Beer-spitting good time: a local music perspective

By Julie Armstrong     8/21/08 7:00pm

It's that time of year again - Orientation Week is upon us - and as more freshmen swim into Rice with the tides, I can't help but reflect on my own O-Week three years ago.Unlike most new students, I didn't enjoy it all that much. I hadn't heeded the "get sleep" warning and had trouble letting loose. O-Week improved substan-tially, though, when my group left the hedges and took a trip to The Chocolate Bar, where a bluegrass band known as the Medicine Show lit up my life and made me optimis-tic about Houston.

My first 18 years had been as sheltered as any Rice student's, and even though I hail from mud-dy-water Mississippi, I had never seen a washboard or a string bass until that night, and I had cer-tainly never heard such beauti-fully cacophonous crooning. The band made friends with the tiny audience and gave shout-outs con-stantly, even letting onlookers sing with them, and for a little while, I forgot my nervousness. That mo-ment stands out as my favorite dur-ing O-Week.

A few weekends ago, I had the pleasure of seeing this band again, now calling themselves the Side-show Tramps, when they played at the Flying Saucer downtown. I had arrived on Main Street a few hours earlier for the Houston Press Music Awards Showcase, an event most of my Rice friends had never heard of, but the crowds of hipsters milling outside three of the ten venues that were showcasing 60 competing local artists told me I had chosen the right place to spend a Sun-day evening.

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Walking inside the first floor (I mean, um, the only floor) of charm-ingly ragged notsuoH, I saw a group of people far more diverse than the haughtily hip, all packed and jamming to a familiar sound: the renowned vibraphone improvisations of Harry Sheppard, whom I had seen play sev-eral times at Café Brazil while I drank ginger beer and pretended to finish reading Three Cups of Tea. Accompa-nied by the Free Radicals, whom the audience would vote Best Jazz in this year's Music Awards, the vibraphone has never sounded sexier.

After a slice of pizza and a brief foray into Venue to see the vigorous Rock en Español winners Los Skarnales domi-nate the stage and bring a comparative-ly massive crowd to claps and cheers, my posse and I spent a few minutes socializing among the Flying Saucer's namesake wall decorations before the Sideshow Tramps took the stage. The band's performance was just as their multi-instrumentalist co-founder Geof-frey "Uncle Tick" Muller had promised it would be: "a sweaty, beer-spitting good time." Add crowd-surfing, chair-dancing and knee-slapping to that mix, and you know why the night left me smiling.

This mu-gasmic extravaganza was not without its flaws, however, and neither is Houston's local scene, which many say pales in comparison to that of other large cities. John Lo-max of the Houston Press has pointed out that touring bands have treated Houston like a sore spot since the 2006 fiasco in which a noise com-plaint led to a violent police breakup of the Two Gallants' show at Walter's on Washington and made national news. Austin, too, has received much blame for luring local artists out of Houston and into its rewardinglyfamous scene.

But blues musician Andrew Lun-dgren has some suggestions for ex-panding the scene, especially for his underrepresented and under-respect-ed musical demographic. "Make it free for all," he says in reference to the Music Awards Showcase, which charged a $10 cover, and allowed ac-cess to the high school and college fan bases, many of whom were also banned from attending the show-case, at least officially, by the 21-and-up rules that remained in place at all of the sponsoring venues.

Lundgren has a point. I so fondly remember the local scene of Jackson, Miss., because of its cheap covers and abundance of under-21 shows. While this solution may not have worked financially for the coordina-tors of the Music Awards Showcase, it goes without saying that discounts for students increase business in the long term. The Houston music scene should be no exception.

In the meantime, other incentives exist for freshmen to trek outside the hedges after their first nine weeks and explore the larger pool of creativity their city offers. Muller mentions the city's diversity as one of them, recall-ing shows he has played with bands influenced by every genre from Turkish to Tejano. "You just have to dig a little deeper," he says. "There's no Sixth Street." When I asked him if he had, indeed, played Austin, he responded, "Why would we go to Austin? We've been there once, and we set the stage on fire at the Continental Club by ac-cident, and we don't think they want us back." Now that's Houston's spirit at its finest.

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