KHJK 103.7, the station known as "Houston's Adult Alternative" and the only place on Houston commercial radio to hear artists such as Mumford & Sons and the Avett Brothers, has been sold to a group of Christian-music radio stations.

According to the Web site radio-info.com, the California-based Educational Media Foundation, which runs the formats "K-Love" (Contemporary Christian) and "Air1" (Christian rock), has signed a letter of intent to buy KHJK.

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(Photo: lollypopslv.com)

A great week for chest-thumping and big moneymaking. Pop the hood for the goods.

RACKS ON RACKS ON RACKS

In news likely to make you hate your job, '90s also-ran Akinyele says he's bagging millions from his new strip club joint. Akinyele is famous for the potty-mouthed anthem "Put it in Your Mouth." While subsequent projects flopped, the Queens rapper may have found his true calling.

Ak and his business partners, Cliff Dutton and Jay, launched a strip club called Lollypops in Las Vegas. And the rapper issued a press release claiming that they raked in $5 million in one week.

How exactly do you make that much in one week?

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Shore Fire Media

Every so often, a ballplayer or musician will accidentally post their private phone number on Twitter, or perhaps a social-media-savvy celeb like Charlie Sheen will tweet out a buddy's digits as a prank. Hilarity ensues, usually in the form of thousands of text messages, and that person is usually soon the proud owner of a new number.

Aaron Freeman, better known as Gene Ween, did something a little different. When his solo album under his non-Ween name, Marvelous Clouds, came out last week, he posted a phone number on the Internet and invited fans to text him their feedback. More than 2,000 people did.

This seems like a good idea for someone like Gene Ween, who has a relatively small but passionate fan base. Here is a small sampling of the outpouring of love Freeman received:

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Pearl Jam vs. Ticketmaster: No Contest.

Do you hate Ticketmaster convenience fees? If you don't, it's because you've never been to a concert. The various fees tacked onto admission prices by the global ticketing behemoth can add a pretty penny in a hurry to the face value of a chance to see and hear our musical heroes, and they're one of the biggest inconveniences associated with live music today. The fees are nothing new, either -- fans and artists alike have been complaining about the practice for decades.

Few have ever gone to such extreme lengths to try to eliminate service fees as Pearl Jam did 18 years ago this week. The Seattle-based grunge icons took a stand against Ticketmaster in 1994, filing a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department over the company's abusive service fee practices and growing monopoly over ticketing distribution.

They flat refused to sell tickets through Ticketmaster unless the fees were ditched. At the time, Pearl Jam was the biggest rock band in the world -- there was no hotter ticket in live music. If any artists could force Ticketmaster to change its business model, it would be them.

Long story short, they couldn't.

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Photo by Tyler Curtis

When we discuss forward thinkers in rock music, Pete Wentz isn't a name that comes to mind. That's probably because, if you're like a lot of people on the Internet, the mention of his name will cause you to groan and/or think of the word "douchebag." While you may not like him on a personal level, his dealings as the head of Decaydance Records are interesting.

In a lot of ways, Decaydance was a rap label that just happened to feature pop-punk and emo acts. They had an image (goofy mid '00s pop rock); the artists frequently collaborated and toured together; Fall Out Boy even put out a mixtape.

There's a lot of chatter about the place of rock music in 2012. They say it's irrelevant, stale and doesn't sell. Pop music is king, EDM is the rising star and hip-hop is the music of the youth. Rock is just a relic of a different age.

So if you're a rock band that aspires to more than getting a daytime slot at Buzzfest, what do you do? Well, perhaps you get past your personal dislike of Wentz and follow his lead. If you can't beat hip-hop, why not adapt some of their its as your own?

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Ten years ago last week, one of the most vicious legal battles in rock history took another ugly turn. Ex-Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl found themselves in King County Superior Court over a dispute with Kurt Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, over the band's considerable royalties.

Grohl and Novoselic asked the court to prove Courtney Love was mentally stable, claiming a contract was invalid as Courtney was ultra-mega smacked-out at the time it was signed. Love had already blocked Grohl and Novoselic from releasing the band's final track, "You Know You're Right," as part of a commemorative box set the previous year as well as sued them for control of Nirvana's legacy.

Years after the legal dispute was settled and "You Know You're Right" hit the airwaves, the bad blood remains. Earlier this month, Love took to Twitter to accuse Grohl of hitting on her daughter, Frances Bean, a claim which both denied with a pained sigh.

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Tomorrow is Record Store Day, which is a little bit like the Super Bowl of music shopping: People who have no interest in the sport the rest of the year will be front and center. Rocks Off would never, ever tell anyone not to go to a record store, but people not already planning to make a beeline for Merge Records' RSD-only M. Ward and Arcade Fire singles (for example) as soon as the deadbolt is unlocked Saturday morning might want to hang back until later in the afternoon.

Oftentimes when it comes to record stores, the old saying "The customer is always right" is completely wrong. To hear them tell it, some record-store workers have ample cause to wonder if their customers have ever even listened to music at all. Rocks Off asked our friends at a couple of Houston record stores for some things that get under their skin -- things that, if you're planning a trip to RSD, you might want to avoid.

They've seen and heard it all before. But they'll still be glad to ring you up.

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Photos by Alexa Crenshaw

Ben Kweller
Fitzgerald's
April 19, 2012

While I can't tell you that Ben Kweller is a polarizing, avant-garde, demiurgic artist, I can tell you that while finding a way to rhyme sexy with spaghetti, he remains an excellent musician.

Kweller, now 30, has been playing music for years, starting out in his '90s rocker band Radish in 1993. He has said that Radish's music could be considered as "sugar metal"; I haven't had the chance to listen to much of that, but basically he seems to have been having a blast playing music for years, keeping up his feel-good fervor into his 30s.

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News emerged late last month that the U.K. date of Sonishphere, the traveling European hard-rock festival, has been canceled. It's a pretty big blow for music fans across the pond -- the headliners scheduled for the event included Queen with Adam Lambert, KISS and Faith No More, and reunited Swedish post-hardcore outfit the Refused were supposed to make their only UK appearance in 2012 at the fest (they've since signed on for the competing Download Festival).

Sonisphere UK has been a major outpost on the European festival circuit since 2009, and its cancellation was disconcerting, to say the least. In a statement on the Sonisphere Web site, organizers released the following statement:

Putting the festival together in what is proving to be a very challenging year was more difficult than we anticipated and we have spent the last few months fighting hard to keep Sonisphere in the calendar. Unfortunately circumstances have dictated that we would be unable to run the festival to a standard that both the artists and that Sonisphere's audience would rightly expect.

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Photo by Chris Gray

The future home of the "Sundance annex," aka upstairs at Sig's Lagoon

A big part of Texas music history went dark this past weekend, when Sundance Records went out of buisness after 35 years. But thanks to the San Marcos record store's strong Houston connection, part of its legacy - in fact, a large part of its inventory - is coming here.

Sig's Lagoon, the Midtown record store across from the Continental Club, has inherited Sundance's stock and will rechristen its upstairs loft as the "Sundance Records annex" in a few weeks, Sig's owner Tomas Escalante says. He has already currently moved most of Sig's existing vinyl stock downstairs and is building new racks to accommodate the approximately 10,000 LPs that represents the first part of the Sundance inventory to be transferred.

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