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It was 40 years ago today...

"Get Back" into both Houston and London's past today when the same band that performed the Beatles' White Album front-to-back last November recreates the Fab Four's famous January 1969 Apple Records rooftop performance at noon on top of the International Coffee Building, the downtown structure (near Spaghetti Warehouse) that once housed legendary psychedelic club Love Street Light Circus.

Free admission, but donations will go to various children's charities.

Noon, International Coffee Building, Allen's Landing (Fannin and Buffalo Bayou).

The City of Conroe has announced the program for its first annual Texas Independence Day Music Festival and Chili Cook-off on March 7.

The musical lineup:

When Neil Diamond hit Houston last October, he told us in the crowd that the proceeds from that night's merchandise sales were going into a Hurricane Ike relief fund. He had traveled around our area with Mayor Bill White and seen the destruction and utter insanity that the hurricane had brought us, and he felt compelled to help out.

Diamond spoke that night of seeing people devastated and living in trailers and cars due to all the damage, especially out off Oak Island. Those folks haven't been able to get back on their feet as easy as the rest of Houston. He sounded like he was deeply moved by the tragedy and did make good on his promise of giving back to us that night, even going so far as matching the merch sales with an amount out of his pocket. That night he ended up donating almost 200 grand to Houston relief.

What we didn't realize at the time was that he intended to do this for every other tour date afterwards, totaling almost 30 more dates on his itinerary, going into 2009. So every show he has rocked since then, and we do mean rock, has been helping our fellow Houstonians through T-shirt and record sales.

Photos by Massa Mohawk

The sweetest revenge for eight years of failed policies came when the helicopter door opened. To watch former president George W. Bush walk to that helicopter and wave bye to the world had to be the most memorable moment of the entire inauguration. Who would have thought that Bush could have stolen the show without saying anything?

The large crowd applauded and erupted in excitement when they saw him boarding his departure helicopter. Everyone in the viewing party stood up and waved at the screen like Bush could see through the projector screen. I tried to hold my smile because I didn't want to look too happy to see him stripped of his presidency but even I couldn't hide it. Out with the old, in with the new.

Los Campesinos!
We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed (Arts & Crafts)
www.loscampesinos.com

We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is a difficult album to wrap your head around.

On the one hand, Los Campesinos!' two lead vocalists Gareth and Aleksandra Campesinos have syrupy and consistently beautiful voices--at the same time innocent and tragic. Their voices are strong enough to carry the songs to danceable places full of an infectiousness not many bands can harness.

But on the other hand, the songs on We Are Beautiful are thematically dark, and shouldn't engender this kind of happiness. It's not often, I would imagine, that one might find himself in the mood to shake it when thinking about crying on the floor of a strip club after five years of horrible breakups, surrounded by the literal peeled off scabs that those breakups symbolize.

With Titus Andronicus, 9 p.m. tonight at Walter's on Washington, 4215 Washington, 713-862-2513 or www.4215washington.com.

The early '80s were an interesting time in the career of Paul Simon. The past glories of hits with Simon & Garfunkel - along with his sizable solo charting - were behind. And he had yet to reinvent himself as a world music maven with 1986's fine Graceland. His 1980 album One-Trick Pony had yielded a hit with "Late in the Evening," but the semi-autobiographical film of the same name, in which Simon showcased his acting chops, was widely panned.

So this 1980 concert at Philadelphia's Tower Theater (which has already been previously released on DVD) finds Paul at the precipice. And musically, it was a good, loose place to be.

There's an interesting supplement in the new issue of Texas Monthly, the one with all-but-declared gubernatorial candidate Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison on the cover. It's a 32-page mini-mag called Texas Bound for Music, and appears to be TM's attempt at... well, it's not really clear exactly what the magazine is trying to accomplish here.

It's always irked Rocks Off that for a publication that professes to love Texas so much, and how central music is to the state's cultural identity, the Monthly is apparently content to confine its music coverage to (excepting longer features) a single page of record reviews in the front of the book and maybe a Q&A or two in the event-listing section. Especially with writers and editors such as John Morthland and Michael Hall at its disposal. So if this is TM's way of expanding its music coverage, more power to 'em. It just picked a really strange way to do it.

I will be the first to admit that when it comes to music, I get misty at points. I guess it's the sentiment of a song, if it lines up with something that I could never intimate to someone else. Love, death, remorse, all the biggies that get that lacrimal gland going in our everyday lives. I have even frequently wondered if it's some evil recipe in the chords and sounds that makes me turn into a bald and tattooed mass of nerves.

Whenever a song makes me tear up, I get all angry at the artist. Like they sat in a studio and said, "Fuck that dude! Let's write a song that makes him cry in traffic like a bitch!"

When Justin Townes Earle recorded "Mama's Eyes," the first track released of March's Midnight at the Movies, he probably added "And let me make damn sure it reminds him of his spotty relationship with his dad and touches on the fact that he looks like his mom, but with a beard!"

The best thing about digging around thrift-store CD bins is discovering someone else's cast-offs. The records that people got sick of, or had absolutely no regard for how awesome it could be. Months back, a wife seemingly threw out her husband's entire punk-rock collection during routine housecleaning, and I found a trove of Sex Pistols bootleg discs and an inordinate amount of mid-'80s TVT Records releases. It was a fun and brooding ride back home.

This past week, I discovered The Move, the late-'60s British mod-rockers who never quite made it here, but whose influence is still interwoven with all who came after. At the Value Village off 19th Street in the Heights, I found a three-disc anthology chronicling the band's early garage singles up to the addition of guitarist and piano man Jeff Lynne, who would take hold of the band and steer them into becoming Electric Light Orchestra. The rest is freaky, operatic, sound-effects laden pop history.

Photos by Massa Mohawk

The inauguration events started early. The people that left the hotel late last night were smart. They knew it would be too packed and too crowded. The police were blocking off all of the entrances to where the inauguration of the first black president would be held.

My friend who used to play in the NBA emailed me telling me that he had a good spot reserved for me if I could just make it there. I couldn't. Also, it seems that the weather was a lot colder than the night before. I could feel myself getting sick.

I didn't want to miss any part of Barack Obama's speech, so I dipped into a sports bar to watch the action on a projector screen that stretched the height and length of an entire wall. I have never seen people more proud. People cheered, laughed, and almost cried during the inauguration.