| Tex & the Horseheads | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Los Angeles, California, USA |
| Genres | Punk rock Blues punk Cowpunk Deathrock |
| Years active | 1980–1986 2007–present |
| Associated acts | The Gun Club, Flesh Eaters, Thelonious Monster, The Ringling Sisters, Screamin' Sirens, X, Backbiter, Jane's Addiction |
Tex & the Horseheads is an American punk rock band, which emerged in the Los Angeles punk subculture of the early-1980s. Their original run was from 1980 to 1986, and during this time they enjoyed a sizeable cult following. The band has since reunited, as of 2007, and tours the Los Angeles area sporadically.
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Tex & the Horseheads are often cited as among the first bands to play "cowpunk."[1] The sound of Tex & the Horseheads, and correspondingly the sound of cowpunk, is characterized by a fusion of classic-styled country-and-Western music and street-tough LA punk bands.[2]
Tex & the Horseheads set themselves apart by appropriating aesthetical and fashion elements from deathrock bands like Burning Image, 45 Grave, and Christian Death. Tex & the Horseheads' band members are: Texacala Jones, Mike Martt, Gregory "Smog" Boaz and David "Rock" Thum. They released two records, a self-title in 1984 and Life's So Cool, produced by X and Flesh Eaters member John Doe, in 1985.
Their songs dealt with themes of heartbreak, love, drug and alcohol dependency, grief, loss, and financial difficulty—all a testament to their destitute roll-and-tumble lifestyle, as well as Texacala's real-life struggles with alcohol and heroin in the latter half of the 1980s.
During the Horseheads’ heyday, Tex appeared in a few small movie roles, including Border Radio (1987), a gritty, Super-8 trailer-park dramedy starring Flesh Eaters frontman Chris D, where she played a ditzy babysitter; Du-Beat-eo (1984), a comic-slop pseudo-documentary about the LA punk scene, starring Joan Jett; and Stephen (Café Flesh) Sayadian’s weirdo 1989 remake of Dr. Caligari, 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).
Texacala was also known to hop on stage with all-girl cowpunkers the Screaming Sirens on occasion. They disappeared from the LA music radar in the 1990s. Texacala recorded a solo record in the 1998, and toured extensively with a backing band the TJ Hookers, as well as fronting Texorcist and working with Los Platos.
In 2007, Tex And The Horseheads reunited and played shows around the LA area. Texacala has since moved to Austin, Texas and has remained active in music there.