Houston Music Blog

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This is how we want to remember you, Kenny.

​Kenny Rogers brings his vast collection of hits and the plastic-surgery disaster he calls a face to Jones Hall to perform with the Houston Symphony tonight, and obviously Rocks Off's extremities are sweating profusely in anticipation. Not because he can't wait to hear "She Believes in Me" with full orchestral backup, but because we're such huge fans of his Kenny Rogers Roasters chain of restaurants, featured in one of our favorite Seinfeld episodes.

The Roasters chain is mostly confined to Asia these days, giving the Filipino government a convenient place to dispose of all those avian-flu-infected carcasses. Still, Rogers' return to his hometown got us thinking about other... inspired celebrity products.

We don't know if it's the election or what - actually it's not, but bear with us - but this afternoon Rocks Off got to wondering whether or not Houston had its own official song, lyrics and music officially sanctioned and ratified to embody the Space/Bayou City's hopes and dreams. This being Houston, we figured no way would a city so willfully ignorant of its abundant musical heritage and talent (officially, anyway) ever take such a radical step. Surely any composer who dared even suggest such a thing would be laughed right out of City Hall chambers.

Well, we consulted a couple of senior Press staffers who are wiser than us in such municipal musical matters, and it turns out we were dead wrong. Houston does have an official song. Houston has had the same official song since 1915, as a matter of fact.

Other events that happened in 1915: Typhoid Mary was placed in lifetime quarantine; D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation premiered in L.A.; Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis was published in the original German; Babe Ruth hit his first career major-league home run for the Boston Red Sox; and Rocks Off's late paternal grandmother, Lavonia Adelle Montgomery Gray, was born in Burkeville, Tex.

​Just a few months back, Rocks Off became the proud father of his own seven-inch-tall GG Allin bobblehead doll. Aggronautix, a small Internet toy company created a diminutive and bobblin' version of the tattooed New Hampshire-born "Poo Poo Rocker" complete with soiled underpants, blood-splatters, and a dirty sneer. We now have that little GG sitting on our desk for comfort and for inspiration on those tough days. Some people have a crucifix or a Buddha, Rocks Off has the singer of "Bite It You Scum."

Now the company has gone a step further by announcing a few new additions to its legion of misfit toys. This month they made bobblehead versions of the Dwarves' Blag Dhalia and HeWhoCanNotBeNamed, Descendents lead singer/mascot Milo Aukerman and the Meatmen's own Tesco Vee available on their Web site.

If this wasn't enough, they are also making an "Extra Filthy Bloody Edition" of the original GG Allin doll, this time including way more blood, anonymous scratches and suspect stains. The older edition of the doll is almost tame compared to this new and expanded one. The only thing it needs is real human shit and heroin.

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Photo illustration by John Seaborn Gray

​We admit, we never thought he had it in him, but apparently the Governator is capable of human cleverness - just like all non-cybernetic organisms. That is, if we accept that the acrostic in this veto message here isn't just a coincidence (read the first letter of each line in the second and third paragraphs).

That's a good one, but this being Rocks Off, we would've preferred Schwarzenegger put his F-U into song form, like these folks.

​Get out your towels: R. Kelly is coming to town. The singer would be best known as "that guy who sang that song in the Michael Jordan/Bugs Bunny movie" if not for the allegations in 2002 that he engaged in sex with an underage girl. Kelly was found not guilty of child porn charges last year, but thanks to file-sharing sites and Dave Chappelle, he's now forever destined to be remembered as "that guy who [allegedly] pissed on a 14-year-old."

Kelly's "Ladies Make Some Noise!" tour, with special guest Pleasure P, comes to Reliant Arena this Friday. And while we at Rocks Off aren't sure what kind of sounds you're supposed to make when an R&B artist starts urinating on you, we are sure that none of these micturition-related melodies will be on Kelly's set list.

More's the pity.

Where are the cup holders?

​As part of our court-appointed public service, we at Rocks Off don't condone driving while intoxicated. But if you must get behind the wheel after having a few, there are far worse things to be driving than a La-Z-Boy. From Yahoo! news this morning:

"A Minnesota man has pleaded guilty to driving his motorized La-Z-Boy chair while drunk. A criminal complaint says 62-year-old Dennis LeRoy Anderson told police he left a bar in the northern Minnesota town of Proctor on his chair after drinking eight or nine beers.

"Prosecutors say Anderson's blood alcohol content was 0.29, more than three times the legal limit, when he crashed into a parked vehicle in August 2008. He was not seriously injured.

"Police said the chair was powered by a converted lawnmower and had a stereo and cup holders."

Hold the phone...a stereo? Sounds like someone needs a list of the "Top Five Songs To Drive Your Furniture Drunk To"...

This guy has nothing on Har Mar Superstar. The R&B singer and Ron Jeremy lookalike has worked the pink-manties look for the better part of this decade. He is, after all, a self-styled lover.

Fresh off his cameo as a rival roller derby coach in Whip It (and his excellent cover of "Never My Love" on the film's soundtrack), Har Mar, as we like to call him, will spend Saturday night in Houston, playing Super Happy Fun Land with Ghost Mountain, Components of the Modern Age and My Jerusalem.

Har Mar is the second iteration of Sean Tillman, who fronts the decidedly more indie band Sean Na Na. Har Mar lies on the other side of the spectrum. His latest album, Dark Touches, is Kanye-esque in its reliance on Auto-tune.

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We knew it would happen, we just didn't know it would take so long. The so-called Texas music (and right-wing) lunatic fringe has finally located us and zeroed in on Lonesome, Onry and Mean. They've got their self-righteous gun-nut editorial Uzis a-blazin' like a shootout at the OK Corral over our blog about Austin Cunningham's song, "Guns and Religion."

​Apparently we have Radio Free Texas to thank for our cup of bile running over. Here are some of the juiciest brain farts from the comment thread on our site.

1. Melanie thinks she has an answer. Unfortunately, it sounds like Lucy trying to "splain" something to Ricky.

"How come all these liberals are moving here to get away from their economies that have tanked because of all the special interests groups getting their hands in all the laws, creating financial burdens for the hard worker (obviously I am not talking about you)? Texas economy is in much better shape than any other and we have Bush, inpart, to thank for that. How you can sit and spout this HATEFUL, BIASED (yes, liberals can be hateful and biased too) drivel, after seeing exactly what kind of change Obama had in mind is beyond me. This is not forward thinking, it is socialism."

Wow, this is news. It's only liberals coming to Texas to look for jobs in our wonderful economy. But wait a minute, we thought liberals were too lazy to work, preferring to wait for their welfare checks and food stamps. You mean liberals are actually coming here hoping to work? Someone hurry and let Ann Coulter know, she should put a stop to this shit right now. Get Governor Ken Doll on the red phone.

Tonight, Rocks Off will valiantly fend off the sleep fairies and attempt to hit up his first-ever Insane Clown Posse show. We don't know what to expect, but from what the Interwebs and close friends have been saying, nay pleading, to us we should be frightened and gird ourselves with smelling salts and small firearms. We even hear they will be tailgating outside the venue, so we better wrap this up and put on our face paints soon.

Rocks Off has known a few scattered Juggalo homeys in his past, and most were affable guys who were just die-hard fans. Juggalos are what ICP's devoted followers call themselves, and the female of the species is called a Juggalette. The definition of just what one is is hard to pin down, and even people that who claim Juggalo are hard-pressed to come find one. Urban Dictionary has its own hilarious definitions of the cult, which range from spot-on to rash yet comical generalizations.

Photo by Katharine Shilcutt

​Yeah, we appreciate the offer - especially the tasteful way you've written it on a giant cardboard penis - but we think we'll tastefully decline today. Good luck at the festival though, dude.

Ummm... you may have that sentence constructon backwards there, Lily...

​Rocks Off wants to know: WTF is going on with Lily Allen? After months of talk that she wanted to quit the music biz, she finally confessed that she did not intend to renew her record contract with EMI.

She made the announcement on a blog called It's Not Alright which she set up as a way to speak out against file-sharers in the UK, whom she says are causing the death of the music industry. (We beg to differ.)

Last Thursday, Allen pulled all her posts from the blog, including a post for which she was accused of plagiarism. Ironic, that. Then, of course, she took to her Twitter page to bitch about it.

Rocks Off loved Allen at first listen (and some of us still do), back when she was a potty-mouthed prepster, just 21 years old, Daddy's little girl. The schtick was charming then.

But when she started canceling shows, fighting photogs and showing up drunk, we started to think it was all just a bid for attention.

Early last year Allen had a miscarriage, and was reportedly devastated. From there things really went downhill. On the crazy-train to Britney-ville, Allen started flashing her tits to everyone. THEN she tried to out-bitch Elton John (not possible).

Aside from a brief flirt with mainstream popularity in the late '80s/early '90s, the Happy Mondays never made much of a splash on this side of "the Pond," as they say. The band, like most coming out of the Manchester scene, garnered more notoriety for their use of pharmaceuticals than anything else. The latest lineup (including dancer/percussionist/acid casualty "Bez" and founding member Shaun Ryder) plays the House of Blues this Saturday, and considering how many musicians "snuff it" due to drug use, we at Rocks Off would like to congratulate the Mondays for surviving this long. As you'll see, it puts them in some pretty select company.

Don't lie, you know you wanna right-click that shit...

​ In late 1997, a song called "My Own Prison" started burning up modern rock airwaves. The band, Creed, was an earnest sounding rock band with a vocalist who sounded like an overly-polished Eddie Vedder and the music had a steady beat that wasn't that far removed from the grunge that was so gauche earlier in the decade. Even the lyrics seemed a tad scruffy, dealing in religious conflict and familial strife, which are all too universal in any era.

We beg to differ, jerkwad...

​Sadly, it's official: Toby Keith, that big redneck doofus who is always threatening to put his boots up somebody's ass or feuding with the Dixie Chicks, has been declared by Nashville Songwriters Association International the top songwriter/artist OF THE DECADE.

Man, Lonesome Onry and Mean bets Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, among others, are pretty pissed, although none of them will ever say so. You know what they say about Nashville: "Nobody ever says anything bad about anyone ... unless their back is turned."

LOM first learned of Keith's coronation via Jon Byrd's post on Facebook. It didn't take long for the comments to start piling up on Byrd's post, either. Nashville artist Chelle Rose piped in with "now why'd ya have to go and RUIN MY DAMN DAY with that!? i ain't a member of NOTHIN... but i might join a few and start VOTIN.

So R. Kelly's newest single is called "Number One." Seriously? Okay, we know Kelly was found innocent of all child-related golden-shower charges by a jury of 12 idiots, but when the subject of Dave Chappelle's "(I Wanna) Piss On You" releases a single called "Number One"... sorry, but we have to believe he is now simply taunting us.

We taxed our brains to their very limits, and we were able to think of ten (as-yet) fictional songs that would be only slightly less inappropriate. Have a look - you know you want to...

​If you're aware of Kanye West's - whom Pollstar is reporting stops at Toyota Center with Lady GaGa January 22; good luck selling tickets for that one now, kiddo - past behavior at all, then you're probably surprised this article isn't longer. His habit of blurting out inappropriate, nonsensical non sequiturs, his tendency to throw a tantrum at the tiniest provocation, his love of blogging in all caps - you'd normally expect this kind of behavior from a 12-year-old Xbox Live player in Ritalin withdrawal, not from a grown man responsible for several award-winning albums which some people consider brilliant art.

Just in case you haven't been paying attention, here are the moments that most made us mutter to ourselves "Holy shit, Kanye West is a total douche".

1. Kanye Screams At His Houston Tech Crew: During a 2008 concert at the Woodlands Pavilion, West's science-fiction-inspired stage show suffered a glitch in which two of the giant screens went blue. "Turn the fucking screen off!" Kanye immediately shouted at the crew. "Turn the damn screens off if they not working." While it's understandable that, when something goes wrong with his intricately designed stage show, Kanye would naturally want the problem corrected immediately, did he have to be such a dick about it? We're fairly certain the crew were working as hard as they could to fix the problem - which they did.

This is what happens when MTV pulls all its VMA footage from YouTube... their lawyers were up early this morning.

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By now you've seen or at least heard about Kanye West's latest bit of spotlight-grabbing at Sunday night's MTV awards - Rocks Off doubts morning-drive DJs are talking about little else (Serena Williams, cough) - when Mr. "Love Lockdown" interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech to let everyone know he thought Beyonce should have won. Which she did, a little later for Video of the Year, and graciously gave up her speech time so Swift could finish hers.

By now such publicity stunts are old hat for Kanye, and honestly, this shit got old after the 1998 Grammys of "Soy Bomb" and Ol' Dirty Bastard rushing the stage with the immortal interjection "Wu-Tang is for the children!"

Rocks Off would just like to get your opinion on a couple of things: How big an ass is The Kanye now? And how classy is Beyonce?

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​Self-proclaimed king-of-rap Jay-Z unveiled his autumn tour schedule last week. The 26-date jaunt - which began Monday night in Chi-town and winds down just in time for Thanksgiving - will take Hovito all around the world, from New York to London to Kentucky to noise-rock haven Providence, R.I., to Ontario to Mexico. He will rock El Paso; he'll thrill Austin.

But the absence of a date for Houston - the hometown of wifey Beyonce - is perplexing, not to mention a bit insulting. Dude's gonna treat the UK to a string of shows so he can smoke Cuban cigars with homeslice/Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, but no love for Sasha Fierce's burg?

Something's up, or seems to be up, anyway. Without spies in the Jay-Z camp to hook us up with insider dope - and with Blueprint 3 MP3s still ringing in our cerebelums - Rocks Off decided to make a few semi-baseless guesses.

​It's pandering pretty-boy pinheads like Garland singer-songwriter Austin Cunningham who are the best at appealing shamelessly to Best In Texas Music Magazine's brain-dead audience. His new Texas radio hit "Guns and Religion," highlighted in this month's issue of BIT, is supposedly based on a Barack Obama statement during a campaign appearance.

"I heard the President say

Campaigning that day

People in small towns get bitter and cling

To guns and religion

Like that's a dumb, backward thing

"Guns and Religion" is full of frat-boy bravado and that you'll-have-to-pry-my-gun-from-my-cold-dead-fingers faux-macho attitude that made John Wayne famous. Charlie Daniels made the mold for this spiteful music, and Toby Keith is the current world champion.

www.ebaumsworld.com

​In the past weeks since word sprung forth that Walter's On Washington would be moving, in no small part due to the influx of upper-crust cats looking for love in all the right places at Washington Avenue's nouveau-trendy bars, the word "douchebag" has made a big resurgence.

The blogs and tweets of Houston's Twitterati were abuzz with shame over the fact that the venerable indie club was leaving the Avenue for bigger, more hospitable digs elsewhere, due to the "douchey" new bars and clubs that have been dotting the strip for almost three years now. The word was used as a noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, conjunction and preposition. Even then, it was quickly usurped in the quickly-moving Internet world by the term "shitpurse," which was actually coined in-house by our own John Gray.

But just what is it that makes a douchebag a douchebag? We quickly found out that douchebags can be male or female. The term is wholly gender-neutral, but it almost always describes young, affluent Caucasians who aren't as hip and earthy as other hipster whitefolk who apparently take it upon themselves to classify everyone else as a sort of cultural chore. It reminds us of the epic greasers versus the socs battles from The Outsiders.

Rocks Off came up with our own sort of Cosmo quiz to tell if you're a douchebag or not. If three or more of the following describe you, your table at Pearl Bar - bottle service only, of course - is ready.

​Lonesome Onry and Mean recently stopped wasting good notebook paper writing drafts of articles about Best in Texas Music Magazine. We were perusing the current issue and thinking about how bad it is when it suddenly dawned on us: the environmentally pure thing would be to write a column about it on the issue itself. Another little facet of LOM's continuing attempt at going green, you might say.

When I floated a trial balloon of my new idea at our local watering hole, the usual suspects started chiming in with other environmentally friendly uses of BIT. There were the obvious ones, of course: toilet paper in a pinch; drop cloth when painting; bird cage liner; fly swatter; campfire starter; wrapping breakables when you move (one virulent wag noted that hopefully if you are an avid reader of BIT, you're moving out of state); oil change rags; pirate's hat; origami.

After a few beers, things got weird: send to Alaska for use in their next oil spill; cover the windows of your meth lab if you run out of tin foil; serve crawfish on it (although another wag who hails from Dublin stated authoritatively that BIT is not strong enough for genuine Irish fish 'n' chips); Molotov cocktail wick; cut out letters and use for your next ransom note; stack them up for use in ballistics tests.

This album isn't called Fore! because Huey Lewis likes to play golf...

​So the other day, Rocks Off wrote briefly about Huey Lewis in regards to the Back To The Future soundtrack, not even thinking to chime in just a little bit about his reportedly huge male member. You know that certain part of the male anatomy all those soft-core porn stars are always talking about on those late night infomercials for boner pills? That one.

Which got us to thinking, what about other rock star penii? We have hated the p-word, so more than likely we'll use "wang" from here on out. What's even funnier is that when we have to refer to our own "thing" we normally just point down and cough. So to even use terms like wang, penis and, daresay, dick in print is a little liberating. Cock. Pee Pee. Boner. Hanger. Banger. Peenie. Weenie.

Sadly we had to make a few sickly and embarrassing Google searches that will probably get us put on a watch list, if we aren't already on one now. We only found a, uh "handful" of sites that purported to list true lengths and girths. The Cynthia Plaster Caster website run by the notorious mold-maker didn't offer much in the way of dimension and, frankly, embarrassed us a little with all its semen imagery. Metal Sludge had a pretty extensive list that we also scoped out. And a big shout-out has to go to The Gauntlet, another metal Web site, for scarring our dreams for the rest of our natural lives.

​Dancing With the Stars announced the pairings for its upcoming season Monday - like you care - and while some out there are no doubt crunching the odds of Debi Mazar and that Russian guy squaring off with Chuck Liddell and...that Russian chick in the finals, local interest is still focused on former U.S. House speaker Tom DeLay and his partner, Cheryl Burke.

Burke is a two-time DWTS winner, and has had her own share of what passes for controversy on network TV. Granted, accusations of being "too fat" aren't quite up there with subverting the Constitution and being one of the most corrupt Congressmen in American history, but perhaps the two can find some common ground that will help propel them to victory. And hey, there have been weirder musical duos...

Daniel Kramer

​Via the Houston site of examiner.com, anti-viral software company McAfee ranks Beyonce near the top of celebrities for whom Internet searches are likely to lead to pages containing spyware, viruses or other technology-borne maladies. Searching Beyonce and other boldfaced names like Jessica Biel (No. 1 this year), the study says, could lead to pages "designed to damage one's computer." And you thought that "Single Ladies" video was viral.

Jennifer Aniston, Tom Brady and Jessica Simpson round out McAfee's Top 5. Rocks Off Googled Beyonce Wednesday morning and the first page or two of returns looked fine - her official site, Wikipedia and MySpace pages, YouTube playlist, etc.. (Not that we actually clicked any of the links... we're not that gullible.) Once we hit the 60s and 70s, we started getting sites like "Musicthatmakesyoudumb" and Photoshop Disasters. We caved in and clicked that last one - it's a picture of some amateurish airbrushing of B's phoenix outfit from the cover of Atlanta Social Season magazine - and nothing crashed except our opinion of her wardrobe designer.

Braaaaaaaap!

​That's the sound of us thinking about Taylor Hicks. For the uninitiated, it's a fart noise, meant to denote a lack of candor or warmth. In another case of the Good Lord shitting the bed of mankind, Hicks is coming to Houston next month to play "Teen Angel" (Frankie Valli's role) in Theater Under the Stars' production of Grease at the Hobby Center - which we don't care about, hence the loud flatulence. The experience starts September 8 and runs five days or so; we are currently praying to various pagan deities to conjure a hurricane that week.

Hicks won American Idol in 2006, beating out resident HPOA Katherine McPhee, in one of the most tragic reality-television moments since that tax-evading queen won the first season of Survivor. Never mind the fact that we still do not understand the appeal behind AI or the fact that Americans saw fit to anoint a "special" looking, prematurely gray-haired, karaoke-grade crooner as its "idol." Even our own mother, who is usually easily swayed by pre-recorded canned pop music and bright lights on the television, hates Taylor Hicks. She even went as far to claim that he looks like he is "not all there," which are pretty harsh words from the lady that raised the likes of us.

In a year when the biggest news stories aren't about war or the environment but a mentally unbalanced woman having a litter of children and the death of a creepy pop singer who hadn't put out a decent album in 25 years, it should come as no surprise that so many people would be up in arms about First Lady Michelle Obama's outrageous decision to wear shorts on Air Force One. On a trip to Arizona. In August.

Frankly, we wish more Presidential spouses had gone this route (rumor has it Bess Truman had some killer gams), but rather than get too wrapped up in debates about how short is too short... for shorts, we thought we'd "honor" her brave decision, and even try to encourage further daring fashion choices with a selection of songs about that most forbidden of fruit: the derriere.

Dr. Hook, "Baby Makes her Blue Jeans Talk": If you can listen to the words of this song independent of the video (which we freely admit is hard to take your eyes off of), you'll realize two-thirds of it merely repeats the title of the song itself. Apparently Shel Silverstein was busy that day.

It's been a rough summer over at Gallery Furniture, what with a former employee being arrested for torching the local home-furnishing superstore's warehouse. But we all know plucky owner Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale isn't going to let losing the lion's share of Gallery's inventory get him down any more than the Astros' and Texans' lackluster performances have (plus, Mack and Rocks Off both have the impending UT football season to look forward to).

Today, Houston blogger and "dunderpate" Mike McGuff posted this video of Mack getting his swerve on in various vintage Gallery commercials, with a little help from his buds Jamie Kennedy, Paul Wall and Chuck Norris. If we were Robert Gillham, the former Gallery sales manager charged with arson in the May 21 fire, we'd be glad to be in jail. At least that way we'd be safe from Mack and Chuck going upside our heads with some pieces from Gallery's "Solid Wood" collection.

Keith Allison

​The mystery of whether or not Michael Vick would be picked up by an NFL team was solved pretty handily last week, when the Philadelphia Eagles signed him as a backup for Donovan McNabb. The Eagles were able to look past Vick's history of...questionable behavior because they need a reliable QB that fits in their scheme, and because nothing puts asses in the seats like a media circus (Terrell Owens, cough).

Important questions remain: can Vick keep his nose clean? Will Eagles fans welcome him with the same affection usually reserved for Santa Claus and their No. 1 draft picks? Most importantly, what song should play when Vick runs onto the field?

We know, we know; they don't actually play theme songs for individual NFL players when they come out of the tunnel. That honor is chiefly reserved for Major League Baseball (and half of those guys use either "Welcome to the Jungle" or some post-...And Justice for All Metallica). Whatever. Indulge us.

Well, this is a strange and incongruous turn of events. Normally when a celebrity gets pumped full of pills by a dubious "personal physician" and croaks, there are no repercussions and everyone's free to split up the dead guy's loot like Christmas came early. Not this time, however: Fox News reported today that Dr. Conrad Murray, believed to be currently holed up in his Houston home, will be charged with manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson.

In response, Dr. Murray, who could be charged as early as next week, came forward with detailed records of all the drugs he gave Jackson and promised to cooperate in every way and to accept responsibility for his actions. Just kidding. He put on his victim hat and cried like a bitch. Invoked God a whole bunch, too. Classy!

Since it seems like Murray and a few of his buddies (including Jackson's dermatologist... it's about time) are going to be serving a little hard time, we went out and found some songs they probably don't want to hear right now. Feel free to post these as responses to any future YouTube videos he releases that don't have the comments disabled. We're all about the broadening of horizons here.