Together again

Nobody's looking past this one gig, but the late, lamented Cartwrights--a virtual family tree of local bands past comprising Barry Kooda (Nervebreakers, Yeah Yeah Yeah), Alan Wooley (Killbilly), Kim Herriage (Feet First), Donny Ray Ford, and Richie Vasquez--will reassemble to open for the Skeletons' Hightone Record-label release party at the Sons of Hermann Hall. The shindig, celebrating the Skeletons' latest album, Nothing to Lose, will be held on Saturday, May 17. The Cartwrights were together a little over a year and had released one excellent album, Ponderosa Fabuloso, and had another in the can when internal tensions caused the group to splinter. Kooda and Ford went on with their other band, the Mutineers, and the remaining band members followed suit. Mike Snider--he who books the best in Texas music into the Sons and other venues--started working on the reunion a few weeks ago.

"Mike called me, and I said sure, if the other guys said yes," Ford--who is also in Liberty Valance and the Widowmakers--reports. "Enough time has passed where there aren't any hard feelings, and I thought it'd be fun."

"Hell no, I ain't playing with those motherfuckers!" Barry Kooda spat into the phone before bursting into laughter. "But yeah, Mike called me, too, and I said that if he could get everybody together, I was in. You know, while there are differences about the business stuff between me and Alan that'll probably never go away, all of us still talk, and I loved being in the Cartwrights; I think they're great."

There was a series of serendipities that conspired to make the reunion happen. Wooley--the one most observers had predicted would probably say no, and currently in Frankly Scarlet--said yes. Herriage, currently with the Lucky Pierres, another steadily gigging band around town, had some time off owing to the marriage of Pierres' Michelle Gonzalez and Frank Pittenger. Vasquez, who drums for Houstonian Jesse Dayton, just happened to be in Dallas that night down the street at the Dark Room, and it seemed like there was a green light all the way around; the deal was done.

"People are always saying that you can't step back," Kooda says. "But I like stepping back to the Cartwrights, because it's like we didn't finish. The truth is that I enjoyed being with those guys, and Alan's one of my favorite people to harmonize with. I think I liked practicing with 'em--just sitting around laughing--more than playing with 'em."

"They're a great bunch of guys, and they really press you to be at your best," says Herriage, who agrees with Kooda's preference for practice. "When you play live, it's easy to let things--like the crowd, the sound, the other acts--affect what kind of a time you have. When you're practicing, it's just you." As far as the group's plans after May 17, no one's ruling anything out--or in. The major factor, in Ford's words, will be "how much fun we have that night. Whatever we end up doing, that's a good way to start."

First anniversary
Johnny Reno got an interesting--and unwanted--present, just in time for his April 24 album-release party at the Red Jacket, incidentally marking one year of Thursdays performing his smooth cocktail jazz with backing group the Lounge Kings at the swanky nightspot. Our copy of Swinging and Singing--featuring a sharkskin-suited Reno and his tenor sax on the cover--opens up with a most un-loungey blast of guitar noise that sounds like an airplane taking off. Oh, well, a surprising new direction for Mr. Reno, perhaps? Even the most unengaged listener, however, can't help but notice that by the disc's third cut, nary a sax has been heard, and the overall sound is less sharkskin and more black-T-shirt-and-nose-ring.

"Rrrrrgghh" was the reaction from someone within the Reno organization who prefers to remain nameless. "We've had one other report of this so far, but who knows how many others are out there that haven't been listened to?" The album's manufacturer--Disctronics, of Plano--has assured Reno that this was just a case of some other pre-recorded discs being in the pipeline that accidentally got identified as his, but a sense of vexation still lingers. In the meantime, the party for the release of the album that sounds like Reno will start at 8 p.m., when the doors of the Red Jacket open.

Scene, heard
Gloriously trashy drunk-rockers Buick MacKane--the red-headed stepchild of the many bands with which Alejandro Escovedo blows off creative steam--will be journeying up from Austin for a Friday, April 25, gig at Club Dada. It'll be interesting to see how Escovedo's new sobriety--brought on by a bout of hepatitis contracted after a family trip to Mexico--will affect the raucous dynamics of the band, but catch them in any case...Breadbox's record-release party will be May 1 at the Last Beat Record Store...

Rapper Ice T--who played a mutant kangaroo in the less-than-pedestrian movie Tank Girl--has announced the formation of a "pay-per-view extravaganza" called Ice T's Extreme Babes, which will feature seven of the aforementioned "extreme babes" shedding all of their clothes. There will also be an Ice T website, which will offer the following features: interactive live sex, a "strip on demand" area, a "sin-sational" Fantasy Revue, an adult newsstand, a section for personal ads, erotic games, and a "huge collection" of erotic photos. One can only assume that one of the copulating couples in the live-sex section will be Ice T doing the nasty with what remains of his career...