Biography
Texacala Jones is the coolest rock star in the world. Nobody can touch her. Axl Rose is a just bratty amateur in comparison. She’s destroyed more hotel rooms than every member of Motley Crue combined on one tenth of the budget, and has casually strolled away from more fiery disasters than Evel Knieval. Her legendary ‘cowpunk’ band, Tex and the Horseheads, has directly influenced every shitkicker rock band in existence, from the Supersuckers to Nashville Pussy. She wore tribal make-up before Adam Ant, torn-up dresses before Courtney Love, and to this day, remains the only girl in the world beautiful and bad-ass enough to successfully wear chicken bones in her hair. She is a voodoo-goddess, a punk rock superstar, a beer-swilling danger hound, the ultimate outlaw pin-up, and one of the greatest blues singers to ever throw up in a suitcase.
Although she had played in bands as far back as high school, Tex is most well known as the lead singer in Tex and the Horseheads, an LA band that formed in the early 80’s in the wake of the spooky desperado punk of the Gun Club. Their sound was half Howlin’ Wolf, half Johnny Cash, with a dose of good ol’ dive bar rock n’ roll tossed in. Tex was wild, free, and sexy as hell, and her band was young, mean, and ready for anything. Of course, LA loved ‘em, and they remained club favorites for years. They released three myth-making albums while together, all on Enigma Records – a self-titled EP in 1984, their only full-length album, “Life’s So Cool” in 1985, and their coda, the live-in-Holland epic “Tot Ziens”, in 1986. The live album has then-new songs, as well as Horseheads classics, and includes fantastically bizarre between-song banter from Tex about how she thought Reagan and Gorbachev should’ve played checkers together, and then maybe blow each other. All three records are full of authentic gut-bucket rock n’ roll, full of slink, venom, heart, and many, many empty bottles of whiskey.
During the Horseheads’ heyday, Tex utilized her considerable charm and cock-eyed grace in a few small movie roles, including “Border Radio” (1987), a gritty, Super-8 trailer-park dramedy starring Flesheaters frontman Chris D, where she played a dizzy babsitter; Du-Beat-eo (1984), a comic-slop pseudo-documentary about the LA punk scene, starring Joan Jett; and Stephen (Café Flesh) Sayadian’s weirdo remake of the Dr. Caligari (1989), where she played a mental patient in a frightwig and a straight jacket. Around this time, she also did a stint as a story teller and back-up singer in the Ringling Sisters, a performance troupe of LA scene-makers, including Iris Berry, Pleasant Gehman, and Johnette Napolitano (Concrete Blonde). She was also known to hop on stage with all-girl cowpunkers the Screaming Sirens on occasion. She was known to do lots of stuff on occasion, most of it illegal or at least dangerous, but her winning smile and lace bustier almost always saved the day.
Somewhere in the late 80’s, the Horseheads drifted apart. Tex has been in a host of different bands since then, including Texorcist, Texacala Jones And Her T.J. Hookers, and Los Platos. In 2001, the Horseheads even got back together for a few reunion gigs. Several of the original Horseheads, including guitarist Mike Martt and bass player Greg “Smog Vomit” Boas, continue to gig every so often, only without Tex at the helm. Tantalizing talk of a full-blown reunion has, to this date, remained the stuff of hopeful rumors, but Texacala Jones is always full of surprises.
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