That the name of Jim Simmon — whose tragic and mysterious death in the aftermath of Harvey was announced four years ago -- is not known far and wide breaks my heart as much as the fact that quite a few great musicians who live here are utterly unknown, for no reason other than they chose not to leave Houston.
You can't quantify great music or journalism or writing. It has to be validated by someone with power, and little of our great writing or music is validated by anyone with power, because few people with power, in the grand scheme of things, ever think about us, here in the so-called armpit of Texas.
We are alone. And we should celebrate our greats whether or not they are celebrated by New York, LA, or Austin.
Back when I first started reading newspapers, there was only one thing about the 1980s Chronicle that I thought it had over the Post, and that was Mike Royko, the Chicago opinion columnist. Royko was not particularly liberal nor conservative in his takes -- he was just preternaturally *right* on pretty much anything he wrote about, and he could be right without being preachy. He was crusty yet kind, proud but humble, funny but serious...He was the best.
Jim Simmon was the Mike Royko of Houston. I remember being electrified reading one of his last columns for the Press, shortly before New Times canned him. I had just returned to Houston from about a decade away from this place and I was just blown away. He just flat smoked any and all of the writers at Nashville's alt-weekly, and also the columnists at the Chron. My arch-conservative grandfather Moe Taylor thought the world of him too -- in fact, I think he handed me that copy of the Press and told me to read that column immediately.
And then he was gone from the Press, and I wondered whatever happened to him...The Internet happened, the blogosphere boiled up from its depths, and eventually I found this strange blog called Slampo's Place — mercifully, still intact. It covered everything -- city hall, Houston as place, sports, Gulf Coast life and culture and history, local media criticism with authority, accuracy and real style, ranging all the way to elegiacal memoir.
Who was this guy?
This mysterious Slampo thought Discovery Green should have been named after Lightnin' Hopkins instead.
As he wrote:
"A park is for relaxation and recreation, two of the enduring themes of Hopkins' prodigious recording career, whether he was singing about throwing dice or watching the ponies run or getting drunk last night and the night before or traveling to Louisiana to acquire a mojo hand that would mess up a woman's mind."
This mysterious Slampo put me on a quixotic quest to find and describe the Houston accent, or dialect, if one or both of those still exists or ever did to begin with. On seeing old footage of Marvin ZIndler speaking to people at crime scenes in 1960s Houston, and hearing their distinctively Southern accents, Slampo put forth these questions:
*But is/was that really a distinctive Houston accent? (This isn’t a rhetorical question-- we’re curious.) What we mean is, were the pronunciations, inflections and cadences peculiar to Houston, in a way that if you were in New York or Boston and heard them you could ask the speaker “You’re from Houston, right?” and be assured of an affirmative answer, as opposed to the broader and more obvious “You’re from Texas, right?” or the even broader and more obvious “You’re from the South ...?” The way we can always immediately peg a native New Orleanian, white or black, even the ones with Ivy League educations like the writers Walter Isaacson or Nick Lemann. The way Ted Kennedy’s “Mannah of Speaking,” as the Times put it last weekend, marked him as the quintessential Boston-Irish pol (albiet one with prep school and Harvard educations).*
In other posts he made a convincing case that reclusive author Thomas Pynchon had once lived in Houston, exposed the fact that Houston City Council District F rep Al Hoang did not live did not live in the district he was elected to represent (nobody cared -- I thought it was a travesty that such great, stylish journalism had gone to waste, just because it was presented on a blog, and not via a mainstream outlet with more cred. So much for citizen journalism.)
I loved his writings on music, and as Press music editor, always cast a wide net for freelancers. Hilariously, I offered him a job as a writer in my stable, not knowing his identity, or that he had once been the top editor at the very place I was working at the time, nor that he was pretty much persona non grata in the New Times organization.
He politely declined. But I was obsessed, and kept reading and reading Slampo's Place, and finally put together enough clues to figure out Slampo's identity: Jim Simmon, former Houston Press editor.
Shortly thereafter, I lauded him as Houston's Best City Life Blogger in the 2006 Best of Houston issue:
"Though this mysterious fellow's real name is a secret, regular readers of his blog know that Slampo is an ex-employee of the defunct Houston Post, a native of southwest Louisiana now living in the Westbury area, a fan of both baseball Hall of Famer Enos "Country" Slaughter and primordial swamp-bluesman Slim Harpo, and a guy who can, on occasion, be tart as a, um, persimmon. Slampo's high-tension prose positively crackles with electricity, whether he's taking on immigration, the Enron trial, City Hall or Tom DeLay, or lamenting the deaths of music heroes such as Buck Owens or Wilson Pickett. (The latter's demise prompted one of Slampo's most Proustian posts.) And just when you think you've seen every mojo in his trick bag, he pulls out something like a very good original poem or a dialogue with his daughter and her schoolmate that rivals the best work of Mike Royko."
I wouldn't meet him in person until a year or two before he died, though we communicated via email and over the phone, mostly in regards to sad occasions, such as the decline and demise of our mutual friend Steve McVicker. He attended a party Kelly Graml Lomax and I threw a summer or so back, and just a few months ago, we attended a Los Lobos show with Patricia and Alan Bernstein and Kem Kemp and another couple. By that time, Jim had been diagnosed with the early stages of dementia, but he really and truly enjoyed the evening, and I am so glad we all got to share it.
If more of America could detect or cared about a Houston accent, Jim Simmon would have been a talking head on TV stations all over America, syndicated in papers from Miami to Seattle...But as it was, in our culturally neglected backwater, he was as good as there ever was, a maestro of the Gulf Coast Pen.
PS: I intended to dip real quick into Slampo’s Place to find some more of my old favorites to include here, but instead wound up spending way too much wee hours time finding new stories — new to me, anyway. And this was me mining strictly from the rich streak of memoir that runs through his blog — look for it under the categories “Prattle” and “My Back Pages.”
Mardi Gras ‘76: A Proustian reverie sparked by a black-and-white photo of the people that you meet when you’re walking down the street at Lafayette Mardi Gras, achingly captured in front on one of that city’s long-demolished picture palaces.
As Simmon wrote in one of his patented afterthoughts:
We don't know anybody in the picture, but we know everybody ... the little fellow with his dad, walking purposefully off to the right ... the pig-tailed girl in the back, turning to look down at something on the street, maybe something she stepped on, or in ... the little girl in the foreground, gazing up pleadingly at her father, with the look of distress, maybe ... her father in the boss hat, waking tall and proud with his shoulders back and the pretty-good-lookin' woman with the popcorn at his side ... Everybody happy, or sad, or happy-sad ... stunned, expectant, searching, hungry ... dragging the street ... throw me something, mister ... in the moment we call "now" that's always passing.
Earthbound ‘69: Catching the moon landing with a high school friend through the screen door of a golf course burger shack, presided over by a herculean hero of theirs.
On a wall behind the screened-off counter, in the kitchen where Joe cooked up delicious burgers and fries, hung a shitty little black-and-white TV bolted to a rickety stand, and it was on that instrument that we saw the moonwalk, although “saw” is not quite the right word. The picture, already dark and cloudy from the moon transmission, was made more so by the quality of the TV and the counter screen we had to watch it through. We remember having to crane our neck and shift our eyes as afternoon shadows pitched into the kitchen, and after a while that seemed to be more trouble than it was worth.
3. A Little Bitty Story ’Bout America, Told, We Hope, Without Saccharine or Sentiment: On his aged mother’s steadfast and lifelong refusal to abandon the Democratic Party of her Deep East Texas youth.
We found her post-convention aversion to Obama odd, though, because she’s a Democrat who can count on her fingers the Republicans she’s voted for over the past 60 years. That includes Eisenhower, twice, and a school board candidate who was the son of a beloved and respected principal she worked for. (“He’s a very nice boy, and intelligent, but he’s a, y’know, Republican,” she explained after raising a yard sign for the boy.) There may have been a GOP candidate or two for governor of Louisiana in there somewhere, although she stuck with Democrat Edwin Edwards, one of the most corrupt politicians of post-World War II America, because he as promised had paid off his support from schoolteachers with nice retirement benefits. She has long been disdainful of the entire Bush clan. Back in 2000 she presciently dismissed the incoming president as a “drugstore cowboy,” and just two weeks after he launched his misadventure in Iraq she stood glaring at CNN and declared, through clenched teeth, “That SOB has a tiger by the tail, mark my word.”
So she’s pretty much a yellow dog Democrat, an affiliation that dates far back into Texas’s and our nation’s past. Hers is not the typical story of small-town, segregationist Democrat-turned-conservative suburban Republican, but rather of small-town segregationist Democrat-turned- moderately conservative Democrat, and remaining one. The party may have left her, but she did not leave the party.
A distaste for Vietnam helped maintain the allegiance after LBJ departed, but she primarily remained a Democrat because, like many white Southerners, she found it impossible to deny the moral claims of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement---impossible to square the supposed point of World War II and the ideas about liberty and freedom she was exposed to in college with the everyday brutal reality of enforced segregation in the Deep South. These people did not march or agitate but quietly resolved to acquiesce. They were not heroic, but they went against their raising. That’s hard to do.
“Be true to your school now
And let your colors fly
Be true to your school (Do it again, do again, we like it, we like it)” - The Beach Boys
You’re a man of many schools, John. Houston, Nashville, Jesuit HS, UT, a kibbutz in Israel, to name a few, and sometimes, like the Allman Brothers in 1969, you just pick up the Holy Grail and run with it on God only knows what topic, but you stay true to your home school, Houston, and the writing and connections are great, just great. I really love that about your work, John.
This is one of the top of your blogs, hand's down. Wish I knew where to look and find like the things you quoted by Jim Simmon. Makes me wonder what was mysterious about his death. Houston and Galveston, for that matter, really don't have discernable accents like Boston or New York (which has several). Houston is so diverse and Galveston an old city of immigrants. From the year I spent at Sewanee which drew the bulk of it's students from neighboring southern States so that I am often able to tell the variances of southern accents whether Carolinian, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama/Mississippi and NE Texas (fixin') but I was never able to really discern a specific Florida accent so I think Houston resembles Florida in that respect- a city which has drawn residents from everywhere. Great piece.