Houston Blog

Mark C. Austin

​Just a quick reminder that tonight is your last chance to see everybody's favorite Houston indie-rock/psych/jazz/blues/surf/spaghetti-Western quartet, the Tontons, who are going on hiatus until January. Unless you want to talk singer Asli Omar out of going to school in New York, that is, but that's probably not going to happen.

The band's free show at House of Blues' Bronze Peacock Room will be filmed for an upcoming Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau TV commercial. Rocks Off thinks its nice the GHCVB is finally paying attention to local musicians whose paychecks don't bear the words "Houston Symphony," but it would be nicer if the band they picked wasn't going on ice until it's all frosty outside. (Tontons, you know we love you, but that's an awful long time to make us wait.)

Ah well. It is a free show. Rocks Off knows you're going to need some Tontons to tide you over until January, so here's "Desperado" and "Leon" from the quartet's self-titled debut LP, which was released last month.

Michael Patrick O'Leary

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Baltimore country songwriter and performer Arty Hill has found Rocks Off to not only be food for thought, but food for songwriting. Readers might recall his previous song "Texas Ganja Man" which was inspired by one of LOM's comments on a blog about Bob Marley.

Well, Hill, who has written songs with icons like Jason Ringenberg of Jason & the Scorchers, has come up with another new song based on one of our columns. Hill wrote to us that he couldn't let go of the image of Bob Woodruff OD'ing and being hauled to the ICU in Omaha, where he was made to drink liquified charcoal to purge his system of heroin.

Arty Hill, "Omaha ICU"

[Note: The scene at 00:47 is a scream.]

​Tonight The Mink's weekly Movie Nite brings us back to 1985, when Michael J. Fox was still known as that smug neocon bastard on Family Ties and Crispin Glover wasn't the batshit auteur he is these days. A screening of Back to the Future starts around 9 p.m. in the venue's Backroom.

BTTF was the first movie that Rocks Off saw at the movie theatre when he was a child. Well, 'see' in the most basic sense of the word, we guess. All of two years old, we probably only saw flashing lights and heard the loud din of Huey Lewis for two hours. At that age movies you see movies with the same cognizance as you would if you were a full-grown adult on acid. But even still, we were there - so suck it, Trebek.

​Rocks Off was sure that Houston's Morgue City was a metal band - it's a perfect metal name, that's for sure. Not quite. The Houston duo, descended from bondage-loving former HPMA Best Industrial winners Bozo Porno Circus, plays a brand of "noiz" not far off from KMFDM or My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult.

Rocks Off sampled a few of MC's MySpace songs this afternoon, and since his iPod has already been spitting out a steady mix of the Jesus & Mary Chain, Echo & the Bunnymen (whom MC recall on the more subduded "Nature of the Beast") and selections from the 2006 anthology A Life Less Lived: The Goth Box lately, liked what we heard. "My New Gun" is serious Motley Crue hard rock, while "Smashing Suxie", on the other hand, is a little more industrial. Morgue City plays Boondocks at 10 p.m. tonight, although Rocks Off gets the feeling they might feel a little bit more comfortable at Numbers.

Starr Hayward

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Macon Greyson, the Dallas band our sister paper up north loved to ignore until it landed a song in The Wrestler, has just emerged from the studio with a four-song EP titled This Machine Kills Hypocrisy. Unlike last year's Twentieth Century Accidents, the new tracks are a return to working with producer Eric Herbst and sound, well, exactly like Macon Greyson live: a solid, pounding rhythm section, smoking Southern-rock guitar licks and Buddy Huffman's smartest-guy-in-the-room lyrics.

Huffman is one of our most pungent observers of the current milieu, and he absolutely nails the feelings of ennui and futility that accompany urban life today in tracks like "Pushing Strings":

"Club think, don't think "I think I'm turning down that one more drink

"Caught five before the body dropped

"You either got to be or your gonna get got

"You're never gonna be somebody else

​Because of Tuesday's We Were Wolves/Satin Hooks show (our ears are still ringing), the Mink moved its weekly movie night to 9 p.m. tonight, but it's worth the wait. They'll be showing the Coen brothers' 1996 classic The Big Lebowski, with $3 White Russians and a pair of Sunny Day Real Estate tickets up for grabs.

Lebowski is an homage to White Russians, nihilism and slack - and, although Kingpin comes pretty close, probably the funniest bowling movie ever made. Rocks Off's favorite part has always been the dream sequence/production number scored to Kenny Rogers & the First Edition's "Just Dropped In (to See What Condition My Condition Was In)." Even if you're not stoned when you watch it - a condition most Lebowski fans know a little something about - these five minutes or so will sure make you feel stoned.

"Condition" has been memorably covered by Willie Nelson and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, but Rogers' original is still our favorite. We never get tired of bringing it up whenever someone argues that all the Roaster was ever good for was treacly pop-country ballads like "Lady" and "Through the Years."

Amongst all Rocks Off's other weekly meanderings (the blood bank, liquor store, pawnshop, emergency room...) we figured we would remind you that Little Washington still holds down a residency at Boondocks on Tuesday nights.

Since summer 2007, the bluesman has been laying down dirty licks and passing the hat at the churning hipster kiddie pool off Westheimer. He still packs quite the crowd, too. We are guessing just a few of them voted for him during this HPMAs, where he walked away with three awards including Local Musician of The Year.

So come on by the bar and be sure to order the man something strong, preferably with gin. He loves the stuff.

It's been so quiet in the tropics lately that even Ike-scarred Houstonians were able to forget that it's hurricane season - until this weekend, that is, when not one but three disturbances showed up "down there." (Better than some other things showing up "down there," Rocks Off can tell you that much.) None of them are likely to present any danger to our little corner of the Gulf Coast, but at least the one that showed up last and washed ashore first shares a name with one of Roy Orbison's coolest, if not especially well-known, songs.

​"Powderfinger" has always been one of Rocks Off's favorite Neil Young songs, up there with "Cowgirl In the Sand" and "Rockin' In the Free World." You know things are headed for trouble from the first line - "Look out mama, there's a white boat comin' up the river" - as a young man who just turned 22 tries valiantly but in vain to defend his home against that menacing vessel with a "big red beacon and a flag and a man on the rail."

"Powderfinger" first appeared on Young's landmark 1979 live album Rust Never Sleeps, as a maelstrom of howling guitar that makes a pretty good shot across the bow itself. Via "Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)," Rust also gave us Young's famous line "It's better to burn out than fade away." The narrator of "Powderfinger" seems to believe that right up until, in another memorable lyric, "I saw black, and my face splashed in the sky." Ouch.

When the Supersuckers were here last November for two nights at the Continental Club, their old friend and Whiskey Boat singer/guitarist Eric Tucker convinced them to come in the studio to cut a honky-tonk version of "Powderfinger." (Nice steel guitar, especially.) It's the first song on Whiskey Boat's debut CD Congress Hotel, which will be available at the band's release show Saturday at the Continental Club. Whiskey Boat goes on at midnight after local psych-rock '60s survivors Fever Tree Rising stir up some Woodstock flashbacks.

​Most descriptions of the Hell City Kings involve cocaine, whiskey and dirty girls, with good reason. Live and on record, the local quintet sounds like every single vice rolled into one greasy rock and roll casserole - like falling down the stairs at Rudyard's after losing a switchblade fight with your drunken girlfriend. This music is grimy and it hurts real good.

Saturday, the band unleashes its new album, The Road to Damnation, with a show at Rudz supported by World's Most Dangerous and Skeleton Dick. So far each track that has leaked from Damnation oozes from our headphones and makes a sticky mess on our desk. We love it. Any project involving guitarist Bill Fool and lead singer GFN is bound to leave a bruise.

This is "Never Let Go." Don't listen to it at work, as you'll set the place on fire and join a violent gang. For fans of Turbonegro, The Hellacopters and that last shot you never can quite recall the next morning.