Festivals Out Your Ass!, Pt. 2: Axiom, Arise and Walk the Earth Once More…

Okay, so this one’s Pt. 2, but it’s technically Pt. 1 of this coming weekend, which is gonna be absolutely insane:

Fri.-Sat., October 12-13 — The Axiom 20th Anniversary Party/Reunion @ Fitzgerald’s
Yep, posted about this one before, but now’s the time, folks, so brace yourselves: The Axiom is officially lurching back to life for two nights, albeit in a fairly different location. The kind folks at Fitzgerald’s are giving over both floors of the place to a host of old-school Axiom alumni for both nights, and the lineup’s pretty damn incredible.

Let’s see… on Friday night they’ve got one of the best damn bands ever to come out of Houston (and, sadly, one that never managed to break beyond the city’s boundaries), Sprawl, headlining the show, along with fellow local icons de Schmog, Blunt, & Fleshmop. I can remember seeing all those folks back in the day when I was a wee shrub of a college student (Sprawl were all or mostly Rice kids; even after graduating, they played somewhere on campus every once in a while), and I vividly recall being either blown away by how great they were or by how freakin’ bizarre they were (and sometimes both).

I’m less familiar with the other folks on the bill — never caught Toho Ehio, U.Y.U.S., Bad Samaritans, or Grindin’ Teeth when they were around the first time, and I know nada about Cave Reverend, Anarchitex, or David Von Ohlerking and The Awful Truth except as names somebody (Justin, maybe?) scribbled on the great Houston band family tree once upon a time.

Saturday, Night #2, is equally cool, with the ever-badass Joint Chiefs, Sad Pygmy (whose Sometimes Nightmares 7″, incidentally, was the first locally-released bit of music I ever bought, & the start of many long afternoons spent sifting through SoundEx’s 7″ bins), & Turmoil in the Toybox as the ones I know fairly well. I’ve heard of the rest, though, including Academy Black (which will include Michael Haaga of dead horse/Plus and Minus Show fame for the evening), Cinco Dudes, Bayou Pigs, Uncle Charlie of Dresden 45, the aforementioned Cave Reverend, Backyard Epics, & Jimmy Bradshaw of Squat Thrust.

Oof. Scanning back over the list, it’s apparent that this is gonna be quite a (noisy/raggedy/wild/dangerous) party. And hey, it’s pretty damn cheap, considering that a large chunk of these bands/people had to be flown in from elsewhere — $12 for a one-day pass, $20 for both days. To make things even better, the whole shindig’s a benefit for the Musicians Benevolent Society of Houston, which is an extremely worthy cause, at least to me.

A Side Note: I got sent a very cool link last week, for a blog called Chronological Snobbery, where Ransom, a self-described “thirty-something suffering from nostalgia,” drags us all back kicking and shrieking to 1992 and the Infected: The Twelve From Texas comp on Sound Virus. Immediate reaction? “Holy shit, I’d completely forgotten about that damn album!” Secondary reaction? “Where the hell did all these people go?”

Seriously, that disc came out right when I was making my own tentative inroads into music in H-town, dragging skeptical college friends out to Emo’s or Goat’s Head Soup or The Abyss/Vatican or The Axiom to check out some band or another, always afraid I’d come back out & find my crappy little Toyota Tercel stripped to the frame. Montrose and Shepherd were rough places, downright scary to a relative kid like me, and Houston as a whole seemed like this grimy, dark, sorta illicit place to live. No one with money wanted to live in the city itself — a far cry from today — so things were ridiculously cheap. Nobody liked Houston, and that in itself was part of the city’s charm.

And Infected served pretty well as the soundtrack to all that. Being broke 95% of the time, I had to settle for listening to/cringing at the copy we had at KTRU at the time, in the mysterious “Local” bin. All the bands on there were weird as shit, but they honest-to-God didn’t care. They weren’t playing to make it on the radio, but because they just wanted to make music, which is something I love about the Houston scene to this day. It’s a damn shame they never got the recognition they deserved, but what the hey — at least people love these bands enough to bring some of ’em back to town for one last(?) hurrah…

(Hey, Ransom — thanks for the link, eh? Good shit…)