Houston Music Blog

As we usually do when we get into work, Rocks Off tuned into Dean & Rog on the Eagle and lo and behold, they were talking about our suggestions to improve the station we posted here Tuesday. D&R especially seemed to enjoy the part where we said it wouldn't kill the Eagle to play some more people of color - if you missed this morning's show, it was probably your only chance to hear Lou Rawls and Gladys Knight & the Pips on the station, like, ever.

In the interest of fairness, Rocks Off did a little research, and it turns out the Eagle may be more color-blind than they realize. So there you go. (Note: this is by no means a comprehensive list; in some cases, the people below left before or joined after the songs in the Eagle's rotation were recorded. But still.)

Big Country

• Tony Butler, bass

David Bowie

• Luther Vandross, background vocals, Young Americans (1976)
• Nile Rodgers, producer/multiple instruments, Let's Dance (1983)

Dobie Gray

Paging the Purple One... the Eagle Needs You!

For Houston music commentators, picking on the sorry state of the city's commercial airwaves is even more fun than sportswriters must have making fun of the Astros. But on the rare occasion a new format does come along - even if it's hardly "new" - it still inspires a glimmer of hope in even the most jaded among us. That's why Rocks Off still can't quite bring ourselves to give up on the Eagle (107.5 FM), "Houston's Classic Hits."

For one thing, morning-drive hosts Dean & Rog's "birthday scam" is about the funniest thing on local radio right now. Another is that Rocks Off could never hate a station where it's entirely possible to hear Blondie and Led Zeppelin, Eurythmics and Lynyrd Skynryd or the Clash and the Rolling Stones back-to-back. But the Eagle is already falling victim to the traps that have doomed so many of its counterparts on the dial to hopeless mediocrity, so if Rocks Off could play program director for a day (or even an hour), here's what we'd do to fix that. No charge.

1. Play More "Hits": Unlike Rocks Off No. 2, we're not going to go off on a rant about how the Eagle plays too much Eagles, mostly because we love "The Long Run," "Already Gone" and "Lyin' Eyes." But if you classify a "hit" as any song to crack the Billboard Top 40 - or hell, even the Top 10 - the Eagle could still radically expand its playlist to include everything from the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" to Nena's "99 Luftballoons." The station shouldn't worry that such a move might alienate its advertisers because, as the DJs point out ad nauseum, it's not selling very many ads anyway (see No. 5).

Craig Hlavaty

Lost Fidelity's Brad Denison and David Rangel

This afternoon, Rocks Off heads down to the cradle of Nolan Ryan and instrumental metallers By the End of Tonight to play a few sides from some bands our dear readers nominated for this years Houston Press Music Awards. Rocks Off should be hitting the air around 4 p.m. today on KACC (89.7 FM), the radio station run by Alvin Community College's own broadcasting department.

We profiled Lost Fidelity, the show we'll be guesting on, a few weeks back and were delighted to find that they have more than their fair share of devoted Inner Loop listeners. David Rangel and Brad Denison are true music fans who definitely have a penchant for the cool new noise coming out of the 713 (and 281) and are not afraid to play local stuff.

Kim Douglass

Hey, it's been a couple of days since we used this photo...

Like a mother sending her baby off to college, we here at Rocks Off are pretty proud of the Wild Moccasins for representing Houston's up-and-coming indie scene so well on the band's first extended tour this past month. So naturally, when we found out Cincinnati Internet radio station WOXY ("The future of rock and roll") posted the group's June 22 "Lounge Acts" in-studio performance on its Web site, we wanted to share it with you. Check it out here.

The Moccasins return home next Saturday at Mango's with Buxton and Ghost Mountain. Still miss them? Rocks Off compiled a few of the band's recent Twitter updates after the jump.

Andrew Karnavas

Rocks Off will be the special guest "audience of one" on tonight's Live from Sugar Hill, the monthly hour-long live-music Webcast broadcast from the historic Southeast Houston studios. Tonight's musical guests are bluesy singer-songwriter Andrew Karnavas and veteran Tex-Mex power-poppers the Freddy Steady 5. Our interviewers will be Rosa Guerrero of KTRU's Mutant Hardcore Flower Hour and Sugar Hill producer Dan Workman.

Freddy "Steady" Krc

Rocks Off is not exactly sure what it is he'll be doing besides just sitting there (and plugging the upcoming music awards at some point), but he's looking forward to finding out. He expects a preview of The Bridge, the new album from Karnavas' band and HPMA Best Blues nominees Runaway Sun (out this month), and hopefully a little chat with FS5 frontman Freddie "Steady" Krc, also the longtime drummer for Roky Erickson & the Explosives, about last week's Erickson show at the Continental. (The FS5 plays the Continental themselves later this evening.)

Sounds like a lot for just one hour. Tonight's episode, filmed by local production company Zenfilm, starts at 7 p.m. and will be streamed at www.outboundmusic.com/lfsh. Tune in - it won't cost you a thing.

Photos by Craig Hlavaty

Last week, we railed on the big boys over at the Eagle and the Arrow for perpetrating hours and hours of Billy Joel and the Eagles on the ears of Houston. It seemed to us that between those two fighting for the same audience, it was in fact the listener who was losing.

But we didn't take into account the excellent work that is going on down Highway 35 every Friday afternoon on KACC (89.7 FM), Alvin Community College's radio station also known as "The Gulf Coast Rocker." During Houston's bustling afternoon rush-hour, Brad Denison and David Rangel unravel "Lost Fidelity," a three-hour garage and indie-rock powerhouse chock full of nerdy music talk that has featured interviews with artists as disparate as Matt & Kim and onetime Beatles drummer Pete Best.

Rocks Off only listens to Houston rock radio in small doses, but when we do it's usually of the classic variety. When our usual diet of AM talk radio veers into the right-wing ditch and becomes annoying instead of amusing, we pretty much shuffle between Country Legends 97.1 or the 93.7 the Arrow.

On June 1, Houston's other classic rock station, 107.5 FM (KGLK), turned into an Arrow clone. Previously K-HITS, "the best of the '60s and '70s," it was rechristened the Eagle, "Houston's Classic Hits." Anchoring the "new" stations morning show are Dean & Rog, who were fired from the Arrow earlier in the spring to make way for Walton & Johnson.

For those in the dark, the Walton & Johnson show is a weird schizophrenic nightmare, anchored by a gay dude from Montrose (how clever) and a random redneck. Assorted other racial stereotypes show up from time to time. Even stranger is that these voices all come from one man. Kind of makes us long for the days of D&R, who come off more like your older pothead uncle rather than a pirate broadcast coming from the basement at Rusk State Hospital.

Wednesday, Rocks Off spoke with KCOH general manager Mike Petrizzo, who voiced his concerns about the financial hardships the proposed Performance Rights Act - which would compensate performers when their songs are broadcast on terrestrial radio the same way songwriters and publishers are - could potentially impose on his and similarly sized radio stations.

Well, as they say in the movies, there's two sides to every story, so this afternoon we spoke with Lovie Smith-Wright, president of the Houston Professional Musicians Association, Local 65-699 of the American Federation of Musicians, to see what she had to say.

Rocks Off: This is pretty much because record sales have dropped so drastically, right?

Lovie Smith-Wright: Ahhh... no. The Performance Rights bill is because any musician or artist, when music is played on live radio, no one gets a penny. With satellite and cable radio, the artists are compensated. Any time you hear a piece of music played over the radio, the artist gets not a dime. This is just some legislation to correct a wrong that's been going on for years.

One of the more interesting bits of music-related legislation to come up recently is the bill known as the Performance Rights Act. Drafted as House Resolution 848, sponsored by House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and co-sponsored by a host of legislators including Houston Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee, H.R. 848 would require broadcasters to pay a fee to performers for using their material. On May 13, the House Judiciary Committee approved H.R. 848 21-9; it now faces a hearing before the full body, although no date has been scheduled yet.

Through some arcane loophole, broadcasters' existing agreements with bodies such as ASCAP, BMI and SESAC - the licensing organizations who tabulate, collect and disperse royalties - only covers songwriters and publishers, meaning if an artist didn't write a song, he or she won't see any "mailbox money" no matter how many times it gets played on the radio. According to some literature from Jackson Lee's office, the law governing such practices has not been amended in 100 years, and the only other countries that treat their artists thusly are Iran, North Korea and China. 

This all sounds equitable enough, but many radio stations - especially smaller ones, ones not owned by giant media conglomerates and often targeted to minority, rural or religious audiences - are worried any further governmental incursion into their balance sheets could be catastrophic. (The committee approved Jackson Lee's amendment that would lessen the amount such stations would pay, and allow for a longer period before their bill came due.)

To see how one such Houston station - Third Ward-based KCOH (1430 AM), a beacon to the local African-American community for well over 40 years - is taking the news, Rocks Off rung up principal stockholder and General Manager Mike Petrizzo Wednesday morning.

Rocks Off: Are you familiar with this bill?

Mike Petrizzo: Very much so, yes.

RO: If this goes through, what sort of effect do you think it would have on KCOH?

MP: I don't think it'll be passed.

What with Creed reuniting, BuzzFest coming up in a couple of weeks and, hell, maybe even the swine-flu scare - As in: What's worse than coming down with swine flu? A Houston radio that only tunes in 94.5 FM - Rocks Off sure has been thinking a lot about The Buzz lately. Probably too much.

I mean, it's a radio station, which in an age when people stream Pandora on their iPhones - to say nothing of car stereos with iPod plug-in ports - makes it almost as big a media dinosaur as the printed page. The station's advertising sales staff would no doubt agree.

Somebody must like it, though. The most recent Arbitron ratings had The Buzz at No. 3, which, in a market of 5 million people, ain't too shabby. So Rocks Off decided to put The Buzz under the microscope to determine two things: if it truly deserves to be the designated whipping boy of everyone who doesn't think the new Seether song totally shreds, and if that familiar old gripe, "Radio is so much better in other cities," really holds any water.