Well – we’ve spent the last couple of days with my brother and his wife in Houston, TX and we’ve gotten to have some pretty good adventures and an absolutely amazing show – and now we’re on the road again. I-45 North is apparently RARELY clear, but it has saved that rare honour for ilyAIMY and we’re racing towards our show in Waxahachie with Jean Rohe on the stereo and pretty good spirits.
The weather’s been flirting with rain, but so far all we’ve received are a couple of raindrops here and there – actual precipitation nothing but a statistical anomaly.
When I’d initially been firming up dates with my brother for our visit to Houston, he’d given me a couple of options of things to do while we were in town since we might well have to be pretty much released on our own recognizance into Houston, what with George and Del having not only an-almost-four-year-old on their hands but also a three-week old… he offered the following list:
Giant heads ?
Death star trench approach?
Waterwall?
Secret button?
Where Del thinks she saw a body?
Our visit was really, really brief, but maybe that was for the best. It was absolutely great to see George and Del and Max, and to meet my new nephew Ike, but sometiems its best to just let the parents be parents and what with the house being under construction on top of everything else, it was swiftly time to make way! Above – George and Ike in Houston, TX.
Well, alright then. Surprisingly we packed a good number of these into our 44 hours in Houston, TX, along with our show and meals and even a couple of hours of sleep. Though the Death Star trench approach was deemed to be too out-of-the-way to visit and better with a local to guide you since it was best experienced at a high speed that would’ve been dangerous for people unfamiliar with the area to approach (?!?!), the Giant Heads were on the other end of those GPS coordinates (I was right!), the Secret Button (which was unfortunately out of order) was at the end of a walk that took us past both the Waterwall and where Del thought she saw a body. Del, my brother’s wife, also thought she’d seen an alligator around there. And a couple of other things. It’s become my impression that Del just kind of… sees stuff. Even with lizards, flying fish, leaping turtles, more lizards, herons, ducklings, giant cicadas and stampeding spider hordes, the highpoint of the visit was still meeting my new nephew.
Sigh. This is why I don’t leave my camera unattended around my brother. ool clouds entering Waxahachie, TX – and a couple of old planes – that are almost totally not visible – but the photo turned out cool. You can see how dirty the windows are though. All the bugs we washed off back in New Oreleans? Yeah. We hit them again. I’d forgotten that cotton was a thing down here until we crossed huge fields of it driving from Houston to Waxahachie, TX.
I’m not particularly good with kids, and this breeds a definite discomfort in their presence (or perhaps these two things are the other way around?) – now, with most kids that means they immediately take to me and want to sit on me and cling to me and cry when guided away by semi-apologetic, secretly-laughing parents. Not so with my nephews: Max still doesn’t know what to make of me and spent a good deal of time peering at me put from around corners. Tickling him seemed to be the best way of dealing with it all (somehow my interactions with my OWN uncles becomes much clearer), but since that me in range of his dreaded retaliatory zerberting, particularly dreaded because Max is an exceptionally MOIST child, it wasn’t my go-to. Finally we’d found a good in-between activity which involved me sort of pretending to be a dinosaur and chasing him around the house, but at one point I switched into full raptor mode – and though the child is capable of shrieking in tonal ranges that I lost the ability to hear years ago, he found my raptor screech terrifying and his squeals of joy dissolved into snuffling tears of (moist) fear… embarrassed I slunk back to my computer until it was time for more tickling, wrestling and horrible, sticky, gross zerberts.
Ike, on the other hand, is just a tiny lizard-thing. A three-week old pupa of a child, he’s in the midst of the “keep one end full and the other end clean” portion of his upbringing and though he’s capable of seeming fascinated by fans and swirling colours, he really was just a source of strange noises and noisome gurglings as he hiccupped and pooped his way through our visit. Cute kid though. You know. Pudgy. Fingers and toes all in the right place. Warm. Smiled a little. Yawned a lot. They get more interesting later.
The show at JP Hops House last night was… amazing. Possibly one of the best I’ve played in recent memory. A good collection of fans and an audience that was rapidly converted. We were slated to play from 9 to 11 or so, but the audience was SO great that we ended up not closing down till 12.15 or so. People knew the words and sang along, the sound was amazing – I think that every sound system should be designed by someone who has to play through it regularly – Jim’s design of that stage is infinitely practical, great sounding and fantastic – and a huge part of that is because he built it back in 1980 as a place for his own band to play, and has slowly evolved it and upgraded it as he finds other things he likes. Even since I played their open mic back in January he’d upgraded from Shure 58 Betas to something higher end and everything just sounded INCREDIBLE. This was the first time I’d gotten to be on their stage for more than just a couple of songs, and the genius of this stage really struck home as I spent more time with it.
That place sure doesn’t look like much. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s a dark parking lot, the sign doesn’t light up anymore, the front glass is mirrored so you can’t see in and it’s been kicked in and shattered in places. Frankly it exudes the aura of a run-down strip club – and going inside, with fluorescent lights and stained acoustic tiling, an old worn wrap-around bar with coolers behind it and generic carpeting on the floor – it feels like you’ve walked into a nothing, Midwest country honky-tonk bar. You expect bad country karaoke.
But the owners are amazing. And the people are amazing. And the music is amazing. It’s a classic example of NOT judging a book by its cover – it’s the inverse of every uber-hip bar we’ve ever walked into with haughty dicks EVENTUALLY serving you drinks and a bad indie band shoe-gazing in the corner. This place is a bright STAR of original music and people who appreciate it. They have a great open mic, an incredible annual festival celebrating the birth of Mr. Potato Head and the weekend of Woodstock, rolled together, and they have a supportive community that keeps the place going. The place is about people and music. Give me that over nailed-on ambience any day.
J P Hops is the Millenium Falcon of music venues: She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts.
Man, this has been a good trip so far. Day 17 and morale is high. The plains of central Texas are green and brown and radiate heat up at perfect, flat-bottomed clouds and you could take any exit sign and use it to name an action hero: Bryan Crockett, Conroe Cleveland, Navasota Huntsville, Mexia Palestine… well, they’d be pretty INTERESTING action heroes. And what with just passing the Cowboy Church (BRANDED for CHRIST!!!), they’d HAVE to be.
