Seeing Howlies at the Mink and simultaneously being underage

I’d never heard Howlies before but, judging by their name, I thought they were going to be a noisy, overly wild, overly hip hipster band that drank PBR.  I was wrong.  I way WAY off the mark.  They sounded more like the Trashmen, the Sonics, or Otis Redding than the Monotonix-type band in my head.  They played straight up dirty rock ‘n roll music your mom wouldn’t let you buy.  They were even produced by Kim Fowley, the filthy genius behind the Runaways and Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers.  The song they played that really hit me, though, was down-tempo R&B ballad called Aluminum Baseball Bat.  In my mind, the only way they could have written that song was by spending countless hours of their lives listening to Stax Record singles.

On the way back home I began to think about the kids that couldn’t make it to the show.  Sometimes I’ll be looking at calendars and I’ll see a band I’d like to see (the Riverboat Gamblers) but then I’ll see that they’re playing at a 21+ bar that I can’t get into (Rudyard’s) and a feeling of disappointment takes over me.  I can’t help but imagine that there’s another underage kid in this city that’ll see someone is playing at the Mink and feels disappointed because he or she can’t get in.

I’ve been going to shows for a pretty long time and I’d NEVER been to 21+ bars until the Mink came along.  I remember back in 8th grade and the early years of high school being turned away from Rudyard’s and the Proletariat for being under 21, but those situations were pretty rare.   I always thought they were doing it because they were trying to create an exclusive atmosphere or they hate kids, but in reality it’s a simple insurance issue.  All-ages places like Walter’s that have a full-service bar have to pay for a MUCH higher insurance package than the Mink who is 21+ and have multiple full service bars.  It may not sound fair but bars aren’t just immobile physical buildings; they’re run by real living and breathing people with wives and kids who work their way from stockboy at Soundwaves up to manager and then finally they save enough money to live their dreams and buy a bar.  Well, that’s at least how the Mink is.

Houston’s scenic moped route, Fleabag, & Cory Branan’s manager

I didn’t have internet access for about 3 week or so and now that I have it back, the internet hasn’t gotten any more interesting than the last time I got on.  Getting on my moped never gets old, though.  On a moped there’s always something to do and something to see, even though I never really have a place to go.

I live on the East Side of downtown and every time I head up to the Heights, I pass that big steel WALD sign.  I don’t know what it is, I think it’s some sort of steel company.  I’ve been seeing it ever since I was a kid.

I also pass this General Electric building that looks like it has been in business for the past 50 years without changing any of its decor.

Fleabag from Oakland, California was marked on my calendar for June 29th at Mango’s.  I’m a big fan of Brad, their drummer who used to live here in Houston.  He’s been in bands like Die, Emperor! Die!, Rosa, Punkin’ Pie, and the Tenspeeds so I was curious to see what this band sounded like.  It was a murky, cloudy day and when I rode out to Mango’s I swore it would rain on me.  I was a few hours early and when I got there I sat with John Sears.  He was eating a salad and drinking a beer.  I asked him if he was here to see Brad’s new band and he informed me that he is the biggest Brad fan around.  We talked about Houston punk houses and Houston punk bands what it’s like to grow up punk in Houston.  He pretty much had nothing good to say about anybody or anything but it was pretty great. No sarcasm, I loved it. He loved it.  It was hilarious.

Fleabag was pretty great, a gritty pop-punk/power-pop band fronted by a female.  Too bad it was a total clusterfuck of a show.  I mean, come on, SIX BANDS on a MONDAY NIGHT? And a few of those bands were on tour, but not on tour with each other.  It was pretty obvious nobody was going to stick around to see SIX BANDS on a MONDAY NIGHT.  Good thing Fleabag played 2nd.

Cory Branan was playing on July 1st at Walter’s but I didn’t plan on going.  If that name sounds familiar but you can’t really figure out how you know it, you might recognize it from the song “Tears Don’t Matter Much” by Lucero.  One of the verses goes something like “Cory Branan’s got an evil streak/and a way with words that will bring you to your knees/he could play the wildest shows/and he can sing so sweet.”  I recently quit my job at the punk rock ice cream shop I had been working at for the past year and a half and didn’t really have much money to spend.  Well I check my email one day and Cory Branan’s manager, Brian Mann, emails me telling me information about the show.  He offered to send me MP3’s and albums and stuff to convince me to go see Cory perform.  I thought it was pretty random for him to email me but he told me it’s because I seem like a “punk rock kind of fellow.”  Well that convinced me enough to go out to the show.  I bought a cheeseburger from the the Broken Spoke Cafe, one of my favorite local restaurants about a mile away from Walter’s that’s also owned by my former assistant principal.  I took it over to Walter’s and walked inside.  Doors hadn’t opened yet and Cory Branan and Jon Snodgrass were doing sound checks inside.  I sat down at the bar and started to eat my burger.  I started to think about how a few years ago I walked into Walter’s before doors opened I was sternly asked to leave, but now I can pretty much walk in there whenever I want and sit at the bar and eat dinner.  The bartender sat down next to me and I asked him how his ice cream was and how his head was healing.  (He got stitches in his head recently and I sent him a 2-quart container of his favorite ice cream, key-lime pie.)  He told me the ice cream didn’t have enough key lime pie in it and his head was alright.

Cory Branan and Jon Snodgrass played great that night.  Instead of playing individual sets, they alternated songs in a single extended set.  Thinks got pretty shambled, though, when Jon lost a piece of his guitar hardware when trying to change a string so he and Cory had to share one guitar and alternate songs.

The headliner of the show was actually Joey Cape.  He was the lead singer of Lagwagon, a big pop-punk band in the 90s that I never listened to.  At the end of the show, he invited Butch from 30FootFall on stage to play guitar and do a sort of duet.

After the show, I was leaving the parking lot and Cory complimented my moped.  I told him that the only reason I went to the show that night was because his manager emailed me and told me to come.  He told me that it was nice to “meet proper” and we said our goodbyes.  I went over to Darcy’s and we tried to watch Tokyo Zombie but we couldn’t get passed the first 15 minutes.  We ended up going to this kid’s warehouse, which turned out to be the old Todo Moto warehouse.

We lit a bag of sanitizer on fire and threw rocks at it while listening to a Geto Boys tape.  We got drunk and then at around 3 in the morning we went to Late Nite Pie to see if they had any left over pizzas in the dumpster or any they were willing to give us.  We parked the car outside near the back and an employee came out and we hung out for a while. He told us to wait a little bit and he went inside to go check on the status of leftover pizzas.  We talked about stars and aurora borealis while we waited.  He came back out and told us that all the pizzas had been delivered or eaten already.  Darcy and I went back to her place.

When I woke up in the morning, I planned on leaving but I had so much fun that I decided to stay for one more day.  She sleeps a little longer than I do so he roommate and I just hung out in the living room for a bit.  Our talking woke Darcy up but she didn’t mind.  We didn’t know what to do all day since we no longer have jobs, but I had a pretty good plan.  I remember Darcy telling me about how she loves Allison Mosshart and the Kills so I told her we were going to Whole Foods.  We go there and walk around and buy some food, but what I really planned on doing was finding Bucky.  Bucky and I have known each other for a while now and he loves to talk and tell stories about all the punk stuff he did or planned on doing, but more importantly he was the driver for one of the Kills’ tours so I wanted him to tell stories about them and Allison Mosshart and Discount.  He wasn’t at Whole Foods so I Darcy and I went to Domy Books to find him.  Luckily, he was there and Darcy and I sat on the floor and ate our food while he told us stories about touring with the Kills.

We finished our food and Bucky finished all his stories so we went back home.  We hung out for a few hours and we decided to go hang out with this kid.  He was hanging out with his friends at the time but he told us we were more than welcome to come by, so we did.  We ended up at this guy’s awesome house; he had a lot of antique or vintage furniture, like old rotary telephones and tube-speakers and antique luggage.  It was amazing.  He also wired all the telephone lines in his house, rebuilt a 1980 diesel Mercedes, is currently building a fountain, and was interested in restoring a vintage scooter.  We get to talking about scooters and mopeds and small diesel powered engines.  This guy was awesome, he was a plant operator for the city of Bellaire.

We ended up going to Catbird’s where we didn’t have any money so we left and went back to the old warehouse.  We sat there for what felt like hours, awkwardly glancing at each other and not saying a word.  It was treacherous, like Sartre’s “No Exit.”

Darcy and I went back to her place and watched the Royal Tenenbaums and she stick ‘n poked herself a tattoo on her left hand.

Dylan “Fuzzy” Fitzpatty and a suicidal vacuum cleaner

Last Sunday I worked one of my last shifts at Amy’s Ice Creams.  On the way home, Rachel calls me up and tells me that I should go to Dylan’s moving-out party.  I declined because it was kinda late and I was kinda tired.  Somehow, an hour later I found myself sitting in Rachel’s living room with Dylan.  We were waiting for Rachel to finish dying her hair.

Dylan drove us to his apartment once Rachel finished her hair.  Calvin was sitting on an old Coleman cooler outside of Dylan’s door when we arrived.  We walked inside and I started drinking even though there were only 4 of us there, including me.  Darcy was out of town and Dylan’s other roommate, Aaron, hadn’t been home in a couple of days.  The more I drank, the more people from my past starting showing up at the party.  These were people I did not expect to show up at all and they seemed to show up in order from the most recent person I had known to the earliest person I’d known.  Everyone there was from a period of my life between 5th grade and Thanksgiving 2008.  Lindsey Smith was there and I remembered reading on her blog that she started listening to vinyl so I told her all about the record label and record distro and vinyl and mixtapes and I assume most of what I said made no sense at all.  I drunkenly scribbled a “perfect mixtape” for her on the back of a receipt for some textbooks I bought a year ago.

Hours later all the girls at the party left, except Rachel who fell asleep.  The remaining males and I all drove to House of Pies in the same car.  I told them about how sometimes the waitresses refuse to serve me, even if I’m sitting there, and they all decided that if I didn’t get served that night we’d all walk out and go somewhere else.  We showed up to House of Pies and every car in the parking lot was a cop car.  We walked inside and every patron was a cop.

When we got back to the apartment, Dylan accidently stepped on a glass so he vacuumed all the broken glass up.  The glass shards ended up destroying the vacuum cleaner and it started to make horrible noise and eventually stopped working.  He literally hanged it up in a closet, as if it committed suicide my hanging, and etched something like “HOOVER WAS HERE” in the wall.  He even wrote a fake suicide note and taped it inside the closet.

Mopeds & Presidents Heads

I was looking forward to the Menzingers’ show last week at the Presidents Heads Gallery, the second floor of a warehouse occupied by Jason and Patrick.  I first got excited after I heard that there was gonna be a keg there and then I got even more excited after learning that the gallery got its name due to the fact that it shares the space with all those giant Presidents heads you see in local news articles.  I’d never seen them before but I always wanted to, I just never knew where they were.  Most of my friends know that I NEVER ride out to the Heights because of the distance and I would normally get a ride with Aaron but he’s on tour right now and it’s about time for an adventure so a moped ride out to the Heights was on the day’s itinerary. I pulled out my map and traced out a good route from my house to the gallery and packed a backpack with some clothes.  I made sure to bring my pint glass.  I went out to my porch to get my bike ready and noticed a stray cat sleeping next to it.

I rode my moped from my house in East End all the way to Washington Ave and I’m surprised I didn’t die along the way.  The old warehouses in the Old Warehouse District looked awesome, though.  Some of the businesses have been open for around 50 years and they haven’t changed their signs since then. I have to go back there to take some pictures.

I pulled up to the gallery and lock my moped up.  I walked up to the second floor of the warehouse and walked around and it was amazing.  The warehouse was once a lead paint factory and it was enormous.  The ceilings were high and the hallways were long and the windows were the size of my living room floor.  I went to Freebird’s with Eric and Val and talked about why Aaron would go on tour right now. None of us could come up with a plausible answer.  After we got back, Darcy called me up and told me she was home.  I finished my burrito and unlocked my bike and went to go pick her up.  I’ve never ridden doubles on a street before, let alone at night, but it seemed alright and we didn’t die.  It went pretty well for having no helmets, a broken headlight, and a one-person seat with no passenger foot pegs.

Jason invited me, Val, and Darcy on the 3rd story roof.  He locked it up so people don’t fall off and die.  He unlocked a window for us and we had to walk up an old rusty aluminum staircase, walk across the 2nd floor roof, and then climb up a rickety wooden latter.  There were no guard rails or even ledges, just a flat roof that suddenly stopped.  The view was amazing.  We could see a near perfect skyline and an awesome view of the Presidents.

It was too hot for me and Darcy to actually watch the show so we spent most of our time on the roof.  It was kinda like a Rosa song.  She was jonesing for a fountain soda so we hopped on my moped and went the Valero down the street.  On the way back a biker told me to be safe out there since it was night and my headlight was broken.  I love it when bikers are nice to me.  We went back to the show and I said goodbye to some people and Darcy and I rode back to her place.  We hung out a bit and I started to get a bit woozy so I decided to take a shower and call it night.  Then Darcy got a call; one of her friends was at Catbird’s.  She asked me if I wanted to go and I eagerly said yes. We hopped in her truck and sped off.

I was walking through the bar and I heard two guys yelling “PETER LEE! PETER LEE! PETER LEE!” I looked around and saw nobody.  I walked passed the patio door and heard the same thing.  I look outside and I see Ben Breier and Hugo from high school hanging out. They were hanging out with Darcy’s friend, Lucy (I think that was her name).  How perfect, I go to hang out with Darcy’s friend whom I’d never met and she happens to be hanging out with two guys I went to high school with.  Ben spent quite a bit of time in Japan and I hadn’t seen Hugo since he graduated. We talked about Japanese girls, showed each other our tattoos, and bought each other drinks until the bar closed.  Darcy and I got home at around 2 or 3 in the morning.

Our meeting at Amy’s Ice Creams started at 9:30 the next morning, less than 8 hours from the time we got home. We met the new managers. I put in my letter of resignation the next day.

Black Congress & Muhammid Ali – a fine summer afternoon at that house from Fight Club

I was riding my moped out to the Museum District yesterday to see Black Congress and Muhammid Ali play at an old punk mansion.  I was pretty early so I decided to change my direction and head over to my friend Rachel’s, who lives close to the mansion.  The weather suddenly started to hurricane on me like crazy.  I was soaked like a sponge from my denim jacket down to my socks by the time I got to Rachel’s apartment.  An hour or two later, Aaron called me and asked me if I needed a ride since it was raining.  I told him that would be nice so I walked outside.  By then the rain was gone, clouds were parting, and the sun was coming out so I called up Aaron again and told him to head to the show because I decided to ride my moped over there.  I walked inside, put my helmet on, and started to unlock my bike when I noticed that the red taillight cover was GONE.  All that was there was an exposed white lightbulb, which meant that every time I tried to brake, only a white light would show.  The taillight cover could be ANYWHERE since I had been riding around town all day.  I turned my head and noticed a shiny red brick sitting in the middle of the street at the corner of Southmore & Crawford.  Behind that shiny red brick was my taillight cover!  I ran over there, picked it up, and screwed that shit back on my bike.

When I got to the house it immediately reminded me of the house from Fight Club.  I told a few people this and they shrugged it off.  I went into the house and waited in line to pee.  Coach was standing in line behind me.  I asked him how it was going and he said to me, “Ahh it’s awesome. Party at the house from Fight Club.”  I didn’t think I was hearing him right because nobody agreed that the house looked anything like the house from Fight Club when I told them and he said, “Fight Club. It’s like the house from Fight Club.”  We both thought the house looked like the one from Fight Club.

Black Congress:

Lynchburg Lemonade Stand, $1 per drink.

Muhammid Ali

Coach was on the grill all day

The keg ran dry but it was alright.