Broke our longstanding boycott of the hypercorporate House of Blues to see Steve Earle. Verdict: Worth it, but it’ll take someone as good as Earle to get us back in there. Something about that venue just attracts old drunk jackasses from the suburbs. Even so, Earle and his band — which includes Mrs Earle Allison Moorer (who sounds more like her sister than I remember) as well as another entire band in The Mastersons — positively cooked for nearly 3 hours; we definitely got our money’s worth as long as you leave out the $8 beers.

We left mildly vexed that fellow New West artist Robert Ellis was having his Houston album release party over at Fitzgerald’s at exactly the same time; in truth it was probably still going on after we left HoB, but 11:30 is too late to go to a second bar on a schoolnight. Fortunately, Cactus was kind enough to reserve one of the limited edition vinyl copies of Ellis’ record for us, so bully for them.