relax and enjoy our selection of album covers that manage to be haunting without a bunch of over-the-top gore.

What else should be in here? Leave your suggestions - and email address - in the comments. Best one gets a pair of tickets to the Houston Press Halloween Party Friday night at House of Blues with the Flamin' Hellcats. And that's no trick, tricks.

The hip-hop world is a less than sensible place - lots of times, you're even required to clarify when bad means bad and when bad means good - so once a week we're going to get with a rapper and ask them to explain things. Have something you always wanted to ask a rapper? Email it to introducingliston@gmail.com.

dasouth.com

​Note: Normally this space is a semi-tongue-in-cheek back-and-forth with a rapper about some aspect of the rapper lifestyle. However, last Sunday, Christian rapper Juan "Enock" James passed away from what appears to be a heart attack. We reached out to Much Luvv label honcho Tre9, with whom Enock lived prior to getting married, to talk about it.

This Week's Rapper: Tre9

This Week's Subject(s): The sudden death of fellow Christian rapper, Juan "Enock" James.

Ask A Rapper: So we had the news passed on to us recently about Enock. That's terrible. Do you mind speaking to the details of that situation?

Tre9: He had a heart attack on the job and, the memorial was [yesterday] and we're having a benefit concert for him [today]. He was only 35. He's leaving behind a four-year-old daughter, Jana, and his wife, Natalie.

AAR: Geez. That's awful. Were there any previous medical conditions?

T: He had high blood pressure, he was taking pills for high blood pressure. But there wasn't anything else that I know of. He was only 35; nobody saw this coming. It was a shock to everyone.

​A wake will be held from 2-3:30 p.m. Saturday at the Stag's Head Pub for Angela Mullan Jenkins, who passed away Thursday from breast cancer complications.

Jenkins came to Houston from Northern Ireland over 30 years ago and worked briefly for a division of Baker-Hughes before beginning her career with British Investments at the Richmond Arms. She is probably best known as the manager of the popular West Alabama pub and music venue The Ale House, which she ran for over a decade until it was razed in June 2001. She then moved over to open and manage the Stag's Head.

During her tenure at The Ale House, she began booking many of the edgiest acts in the city and state. She was an early supporter of the seminal Texas rock band True Believers, who often slept on her couches and floors before they found fame. Her impact on the music Houston scene in the '80s and '90 is incalculable.

​Late Thursday, word came across the ticker that legendary comedian and TV star Soupy Sales had passed away at age 83. After a stint in the military and on radio, Sales went on to be one of the major pioneers of televised sketch and children's comedy.

In 1965, he pulled a stunt where he asked his young viewers to go into their parents' wallets and purses and send him those "funny green pieces of paper with pictures of U.S. Presidents" in exchange for a postcard from Puerto Rico. The stunt didn't gain him many fans with parents, but became a storied Sales bit that is still revered to this day.

Sales and his first wife Barbara were only married for 19 years, but they had two boys, Hunt and Tony. The Sales brothers became famous in their own right as noted musical associates (read: sidemen) of Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Todd Rundgren.

Hunt and Tony played drums and bass, respectively, on Pop's Lust For Life album, which contains not only the manic title track, but also "The Passenger." In the late '80s they formed Tin Machine with Bowie and guitarist Reeves Gabrels, releasing two moderately received albums and a live set together before Bowie and Gabrels moved into a more electronica milieu.

Andrew Brown/ Patrick Lundborg/ lysergia.com Walt Andrus in his studio, 1967

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Walt Andrus, best known as the engineer of numerous Thirteenth Floor Elevators sessions, has gone where the pyramid meets the eye. Andrus, who engineered many of the most famous sessions for Houston's infamous International Artists label during the psychedelic period, was living in Truth or Consequences, N.M., when he passed away from melanoma. He was 72.

While Andrus is most famous for his Thirteenth Floor Elevators session work, he was also involved with recording seminal Texas psychedelic acts like Lost & Found, Golden Dawn, the Red Krayola's free-form psychedelic opus, The Parable of Arable Land, and Fever Tree's 1968 classic Another Time, Another Place. He also worked for a time with Don Robey at the Duke-Peacock label.

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Weird Al Yankovic, the accordion-playing satirist who has made mockery of everything from the American diet to gangsta rap - as if he needs any introduction - turns 50 today. As Rocks Off's editor asked, "How can he be only 50?"

It's a good question, because if you're anything like us, Weird Al was a huge part of your cultural lexicon as a kid growing up in the '80s. From his early work, showcased on the Dr. Demento show - our dad used to force us to listen to Dr. Demento on Sunday nights on our hometown's classic rock station - to his series of songs making fun of Michael Jackson's work, there's something about Weird Al that just seems timeless.

After the jump, five videos from Rocks Off to say Happy Birthday Weird Al, and thanks for making our lives just a little sillier.

​On this date in 1967, some 50,000 protesters marched on the Pentagon with the intention of levitating it and exorcising any "evil spirits" within. The effort was led by Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, poet Allen Ginberg, and Ed Sanders and satirically-minded rockers the Fugs. As we all know, the exorcism worked, the Vietnam War ended the next day, and peace and love have reigned supreme for over 30 years.

Ha ha, no. But Rocks Off isn't all about sarcasm and laughing at hippies, we're here to help, even if it is a few decades too late. So with that in mind, here are some tunes that might have helped Hoffman and company in getting that building off the ground.

Modest Mouse, "Float On"

We can't help but wonder if the hippies, grateful as they might be for the levitational assistance, wouldn't end behaving like most petulant MM fans anyway and accuse the band of selling out because they played in front of 50,000 people.

Tuesday just happens to be the 59th birthday of Rocks Off's personal hero, role model and by all accounts someone who smokes even more weed than we do, Thomas Earl Petty. Speaking of, it's also Snoop Dogg's birthday, which means 10/20 deserves to be a NORML holiday even more than 4/20 does. But until that happens, here's our choice for the best Tom Petty songs either written by or credited to someone else.

Mudcrutch, "Orphan of the Storm" (Mudcrutch, 2008): Of course, this had to be first - it's about Houston, y'all, specifically a hard-luck woman forced to relocate here after a hurricane (Katrina, we're guessing). Petty's country ballad might well be just as poignant if it were set in Pittsburgh or Portland, but his portrayal of the Bayou City as a junkie's paradise with a "copper-colored sky" could have come straight out of Houston. It's Worth It.

Last week, America was captivated by the saga of Falcon Heene, the six-year-old boy we were told was floating across Colorado in his father's experimental weather balloon. We were so riveted, in fact, that media outlets struggled to find airtime for other equally important stories, like Madonna getting sued and Beyonce canceling a show in Malaysia.

But all Rocks Off could think of, while we were watching that incredible flimsy foil contraption, that was supposedly keeping a 40-pound boy aloft, was: "If only that kid had some music for his voyage." After all, any trip is boring without tunes, so for any of you other wannabe balloon kids out there planning on trying this at home*, here are our suggestions.

*Don't try this at home.

Nena, "99 Luftballons"

On second thought, it's probably for the best that he didn't listen to this. If word got out that someone of Japanese ancestry was flying around listening to German music, it might have started a panic among Colorado's WWII veterans.

Brendan Mullen, documentarian of the early L.A. punk scene, died this past Monday at the age of 60. From the basement of a porno theater to The Decline of Western Civilization, the Scottish-born implant helped chronicle early American West Coast punk both orally and through the written word, ending his life's work with a series of books on the scene.

Below, five videos in his memory. First, here's Mullen in the seminal documentary on L.A. Punk explaining in technical terms why punk is better than disco.

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Recently, Rocks Off found ourselves skulking around the edges of a birthday party wondering what the hell we were doing there. The week had brutally kicked our ass, and the only place we really wanted to be at that juncture was sitting on our couch watching the Syfy channel with a very strong drink in our hands.

​To put a finer point on that brutal-week thing, any fellow practitioners of amateur psychology may get a sense of what we mean by reviewing the day's playlist which had run from America to Tom Waits to Ministry. In a nut shell, all over the place, pretty nostalgic and a bit asocial at best.

So there's the situation. It's a friend's milestone birthday, meaning it would be lame to just cut out. At least an hour of representing is necessary, but on the interpersonal skills side we're channeling Rain Man. There is no way to make it through an hour of small talk without sticking a toothpick in our or someone else's eye, we don't really give a damn about sports, except maybe World Cup soccer, and even that's a stretch right now; and we can't even think about going toward politics out of respect for the friendship we are there to honor. So what does one do?

Ding! Musical profiling.

...I may regret this.

​So there was a time, not long ago by geological reckoning, that I was a U2 fan. Growing up during the pre-Internet late 70s/early 80s in a town where the only place to buy music was a Camelot Music in the mall limited your options somewhat. Nevertheless, the Edge's loud, ringing guitar on songs like "I Will Follow" (from Boy) and "Two Hearts Beat As One" (War) sought me out, appealing to that part of my adolescent male brain that liked loud, ringing guitars, and the lyrics on songs like "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Like A Song" were political enough to make you feel edgy without requiring the commitment of going full-bore into punk.

I snapped up Boy and War at roughly the same time (it took longer to warm up to October), as U2 took up regular rotation duties alongside Queen and Rush. And there they stayed, occasionally making way for other bands but still getting regular spins until we parted ways around 1993. As a result, I have a lot of memories of Bono and the boys, some pleasant, some...not so much. Here are a few.

​Front man and bassist Dickie Peterson of pioneering metallers Blue Cheer was found dead Monday morning in Germany. He was 61 years old and had reportedly been battling cancer for the past year.

Blue Cheer's lasting influence on modern heavy rock is insurmountable. With their devastating low ends and Peterson's grungy howl which even predated that of even Robert Plant, BC was a critical chain in the evolution of what would become heavy metal and stoner rock as we know it today. The band last performed in Texas during SXSW 2008 where they played with bands like High On Fire, the Supersuckers and the Meatmen. Those groups and countless others can look to BC as the catalyst for all things heavy past, present, and future.

​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.