Photos by Marco Torres

DJ Elroy Boogie: "I joined the club!"

​Thursday night, the Houston Police Department was called to Boondocks for the third time in less than a month due to complaints about the noise. Three more citations were given, this time to DJ Elroy Boogie and DJ Klinch, and -- for the third time -- Ryan, Boondocks manager.

Here are my notes from last night (quotes are statements overheard from one of the police officers):

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Photo and video by Marco Torres

​Sunday afternoon, Rocks Off ventured over to Roosevelt Lounge (5219 Washington) to witness what we expected to be a protest organized by Quanell X, leader of the local chapter of the New Black Panther Party. This event was in direct response to the club's alleged racist door policies that led to the arrests of two Houston Dynamo players on Feb. 4.

X states that the club owner has agreed to sit down with him sometime this week to discuss the incident and hopefully come to some sort of a compromise that will be in the best interest for both sides of the dispute, as well as for the community. He also noted that the initiation of a formal protest of the club will depend on the outcome of this meeting.

Nancy Shaddock, board member of Dynamo Charities, was also on hand to express her disappointment with Roosevelt Lounge and said she hopes to assist in creating a solution to this case.

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We all hate the trope "Houston, we have a problem," but we do have a problem in Houston with talkative, inattentive crowds at live shows. Scanning back over reviews from the past two years, at least 20 percent of them mention crowd noise.

So what do the musicians think and, more importantly, what do they do? The last time we saw Steve Earle he pulled out Doc Watson's famous one-liner to silence a request screamer: "I remember my first beer, too, buddy." We've also seen Earle quiet two talkative ladies with the sarcastic, "Am I botherin' y'all?"

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photos by Marco Torres

Saturday night legal trouble for Boondocks manager and DJs

​Saturday night, as we rolled up to Boondocks (1417 Westheimer) for the H-Town Sneaker Summit Pre-Party, something felt strange. There were cop cars on Hawthorne Street, lights blazing, and police officers roaming around. We first assumed that they were ticketing illegally parked vehicles and were waiting for a tow truck. We parked (legally) and proceeded into the party. After a few minutes of hanging out at the DJ booth, Ryan, the manager on duty, summoned DJ Sober to the front door. We followed.

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Ayman Harper in (theLID, a performance featuring live music by Matmos.

​Matmos, the Matador Records-signed electronic music duo that has done work for Björk, has never performed in Houston. The person responsible for making the group's debut show in town happen? An expat living in Germany.

A few years ago, dancer Ayman Harper -- a graduate of the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts who relocated to Berlin, Germany to pursue a full-time freelancing career in dance and performance theater -- cycled by Berlin's Babylon Theater and noticed the band's name on the marquee. A fan of the Baltimore-based group for years, Harper tried to catch the end of the performance but was too late.

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Photo By Marc Brubaker

Sleigh Bells at Warehouse Live in April 2011

​Brooklyn-based Sleigh Bells' Derek Miller, former guitarist for hard-core band Poison the Well, and Alexis Krauss, former singer of a girlie group no one has ever heard of have finally finished the much anticipated follow up to 2010's Treats.

Reign of Terror is slated to be released on Valentine's Day of 2012 so jot that down if your honey is into heavy electro-pop with blown-out drums and fuzzy guitars turned up to 11 instead of flowers and chocolates. Ain't that sweet?

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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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We know, we know... it's just too easy.

​Rocks Off would like to thank Force Field PR and, we suppose, Neon Indian for sending the above picture to our email this morning. It nearly made us spray coffee all over our monitor. We don't quite know where to start, except to venture a guess that if you wore a sweater like that even to Poison Girl or Boondocks, you needn't bother pinning a "Please Kick My Ass" sign on the back. And God help your underfed, overmedicated ass on Washington Avenue.

But, you know, they do things differently up in Big D and its little-d satellite scene of Denton.More >>