Since I've started trying to bring the little digital camera I got for Christmas to more shows lately, I've been feeling a bit nostalgic for the Days of Yore here in Houston's murky-yet-vibrant scene. There was a time when I'd bring my trusty Pentax to every damn show -- esp. the ones we played -- and try to get pictures of fellow H-town musicians doing their thing for, well, pretty much nobody but other H-town musicians.

They were strange times, but fun. And more and more lately I feel like our big-little scene's gone back to that time again; there are a ton of great bands, after somewhat of a dry spell with only a handful of brave stalwarts soldiering on through (Bring Back The Guns, the Guilloteens, etc.), and the people seem more tightly connected than they were before, kinda like what I remember of my own band days. We played with friends, for the most part, or people who became friends, and luckily, most of our friends were much better musicians/songwriters than we were. We didn't give a crap who came, but just got on a stage, plugged in, and played for the hell of it. Again, Now feels a lot like Then, at least to me.

Anyway, in the pre-moving frenzy, I stumbled across an old photo album where I'd fortuitously stashed a bunch of my attempts at rock photog-dom, pictures of such venerable bands as Pop Deflation, the aforementioned Fatal Flying Guilloteens, Ultramagg, & (I think) Inbred Whiteboy, heroes all. Seeing as these were all from the pre-digital camera-happy past, I had to scan all the damn things in, but looking at 'em now, I think it was worth it. Here're a few of my favorites:

Pop Deflation @ The Oven
(And yes, that's Melissa Lonchambon of Panic in Detroit/Sharks and Sailors fame sitting on the floor.)

Fatal Flying Guilloteens @ The Oven
(Pre-dual vocalists, pre-John Adams, and pre-McManus leaving town for the first time, even.)

Junior Varsity @ ClubSafeParking
(Holy shit, I miss JV.)

Ultramagg @ The Mausoleum
(Glad to know these guys are still around...)

Charlie (The Suspects/The Magnetic IV) @ Rudyard's
(The picture honestly doesn't capture the full awesomeness of this tattoo. The colors were amazing. I think he had the other arm done w/something like this, too...)

The Lonely Guys @ Mary Jane's
(Hey, Peter -- remember this one? You were damn entertaining that night...heh. I smell blackmail material...)

So, there you go -- if you care to check out all of 'em, there're online here and open to all. I've also been finding & slapping up some previously-digitized stuff from the old SCR print 'zine, so some of the pics may look familiar to readers of the actual paper version of this thing. I'm hoping to add some more soon, but my other photo albums are already packed away & stored in a closet at the in-laws' house, waiting to be (maybe) unpacked at the new place, so further scanning will have to wait 'til then.

Oh, and the astute viewers of this site might've noticed a new little doohickey over there on the right -- under Our Pics, I've finally got a Flickr badge running, cycling through all the SCR-/band-related pics currently in my Flickr account. This "Web" thing's turned out to be pretty neato...

RE: Moving: Since I hinted at it above, I might as well clarify -- yep, we're moving. Not the e-zine, mind you (the P.O. Box will stay the same), but my actual home. I feel compelled to mention, btw, that moving has got to be one of the most terrifying/frustrating experiences known to man. We just sold our current house & bought another, so now we have to figure out how to pack and move our ridiculously large amount of shit (we're both packrats, despite my wife's protestations that she's not), not to mention make it fit in the new space. Gah. This is why it's taken us five years longer to get 'round to doing this than we'd originally planned...

Labels: Admin Stuff, Cool Web Junk, Musical Crap, Random Rambling, Things To See

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