Eclectic Company: A Conversation With Late Bloomer Promoter and Manager Houston Jones

“I always had a fantasy of being in the music business,” Lake Charles native Houston Jones admitted. “The seeds were planted when my parents took me to see Elvis Presley, Sonny and Cher and the Doobie Brothers, back in the 1970s, where I developed a taste for live music. Then, when I was living in New York, I made a half-hearted effort to get a job with Steve Gottleib, who recorded TV theme song records. But then I got married and had kids, and I had to do more to take care of things than hang around with a bunch of starving artists. So I just back-burnered the whole idea.”

Jones went on to work in the financial industry, but the music biz dream kept simmering in the background. Then a few years ago, Jones helped Ponyfest – the arts and music festival and organization started by a group of young Lake area artists – with fundraising. “Then the second year,” Jones explained, “the guy who’d booked the bands left. I was more than willing to take over that job, because it fulfilled that childhood fantasy to get into music promotion. I was the chief talent buyer for Ponyfest in 2008, which we expanded to a two-and-a-half day event. I think that year we tried to grow it too big too fast. We didn’t have the marketing we needed to make it a big event.” Jones had thought that if Ponyfest brought in top-notch bands in various musical genres, such as Cajun, funk, country rock, alternative, and others, people would come out to the event spurred on by the music alone. “They didn’t come,” Jones said, “and that was discouraging. Now I’m a little smarter about this.” They decided to skip festival year 2009, and concentrate on getting their organization together. Jones believes they’ll have a better plan and a better festival in 2010.

The improved festival will be run by a new 501(c)(3) non-profit that was started by several of the remaining Ponyfest supporters – Jones, Blaine Bourgeois, and Jeff Kudla, among them – and will have a new name, Sassafras, that was selected for its regional associations. “We wanted a catchy one-word name,” Jones explained, “something like Lollapalooza, or Bonnaroo, or Coachella, that has a connection to Southwest Louisiana. Sassafras is the principal spice in filé gumbo, so it has the local context we were looking for.” More importantly, Jones said, they’ve selected a new executive director, Blake Soto, “who’s a huge arts and music fan, a really good leader, and a universally well-liked young man, who’s got a lot of energy that he wants to use to make things happen in Lake Charles.”

One by-product of Jones’ involvement in Ponyfest was that he developed relationships with some of the bands he worked with on the event. “I was looking to hire Magnolia Sons, and found them in Atlanta recording their album and changing their name from Tuesday Debut. They were also changing their sound, softening it, making it rootsier, more Americana,” Jones remembered. “When they sent me a demo I absolutely fell in love with it. Oh, my god!” he remembers thinking at the time, “I couldn’t believe these guys were in Lake Charles! Of course we hired them and gave them a pretty good spot on Ponyfest, and as the event approached I got to know them a little better, especially lead singer William Ferguson.” Jones approached Ferguson about managing the band, and discovered that the band were about to ask him if he’d consider working with them. Jones is proud of what he accomplished with the band in less than a year before they parted ways, even though he wasn’t able to secure them a record deal. “I got them to where they’re playing from Austin to South Carolina, with a substantial fan base in the southeast,” Jones concluded. “I really learned everything I know about the business working for Magnolia Sons. There’re a lot of moving parts in it."

Another band that had played at Ponyfest and ended up with Jones as manager is the Louisiana megastar party and bar band Dash Rip Rock, who have been around for a quarter of a century. “People like [Dash Rip Rock guitarist/frontman, and Barbe High School graduate] Bill Davis have seen how the industry has changed in 25 years,” Jones told me. “When the band started up in 1984, records were on vinyl. Then there were CDs. Now it’s mp3s. Twenty-five years ago record labels had huge influence and importance, but as the Internet has grown, record labels have become less pertinent. Artists are making their own records, or signing distribution-only deals, so the traditional role of a record label is falling by the wayside. That said, it makes it a lot easier for young bands to do everything themselves with available technology. The negative side is that so many more bands are trying to get gigs, trying to sell CDs or downloadable mp3s. It’s different,” Jones concluded. “Not easier or harder than it was 25 years ago, just different.”

Dash Rip Rock’s power/punk trio has boasted numerous drummers and bass players over the years: They spawned Cowboy Mouth (founder member Fred LeBlanc was Dash’s second drummer) and helped mentor Louisiana-bred rock and alternative bands like Better Than Ezra. They’ve been hymned as popular darlings more times than they can count (most notably on MTV news, where they were lauded by host Kurt Loder for their deconstructed cover of “Delta Dawn,” circa 1990). But they’ve never really sustained a national profile.

“I’m trying to get them back to the level of prominence they were in in their heyday,” Jones said with confidence. “They’re still a high energy live band, as you can hear for yourself at Luna’s, Thursday night, December 3rd" (or visit on youtube or their www.dashriprock.net website). "And when we go back to SXSW,” Jones said, referring to the Austin music industry convention at which many careers are made or reborn, “we’ll get down to business.”