H-Town Mixtape Part II

Back in 2001, before Tropical Storm Allison, before Enron, before the Great H-Town Rap Boom of 2005, one of the very first columns I wrote was a piece about Houston's lack of a quasi-official city anthem. (You can find it here: http://houstonpress.com/Issues/2001-06-14/music/racket_full.html.)

Songs put forth in that piece as being almost but not quite our city's anthem included the Geto Boys' "City Under Siege," Rodney Crowell's "Telephone Road" and Johnny Copeland's "Houston." But the song I believed fit best was Guy Clark's "LA Freeway," which was, ironically, about longing to leave Los Angeles behind for Houston's relatively bucolic charms. But by 2001, I reasoned, Houston had become just as much a smog-choked concrete bungle as the Los Angeles Clark sang about, so it seemed to fit us as well as any other song.

But that was five years ago, and since then, I have been diligently harvesting fresh contenders to the throne. And I've since come to the conclusion that this city is too damned complicated for any one anthem. Now, I'm just gonna rattle off a bunch of songs about H-Town for you to download, listen to and play in the car for your visiting relatives while you are squiring them around from the Galleria to the Kemah Boardwalk and then over to the refineries at night. So, away we go:

Fifth Ward bluesman Juke Boy Bonner has a trio of Houston songs no basic H-Town mixtape should go without. Bonner, a singer-guitarist-drummer-harmonica player who billed himself as "The One Man Trio," was an atypical bluesman for the '60s and '70s -- a published poet with an unusually explicit social conscience. Much like the Geto Boys and every rapper since, he was always ready to discuss the harsh realities in The Nickel, as he does on the driving, John Lee Hooker-esque boogie "Stay off Lyons Avenue": "Cause if you go there green, somewhere down near Jensen'll be the last time you'll be seen." Which remains true, all these years later...

His "Houston, The Action Town" is a slightly more raucous boogie, as befits the subject matter -- "womenfolks running around in the street flaggin' the menfolks down." "Don't be no chump behind what you're pursuin'," Bonner advises, "'cause this city's full of slickers, boy, so you better know what you're doin'. 'Cause you know Houston -- that's the action town."

The last of Bonner's great trilogy is "Struggle In Houston," which has more of a Jimmy Reed feel. But Reed never sang about stuff like this, and the song is worth quoting here in full:

"It's a struggle here in Houston, man, just to stay alive (repeat)

I don't mean you'll die of starvation, I mean you gotta watch out for bullets, bombs and knives.

There's some streets in Houston I stay clear of after dark (repeat)

'Cause there's some cats that'll bump you off just to hear their pistol bark.

Struggle here in Houston just to stay out of Ben Taub (repeat)

You're liable to get your head bashed in if you break a twenty after dark."

The Andre Williams-penned Ted Taylor deep soul classic "Houston Town" is another great from the same era. It features a slow-simmering intro that blossoms into first-rate orchestral soul, and it finds Taylor and his keening falsetto wrecked and ruined in a cheap hotel, watching a cold rain fall on a colder city, begging someone, anyone, to get him out of Houston town. (Williams wrote the song after an epic cocaine bender here he says almost cost him his life.) Admittedly, "Houston Town" isn't one you booster types might want to bang, but it's a lost classic nonetheless.

As we mentioned in the previous Houston anthem piece, black and white Houstonians tend to write about the city differently. One of the only national rock songs to do more than name-check Houston is Iggy Pop's surreal "Houston Is Hot Tonight," with Dali-esque lyrics like "they've got a moon-man on the telephone," "Arabian sheiks and money up in the sky" and "now I don't mind a bloodbath 'cause I've got oil on my breath." But on the whole, white people -- especially country singers -- tend to just mention the city's name in passing. There are quite a few country songs that have Houston in the title, but virtually none of them bring the city to life in any way -- it's a lot like that sitcom where Reba lives here but never seems to leave her kitchen, which, at any rate, appears to be in Cinco Ranch. (Examples of this type of song include "Houston Solution" and "Houston [Means I'm One Day Closer to You].")