“Beware of Bugs!” was the warning/announcement on an album by obscure Texas 70s rocker, Nitzinger.
John Nitzinger meant Bugs Henderson, another Dallas-Ft. Worth guitarist/songwriter well known in that regional rock scene.
Bugs Henderson was in the grand tradition of Texas blues guitarists although not nearly as well known as ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Johnny Winter and — much later — Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Cancer took him this weekend, making it two weeks in a row that the disease has struck down older American rock musicians.
Local blues guitar legend Bugs Henderson, the fiery blues-rocker with the wicked six-string sting, died Thursday night from complications of liver cancer. He was 68.
Henderson’s death at his home in Jefferson, Texas comes a mere four days after a huge benefit with a slew of well-known musicians was held at Palladium Ballroom to raise money for his medical expenses. Henderson had no health insurance and the cost of his care was mounting. Henderson did not attend that Palladium benefit because he was at home under hospice care.
Henderson, who was born in Palm Springs , Calif. but grew up in Tyler, Texas and spent a part of his life living in Dallas, was not only beloved in the United States as well as overseas, but he was also respected for his signature blend of blues, rock and funk. He was a sweetheart of a guy, too. I only interviewed him once by phone, but it was a relaxed, joyful and genuine conversation.
Thank heaven for hospice care. It’s the only thing left when the end is certain.
Henderson achieved some recognition, first as the guitarist for Texas garage band, Mouse and The Traps, an act with regional hits.
The songs would grow in stature as a niche audience for Sixties pyschedelia and garage punk grew in the late Eighties. Today they’re all preserved — in the cloud, so to speak, on YouTube.
Mouse and The Traps’ best tunes were Maid of Sugar — Maid of Spice, the electric Bob Dylan rip — A Public Execution, and Lie Beg Borrow and Steal, embedded below.
Dig the hepcat sitar line, mimicked on what sounds like banjo, prior to the fuzzed up riff.
Henderson also wrote material used by Bloodrock, a gritty and somewhat frightening-looking Texas rock band that hit the singles charts once, in 1971 with “DOA,” a song about going through the windshield, distinctively performed over the wailing of an ambulance or police car siren.
After Bloodrock, Henderson became second guitarist for Nitzinger, another Fort Worth act that hit that momentarily hit the big time with a trio of major label records, all of them far too hairy and unpalatable for any real success in the American pop market.
Here’s “God Bless the Pervert” with John Nitzinger and Henderson on guitars, from that band’s One Foot in History. It would appear to be in part inspired by Charles Whitman, the Texas Sniper.
But the meat of Henderson’s career was spent growing old with the blues. You can visibly age, lose your hair, even be pretty ugly, and continue to play it for those toiling and slogging toward the end along with you.
“The Big D Shuffle” is emblematic of Henderson’s music and the Texas brand of player’s blues rock. Everyone has to have an instrumental showcase, perhaps several, and Henderson’s shuffle (his Texas band was called the Shuffle Kings) is true to the tradition.
Anyone who likes ZZ Top’s “Apologies to Pearly” will be immediately satisfied.
If the music you’ve played has the span exhibited in the excerpts, you’ve done a real good job.
Self-explanatory. Vote for me — or at least play the song counter up. The idea of me potentially getting to antagonize an audience at a Warped tour stop should be quite amusing, even inspirational, to readers.
And if it’s not, why are you here, anyway?
Plus I can make the claim of being the only expert on national security and terrorism on the stages.
So click on my face and follow the instructions.
Update:We’re getting thrashed. It’s humiliating. C’mon, you know in your hearts this is orders of magnitude better than metalcore/punk rock bands like grains of sand on the beach.
Pester your friends.
Don’t you think the guy who wrote one of the first books on computer viruses, who shot down the US guv’mint on ricin in 2004, who blows away the crap about the power grid being knocked out by Anonymous, deserves a break? What has Internet support come to if it doesn’t work for all of us at least once?
Update II: Not quite as humiliating! We’re now a bit competitive in the average of the great bottom tier of bands who don’t have the resources to do click rigging and all the other things that make Internet ‘likes’ and popularity counts such reliable metrics of undiscovered talent.
So thank you and keep the pedal to the metal! Onward and upward forward!
Boy, imagine what would happen if the judges at Ernie Ball actually listened to all the tapes of bands posted to their cloud. Yeah, people always want to hear new stuff from the Internet. Their ears are always open, their eyes to the fields for the new and fresh stirring the underbrush.
The on-line buzz will uncover/discover … the 100,000th metalcore punk rock band in the land!
“The National Anthem is the best startlingly real and truthful electric folk rock song this year!” — Joe Morgansternly, The Weekly National Standard Journal & Politico Review
Ben Folds, a man so downright great he’ll bear burdens like an ass, is musical director on William Shatner’s Has Been. He’s the right fellow to take the colostomy bagful of Singing Shat and search it for gold. On the scale of Singing Shat, Has Been ranks above the Shakespeare rap in Free Enterprise, but below “Mr. Tambourine Man,” where he first found much fool in himself, to the world’s pleasure and increase in laughter. Other reviewers have insisted it is Singing Shat’s best, furnishing praise like “the original William Hung, only with straight teeth” and ” ‘Has Been’ strives to make an ugly deed look fair.”
Notably accompanying Singing Shat is Henry Rollins, the man with wits in his belly and guts in his head, exhibiting it all for “I Can’t Get Behind That.” With Rollins and Folds, Garson Foos, leader of Shout, obviously has hopes Singing Shat will please fans of intelligent alternative rock, or at least idiot-worshippers to whom Bill is an idol.
Propped up in public by the best sustenance pharmacy provides, Osbourne assumes the guise of a vigorous man. Made a celebrity for being a shaking wretch on TV, Osbourne now has the gall to pretend otherwise, speaking of ambushing a robber and making available a commemorative box set in his spare time.
It’s recommended that the collection be pushed into a slit latrine and covered with lime. Prince of Darkness contains live renditions and demos of ho-hum heavy metal “classics” and cover versions (examples: “All the Young Dudes,” “For What It’s Worth”) that only those who received copies for promotion needed to hear.
What’s called for instead is a CD of Ozzy truth, call it Die Fledermaus. Translated as “The Bat,” Osbourne’s fictitious CD would open with “Harsh Solution,” a diatribe at being manacled at the Alamo for drunk-in-public urination. ZZ Top-esque is the lyric: “How could those coppers be so unkind to arrest me for [pissing] while blind.”
The head goth’s music is autobiographical. “You Won’t Be Coming Home” deals with the more than twice-told tales of Osbourne’s attacks on his wife while demented from drugs and strong drink. The centerpiece of the CD is the title cut, a mini-rock opera. Beginning with “No More Tears, Sad Dove,” Osbourne sings about the unreasonable hysteria following his first famous solo career event. “Die Bat!” continues, recounting the misery that resulted after the singer bit the dead head off one of those things, too. The mini-opera closes with “Killer Injection,” a metal bolero of misery on the abdominal inoculations one gets for rabies after eating unprepared fledermaus. All appropriate for playing spot-the-walker, wheelchair, and oxygen on the sides of the stage at Ozzfest.
Without Montrose, no Van Halen as that band emerged in ’77.
I still have most of his albums.
Never repeating himself, Ronnie Montrose was certainly not a man who needed social approval in the way of a big audience to stay energized.
As a result he made albums that were all over the place. Montrose, the band, was pure hard rock. As it neared the end of Montrose’s patience with it, a more electric keyboard sound dominated until the man axed the singer and wrote an all instrumental record.
By the Eighties, Montrose was back into the rock band format in Gamma, a quartet which — surprisingly — again provided a vehicle for art and synth work as much as the thick dominating Les Paul riff-tone for which he became known.
Always exciting, Montrose’s power chords were hand grenades and over the course of the Seventies and Eighties I saw him on the big stage about half a dozen times.
The most memorable show was one at the Tower in ’77 or ’78 in support of his Open Fire solo album.
The show was audacious in 1978, particularly for rock audiences used to the classic format with a frontman/lead singer.
Montrose wasn’t working jazz and there was only one band given a get-out-of-jail free card to perform fusion for the rock crowd and that was the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Still, Open Fire was a fair album. It actually made a much better show, though.
Back then Montrose was sandwiched between Journey, the headliner, and Van Halen in support of its debut album.
Eddie van Halen was a tough act to follow. Ronnie Montrose handled it with aplomb. He was every bit at the same level of heavyweight guitar playing as the younger star.
Here’s some film from the Open Fire tour.
Today, it still entertains with many things.
You have the fruity rockstar clothes of the late Seventies, the power guitar coupled to a bit of an arty take on some things Emerson, Lake & Palmer, an antagonizing mountain of synths and keyboards piled onstage, and the fact that it probably did a lot to inspire emerging punk rockers who were rebelling against everything like it.
Instead of the more popular “Daydream Believer,” this is “Valleri,” a psychedelic favorite of mine as a little kid, from The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees. Nothing but a simple vamp, given seasoning with acid fuzz and a trippy guitar fill.
The J C Penney joke is a reference to the advertising gig, later regretted, the Monkees’ record company landed with the company. The Monkees were subsequently kitted out in what department store America thought would be hot hipster pop star clothes for kids.
The Scorpions, the German pop metal band cosmically famous in the mid-to-late Eighties, have just issued Comeblack, an album of covers. Most of which are total crap. However, a redo of the Small Faces “Tin Soldier” is worthy, if in a special way. And I’ve set up the blog post so you can see how I mean it.
The Scorps “Tin Soldier,” with Klaus Meine singing, “I’m a little tin solder that wants to jump into your fire” and more, is — well, so very gay. And I mean this in a good way, think Village People and camp, so to speak.
I’ve set this up so you can see this version of “Tin Soldier” as the soundtrack for the trailer to Taxi Zum Klo, an old and rather charmingly amusing foreign movie about life in gay Germany.
For this to work, now — achtung (!), turn the sound on the first YouTube video to off. It’s called muting.
Now start the trailer. Then quick start the Scorpions tune in the lower embed. Ignore it, easy to do, and watch the trailer with the new music. (The trailer is only 1:35, enough to get the feel. But if you want, since the Scorps tune will still be playing, haul the trailer track button back into replay.)
Wunderbar!
Taxi Zum Klo, Taxi to the Toilet, herein as Scorpions zum Klo.
I could have stripped the music from the original movie trailer and overdubbed the video with the Scorpions track. But using this method, there’s no need to mess with the original owners with a new upload.
Still, I love the results and I hope you’ll appreciate it in the spirit intended. I like the movie and the tune.
“And sent from on high, would come a prophet, in simple sleeveless vestments, to help the faithful defeat the wicked king, before he spreads his health care seed!”
Mark Fiore cartoon animation on the wisdom of the bishops. The guy who does the voices is teh shit!
The Apple juggernaut crushes all in its path, might makes right, the end justifies the means, those jobs aren’t coming back, no wire hangers, I want a glass screen in six weeks, put that thing in your mouth!
Inspiration: Frank Zappa & the Mothers’ “We’re Only In It for the Money”
Key gear: harmonica — Mojo Hand/Conqueror Root — made in China, Jay Turser Stratocaster funk guitar — made in China. The Deutschlandlied. How’d that get in there?
Boycott American goods!
Oh wait, you can’t. Nothing to avoid at the store.
This is a re-release of La Puta, from early last year. I removed the link to the archive after a couple weeks. It is now restored — about 80 Mbytes with some album art.
The reason: My friend Don Hunt liked La Puta. He had a copy in his collection, one his brother and another family member discovered in going through his effects. They listened to it over margaritas and there was subsequently a slight tussle on who would actually get to take it back to Texas.
And ZZ Top and Texas are the music’s inspirational material.
Some notes on the tuneage:
Don’t Let Your Daddy Know — we had a ball in study hall or something like that.
La Puta — a wandering ballroom waltz about looking for prostitutes in Texas, apparently jailed by fundamentalists. Technically, a spoof on Que Lastima (What a Pity) from ZZ Top’s Mescalero. Texas guitar through rotary speaker effect, the works.
Needle & Spoon — Savoy Brown cover
Hump Blues — slide blues noise on personal disgrace having to do with a host of very dull fools, overdue bills, venereal disease and commensurate loss of lady friend
The Pennsy Redneck — dobro instrumental
Ace of Spades — Link Wray & the Wraymen cover
The China Shuffle — another ZZ Top rip, specifically the guitar sequencer programming which imitates their style from Eliminator on.
Had No Pills — “Did you see the man on TV?/He asked why you had flopped.” Viagra commercial blues, you had no pills, no stiffen pills. Melancholy harmonica because something’s drooping.
DeCulo — The Ass, instrumental
That’s Logistics
Act Naturally
Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein
Highway Patrol
Central Park Boogie — big stomping riff based on Savoy Brown stuff you probably have never heard.
A Moment from ‘Brown Shoes’ — If you’re a Mothers of
Invention fan, you’ll recognize it.
Fiscal Discipline Rock
Heevahava Boogie — a Pennsylvania Dutchman welcomes “Mr. Keith Emerson”
If you listen to the lyrics you’ll get why some old guys sipping margaritas enjoyed it. It’s all about booze, tasteless jokes, poon and various failures. Never been a big fan of inspirational tales and Norman Vincent Peale-isms embedded in rock and roll.
Since it’s meant as an album and I despise iKit, ideally to be burned to a compact disc. Real old school. Or play it as mp3’s on whatever fancy thing you have, just don’t tell me.
