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    ALL SAP, NO CATTLE

    Lady Antebellum puts on a tired Houston Rodeo performance: Hot band fizzles

    Michael D. Clark
    Mar 12, 2011 | 5:04 am
    • Lady Antebellum on the stage at RodeoHouston Friday night.
      Photo by © Michelle Watson/CatchlightGroup.com
    • Lady Antebellum got the prime Friday night Rodeo slot, but did the performancemeasure up?
      Photo by © Michelle Watson/CatchlightGroup.com
    • Lady Antebellum's spent a long time on the road and it's starting to show.
      Photo by © Michelle Watson/CatchlightGroup.com
    • Lady Antebellum will say goodbye to the Rodeo crowd for another year.
      Photo by © Michelle Watson/CatchlightGroup.com

    Almost a year ago to the day, I kvetched in CultureMap about Lady Antebellum's appearance at RodeoHouston being a monumental missed opportunity. Last year, the harmonizing trio was the hottest act in country.

    Singles from its second album Need You Now were flying to No.1 upon release and awards from Grammy, the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music were being bestowed as if pre-ordained.

    The hitch at last year's rodeo was that Lady Antebellum was slotted on a Monday night. The dead zone of RodeoHouston no matter who is playing.

    RodeoHouston rectified that this year by allotting the Lady Antebellum trio — vocalists Charles Kelley and Hillary Scott and multi-instrumentalist Dave Haywood — with a plum Friday night slot in Reliant Stadium. It should have been ideal, but this year the group lacked something equally — if not more — important than a prime day of the week.

    They lacked momentum.

    Unlike Keith Urban and Janet Jackson who teased RodeoHouston audiences over the last week with sneak previews of tours that were still heading out to a wider audience later this year, Lady Antebellum brought the tired remains of a grueling year-plus tour in support of old album Need You Now to the rotating Rodeo disc.

    The wear and tear the road has taken on the band since last year's RodeoHouston performance was evident.

    Lady Antebellum's 13-song, 65 minute set included all seven of its hits singles (including four country radio No. 1's) over the last four years, but the delivery felt tired. Ironically, it was the non-hits (the songs Lady Antebellum has grown the least tired of performing) along with one preview song from a forthcoming album that carried this show.

    Opening with the 2008 first album hit "Lookin' For A Good Time," Lady Antebellum put its cross-gender country roots on display early only to swipe it away for most of the rest of the set. "Love This Pain" was interesting because it strayed so far away from country with an electric guitar solo by Slim Gambill. It was worthy of 1980s arena rockers. By contrast, weepers like "When You Got A Good Thing," an album track from Need You Now sounded like Kenny Loggins and Faith Hill getting together to do a super-sappy Disney movie anthem.

    It wasn't until the new ballad, "Just A Kiss" a sneak peek at Lady Antebellum's future, followed lesser known past non-hit string jams "Perfect Day" and "Stars Tonight" from Need You Now, that the singers and backing band clicked into place and gave the energetic performance Lady Antebellum spoiled us with over the last two years at the Rodeo.

    I don't blame the artists. They're doing what a country band on top is supposed to do by playing the hell out of their songs in as many places as possible while the iron is hot.

    The problem is the iron is now lukewarm.

    Perhaps it's time for their manager or a caring A&R representative at their record label, Capitol Nashville, to look at Lady Antebellum's road-worn faces and give them a much-earned vacation.

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    Art on the Prairie

    The roots of Lone Star art: William Reaves unearths the Texas modernistlandscape

    Steven Devadanam
    Mar 31, 2011 | 4:40 pm
    • Richard Stout, "Evenings Fall," 1967
    • David Adickes, "Three Men on a Beach," 1953
    • Jack Boynton, "Inland Lights," 1956
    • Emma Richardson Cherry, "Southern Morning," c. 1930

    This month's editorial series, True Grit: Houston Style, has sought to answer to what extent Houston embraces its Texas roots. To investigate how Houston artists have come to terms with their state's landscape, we went to William Reaves Fine Art, a gallery whose mission is to define modernism in Texas.

    "We opened the gallery to convey a story about the evolution of modernism in our state," says the gallery's owner, William Reaves. He pinpoints Houston as the "birthplace" of Texas modernism for the community's willingness to display abstract works in museums and support award-winning artists as early as the 1930s. Artist-teachers like Emma Richardson Cherry and Ella McNeil Davidson had means to travel internationally and cultivated a generation of informed local artists like Robert Preusser and Frank Dolejska in the 1920s and '30s via institutions like the Art League and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

    Reaves notes that much ink has been spilt chronicling the first half of the 20th century in Texas art, but it was not until after World War II that the region received the necessary influx of knowledgeable artists to create an enduring community. Several local artists who stayed in Europe after the war brought back global influences. Paris was briefly home to a creative Texan expat culture, inculcating such minds as Herb Meers and David Adickes, who studied under the lionized Cubist painter Fernand Léger.

    "This sort of French-looking, Texas cubist school that they created when they returned was very different from the bluebonnets people were used to seeing," says Reaves.

    As the 1950s progressed, Houston became a "hotbed" for non-representational art, led by figures like Jack Boynton and Richard Stout (whose work from the era will be on view in an exhibition opening Friday). "A lot of this stuff from the '50s is new again because it's been kind of squirreled away in closets for awhile," says Reaves. "It comes off as fresh because there's a kinship with contemporary artists."

    No doubt that international currents increasingly flowed into the local art mix, but did Houston artists ever completely turn their back on the Texas landscape?

    "My impression is that it's a blend," says the gallery owner, citing Richard Stout as an example of an artist who has studied under other masters and blended that style with an impression of the state. Explains Reaves,

     

    He paints in an expressionist style and has been informed by a lot of different artists over time. In addition, he was an art professor at UH for 25 years, so he's very aware of what's going on internationally. But Richard is also from Beaumont and his work almost always sees a landscape influence — a lot of coastal plains and rich atmosphere. Yet it is painted in a way that is informed by a lot of important artists from the New York School."

    Similarly, Boynton and McKie Trotter presented work at New York galleries, yet their respective reductive landscapes and abstract expressionist works evince a horizon line evocative of the wide skies and flatness of Texas.

    In truth, the link between Houston artists and their Texas roots is not a black-and-white issue. But to some extent, the answer is embedded in the cadre of works on view at William Reaves Fine Art. More than simply display and distribute artworks, the gallery presents curated thematic exhibitions that are accompanied by robust physical and online catalogues derived from research conducted at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Hirsch Library.

    "The gestalt of what we're trying to do," says Reaves, "is trace a history of Texas art that may have been overlooked, but at its zenith, there's this beautiful, vital modernism."

     The exhibitions Lone Star Modernism: A Celebration of Mid-Century Texas Art and Richard Stout: The Early Years open Friday, with a reception April 9, 5 - 8 p.m. A gallery talk will be held April 30 from 2 - 4 p.m. Both exhibitions are on view through May 7.

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