Five Across the Eyes - the Newest Happy Hour Album

The newest Happy Hour CD Five Across the Eyes is like nothing you’ve ever heard on MTV, MUN2 or any other slick corporate advertisement machine that would rather sell iPods and Pumas than play music.

You know from the sound that no one in the band is trying to be anything but a true musician in the most blue-collar sense, like they really hate anyone who considers themselves a true musician.
If someone who considered himself a true musician said the wrong thing at a show, it could get ugly, like maybe a guitar neck to the teeth. The band is a gang, sort of, but not necessarily criminal. Some members are tougher than others, and maybe one or two would even rather avoid violence. But they’ll stick up for each other to the end. It’s something they care enough to sing about. These aren’t 18 year-old punk rockers whose parents bought them a Washburn guitar and a JBL PA system for Christmas. They aren’t creating memories in a phase of their lives that someday they might cherish. This is it, the end of the line.
With all but one of the five members past 30 years old, it might never get any better than the infrequent shows at second rate RGV bars and clubs where they don’t get paid then pool their money for a case of Busch beer to guzzle at an after party. Now and then they will book an out-of-town gig that, if the right person turns up in the crowd, might someday lead to something. But that’s probably a long shot and they seem to know it. You could compare Happy Hour to a few punk or metal bands that have so to speak made it. But any comparison would be off the mark, even if you said they’re part NOFX and part Operation Ivy, with streaks of Black Sabbath and Green Day — mainly because their singer Javi has a true voice, unique like Kurt Cobain’s was … unique and singular, too, like Frank Sinatra, or Martin Luther King. His voice comes from somewhere that isn’t himself, from some inspired spot of mind that gives life to art. The guitar work is strangely organic yet harshly and densely constructed, with drums that cleanly pop in an almost military precision and a melodic bass line that weaves beneath the Mesa Boogie’s dissonant crunch like a dangerous ocean riptide. In short, Happy Hour is enigmatic — crafting music that’s mean-spirited and hopeful at the same time, like a Broadway musical performed in a war zone.

BIG SCENE, FEW SINGLE 20-SOMETHINGS
Happy Hour isn’t playing at the Life-Liberty-Rock & Roll festival, but some of its band members are. Happy Hour was sort of an offshoot project of a band called Bread 8, the fest’s headlining act. (It’s a joke, say the name Bread 8 in Spanish to get it.)
But Happy Hour is emblematic of the persistence and talent that can be found in the local punk and metal music scene, where some 300 bands are peppered from Brownsville to Mission. Most musicians are on the younger side. But a solid representation are older, seasoned, and well-practiced veterans of a scene that few have been watching. There’s no huge percentage of the RGV’s population in their early 20s and 30s, say like in Austin, to feed a music scene this big with the proper single, fun-loving fans and hangers-on. There are few bars that even tolerate local acts, and the ones that do are generally so far at the edge of mainstream culture that you’re as likely to find a Vietnam Vet drinking down his monthly disability check there as a punk rocker with a Mohawk.

The most dedicated venue for this music is in Brownsville, at a place called Chapa’s Bar The Pit on cantina row. Pop in at any of the bars that surround Chapa’s and you’ll hear nothing but pure Norteño music, in dark, dingy dives that harbor undocumented prostitutes and Tejano drug pushers. Other than that the RGV has no truly dedicated venue for this scene, though temporary and early homes were found at Edinburg’s Trenton Point event hall, which hosted punk shows in rotation with quinceañeras and weddings.
Also in Brownsville there used to be a place called Joe Shull’s New Rising Sun, which sold cold, bottled beer in a shack filled with blacklights and 70s rock posters. There have been other venues in Harlingen and McAllen that have seen a brief clustering of activity from homegrown original acts, like 10th Street’s wall-carpeted Cypress Club before it underwent its trendy remodeling. “It’s always like a weird setting. One time it was an ice cream shop, a burrito restaurant. It’s just a place to play … any place that would accept the music,” said Evana Vleck, co-founder of the South Texas Underground Music Festival, a punk rock fest in the upper Valley that lasted 4 years and moved from a ranch to a coffee shop to a county park. Even though STUMF could bring in as much as $10,000 during its two days of music, it died because there was never an affordable venue with the necessary stages and sound system, she said, a problem that local bands still constantly battle.

INSECTICIDE TO ROCK WITH
Norbie Gomez, 50, owns a pest control service in south McAllen. He’s a hard worker, clocking in 12 hour days then rushing back to his downtown office which doubles as a recording studio.
He’s helped dozens of bands cut tracks, some of which have then gone on to further success, like the 13th Victim, a McAllen band that moved to Austin a few years ago then shuffled members and signed with King Fing’r Records. Victim is a pretty big deal right now, packing shows with their punk/hardcore assault and planning for an upcoming statewide tour.

Though local musicians often make their way to Austin in search of a bigger scene, and sometimes find a niche with an Austin-born band, Victim is unique because the members and the name started here. Norbie recorded Victim’s freshman CD for free, like he will for any band he thinks deserves a shot. He’s known among local musicians as the Godfather of Punk. He has five children, funding two through college and one through a Masters program. His two youngest, boys, are musicians, one playing the trumpet in high school and the other playing bass in local bands, including Norbie’s own Fuel Injected Norbies, a cover band boasting an album’s worth of original cuts and hundreds of renditions spanning Led Zeppelin, Credence, and Pearl Jam. Norbie treats local musicians much the way he treats his own kids. If a band needs T-Shirts, he’ll find a way to get them printed. CD covers? Norbie’s got the fix. In fact his pest control office has a whole wall dedicated to storing T-Shirts of bands that faded away or have temporarily stopped playing — hanging over desks littered with invoices, bills and pest control order forms. Norbie said that he’s coordinating this weekend’s festival because he’s seen too many bands taken advantage of, filling bars that will host them on otherwise slow nights but then not getting paid.

When there’s a festival or a battle of the bands, the groups have to pay their own way, putting money into the pockets of the promoters and getting no real exposure. “Here’s the problem is that a lot of these so called promoters won’t even write a press release about their shows. They don’t care about the bands,” Norbie said. The 24 bands lined up for the Life-Liberty-Rock & Roll festival will be getting paid, no matter what’s brought in at the gate. With a line-up including Driver 23, Methmare Motorcade, the december drive, Houston’s Vatos Locos, Sunglasses and Mushrooms, Jake Cortez and Abyss (maybe the longest-standing RGV-born metal act in existence) this Life-Liberty-Rock & Roll festival offers a good peek at the range and quality of music that can be found on local soil. Don’t expect anything fancy. It’s all about music that isn’t meant to get you where you’re going, but to make you proud of where you are.