#A.C.E. CACTUS MUSIC BANK FREE#

'The Cactus All-Stars will be back,' he says, though when asked, he revealed that the return of George St. Looking around the new digs, as a few familiar faces stocked the shelves, you can see that Bishop has brought back not just the same bins and carts but also many of his old employees. 'It's the same exact footage if you subtract the video area,' says Bishop. New Cactus is roughly the same size as old Cactus. Around here, even the chain restaurants - James Coney Island and Whataburger - are local, or at least Texas.' There's nothing local up there anymore, and there wasn't much foot traffic around there at night. 'Our old location had gotten kind of stale.

'Thursday through Saturday nights, it's like little Las Vegas around here,' says Bishop, indicating the foot traffic from bars such as The Stag's Head, McElroy's Pub and The Davenport. New Cactus is in always-hopping Shepherd Plaza at 2110 Portsmouth. The store has migrated about a half-mile south of its former home on the corner of Shepherd and Alabama. 'But there's been so many people nipping at my heels for us to reopen sooner, that I just thought, 'The hell with it. 'We wanted to wait until February for the official grand opening,' says Quinn Bishop, now as then the store's general manager. The store's soft relaunch is this week, just in time for holiday shopping. Cactus Music and Video has returned from the dead. He remembered it fondly as a fine spot to while away a hungover afternoon, 'when you needed to get out of the house but didn't have any place to go or anything to do or much desire to put on a clean shirt or tie your shoes.'Ĭactus was the place to go, he said, when 'you didn't want to see anybody or be seen by anybody, but didn't mind running into someone else in the same condition.'įormer Southwest Wholesale sales manager Paige Mann remembered it as a place where you could meet both your friends and your idols, ask a staff member for a recommendation and have a solid one delivered with both passion and conviction.

Local musician Rob Mahan unconsciously articulated the 'third place' concept.

#A.C.E. CACTUS MUSIC BANK FREE#

Sure, it wasn't the cheapest place in town to buy CDs, but think about the atmosphere on in-store nights: Where else could you enjoy free music and bevies with dozens of your closest friends?īack when Cactus closed, we harvested a number of eulogies from Cactus employees and customers and prominent figures in the local industry, and the statements made for heartrending reading.īrad Turcotte, then president of Compadre Records, and now both the president of Compadre and an executive vice president with Music World Entertainment, called it 'a huge blow to the music industry, not just in Houston, but for the nation.' Ray Oldenburg, who coined the term, maintained that true third places have to be either free or inexpensive, should offer food and drink, be easy to arrive at (preferably walkable) and have a sturdy bulwark of regular customers.Įspecially when it hosted in-store concerts, Cactus functioned as a third place for a good portion of Houston's music scene, a convivial meeting spot that was neither home nor a bar. These places are neither home's first place nor work's second, but somewhere in the middle. Social scientists speak of 'third places,' by which they mean informal anchors to community life.

Early last year, with good reason, we called March 31 'a day that will live in Houston music infamy.' That was Cactus Music and Video's last day of operation.

A.c.e. cactus music bank