Rainy Days & Sundays Always Bring Me
Down:
The Houston Press Music Awards Showcase
July 30, 1995
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in the Public News, August 2, 1995
The basic idea for this past Sunday's Houston Press Music Awards Showcase: get eight Richmond Strip venues to host five bands each, have the bands start each hour on the hour and provide ballots so that folks can vote while listening to the nominees. Theoretically, people will be free to go from club to club as you please.
Sounds good, except nobody could have possibly seen all or even a substantial portion of the bands. I suppose the assumption is that voters have already seen the musicians and just want to verify their decisions before casting their ballot.
Since it was obviously impossible to see every performer, I did the next best thing: I went to every venue. What follows is not a review of the performances. That would be cheating. No, I'd like to talk about the event as a whole, and to discuss the general attitude that pervaded the whole mess.
Self-promotion ruled, although this was really no surprise. Since ballots were still being taken until the end of the night, almost every band made some appeal to the audience to vote for it in whichever category. Some took other approaches, like the large rasta guy at Richmond Arms who demanded, loudly, to know which reggae band I was voting for. When I said I hadn't heard any of them, he finally broke, smiled broadly and walked away. Cute.
Despite the highly-promoted fact that admission to one venue got you admission to all, the scheduling of bands was designed to keep folks in one place all evening. Blue Planet and Sam's Place were designed for the Buzz crowd, while Woodrow's aimed at KIKKers and the like. This wouldn't normally be cause for complaint, but the evening was touted as a musical grab bag, and most people didn't get a chance to hear something totally new. Add to that the distance between some of the clubs (you try walking from Blue Planet to Woodrow's in the pouring rain) and the result was a stationary clientele. Some places, such as Billy Blues and Richmond Arms, tried to have diverse acts, but most didn't bother.
The crowds themselves tended to be a pretty homogeneous bunch. The audience in Sam's Boat was mostly late-teen, early-twenties, while Magnolia Bar & Grill tended to be older, with folks in their thirties and forties who didn't seem to expect that they'd be getting live jazz with their dinner, though they did seem delighted with what they did get.
Many of the venues seemed to be ill-equipped to handle live music. Rain was pouring through the ceiling of Sam's Place by the end of the night, which probably aggravated the electrical problems the Jinkies faced while setting up, when singer Carlos DeLeon's microphone continuously shocked him (the entire sound system later shorted out during a song). The "stage" at Richmond Arms seemed like an office or a balcony for a private party, completely separating the performers from their audiences. Some of the audience responded by ignoring the music, and Wyndnwyre performed to their devotees on the floor only.
At Blue Planet, the Suspects were also playing mostly to hard-core fans who, although appreciative, couldn't give off the energy of most of the band's shows all by themselves. Hell, when the Suspects were nearly finished, only one person yelled, "Play more ska!" and that was me, for Christ's sake. I'd suggest that it was the early hour of the performance, but a hop on over to Billy Blues showed that the Gypsies already had the crowd going at full speed (if still seated).
By around 6:00, most of the starting times became approximate. I dashed like mad to get to Woodrow's to catch Joe "Guitar" Hughes, only to wait a half an hour until he started. Fleeing back to Sam's Place to catch a Giancarlo Caffarena-free Jinkies (a permanent situation, if the conversation that I, um, overheard between members of Dry Nod and deSchmog can be believed), I was treated to the second half of deSchmog's set, which I hadn't expected to see. I celebrated by first fighting off the sound tech who became curious about what I was writing, then I decided that lead singer Diane Koistinen should quit smoking and put her oral fixation to good use food, perhaps.
Anyway, the Jinkies played and I enjoyed it very much, thank you. Caffarena's Chapman Stick was a terrific gimmick, and his departure leaves the Jinkies as merely a great band. They were the only performers all night whose entire set I saw.
The final and main problem with the event was that there were just too many bands. This is not South By Southwest, which is at least spread out over multiple nights. If you offer dozens of bands within a six-hour period, there's going to be a lot that people just won't be able to see. And I realize that this is, on some level, complaining that Houston has too many good bands. I just think that there were others like me, who felt like they had one day in Disney World to do everything.