Band Suicide

This indirect method didn't work with The Plus and Minus Show. Haaga never could sell the guys on the concept that they were a band. "I was spoiled because [dead horse] was relatively successful -- it proved worthwhile to stay together and do things," he says. "Ultimately I guess we didn't grow in the same direction, but for a good five or six years we were all on the same page. We enjoyed getting together and rehearsing. We didn't really care that we were poor; we just enjoyed hanging out and playing video games before you practiced, and then you rehearsed for four hours. We had a really good time together."

Haaga is now in his mid-thirties, and most of his new band was about a decade younger. He believes that life has gotten somehow harder for everybody since the dead horse days. "There's less hours in the day for everybody," he says. But he also believes that this generation of rock musicians approaches their careers fundamentally differently than his did. "Now there's this whole mind-set where you have to go straight from rags to riches. Now people just really want to get famous," he says. "The camaraderie of a band, the idea of a unit, just seems to be gone."

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Ramon Medina, the guitarist in the excellent though damn-near-intentionally obscure psych-rock band Linus Pauling Quartet, spoke for many of Houston's best bands when he sent me the following e-mail: "Musicians [in Houston] don't make music because it's popular, it will sell, or anything more than it is fun to make music. Some people play soccer, some write books, others simply make music. No great mystery -- it's just fun and rewarding, even if everyone hates your music. That's why Houston will never get anywhere in any traditional sense. Our vision of success isn't to be the next U2 or whatnot; we simply want to make good music and have fun doing it."

And while you get the impression that Haaga would indeed like to be the next U2, he refuses to brand The Plus and Minus Show a failure, even though he has pretty much moved on from the record. (Instead of resuscitating The Plus and Minus Show with a new band, he's now spending a lot of his free time archiving dead horse recordings, articles, photos and band paperwork.) "Coming out of a total metal background, I had a lot of fear in putting that record out. It wasn't really that people were gonna harm me, but that people wouldn't accept it, or that it just wouldn't be good. And it came out perfectly good. So in a lot of ways, it was the biggest success and the biggest relief and the biggest joy I ever had -- not being in Superjoint Ritual or opening for Lynyrd Skynyrd or having my band's T-shirts on MTV. I'd been wanting to do that record since I was 16 or 17," Haaga says.

Maybe it's just sour grapes on the part of Haaga and Medina. Or maybe our scene really is purer than most. In Los Angeles, Bunch saw plenty of rock musicians with MTV dreams, and expounding on them is one of his pet rants. "From the '60s through the '80s, rock stars were rock stars, sports stars were sports stars, movie stars were movie stars, and models were models. They didn't mingle. Every now and then you would see Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper hanging out with Bob Dylan, but there wasn't this nonstop Dennis Rodman/supermodel/televised superparty," he says. "A lot of musicians just want to know, 'What's the quickest way I can get invited to that big party? Am I gonna spend ten or 12 years in my bedroom with my guitar and my pen, writing and writing until I get great? Or am I gonna take 18 months' worth of guitar lessons, get a cool haircut and then talk a major label into giving me a couple of million dollars so I can jump around and look cute?' "

Virtually no Houston musicians are in that category, and at first that aspect of the local scene charmed Bunch. "All the bands that I've seen here have this real thirst, fire and passion to create," he says. Ultimately, though, he has gotten a little frustrated with it. "The trick is this: How can you get those people who play for the sake of it to get some of the motivation and the business understanding of the shallow people?"

Well, if Medina's right and if records as good as Haaga's can still stiff here, we will probably never know the answer to that question. After all, it seems that most of the Houston-born musicians with any brains or business acumen or driving ambition head out for Austin or Los Angeles or New York or San Francisco as soon as they can, which leaves us with only the (take your pick) dumbest, craziest or most apathetic players. Luckily, neither calculating intelligence nor sanity nor drive is directly related to musical talent. You can hear the proof of that in a dozen bars and clubs in every corner of this city every weekend night. Perhaps the best thing to do is just to live in those moments. After all, we are destroyed only when we expect there to be more than there is.