Houston Music Blog

Craig Hlavaty

Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas

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Warning: Some of these videos contain very graphic images.

Anyone who knows Rocks Off, even in passing, knows of his fierce JFK assassination obsession. The theories, the scientific data, the literature and the various opinions shooting through the Internet with a lightning-fast velocity are all like catnip to us. We even make the trek up to godforsaken Dallas every year to visit the Grassy Knoll and throw down our own conspiracy theories about JFK's death with what is now a familiar group of fanatics and quasi-academics. For the record, we believe that a high-level conspiracy involving the military industrial complex is at fault, whose goal was to line the pockets of war profiteers and to ensure we stayed in Vietnam.

According to an email Rocks Off received from none other than the World Toilet Organization, today is World Toilet Day. We're told it's an "internationally recognized" occasion for drawing attention to the plight of the 2.5 billion people on the planet who lack proper facilities. To this end (heh), they're encouraging people to participate in something called The Big Squat.

Rocks Off's knees aren't what they used to be, so we'll have to pass. You've already seen our sister blog Hair Balls' suggestions for songs to help you pinch a loaf, but we took a different swirl on the matter, if you will. After the jump, a look at songs featuring creative lyrical references to shit, as well as placing each song in a specific category. No need to thank us, it's what we're here for.

Michael Hogue

​A little over seven years ago, we wrote about the South Park Mexican trial.

The rapper, born Carlos Coy, had it all: money, his own record label, a nightclub and, most importantly, the ear of a generation. He was the voice of a new type of person: the Southern and Southwestern Mexican-American who acclimated to American life through black culture - specifically hip-hop - instead of white. As Tejano music and culture started to wither and die in the wake of the murder of Selena, SPM stepped into the breach with a new style and swagger.

As the '90s progressed, young Texas Latinos stashed their hand-tooled leather belts, ostrich-skin boots and Charro-style hats and replaced them with, as commentator Rolando Rodriguez recently put it, " 'south side fades,' fitted Astros hats, oversized t-shirts, [and] gold grills in the mouth spittin' Southern slang."

And then Coy's weakness - a predilection for sex with underage girls - came to light. In June of 2002, Coy was convicted of the aggravated sexual assault of the nine-year-old daughter of two family friends and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Not really sure whether it's our alcohol mixture, some pharmacological imbalance our sex life or just male menopausal phenomena, but lately Lonesome, Onry and Mean has been on an evil bluegrass jag. Nothing like playing our Stanley Brothers 45-rpm of "If I Lose" - "If I lose, let me lose/ I don't care how much I lose/ If I lose a hundred dollars while I'm tryin' to win a dime/ My baby, she's got money all the time" - to make us feel like drinkin' a barrel of moonshine, sharpening our razor and ambushin' some revenuers or strangling the no-good lyin' woman who done us wrong and burying her down in the holler by the sycamore tree.

Here are a few of the meaner nuggets in constant rotation this past week:

Stanley Brothers, "Rank Stranger": Certainly the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou, with its spot-on Dan Timiniski version of the Stanleys' "Man of Constant Sorrow," brought both bluegrass and Ralph Stanley back into the public consciousness after a long period of dormancy where the music was literally of interest to few people beyond the rabid aficianados LOM often refers to as Bluegrass Nazis.

www.freepresshouston.com

​The first bit of news to report from this weekend's Westheimer Block Party is not a happy one at all. Late Saturday night, Free Press Houston staffer Lee Powers, 19, fell to his death from the Hazard St. bridge over U.S. 59.

Powers, who also worked as a cook at Mango's, did many different tasks for the Montrose publication that produced this weekend's Block Party, a visibly shaken editor/publisher Omar Afra said Sunday afternoon. Among other things, Powers interviewed Devin the Dude, helped deliver the paper and distributed flyers for Block Party and other FPH-produced events such as Summerfest this past August.

"He did everything for us," Afra said.

Rocks Off glimpsed several Free Press and Block Party staffers who had obviously been crying Sunday. Many more left the festival early - "half the staff walked out," Afra said.

"He was more than warm in his greeting, and a perpetual friend to everyone he met," FPH's Mills McCoin posted on www.freepresshouston.com Sunday afternoon.

Afra is organizing a benefit for Powers' funeral expenses scheduled for this coming weekend at Mango's. The specific date, time and performers are TBD.

Sweet little Chris Brown. This is how we prefer to remember him. This video came out when he was, what, 16? He's so young here, so adorable, so polite! The way he calls that girl dressed entirely inappropriately for her age "miss." The way he explains to her the simple steps of dancing while performing his own fancy footwork and kind of stalking her down the sidewalk. His voice hadn't even finished changing yet.

He does get a little grabby in the back of that car, though. Rocks Off's kid sister was watching back then - she had a bit of a crush on Brown. Even though we don't approve of him keeping "three or four sweeties on your clock" It all seemed so innocent then compared to this washed up image of him right here.

Maybe that's the key to keeping this all in perspective, this incident. Brown has talked extensively about his family's history of domestic abuse, even before his own problems started. For a while early in their relationship, neither Brown nor Rihanna would admit that they were a couple.

Looking back, Rocks Off wonders about this. Was it something about the pressure of fame on two people who are just barely adults? Or was there another, internal pressure?

See the rest of Rihanna's 20/20 interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer here.

Chris Brown brings his "Fan Appreciation Tour" to town this weekend, leading to several questions. Not the least of which are, "Who the hell is still a fan of this guy?" And, "Will his 'appreciation' of same take some form other than beating the shit out of them in a parked car?"

Brown's assault on Rhianna and his subsequent mealy-mouthing about the incident paint an unkind portrait of the R&B singer, but where does he rank alongside other musicians with a penchant for beating women? Rocks Off has helpfully provided a random sampling of abusive artists for comparison.

Ah, here we go again with local artists trumpeting "Grammy nominations." The latest is Atascocita-grown country singer Susan Hickman, who seems to fancy herself as a Miranda Lambert/Martina McBride type. We stumbled across Hickman accidentally through MySpace's "Status Updates," and our eye was immediately drawn to: "Susan Hickman Up for 6 1st Round Grammy Nominations."

Now Lonesome, Onry and Mean doesn't claim to know everything about what's going on around here, but we do try to keep our ears to the ground about 23 hours a day for what's happening in the local live music scene, especially the country music scene. And, to lay it on the line, we've never heard of Hickman.

What gets LOM is the overblown bullshit of touting "6 1st Round Grammy Nominations" by a virtual unknown. Such public-relations malarkey may fool the average fan, especially if their music diet is the by-the-numbers Nashcrap Hickman specializes in, but it doesn't fool anyone in the working press or most club owners. Remember local folkies Sugar Bayou getting their public relations teat caught in the Grammy hype ringer with John Nova Lomax about five years ago?

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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.